Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World : Exercises in Philosophical Anthropology [1 ed.] 9789004340015, 9789004340008

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Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World

Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology Editorial Board Chris Bremmers (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Editor in Chief) Gert-Jan van der Heiden (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Peter Reynaert (University of Antwerp) Advisory Board Jos de Mul (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) John Sallis (Boston College) Hans-Rainer Sepp (Charles University, Prague) Laszlo Tengelyi† (Bergische Universität, Wuppertal)

VOLUME 15

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scp

Phenomenology, Architecture and the Built World Exercises in Philosophical Anthropology By

James Dodd

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016051826

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1875-2470 isbn 978-90-04-34000-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-34001-5 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents List of Figures vii Introduction 1 Phenomenology, Architecture and Philosophy 1 The Guiding Question 5 Outline of the Work 7 1 Knowledge and Building 12 Architect and Engineer 12 Works and Meanings 23 The Space of Appearance 29 Rhetoric and the Engineering Ideal 33 2 Building and Phenomenon 39 Three Problems: Bearing Reference, Time and Encounter 39 Five Gestures of Phenomenological Philosophy 50 The Problem of the World 68 3 Phenomenon and World 71 The Pyramid and the Labyrinth 71 The Labyrinth of the Natural Attitude 74 Obscurity, Transcendent and Immanent 82 4 At the Edge of the World 96 The Art of Suspension 96 The Suspended Labyrinth 103 The Edge of the World 116 5 World and Thing 122 Questioning Thingness 122 Adumbration, Sensation and Movement 130 Orientation, World and Spatiality 142 The Dimensions of Orientation 149 6 Thing and Built Space 159 The Idea of an Exemplary Phenomenon 159 The Concept of Built Space and a Skeptical Objection 164

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The Phenomenality of Built Space 168 Access and the Space of Encounter 176 Appearance and Making 184 The Problem of Built Space 192

7 Built Space and Expression 194 Towards the Problem of Expression 194 From Textual to Hodological Expression 207 Expressivity, Event and Presence 216 8 Expression and Presence 219 Spent Light 219 Image-Consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) 222 Presence and Complexity 230 The Presence of Built Space as Being-Rendered 239 The Spent Light of the Built 245 Conclusion: Towards a Phenomenological-Anthropological Vocabulary of the Built World 249 The Idea of a Vocabulary 249 From Confrontation to Continuity 254 From the Defined to the Possible 256 From Interpretation to Access 258 From Reading to Moving 261 From Closed to Open 265 Bibliography of Works Cited 271 Name Index 281 Subject Index 283

List of Figures 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Etruscan temple ruins (Orvieto, Italy) 45 “To the heroes of 1809” (Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal) 46 Café Hawelka (Vienna, Austria) 88 Romanesque church (Travestere, Rome) 125 Mineirinhas (Portugal) 173 Stephansplatz (Vienna, Austria) 201 Holocaust memorial (Berlin, Germany) 202 Café Brasileira (Lisbon, Portugal) 234

Introduction Taking possession of space is the first gesture of living things, of men and animals, of plants and clouds, a fundamental manifestation of equilibrium and of duration. The occupation of space is the first proof of existence. le corbusier1



Phenomenology, Architecture and Philosophy

This book is an introduction to classical phenomenology, its methods and basic concepts, taking as its point of departure and orientation the phenomenon of the built world. It is organized as a series of exercises which, taken together, provide the groundwork for a phenomenological approach to understanding the built world as a fundamental problem of philosophical anthropology.2 Thus the aim in these pages is not simply to present phenomenology as a method, transferable from one discipline to another, but to explore the potential for phenomenology as a way into philosophy. It is the argument of this book that this can be done through a phenomenological reflection on the built world, which in turn illuminates in a unique fashion the philosophical significance of human building and making. The built world is conceived here in a way that is not limited to its formal representation as an objective order of things, but includes a broader sense of the built as space and time fashioned in accordance with a living understanding of what it is for human beings to exist in the world. In this view, building is accordingly not an external supplement or vehicle of human understanding, its mere instrument, but its fundamental expression, its “first proof 1 Le Courbusier, “Ineffable Space,” in Architecture culture 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), p. 66. 2 I use this term in a very broad sense, and mean by it simply a philosophical articulation of and reflection on human existence. The primary aim of this work is an introduction to phenomenology, not a contribution to philosophical anthropology defined in a more systematic way. The project of the latter is however not irrelevant. See in particular two exemplary works by Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975), and Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht (1931), in Helmuth Plessner Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982).

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Introduction

of existence,” to evoke the phrase of Le Corbusier. The farmer who connects one field with another by clearing a path, the small community that constructs a meeting house in the center of the town large enough to hold the entire adult population, the modern urban planner organizing a network of mutually conditioning flows of persons and resources, all stand as proofs of the existence of a fundamental understanding of how, in order to pursue the ends of life, space and time must be given form. Phenomenological description is uniquely capable of bringing into view the physiognomy of this understanding, its texture and complexity, thereby providing an important basis for a critique of what constitutes its essence and its conditions of possibility. It is important to be clear about what this book is not, since it runs against some relatively common expectations regarding what to expect from books that bring together philosophy and architecture. It is an introduction to phenomenology, with an emphasis on its classical expression in the work of Edmund Husserl and the early Martin Heidegger; but it is not an introduction that takes the form of situating the work of these thinkers in the history of philosophy, identifying the origins and tracing the development of its concepts and problems. It is an introduction to the concepts and methods of classical phenomenology, as well as what Husserl and Heidegger would have called its “basic problems,” but it is not an introduction for beginners in philosophy seeking basic literacy regarding the core principles of phenomenological investigation. Some philosophical knowledge is thus presupposed, but at the same time without being opaque to the industrious novice. This book is instead meant to be an attempt to explore the philosophical potential of phenomenology as an approach to understanding the essence of human existence, organized through a reflection on the philosophical-anthropological meaning of the built world. This work also departs, in some ways, from what one might expect from a work in philosophically inspired architectural theory. The endeavor here is not to develop a theoretical paradigm to guide the practice of architectural design, nor to develop a program or agenda that projects a vision for the construction of particular kinds of spaces, buildings, structures, or objects generally. Nor is the purpose of these reflections to formulate criteria for the aesthetic or ethical evaluation of architectural forms and styles, or even, as is often the case with philosophers, to give a philosophical account of the aesthetic or even ethical experience of architecture.3 Instead, what guides this book is a question, decidedly philosophical in both its form and content, which is at least implicitly shared in most if not all of these (and many other) approaches to a theory of architecture: what does it mean for humans to inhabit a space, in the mode 3 See for example Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); also Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT, 1998).

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of an understanding of what it means to be in space? What does it mean for human being in the world to find its first proof of existence in the kind of possession manifest in the building of space? The specific orientation this question provides this work is important to emphasize, since it often motivates a shift away from a focus on the description, analysis, or assessment of buildings, monuments, or other kinds of built things that usually dominates the narrative of architectural theory. The descriptions and analyses of the built environment found below will often remain on the level of phenomena that are apparently much more primitive, even trivial. The intent behind them is to develop as precise and nuanced a terminology as possible regarding the most basic structures of the experience of the built world—such as the spatial and temporal dimensions of bodily comportment, the concept of appearance or manifestation and its role in the constitution of the human world, and how the varieties of expression are grounded in material being, to name just a few of the salient themes of this study. In part this is meant to deploy descriptions in such a way that aid the presentation of phenomenological concepts and methods; but it is also driven by the desideratum of illuminating the philosophical force of the phenomenological problem of the built world. This double task, of both introducing phenomenology and developing a philosophical reflection on the meaning of the built world, remains definitive throughout. Instead of formulating a theoretical position regarding architectural practice or the artistic value of contemporary architecture, the aim is to instead question what orients, or what could orient, our basic vocabulary when talking about the material environment, and with that our most fundamental ways of thinking what it is for something to be in the world through the activity of human making. All of these caveats in place regarding what this book is not, it is for all that not so out of place among phenomenological approaches to architectural theory that have developed in recent decades. It owes a great debt, sometimes explicit and always implicit, to the work of theorists such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Thomas Thiis-Evensen, along with architects such as Stephen Holl, Rachel McCann, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Peter Zumthor, as well as, to some extent, Daniel Libeskind. Dalibor Vesely and a number of his students and followers, including Marco Frascari and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, have also produced seminal work in this vital and important tradition.4 4 See for example Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London: Wiley and Sons, 2005); Steven Holl, Idea and Phenomena (Baden: Lars Müller, 2002); Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge: MIT, 2004); Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Presence, Language and Place (Milan: Skira, 2000); Alberto Perez Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); Daniel Libeskind, The Space of Encounter (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Thomas

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Introduction

Another important source of inspiration is the extensive phenomenological work on the experience of place found in the writings of the philosopher Edward Casey.5 Much of what follows resonates with the central themes and gestures found in many of these authors—such as the problem of the interface between culture and the individual; the concern with the challenges, promises, and dangers of modern technology; the description of the interplay of historical consciousness and built environments; the appreciation of the complex role played by the senses and the body in the experience of the built world; an insistence on a nuanced approach to the difficulties surrounding the function of representation in architecture; and, above all, the emphasis on the historically problematic and shifting character of the meaning of space and place. This means that, even if on the surface this book seems to follow a different path, the phenomenological exercises in the philosophical anthropology of the built world that it contains are, on a deeper level, fully commensurate in both intention and result with what many architects and designers have come to expect from this tradition. Likewise, though this work also restricts itself to issues germane to demonstrating the force of the methods of classical phenomenology, it will nevertheless hopefully contribute in some small way to the ongoing discussion of the myriad technical, aesthetic, political, and sociological issues encountered in the study of architecture and design. This expectation is not without some prior confirmation, for most of the analyses presented below were formulated in the context of a seminar on the phenomenology of architecture and light taught at the New School for Social Research in 2009, the participants of which included graduate students in design from Parsons the New School for Design. The final product benefits enormously from many fruitful engagements with passionate students of design seeking in the history of ideas important means to help them build a better and more human world. Nevertheless, the main intention of this book remains not so much to bring architects and designers to phenomenological philosophy, as the other way around: to bring philosophers to the insight that the problems of architecture Thiis-Evensen, Archetypes in Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Rachel McCann, “Entwining the body and the world: architectural design and experience in the light of ‘Eye and Mind,’” in Intertwinings: interdisciplinary encounters with Merleau-Ponty, ed. Gail Weiss (Albany: State University of New York, 2008); Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2006). 5 Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: Univesity of California Press, 1998); also by the same author: Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Cf. Robert Mugerauer, Interpretations on Behalf of Place (New York: suny, 1994).

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and design have a fundamental philosophical importance. For a serious engagement with the perennial questions of architecture and design—questions surrounding the pursuit of concrete human life in a built environment the forms of which are in turn generated out of the interests, pursuits, and experiences of that life—have been all too often neglected by philosophers, even if, as I hope to show, such questions belong to any rigorous attempt at a philosophical understanding of human existence.

The Guiding Question

That the description of the built world can serve as a point of departure for an introduction to phenomenological philosophy rests on the fact that the built world represents a philosophical problem, or better, that it demands philosophical reflection. The philosophical relevance of the built can be illuminated in a number of ways. Christian Norberg-Schulz, for example, emphasizes the problem of meaning: what makes architecture, or any work of art philosophically relevant is its realization of concrete meaning, in the sense of addressing a basic existential need: “It is one of the basic needs of man to experience his life-situations as meaningful, and the purpose of the work of art is to ‘keep’ and transmit meanings.”6 This theme of the “meaning” of architecture can also be understood as a particular form of the problem of knowledge. This does not have to result in a narrowing of the discussion to arcane problems of epistemology, thus leaving behind the supposedly more practical concerns of the architect and designer. For understanding the existential problem of meaning in terms of the problem of knowledge in fact points to a common concern of philosophers and architects: namely the fundamental task of comprehending the ways in which our increasing knowledge of the natural and social world since the Renaissance shapes the way that we both build and inhabit the built world. The problem of knowledge also points to the problem of modern science, the in many ways inevitable frame of reference in any discussion of the relation between philosophy and architecture. One result of the complex legacies of the scientific revolution, at least from a philosophical point of view, has been a renewed realization that the meaning of knowledge is not something static, but in its plasticity continuously opened to question. One could perhaps cite 6 Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), p. 5. Also see Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), pp. 221ff.

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as characteristic of science in general, but modern science in particular, an ever more intense, life-shaping problematization of what it means to know, animating not only philosophy, but also all of the practices, arts, and creative pursuits of human beings. Knowledge, in other words, is not only something that shapes life, but the meaning of knowledge is itself shaped by a life that embraces knowledge as a source of power and development. From the perspective of the built, the more that scientific knowledge helps us to realize a certain kind of environing world, the more we experience this environment as setting the stage for that doubling back on itself which sets into motion the questionability of human knowing. Take for example the introduction of the use of the telescope in astronomical observation.7 The telescope does not simply extend the horizon of the observable world, thereby increasing the aggregate of observations; it also transforms the basic character of observation itself. What it means to observe something in nature shifts: observation is now carried out in relation to conditions that are determined by enhancements the telescope provides to the unaided eye, and continues to be conditioned by the subsequent development of an ever more exacting ideal of technical precision. Once the natural resistance to the idea of an “observation” that cannot be replicated by the naked eye has been overcome, the pursuit of observation can take the form of expanding the horizon of an ongoing development of observational instruments in general (for example the development of devices that operate on wavelengths other than that of visible light, such as radio or ultraviolet telescopes). The establishment of a more fluid, plastic horizon for the meaning of the observable that results in turn introduces a complexity, often unpredictable, into the basic meaning of access that continues to determine the root sense of observation. This does not, however, necessarily amount to the wholesale replacement of one conception of observation with another. Modern, instrumentally enhanced observation ultimately continues to draw upon ideas and expectations that have their origins in more ancient practices of rigorous, systematically directed perception. These ideas and expectations are not abandoned in the use of such instruments, but they are rendered problematic in fundamental ways, and in this way call for philosophical reflection for the clarification of their meaning. The telescope is, of course, something built, something made. Thus here we can perhaps begin to discern a clue as to how the built world in general might emerge as a distinctive problem of knowledge: the guiding idea would be that 7 See Henry King, The History of the Telescope (Wycombe: Charles Griffin, 1955); also Geoff Anderson, The Telescope: Its History, Technology, and Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

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the built demands philosophical reflection by becoming problematic, and this happens precisely when we realize the extent to which it is an embodiment of human knowledge, not as its static, fixed possession, but precisely as something that we encounter in terms of a fluidity that tends to put the knowledge it embodies “in question.” This will in fact be one of the basic working theses in the chapters that follow. Nevertheless, one might have doubts as to whether architecture broadly construed represents, so to speak, a sufficiently thick enough embodiment of knowledge, such that a relevant sense of problematicity can emerge in a way that is philosophically interesting. Instruments like telescopes are one thing, since they are intimately involved with the scientific project of knowledge, but buildings and monuments are something rather different. Do they perhaps fall short of the kind of problematicity characteristic of the history of the telescope? Such doubts need not go so far as to entail the claim that the built environment in general is not an embodiment of knowledge. It is of course a truism to assert that knowledge of human affairs is somehow expressed in the built environment—a Shaker homestead, for example, with its built-in and multi-functional designs, expresses a perceptive understanding of the patterns of rural life, as well as a grasp of basic principles of economy. The issue has instead to do with in what sense we can say that the problematicity of knowledge likewise finds its embodiment in built space, and with that in a way that could potentially lead reflection to an insight into the meaning of knowledge. Thus our guiding question: in what sense does architecture in general demand philosophical reflection on the being of knowledge?

Outline of the Work

In order to properly frame the question of the built world in a manner that illuminates its philosophical importance as an instance of the problem of knowledge, it is clear that the sense in which knowledge is “in question” in the case of the built world needs to be determined. To do this, the first exercise below develops the theme of the built world as the embodiment of problematized knowledge through a historically oriented discussion of the ambiguous opposition between the figures of architect and engineer (Chapter 1, “Knowledge and Building”). The opposition between architect and engineer, in very rough terms, contrasts an understanding of building that orients itself around the ethical, aesthetic, political, and moral fabric of human life on the one hand, against one that orients itself around the potential for the technical manipulation of materials and the organization of making on the other. What interests

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us here is not so much any given defense or critique of the opposition between the architect and the engineer, or even an exhaustive history of the concepts of architecture and engineering. More important is taking the common confusion aroused when trying to draw the contrast sharply and consistently as a hermeneutic opportunity to articulate the problem of how knowledge is “embodied” in the built world. This difficulty is illuminated in Chapter 1 by a schematic reconstruction of a selection of the various fates that this distinction has undergone in the history of western building. The philosophical interest in the distinction between architect and engineer ultimately rests on how it sets into motion questions germane to the general problem of how to understand the nature of the built world as precisely a human artifice. In this connection we will briefly engage the thought of Hannah Arendt, following a suggestion of Kenneth Frampton, in order to fix what is at stake philosophically in the troubled distinction between architect and engineer. Of specific interest will be Arendt’s understanding of the dependence of the realm of action on the artifact world of homo faber, which functions as the establishment of what she calls the “space of appearance.” The space of appearance, or what Dalibor Vesely called the “space of communication,” is essentially the space of meaning; accordingly, the problematic character of knowledge exercised in the competing ideals of architecture and engineering points to the necessity for a more fundamental reflection on the relation between meaning and appearance. We will thus make our way back to Norberg-Schulz’s idea of the existential meaning of architecture, though now armed with an argument for approaching the question of meaning through a reflection on the essence of appearance or manifestation. For the extent to which architecture represents an embodiment of problematized knowledge will be identified as the extent to which the ambiguities of its poetic idealization call for a reflection on the interweaving of meaning and appearance, and with that the identification of an appropriate approach, or perspective, for framing such a reflection. Incipit phaenomenologia. The rest of this work then seeks systematically to introduce phenomenology through a progressively complex development of a description of the built world as the concrete relation between meaning and appearance, thereby fixing the dimensions and contours constitutive of the space of appearance. Its general procedure can be described in terms of the following plan. Chapter 2, “Building and Phenomenon,” pursues a twofold aim. The first is an extension of the reflections of Chapter 1 to include not only the question of the kind of knowledge operative in the activity of building, but also

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the question of the character of the built as such as something encountered in experience. This is done through the introduction of three working problems with respect to the question of how the built world bears different senses or meanings: how the built bears a reference to purpose, or purposiveness; how the built bears a sense of time or temporality; and finally how the built opens a space of encounter between subjects. These three problems are not meant to be exhaustive, but they are useful in unique ways since, as will be shown, meaning, time, space, and intersubjectivity play a ubiquitous role in classical phenomenological analysis. The second aim of Chapter 2 is to present some of the fundamental gestures of phenomenological philosophy, with a particular emphasis on its classical form in the thought of Husserl and the early Heidegger, but in a way general enough to encompass many of the basic characteristic aspects of the phenomenological movement as a whole. The emphasis on classical phenomenology is at least in part meant to fill a lacuna of perspective in many phenomenological treatments of architecture, which tend to orient themselves to ideas from the later Heidegger and the post-war phenomenologies of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others. The aim in Chapter 2 is not to be exhaustive of all the different permutations of phenomenological method, but to provide a solid foundation for the development of our guiding question, and in doing so to demonstrate the enduring relevance of early phenomenology as a rich resource of analysis and methodological reflection, something that is often overlooked in contemporary discussions of phenomenology in the architectural literature. One of the central gestures of phenomenological philosophy of any stripe is the introduction of the problem of the world. This gesture will be of particular importance for the remainder of this study. Along with Arendt’s argument for an inner bond between human artifice and what it means to be in a world, phenomenology presses the need for developing in a fundamental manner a sufficiently nuanced conception of the world in order to understand the manner in which the built environment embodies problematic knowledge. The elaboration of such a conception is the task of the exercises pursued in Chapters 3 and 4, “Phenomenon and World” and “At the Edge of the World,” respectively, which together explore the significance of the classical phenomenological reflection on the natural attitude and its suspension in the phenomenological epoché. These two chapters comprise the more methodological-philosophical portion of the book, and may prove to be difficult going for the inexperienced, who may thus find it felicitous to turn to the more concrete problems of body, orientation, expression, and presence in the chapters that follow. Yet these

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methodological chapters also serve to introduce salient conceptions of world, environment, experience, obscurity, horizon, and perception that are relevant to the descriptive exercises having to do with the concrete meaning of built space that make up the bulk of the remainder of the study. The world is not the only concept that requires phenomenological reorientation; perhaps more significant is the manner in which the concept of the thing finds an extension and critique in the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. The exercise in Chapter 5, “World and Thing,” extends the problems of how things bear purpose, time, and encounter towards the development of the sense of their specifically subjective depth. The essential aspects of this subjective depth of things are outlined in the elaboration of three fundamental dimensions of orientation—that of the body, the ego or self, and intersubjectivity, all fundamental themes in the phenomenology of perception. Built space is a species of oriented space, and this idea is developed in terms of a fuller account of concrete human orientation that serves as an alternative to more abstract notions of perspective, which tend to be reduced to questions of representation, at the expense of the complex of meaning and appearance that is constitutive of the perceptual life of subjects. Chapter 6, “Thing and Built Space,” brings together the reflections of the preceding chapters into a more systematic elaboration of the concept of built space proper, thereby bringing to a conclusion the investigations of the sense in which the built world can be conceived as a form of embodied knowledge, one open enough to illuminate the manner in which its problematicity is something manifest and experienced in concrete terms. The articulation of a phenomenological account of built space as the analysis of the subjective depth, worldhood, oriented character, and thingness characteristic of the experience of the built, also brings to a head the problem of the tension between surface and depth that marks many of the analyses found in the preceding chapters. Chapter 7, “Built Space and Expression,” explores the question whether the threefold orientation constitutive of the phenomenality of the built world can be understood in terms of the problem of expression, which would suggest that the tension between surface and depth can be mapped onto the difference between a sign and its comprehension, or a text and its interpretation. The exercise in this chapter is to explore how to expand the description of the expressivity of the built world through the contrast between a conception of the architectural act as one of communication comparable to that of a text, and a conception of expressivity that cleaves closer to the movement of an event, or the event-character of the human world. This engagement with the problem of expressivity, or better the exercise of broadening the concept of expression to include diverse phenomena of

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architectural manifestation, in turn brings to the fore the problem of the sense of the presence of the built. This is above all the case given the growing importance in the discussion of the presence of human possibility in our perception of the built environment. That the theme of possibility takes on such importance should come as no surprise; after all, Arendt’s concept of the space of appearance with which we begin is already based on an insight into how the human artifice engenders, gathers, concentrates, and preserves not only the actualities, but the possibilities of human life as well. The argument will be that the potential for the space of appearance to cultivate human possibility can be grasped only once we understand its relation to the imagination, but this in turn is possible only once we understand how the imagination can be something physically given. Chapter 8, “Expression and Presence,” accordingly develops a phenomenological elaboration of the presence of the built as analogous to the phenomenological constitution of the image, which is in turn understood, following a series of suggestive lectures of Husserl on the subject of image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein), as a species of physical imagination. These exercises, taken as a whole, follow a trajectory that leads the reflection from the question of the kind of knowledge that constitutes the activity of building, to the question of access framed in terms of the interface between appearance and meaning. This interface is in turn understood as ordered by a threefold structure of subjective orientation that is constitutive of the perceptual experience of the world and the things encountered within it. The open, horizonal character of both worldhood and thingness in turn leads to a way of thinking about expression that brings to a head the problem of presence of the built as a specific modality of being. We thus move from knowledge to building, from building to phenomenon, from phenomenon to world, from world to thing, from thing to the built, from the built to expression, and from expression to presence. This is not so much a multi-step argument, as a progressive layering of descriptive strata, coupled with the pursuit of a shifting conception of what is philosophically important about a reflection on the built world. The Conclusion, “Towards a Phenomenological Vocabulary of Architecture and the Built,” brings together a selection of some of the key shifts of description characteristic of the study as a whole, in order to show to what extent phenomenology can potentially be the source of a viable conceptual vocabulary for the development of the philosophical problem of the built, and by extension take a step towards laying an important foundation for a philosophical anthropology of the built world.

chapter 1

Knowledge and Building

Architect and Engineer

One way to pursue an interpretation of built space as the embodiment of what in the Introduction we called problematized knowledge is to reflect on the distinction between “architect” and “engineer.” Yet it is not so much the distinction itself that is important, as its ambiguous, often tortured history. We might certainly be able to do without the distinction entirely, and the argument here is by no means meant to be a defense of its cogency. The point is instead that a brief reflection on the history of this distinction allows us to pose the philosophical problem of the relation between knowledge and building that will frame the rest of this work. The history of the distinction between architect and engineer is one of occasionally strong differentiations in the concepts interspersed with exceptions, ameliorations, and confusions. There is for example a strong, mostly 19th century tendency to draw this distinction sharply, setting into stark opposition the artistic or social vocation of the architect with the technological mastery of the engineer. One thus imagines, on the one side, the one who plans and conceives in accordance with creative purpose and idea and, on the other, the one who executes the actual construction in accordance with technical necessities or practical demands. This tendency could perhaps be considered a consequence of the incorporation of scientific method into the art of construction, but it is not reducible to this, and only partially explained by it. The basic distinction itself, on the level of both concept and social practice, is in fact very old, dating from as far back as archaic Greece.1 Yet the mere fact that a distinction has been made does not mean that there is much at stake, or even that the distinction is all that coherent; often the fortune, or even the basic meaning of concepts waxes and wanes through the history of cultures. This is certainly the case with the opposition between architect and engineer in the history of western building. The distinction takes hold in the classical era, loses force during the course of the Middle Ages, finds its way back into use in characteristically complicated and ambiguous ways during the Renaissance, and gradually regains ascendency with the development of 1 See R. Ross Holloway, “Architect and Engineer in Archaic Greece,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 73 (1969): 281–290.

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the building professions in modern Europe since the 18th century. Sigfried Giedion sees its most prevalent expression in the 19th century, which for him was marked by a culture for which “the paths of science and the arts diverged,” and thus where, unlike in the Middle Ages, technical innovations were not immediately incorporated into the birth of new aesthetic means of expression. Technical innovations instead serve, according to Giedion, only as a prop for a facade of traditional artistic styles; there remains a gulf in perspective between constructive innovation and the attempt to express the “aims, emotions, and outlook of the age” in architectural form. This presumably reaches its most extreme form by the 19th century, as Giedion’s discussion of the use of structural iron suggests.2 Giedion also notes that this gulf could be seen to be embodied institutionally in the separate missions and cultures of the schools of architecture found in the École des Beaux-Arts, founded (or re-founded) by Napoleon in 1806, and the École Polytechnique, established just after the Revolution in 1794.3 One could also, with Kenneth Frampton, point here to the contrast between the royal predecessors of the two Écoles, the Académie Royale d’Architecture, founded in 1671, and the École des Ponts et Chaussées, founded in 1747.4 In both periods one finds a division of training that lines up, more or less, with a perceived division of relevant knowledge about the built environment. One side represents competence in the historical, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of building expressed in the tenets of neoclassicism, the other represents competence in modern technologies of construction that incorporate the results of research in contemporary sciences such as mechanics. For Giedion, the decisive moment that led to the birth of modern architecture was the effective absorption of the engineer into the architect, and with that of the machine into architecture. What resulted, on Giedion’s account, was not only a new style in which the processes and technologies of construction found clear expression in built forms, but a new aesthetic ideal more commensurate with the existential outlook of an ever more technologically driven modern age. For the engineer, as Anatole de Baudot put it at the meeting in Paris of the International Congress of Architects in 1889, represents “l’homme moderne 2 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture. The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 183. 3 Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, p. 212. 4 Kenneth Frampton, “The Status of Man and the Status of His Objects: A Reading of the Human Condition,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968, ed. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT, 2000), p. 368. Also see Chapter 1 of Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1980), especially pp. 15f.

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par excellence,”5 thus implying that the architect has a place in modernity only once architecture has been re-conceived as a form of engineering. What is of interest in this history for us is not so much the debate over which narrative properly represents the development of modern architecture from its classical or neoclassical predecessors. What is important is to recognize the inherent fluidity of the conceptual opposition between architect and engineer; it indicates that what it is to know, what it means to know one’s way around the tasks of building, remained in flux in the development of the practices of building. The distinction is chronically unsettled, even as the practices it is meant to determine become progressively more sophisticated and conceptually rich. The result is that the distinction is always more or less endangered, even when it seems to be obvious; not only does it take many different forms in the history of western building, under the right conditions it can disappear altogether, or at least crumble if put under pressure. Sometimes it seems to map onto other distinctions, say between artist and craftsman, or builder and worker, but without ever being really reducible to them. Yet it never really dies, and represents what could be described as a productive ambiguity.6 Tracing the history of this ambiguity, it is useful to recall that architecture and engineering draw from a common military origin, and that military 5 Quoted in Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, p. 216. 6 I should emphasize that it is precisely the philosophical question of the nature of architectural knowledge that is motivating the present discussion. The ambiguity of architect and engineer is philosophically suggestive, but in the end it turns out to be of limited value for any full reconstruction of the history of these concepts within architectural theory and practice as such. For there are too many instances in which the ambiguity between architecture and engineering is more than successfully mediated, and in ways that essentially avoid any potential threat to self-understanding. Keeping to the 19th century, we can cite as one example the work of Gottfried Semper, who in texts such as his 1852 “Wissenschaft, Industrie, und Kunst, oder Vorschläge zur Anregung nationalen Kunstgefühls” and the “Prolegomena” to Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten oder praktische Ästhetik (Mittenwald: Mäander, 1977), presents a unified vision of technical craft and artistry, one that provides the theoretical basis for both an educational program for architectural practitioners as well as a heuristic for the reconstruction of the history of the building arts (Baukunst) in general. There are many other examples—such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1901 “The Art and Craft of the Machine,” not to mention the work of Walter Gropius, about which we will have more to say below. There is thus no need to suppose that the figures of the architect and the engineer are eternally at odds. Here philosophy, which in the pursuit of its problems tends to tax concepts more than necessary, must guard against suggesting that there is more confusion in these matters than is actually the case; the motivation instead is more to revisit a potential ambiguity or misunderstanding in order to illuminate what is at stake in the discussion. (Many thanks to the anonymous reader of this work in manuscript, who emphasized the necessity of adding this caveat, and in particular emphasizing the importance of Semper.)

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engineering in general played an important role in the early history of the development of Western building technology.7 The term architecti was used by the Romans as a name for military engineers who oversaw the construction of roads, bridges, and siege machines such as the ballista which, along with catapults, scorpions and the like were the original “engines” (or, in Vitruvius, machina) of the engineers. Vitruvius himself was just such an architectengineer during Julius Caesar’s campaign in Gaul, and devoted the concluding chapters of Book X of his De architectura to the design and construction of engines of this kind.8 The bond between the making of spaces and the construction of machines is however even older, reaching into the mythical past. Daedalus, the mythical prototype for the architect, was not only the builder of iconic structures such as the famous labyrinth and dancing floor (choros) in Knossos, but also of wellwrought machines, automata, that seemed to move as if alive.9 In the earliest representations of building in the West, machine and edifice are genealogically bound one to the other; the dancing floor and the labyrinth, just as much as the mechanism, represent examples of the orchestration of movement in constructed design. One should also keep in mind that the Roman term architecti, understood as a military function, also points to organizational practices. This use of the term echoes what we find in Plato, where architekton, consistent with the etymology of the word, means simply “master builder.” The sense here seems to be more of a foreman than the practitioner of a distinct discipline set apart from the general category of those who build. The emphasis in Plato is on the knowledge of craft, rather than the execution of craft itself that would fall into the hands of a builder proper. Nevertheless, there remains implicit an essential continuity between knowledge and practice, expertise and execution, even if the process lends itself to a hierarchical division of tasks.10 So even in the 7

8 9 10

On the history of engineering and technology in the ancient world, see John Humphrey, John Oleson, and Andrew Sherwood, eds., Technology: A Sourcebook. Annotated Translations of Greek and Roman Texts and Documents (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. Chapter 12 on military technology; also S. Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially the second chapter, an essay on the Hellensitic period; and finally Astrid Schürmann, Griechische Mechanik und antike Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991). Vitruvius (Marcus V. Pollio), On Architecture, ed. and trans. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard, 1934), Book X, Chs. X–XVI. See Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Myth of Daedalus,” in AA Files 10 (1985); also McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, pp. 48–71. See Plato, Erastai 135b, where architekton is associated with high birth, better pay, and comprehensive knowledge, whereas tekton, or builder, is associated with manual labor.

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hierarchical context of a Roman military campaign, there remains an implied continuity between the architecti and ordinary craftsmen. Yet here and in other contexts the semantic distinction between architectus and faber remains available, as can be seen in a passage from Cicero’s second letter to Varro: “And if anyone wishes for our services, not merely as architects (architectos), but as true builders (fabros) of the edifice of the res publica, let us not refuse to assist, but rather hasten with enthusiasm to the task.”11 This essential continuity, with the option of hierarchical division, was arguably also the case in the classical and Hellenistic eras, where the function of the architect as a planner who drew up specifications (suggraphe) was often distinguished from builder-engineers who specialized in masonry and the cutting and transport of stone.12 In all of these cases, from the Roman architecti squaring out the structure of a military encampment, to the Periclean architects overseeing the construction of the Parthenon, to the builders of the cities of Alexander, the emphasis rests on the unity of the process of building, from conception to execution. In the ancient world the essential point consistently seems to have been that the designation of the “architect” remains immanent to the semantics of the general idea of the “builder,” which was understood in terms of a fusion of the practical knowledge of construction with insight into the human interests, political or other, to be addressed by the structure or machine to be built. This is arguably true even in Vitruvius, though here one finds an interesting and significant extension of the figure of the architect. In his De architectura, not only is architecture presented as a combination of ratiocinatio,

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Also see the discussion in M.L. Clarke, “The Architects of Greece and Rome,” in Architectural History 6 (1963), p. 11. One should not read too much into this distinction, as Alison Burford argues in The Greek Temple Builders of Epidauros (Toronto: University of Tortonto Press, 1969), p. 139: “There was no other distinction [in the 4th century B.C.—JD], technically speaking, between the architect and the craftsmen who worked with him on the temple [the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros—JD] than that the architect was more skilled and thus competent to command them. This is surely true of all but the greatest architects of any age, but the intrusion of the concept of the architect (in our sense) as a man elevated to another plane by his genius and personal mystique has tended to complicate unnecessarily the question of the Greek architect’s status in his trade.” “[…] non deesse, si quis adhibere volet, non mudo ut architectos, verum etiam ut fabros, ad aedificandam rem publicam, et potius libenter accurrere.” Cicero, Epistulae ad Familiares IX, Letter 2 (to Varro). See Clarke, “The Architects of Greece and Rome,” p. 11. Clarke also argues here that “the words paradeigma in Greek and forma or deformatio in Latin do not clearly indicate the form in which plans were presented, but passages in Vitruvius suggest that ground plans, elevations and perspective drawings were used.”

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explanation and understanding, with fabrica, the art of construction, but it is also conceived as an activity that draws from all fields of knowledge, including philosophy, history, music, medicine, and astronomy.13 To be sure, JeanLouis Viel in the 19th century was perhaps right to ridicule Vitruvius on this score, since there is little to nothing in De architectura that would illuminate for the reader just what precisely the supposed role of these more “humanistic” disciplines is supposed to be. Above all, one should, as Indra Kagis McEwen has argued, avoid the temptation of reading the intellectual habitus of Renaissance humanism back into the Vitruvian text of early imperial Rome.14 Yet perhaps we can at least credit Vitruvius with the conception of a practice of architecture that reflects and unites the corpus of human wisdom, such that it seeks to be an art of construction that is more than the manipulation of materials and the development of techniques of fabrication. Such a conception might point to the promise of the architect as an intelligent visionary of the built world, a “thoughtful builder of spaces,” as the architect Louis Kahn would put it centuries later. It is in this sense that, in the Vitruvian tradition, architecture, or at least the idea of architecture if not its actual practice, is represented as embodying a uniquely civic spirit. Its guiding principle is that to build for citizens requires insight and wisdom regarding the lives of citizens, and in the classical as well as the Roman world this involved the literary and plastic expression of the virtues of a life lived in cooperative purpose—or in Vitruvius’ case, the life of a participant in the triumphal ascendency of Rome as a world-power in the person of Augustus Caesar, to whom De architectura is dedicated repeatedly. To think about architecture, or to write about it, would thus seem to assume an organic relationship between the development of the skill of fabrica and a ratiocinatio that not only describes the principles of fabrica, but also articulates its meaning in light of a broader understanding of the nature of things. One might even point to Vitruvius on this score as an example of a philosophy of building that not only passes over the potential to separate the figure of the architect from the engineer, but also articulates strong reasons to resist it. For to build well, with understanding, the Vitruvian architect cannot 13 Vitruvius, On Architecture I, Ch. 1, p. 9f. The famous passage reads: “He should be a man of letters, a skillful draughtsman, a mathematician, familiar with scientific inquiries, a diligent student of philosophy, acquainted with music, not ignorant of medicine, learned in the responses of jurisconsults, familiar with astronomy and astronomical calculations.” (Translation after Granger) On this definition see Frank Granger, “Vitruvius’ Definition of Architecture,” in The Classical Review 39, no. 3/4 (1925): 67–69, and Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). 14 See Letter 6 of Jean-Louis Viel de Saint Maux, Lettres sur l’architecture (Paris: n.p., 1787); also McEwen, Vitruvius, Chapter 3.

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remain indifferent to the wisdom found in the various arts and sciences, but must rather strive for a synthetic view. Yet despite this potential resistance, there remains room within the Vitruvian conception of an organic unity of architecture and engineering for that disharmony and separation that will play such an important role in the 19th century tendency to oppose the architect-artist and engineer-technician that authors like Giedion find so significant (and others, such as Semper, so contemptible15). After all, to reflect on what one wishes to order, and to actually compose the order in the form of something made, are different enough to allow, within the social activity of building, for at least a foothold for the suspension of one in favor of an exclusive focus on the problems of the other. There is room, in other words, for the figure of “architecture” to be conceived as what we might call a more idealized approach to building, where the architect proceeds more like a poet, giving expression to an idea rather than constructing a mechanism that fulfills a specific function (like putting a heavy stone through a wall from a long distance). Likewise, there is also room for the figure of something like “engineering” to emerge as a more empirical, concrete, ultimately localized knowledge of the techniques of building, one that aims at ever more effective and ingenious constructions based on a progressively more extensive knowledge of building technologies, above all in the wake of a more developed understanding of the natural properties of materials and of the sciences of nature in general. An expression of such an ideal in fact emerges in late antiquity, in the 4th century A.D. with Pappus of Alexandria. In the Introduction to the eighth book of the Synagoge, which covers mechanics, Pappus describes the figure of what he calls the mechanicos, or the master of the science of mechanics, as an expert on the totality of mathematical and natural sciences and their applications in construction, citing Archimedes of Syracuse as a paradigmatic example.16 The humanistic orientation of a Vitruvius is absent, though the idea of a maker being in possession of a synthetic body of knowledge remains. This comprehensiveness of the knowledge of the mechanicos seems to have made such figures rather scarce; a survey of the titles of those responsible for construction in Hellenistic Syria made by H.C. Butler at the beginning of the 20th century suggests that such masters were rather rare—apparently the 15 Semper, Der Stil, p. XIII, fn1. 16 Pappus, Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis quae supersunt, vol. III, ed. Friedrich Hultsch (Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1876–1878), pp. 1022–1024; also see the discussion in Glanville Downey, “Byzantine Architects: Their Training and Methods,” in Byzantion 18 (1948), pp. 106f.

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only surviving evidence of a builder being designated a mechanicos points to one Isodoros, who is listed as “Isodorus mechanicos” in an inscription dated 550 a.d. The vast majority of inscriptions compiled by Butler that name those involved with construction employ instead the titles of technites, oikodomos, and architekton.17 Though there is not enough evidence to fix precisely what functions are associated with each of these titles, the passage from Pappus would seem to support a differentiation in accordance with the relative mastery of the theoretical and practical whole of mathematics and natural philosophy. One might thus speculate that a technites may have had mastery over only a particular technical expertise; perhaps the architekton something approximating a general grasp of an area of such disciplines or practices (perhaps conjoined with an organizational function, such as that of a general contractor); the oikodomos in turn a practical mastery of general skills of construction needed to function as a laborer; while only the mechanicos would have possessed a grasp of the whole, and thus represented the ideal of a kind of engineer-scientist. However, the mere potential for a separation between, so to speak, a nontechnical interest in built form and a technical one need not necessarily introduce a gulf between the architect and the engineer. Even in Pappus, one might argue, the difference is one of degree, not of kind; in any case, it would make more sense than not to assume among all of those who participate in the planning and execution of construction a common interest in beauty and the political needs of the Emperor in the construction of public buildings. The factor of organization, or better that of the culture of organization, may be the decisive impulse, at times bringing the potential for a separation between architect and engineer to bear, at times leaving it dormant. Thus for example Nikolaus Pevsner has argued that the pressures for specialization that belong to large-scale cooperative projects, combined with a culture that values individual talent and genius, might be what promotes a more distinct opposition, as was perhaps the case in classical Greece. Or if one situates the concepts of architect and engineer in the context of social change, then we can recognize cases in which their separation, or even rough fragmentation, is motivated by a variety of factors that have to do not so much with the scientific organization of knowledge, as with the development of 17

This material, originally published in Howard Crosby Butler, Early Churches in Syria: Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1929), appears in the Appendix to John Warren, “Greek Mathematics and the Architects to Justinian,” in Art and Archaeology Research Papers (London: Coach Publishing, 1976); this essay also has an interesting discussion of the passage from Pappus referred to here.

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social and economic groups.18 But it may also happen that, in an age that does not put much of a premium on the recognition of individual genius, organizational pressures lead to much more emphasis being placed on the techniques of construction, at the expense of the articulation of the principles that inspire it, to the point where the very distinction between “architect” and “engineer” again becomes obscured. A certain ambiguity is thus often at play: the engineering perspective, developing at something of a distance from an explicit engagement with social and aesthetic ideals, becomes both more immanently articulated and autonomous; but at the same time it tends to re-integrate into a world in which all human practices and endeavors are ultimately understood in terms of those same social and aesthetic ideals. Pevsner argues that this seems to have been the case in medieval Europe,19 an interpretation that is not far from that of Giedion cited above, who credits the medieval craftsmen with the capacity to translate immediately technical achievements into aesthetic forms, which he sees as an early example of that fusion of industrial science and art that would become such an important desideratum of Bauhaus modernism. Perhaps the example of medieval Europe should alone convince us that even where a more “Vitruvian” spirit of unity appears to have been eclipsed, it would be a mistake to conclude that engineering or craftsmanship ceases to be in touch with other cultural or spiritual interests in built form. So for example the diminishing of the figure of the architect does not entail a resulting lack 18

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So for example in the 18th century “the practice of architecture had ceased to be a trade and had not yet become a profession […] What we see in the pre-Victorian period is a process of fragmentation, the splitting up of the idea of an architect into its component elements—the builder, the surveyor, the architect, and the engineer.” J. Mourdaunt Crook, “The Pre-Victorian Architect: Professionalism and Patronage,” in Architectural History 12 (1969), p. 62. See Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Term ‘Architect’ in the Middle Ages,” in Speculum 17, no. 4 (1942): 549–562. The point here, to frame the issue again in terms of the Middle Ages, is thus that the “engineering perspective” does not need to be explicitly cut off from theological and aesthetic points of view in order to gain some measure of autonomy; this means that we do not need, at least in principle, to trace the motivation for a given work of architecture back to either the demands of the one or the other. One consequence of this is that, in a way, it allows us to remain neutral regarding Erwin Panofsky’s interpretation of the architecture of the Abbot Suger as an expression of a particular theological vision. It is perfectly consistent to perceive, or to understand the meaning of the work from within one frame (the theological), all the while relying on the integrity and autonomy of another (that of engineering) in how one builds—both can co-inhabit the same reflection without falling into the trap of an either-or. See Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and Its Art Treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

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in vision, civic or otherwise, among those who construct; just as little would it be legitimate to claim that an apparent ascension of collective craftsmanship in the social form of the guild heralds the loss of a sense of individual creativity. More, one should be conscious that the entire question of this opposition between architect and engineer is deeply complicated by historically different attitudes about the very nature of work and labor, attitudes that do not always find explicit conceptual expression. The Shaker cabinetmaker, for example, is clearly a very different spiritual creature from the classical Greek architect, but is no less of a communal being or a creative spirit. Above all, the shifts and transformations of the self-understanding of the practice of western building from the ancient world to the modern age should not be taken as progressive fragmentations of some Vitruvian whole, but instead often random alterations of the constitutive logic of what has by and large unfolded as an organic interrelation of the elements of conceiving and making. Consider again the idea of the architect as representing a civic vision, an understanding of what it means to be a citizen, one that draws upon the whole of culture. This need not be, as one might take from Vitruvius, limited to the blending of literary, religious, aesthetic and philosophical ideas into the art of building. It is in principle perfectly possible, in the wake of a robust development of an engineering perspective with its emphasis on technology, invention, and the organization of production, for the very civic character of built space to be itself effectively reconceived—that is, reconceived in terms of an ideal articulation of the technical functionality of public space, even one that is fused with a new aesthetic that expresses the spirit of this new orientation. And in fact it makes sense to speak of a robust engineering perspective where one finds instances of a rationalization, even aestheticization of the built world that stands in contrast with the ideals of the litterae-imbued Vitruvian visionary. This would imply that, in terms of the logic of knowledge and building, the knowledge of the engineer need not be seen as stopping, in principle at least, at the threshold of being a mere practical supplement to the knowledge of the architect, as if the former made sense only in terms of the figure of the real, while the latter only in that of the ideal. Pappus already stands as a clue to how a counterexample might emerge, with his emphasis on mechanics as something that has both a purely theoretical side as well as a practical side; the question turns on the direction in which theoretical “mechanics” is to develop. What is clear is that engineering itself has the potential to develop into an ideal of knowledge, thus assuming a perspective that one would be more prone to expect from the architect, though now in a very different key, playing on very different emphases. And it is precisely what is implicit in this shift of key that interests us. What is implicit comes into view only once we recognize that the semantics of both “architecture” and “engineering,” however confused

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they tend to be, harbor the potential for self-articulation in abstract, ideal forms that totalize the self-understanding of those who build in a characteristic fashion. Both concepts harbor, in short, implicit idealizations of perspectives on building that serve in the navigation of the complex reality of its practice. The emergence of a specifically “engineering” ideal of what it means to build can also be seen in Bauhaus and other modernist-inspired architectural movements, where the built world is explicitly rationalized through the systematic pairing of function, or the formalized representation of human activity, and forms that both express and enhance such activity through standardized design.20 Constructability as such also becomes a theme in a unique way, as in for example the development of pre-fabricated, factory made components that effectively amount to the design of the process of design itself, embodying a vision of the horizon of making in which its possibilities are pre-conceived in order to enable the rapid development that is the heart of mass construction. To be sure, Bauhaus is also an aesthetic, as Gropius’ famous door handles that he designed in the 1920’s continue to attest; more, the basic principle of the school was not a one-sided embrace of engineering in the limited sense of mere technology, but the fusion of art, craft, and industry into a “total” work of art. The force of this aesthetic derives in part from its congruence with a modern sensibility that prizes economic transparency that allows for the technical purposiveness of the space or the object to shine through, so to speak, without relying on an intervening surface of an ornamental style. But the example of Bauhaus just confirms the thesis that the idealization of engineering not only serves to determine, but also to navigate, and with that to interpret, the complex activity of building. The more “engineering” comes into its own, the more powerfully its potential for formulating an ideal of knowledge for building is realized, the more it appears to transform itself into an ideal for building as such, even one that seeks a balance with artistic and aesthetic interests. Again, our purpose here is not so much to work out the ambiguities and challenges of reconstructing the conceptual histories of architecture and engineering. What is of interest here is more the fact that the various instances in which the semantics of this opposition are articulated, whether in a Vitruvius, a Gropius, or even a Pappus, push us to reflect more explicitly on what it is to make things, or better: these examples push us to inquire more systematically 20

See Walter Gropius, The New Architecture and the Bauhaus (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965); Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture (Miami: BN Publishing, 1998); also Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

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into that implicit knowledge of what building is, what it means to navigate the possibilities inherent in the construction of the edifice or the machine. And in making such an inquiry, we find ourselves in the position of having to make a choice, not only about what it means to build, but above all what it means to know—for the confused and ambiguous history of the concepts of architect and engineer shows that the two questions are in fact inseparable.

Works and Meanings

To develop what is implicit in this inseparability of the questions of what it means to build and what it means to know, let us follow the lead of a suggestive essay from the 1960’s by Kenneth Frampton, in which he proposes a reading of Hannah Arendt’s distinction between labor, work and action as a means for framing a discussion of the foundations of architecture.21 Frampton’s essay on Arendt is of interest here precisely because the issue for him turns on the consequences (specifically, the worldly and political consequences) of the modern development of the engineering ideal. The most important concept here is that of work or works. In Arendt, the realm of work includes everything that is fabricated, produced and built, everything that together constitutes what she calls the human artifice.22 The works of homo faber are significant in two fundamental and universal ways. First, they represent the success of human beings in the technical manipulation of their world, one that allows for the alleviation of labor. In contrast to work, labor is understood by Arendt as the unending burden of providing for the necessities of biological existence. Labor secures life in a provisional, contingent fashion, without permanence and stability, since it follows the logic of consumption over that of creation. The instruments and spaces of the engineered world, understood by Arendt as the extensions of the strength and force of the human frame, allow for securing a space of existence that is not strictly determined by the cycles of biological need and the necessities of immediate survival. In short, the human being as homo faber represents the emergence of a kind of limited exemption from the otherwise overwhelming determinacy 21 22

Frampton, “Status”; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). “The work of our hands, as distinguished from the labor of our bodies—homo faber who makes and literally ‘works upon’ as distinguished from the animal laborans which labors and ‘mixes with’—fabricates the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.” Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 136.

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of biological existence; in this sense it is the origin of a specifically human world in contrast to the natural.23 The second way that work is significant is that it provides the material basis for both the realization and the remembrance of the actions and logoi, meaningful speech, of human beings. “The whole factual world of human affairs depends for its reality and its continued existence, first, upon the presence of others who have seen and heard and will remember, and, second, on the transformation of the intangible into the tangibility of things,” where the relevant tangibles here include, but are not limited to, “sayings of poetry, the written page or the printed book,” and “all sorts of records, documents, and monuments.”24 One here recalls a passage from Vitruvius, in which he concludes that the architect should not only be familiar with the writings of physicians, philosophers, and historians, but should also be capable of writing about architecture, so as to preserve the knowledge of construction in commentaries (commentarii). It is only the combination of what one achieves in building and writing together that constitute the authority (auctoritas) of the architect: Architects who aim at employing their hands without the aid of writing [sine litteris] will never be able to achieve authority equal to their labors [haberent pro laboribus auctoritatem]. Those who rely on discussion and writing [ratiocinationibus et litteris] will look as if they have chased a shadow and not the thing itself. But those who have mastered both, like men fully armed, will attain their goal speedily and with authority.25 McEwen, commenting on this passage, even goes so far as to argue that writing seems to have been more important to Vitruvius than drawing or geometry. The evidence of any drawings associated with the original text of De architectura is meager, perhaps pointing to the possibility that for Vitruvius, explanation and clarification, ratiocinatio, must have been for the most part discursive, and not graphic.26 This contrasts sharply with Vitruvius’ Renaissance admirers such as Andrea Palladio, who relied heavily on drawing in order to reconstruct the 23

Ibid., pp. 79–92. Also ibid., p. 92: “Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.” 24 Ibid., p. 95. 25 Vitruvius, On Architecture, I.1.2, translation after McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 33. 26 McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 32f; cf. Pierre Gros, “Les illustrations du De architectura de Vitruve: Histoire d’un malentendu,” in Les literatures techniques dans l’antiquité, ed. Nicolet and Gros (Geneva: Vandoeuvres-Genève, 1996), pp. 19–36.

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architectural landscape of ancient Rome from the ruins, and above all to interpret Vitruvius’ text itself. Drawing for a Palladio served in many ways as an act of memory, in the form of the reconstruction of a lost but newly found world;27 for a Vitruvius, on the other hand, it was writing that best fulfilled the function of memory, and the reason for its inclusion in architectural knowledge had precisely to do with the importance of memory. McEwen argues that this can be understood, in part, in terms of the Roman tradition of the commentary (commentarius), a practice of writing dedicated to preserving a “stronger memory” of knowledge. The practice of writing commentarii was developed for the benefit of those in need of a brief and accurate record of rules, codes, and procedures, such as consuls and generals. Presumably for Vitruvius, this list might have included architects and engineers; yet McEwen argues that, at least in the context of De architectura, the question of what, in architecture, is to be remembered, and ultimately by whom, is not without its ambiguities: Vitruvius does not specify who or what is to achieve a ‘stronger memory’ through such writings (the architect or his work?) or whose memory is at issue (the architect’s? public memory? the memory of posterity?). But the essential point is clear. Writing nails memory down, makes it firmoir, more steadfast, longer lasting, more powerful.28 The art of memory is of course neither limited to writing, nor even to building monuments; all artifacts, everything worked, “nails memory down,” slowing that inevitable fall of words and deeds into oblivion. Yet artifacts also open a performative space for words and deeds, and in fact it is probably best to think of the two, performance and preservation, as intimately bound. Infrastructures such as bridges, roads, cities, and market squares that allow for large scale concentrations of human agents into effective pluralities—recall again the role that military engineering plays in the history of architecture—belong to the same fabric of the tangible world as the cultural artifacts of literary objects and monuments. All of this together forms the conditions of possibility for the concretion of human presence as something that has traction and permanence. For Arendt, this above all means that the world of homo faber is a fundamental condition of political life as such, since only through this permanence of artifacts do the realities of speech and action have any kind of enduring quality. More, it is only 27

Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, trans. Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997); see especially Books II and IV. 28 McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 17.

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in and through the human artifice that political existence is something properly worldly and not merely natural. “Human life, in so far as it is world-building, is engaged in a constant process of reification, and the degree of worldliness of produced things, which together form the human artifice, depends upon their greater or lesser permanence in the world itself.”29 It is this emphasis on the world-making function of homo faber that draws Frampton to Arendt’s work. More, the distinctions that she introduces allow Frampton to formulate a critique of the emergence of the engineering ideal introduced above, the historical genesis of which he also sketches in his essay.30 The key thesis of Arendt’s is that the logic of the world opened or made possible by homo faber is not reducible to the technical ordering of things and spaces that are the purview of the producer. Arendt wants to emphasize a difference between what is planned and conceived on the part of those who build, and the full reality of the world that emerges within the horizon set into place, or made permanent by the human artifice. Put another way, for Arendt the significance or “meaning” of the artifacts of the built world is not something that is provided by homo faber, or generally by the realm of work, but can only emerge out of the realm of speech and action. It is in speaking and acting that we ultimately constitute the meaning of our existence, not in the material construction of the world of things, even if the durability of the latter is of fundamental ontological significance for the former. The world of works does not independently generate its own meaning, but is dependent upon speech and action as a response to a need for meaning, one that unfolds in terms of the drama of our attempt to answer the question of who we are.31 29 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 96. Cf. ibid., p. 173. 30 Cf. Frampton, “Status,” pp. 364–365. 31 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 175–188. And here of course we return to the thesis of Christian Norberg-Schulz articulated in his Genius Loci that we have already cited in the Introduction. Given that Norberg Schulz’ Genius Loci, as well as his Architecture: Presence, Language and Place, are written more in the horizon of an engagement with Heidegger’s later thought than in relation to the classical phenomenology of the earlier Heidegger and Husserl, we must postpone a more direct engagement with the writings of this important contributor to the phenomenological tradition within architectural theory. The central themes of meaning, place, and (soon to be introduced below) appearance or phenomenality become articulated in Heidegger’s later writings in unique ways that depart from Husserl’s and his own earlier phenomenology, and which become further complicated by Norberg-Schulz’ own reflections on architectural and natural forms. Nevertheless, the general relevance of Norberg-Schulz’s work to the present project is evident, as is the thought of the later Heidegger found in essays such as “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” and “Poetically Man Dwells.” (See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought,

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This is the key point that needs to be brought to bear in any attempt to understand how the built world can represent an embodiment of the problematicity of knowledge. The built is, on the one hand, the realization of the technical mastery of homo faber, and this includes a distinct vision of the human world—it is, in fact, for Arendt an essential dimension of the very opening of the human world as such. More, the world of homo faber is founded on a vision, and in two senses: first, it is a vision qua knowledge, a grasp or understanding of how matter can be transformed; second, it is a vision qua projection, the laying-out of a plan for life that shapes and orders things into those forms that fix the parameters of an environing world. However, an envisioned world in this twofold sense is not in and of itself a meaningful world, though the promise of meaning is very much in play, in that the manner (perhaps we could even say the “visionary” manner) in which the world is opened through the horizon of human works provides the medium through which something like the “meaning” of an action or an event can first emerge as a problem and a task. To be sure, for Arendt it is ultimately power that holds together the community of action, and with that establishes the integrity of the public realm;32 yet it remains the case that some enduring trace of an action is necessary in order for its sense to be a theme for a reflective search for its meaning. Some document or testament to human presence is needed for that presence to become visible to itself as a question to be addressed; in short, memory requires a place in order to “be” at all, as a locus in which thought in pursuit of meaning finds its traction. The power of the community of agents thus incorporates a power already promised in the permanence of things, and perhaps above all of p ­ laces. “So great a power of suggestion resides in places,” writes Cicero, who always preferred to give his speeches outdoors in full view of the city of Rome, well aware that his powers of political persuasion were as much an effect of the place as an expression of his intelligence, “that it is no wonder the discipline of memory is based on it.”33 Cicero is here referring to the ancient mnemonic practice of organizing memory in accordance with a system of loci or places, an art that found further justification in the Stoic identifications of existence with body, and of body with being in a place. All of this for Cicero explained the source of the political trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper, 1971)), and we will on occasion indicate areas of contact in the notes. 32 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 199–201. 33 Cicero, De finibus 5.2, quoted in McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 82. Also see Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), Chapters 1–2.

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force of rhetoric, as the local nature of the power that binds together the very being of the res publica. It is instructive to cite here the work of Louis Callebat, as McEwen also does, who argues that many of the key terms of Vitruvius (such as ordinatio, dispositio, and eurythmia) had their origins in the rhetorical tradition.34 From Arendt’s perspective this close association of rhetoric and architecture makes perfect sense, to the extent to which works serve as the organizing loci for the accomplishments of giving meaning to what occurs in the horizon of the human world, without representing the fulfillment of these accomplishments themselves. From the perspective of meaning, knowledge of building in the narrow sense always remains chronically incomplete; to open a world in this way, or to encounter the question of meaning in the horizon of a world that situates and sustains its being in an artificial web of permanence, is not yet to determine this meaning. Whether as Cicero’s rhetorician or Vitruvius’ architect, to engineer successfully a human artifice is not yet to come to a conclusion about who we are. Nor would it be sufficient as a means—the human artifice is a condition for the experience of problematic life, not an instrument that can be utilized in order to determine its sense. Meaning is in this sense made possible by design; it is not however designed in turn. This echoes Arendt’s main thesis in The Human Condition: the technical paradigm of homo faber does not provide the answer to what she took to be the essentially political question of meaning; only action and speech, which do not organize but decide, can do this. Although the world of the human being is something essentially produced, human beings are not engineered—even if we might be tempted to expand our conception of the “built world” to include social engineering, public policy, the formation of opinion, and the organized production of mass culture. We would do well to remember that Arendt is taking aim at the strand of political philosophy that, since Plato, has tended to contrast the ruler, as the one who grasps being insightfully, who thinks or conceives, against the agency that carries out orders or commands from others. This opposition, itself representative of an important philosophical impetus the reflection of which we can perhaps discern in the distinction between architect and engineer, is for Arendt at the heart of a whole class of threats to political life that all come down to the attempt to “solve” our problems with contingency by shaping the political world in accordance with the principles of utility and durability that govern the sphere of work—as if we could make a world that would stand as a 34

Louis Callebat, “Rhétorique et architecture dans le De architectura de Vitruve,” in Le projet de Vitruve, ed. Gros (Rome: L’École française, 1994): 31–46; see discussion in McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 79.

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technical solution to what are essentially political questions, that is, questions of our making sense of words and deeds.35 Arendt’s perspective is interesting for our problem, since she emphasizes the complexity of how the built world sets the human question into motion. What is questionable in human life is not simply what to make next, even if the question of what to make represents a fundamental condition for formulating the question of who we are. For we encounter the latter, in part, through an incipient problematicity that is embodied in the material-cultural world in which we are enmeshed. Things matter. We can be what we genuinely are, only if we successfully understand ourselves, and with that build a world fit for our existence; but building itself does not resolve the human problem, nor does the appearance of its products signal that the problem has been solved. In a sense, building alone proves nothing beyond bare existence; as such, it only increases the need for posing the question of its sense.

The Space of Appearance

There is another aspect of Arendt’s analysis that brings us closer to the other side of the question posed in the Introduction, namely concerning the potential significance of a phenomenology of the built world. On Arendt’s account, the space proper to speech and action, grounded in the human artifice but not reduced to its logic, is the space not only of meaning, but also of appearance.36 This point is central to Arendt’s conception of political life. She argues that the emergence of political reality is not simply the unfolding of a course of events, but is a movement of natality and establishment, of beginnings and their issuance into an unfolding political and historical situation. Political agents, whether individuals or groups, “appear” precisely in the sense of emerging in the unique form of a promise in concert with others, one that finds its conditions for realization and potential for articulation in a common space and narrative horizon. Appearance in Arendt’s sense is not reducible to simple meaning, if by that we understand an account or interpretation of a given act; agents do not appear simply because their actions make sense. Nor is the “space of appearance” a mere figure of speech for the representation of political reality, say in image or ritual. Arendt is instead seeking to emphasize that the lived embodiment of meaning, with its dimensions of natality and risk, determines the given factual context in which meaning has weight and value in the collective experience of a polity. This idea, that the question of meaning 35 36

See Arendt, The Human Condition, 220f, esp. p. 227. Ibid., pp. 199–212.

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is pursued in a context, and that this context is to be understood in terms of an order of “appearance” that is not reducible to meaning-schemas encoded in social representations, is a key thesis that will be explored below in many ways on a more explicitly phenomenological register. One might pause here. Is it really helpful to pursue Arendt’s idea of the space of appearance when discussing architecture or the built world from a philosophical perspective? One might think that, for example, Frampton’s own emphasis on Arendt’s discussion of the durability of the works of homo faber would be more appropriate. Following Frampton’s lead, we could then explore Arendt’s evocation of a peculiar kind of immortality that the durability of works entails, and thus find a way into traditional philosophical themes having to do with the relation of finite, mortal life to the transcendent patterns of cosmic and historical existence. The guiding idea would be that, at the heart of the logic of fabrication, there lies continuity with a past that is embodied in the built world and a projection towards the future. In this sense, to quote Frampton, “[a]ll signification in built form thus embodies a sense of immortality.”37 This sense of immortality is manifest in an ambiguity at the heart of the human artifice, where “representation and commemoration can never entirely be prized apart,”38 and where the gesture of architectural creation thus lays a singular claim to being the vehicle for a properly historical consciousness, one that transcends the fetters of immediate practicality, and thus opens a critical distance between itself and the relative commemorative paucity of the engineering ideal. In an obvious sense, perhaps even more so than other cultural products such as literature or film, architecture is surely an exceptional instance of this durability of the artificial—and perhaps one should conclude that, in the interest of a philosophically robust reflection on built space, one would be better served appropriating Arendt’s notion of the “durability of art”39 for a philosophical discussion of the built instead of the “space of appearance.” But it is precisely the obvious plausibility of this approach that needs to be put into question. Is it so certain that our understanding of the essence of architecture is best fixed in terms of what Arendt understands by “work” alone, as contrasted both against labor on the one hand and action on the other? Or is this perhaps misleading? Perhaps the built world is more to action and its manifestation vis-à-vis the space of appearance beyond its function as an 37

Frampton, “Status,” p. 366. Here Frampton cites Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 167–168. 38 Frampton, “Status,” p. 366. 39 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 167–174.

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indifferent instrument for the presentation of words and deeds. Frampton is also aware of this objection; he himself emphasizes that the question of architecture has to do with “that political reciprocity that must of necessity obtain, for good or ill, between the status of men and the status of their objects.”40 That is, the instrumentalization of human beings, as Henri Lefebvre would also argue, cannot be separated off from the instrumentalization of the public space in which human relations are given concrete form.41 I would argue that just what the “political” means here, or the basis upon which any “reciprocity” of any status of human being and the fabricated world can be conceived, is dependent on an understanding of the constitutive dynamics of precisely the space of appearance. For humans and things are political to the extent to which the hope, potential, and promise of the meaning and significance of their lives can appear, which is something more than their being secured, deployed, organized, and institutionalized. Thus the point is not to challenge the idea that durability is essential to the human edifice, but rather to argue that artifice points to a question of origin that is broader than the question of its preservation. Take for example the phenomenon of fragility. Arendt, and in a more poignant fashion Jean-Paul Sartre, emphasizes that fragility belongs to the essence of the durability of things.42 What is preserved, what endures in the built world are not simply those gestures or expressions borne by things like a stamp; what also becomes established is the very possibility of their being destroyed, their openness to annihilation. The world that shines in the human artifice is an essentially exposed world; its “immortality” is not a quiet repose of a being that cannot be touched by death, but on the contrary the site of an almost continuous emergence of so many opportunities to be shaped, modified, torn, rent asunder, desecrated, ruined, distorted, perverted, and erased. More, this exposure is not simply the bare potential of things to be subject to purely physical decomposition; in fact such a perspective is blind to just what we mean by terms such as “catastrophe,” “cataclysm,” or “destruction.” So for example, at one level an earthquake is simply the re-organization of otherwise indifferent matter; but within the context of the human world, an earthquake is the experience of destruction that is always already ingrained as a possibility in those things in which we have invested ourselves, as beings who live in something like a 40 41

Frampton, “Status,” p. 375. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 26. 42 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 191; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: wsp, 1956), p. 40f.

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“world.” As Rousseau remarks about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the gravity of the disaster was the function of the investment made by the citizens of the unfortunate city in the material objects of their life—their very lives seemed to have been going up in flames, pulling them into the burning houses. “How many poor creatures,” Rousseau writes to Voltaire, “died in this disaster because one wanted to go back for his clothes, another for his papers, a third for his money? Can’t you see that the physical existence of a human being has become the least important part of themselves, and that it seems to be scarcely worth saving it when one has lost all the rest?”43 Thus if we are to really understand just what it means that the human artifice is something that “endures,” we also need to understand just what it means for something like a disaster to occur, or a city to be destroyed; we need, in other words, to inquire into the common origin of both human immortality and mortality. This also has implications for understanding what lies behind Arendt’s emphasis on the ancient idea that speech and action are what they are only to the extent that they generate their own remembrance by leaving a mark on the world in which they occur. In the ancient context, the relevant notion was arguably the impact of virtue, or human excellence. Human success, witnessed by equals and buttressed by the permanence of the artifact, is a bulwark against its own disappearance. Arendt in this regard glosses Aristotle (compare Nico­ machean Ethics 1100b12-17): “where arête is, oblivion cannot occur.”44 However, this can be the case only if remembrance is more than simple preservation. The logic of remembrance, of the rejection of oblivion, is not one of storage, which is itself really just organized oblivion,45 but of a presence that endures as something meaningful. Arête is thus uniquely tied for Aristotle to the logic of a public visibility, insofar as a flourishing human being for Aristotle is precisely a political phenomenon. This means that remembrance is not simply a function of a technology for recording the actions of a Solon or an Achilles; the durability of remembrance, its holding out against the oblivion of the passage of time, does not simply find its origin in the hardness and weight of stone, 43

Rousseau, “Rousseau to Voltaire, 18 August 1756,” in Voltaire, Candide and Related Texts, trans. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), p. 111. 44 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 208n40. 45 In the case of Onkalo, the underground nuclear waste storage facility being built in Finland, oblivion has itself become an explicit problem of design—not how to avoid it, but how to achieve it. The bunker must last 100,000 years, and the safest way to keep it secure is to forget it so completely that it will never be re-discovered—posing a complicated problem of deep forgetting that the engineers in Michal Madsen’s 2010 documentary Into Eternity struggle to solve. My thanks to Philip Schauss for bringing this film to my attention.

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though it does find in such hardness and weight an important if not exclusive opportunity for its realization. The implications of this role of appearance as something that involves, but which is not reducible to, the materiality of the human artifice is of great importance. For it implies that, if the determination of the knowledge of the architect-engineer is something essentially in flux, then one axis of its determinability has to do with the manner in which knowledge of building is bound up with a knowledge of appearing, and to what extent understanding the essence of the built world requires an understanding of the essence of the space of appearance.

Rhetoric and the Engineering Ideal

Returning to the distinction between the architect and the engineer, we can begin to fix more concretely the theme of the problematicity of knowledge in terms of the phenomenon of the space of appearance. The distinction between architect and engineer also plays an important role in Frampton’s essay on Arendt, in particular in light of the historical tendency to drive a wedge between conceiving and making, embodied respectively in the figures of the master architect and the laboring craftsmen.46 Frampton, perhaps here forcing the historical evidence a bit, tracks the manner in which this tendency crystallizes during the Enlightenment into a more consistent professional division between the realm of architecture proper and that of engineering. He also emphasizes in this context the modern fascination with the machine, and the rapid proliferation of its technical application outside of the bounds of its traditional employment (such as siege warfare and irrigation), culminating in the modern ascendancy of mass-produced engineered forms over the local construction of “places.” This is perhaps most apparent precisely in that realm where the activities of the “architect” had been dominant since the Greeks, namely the city, as Frampton emphasizes: Increasingly buildings come to be designed in response to the mechanics of their erection or, alternatively, processual elements such as tower cranes, elevators, stairs, refuse chutes, gangways, service cores, and automobiles determine the configuration of built-form to a far greater extent than the hierarchic and more public criteria of place.47 46 47

Frampton here cites the work of G.C. Aegan, The Renaissance City (New York: Braziller 1969), in particular his discussion of Filippo Brunelleschi on pp. 25–26. Frampton, “Status,” p. 370.

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This is not a question of style, but involves a particular course in the development of the idea of the act of building as such, or more generally the activity of fabrication and production. It is in this context that the metaphor of the machine, or of an interlocking system of moving (or functional) elements the behavior of which is bound within reciprocally defined limits and forms, makes itself felt in a unique way. The rise of engineered space as the predominant modality of human organization, and with that the conception of the fabricator of spaces as a technician or engineer, lays the basis for a peculiar mode of closure, and with that a type of simplification, one that holds out the promise of a unique form of mastery. That is, the mastery of built form as an object of specifically engineered (or mechanized) production promotes the myth of a “total” or “absolute” position of the designer as technician, a role that, to use an expression of George Baird’s,48 leads to a crisis of faith in the rhetorical nature of architecture. If the architect stands over and above the experiences of those for whom the design is being executed, to the point where even these experiences themselves are for all due purposes taken to be “designed,” then all the vagaries and ambiguities of a common, shared experience (thus its “rhetoric”) tend to be taken as effectively cancelled from the equation, irrelevant to the program. Ambiguous machines, laden with all the compromises and open suggestiveness of the rhetorical, are not really machines. Once the ideal of precise organization fulfills itself in the mechanization of modern life, ambiguity is no longer allowed to play a recognized constitutive role, and the experience of free engagement so essential to the meaning of rhetoric is lost. We should note that the systematic exclusion of rhetoric in Baird’s sense does not exclude the role of art in the practice of architecture; on the contrary, it arguably forms the common ground of modern architecture and art, not to mention their combination. The argument instead is that the act of artistic creation, just like the act of architecture, ceases gradually to be understood as a gesture embedded in a complex political life of persuasion and vision, so important to Vitruvius (not to mention Arendt). This is perhaps most evident in the almost hegemonic role of the museum in the production and consumption of modern art. The central agency of making, of creating and building, becomes instead the Gesamtkünstler, for whom the work of art, the built world, and the consciousness and life that appear in relation to both are so many 48

George Baird, “La Dimension Amoureuse in Architecture,” in Architecture Theory Since 1968. Baird goes on to offer an alternative understanding of the architectural act as an instance of a situated act of expression, using instruments from modern semiology.

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variables of adversity that make up the material parameters of the unfolding act of the design of “modern life” or “modern experience” generally. This increasingly “technological” (in a very broad sense) conception of building has developed with remarkable consistency since its nascent emergence in the Enlightenment. It was arguably a central element of the modernist revolution that sought to break away from the 19th century obsession with historical style, and with that from the Beaux-Arts as the basis for architectural theory and education. It has also proved to be a remarkably adept and versatile conception of building, one that is far more pluralist and open in spirit than is often recognized. Gropius, for whom the architect must “design buildings to accommodate the flexible, dynamic features of modern life—not to serve as monuments to the designer’s genius,”49 attacked the very notion of an “International Style” (for which he, along with other Bauhaus and modernist architects who had become influential during the Weimar period, was blamed), precisely by emphasizing both the adaptability and local thoroughness of architectural technique: “It [the program of Bauhaus] is not a style because it is still in flux, nor is it international because its tendency is the opposite, namely, to find regional, indigenous expression derived from the environment, the climate, and landscape, the habits of people.”50 Here again we can see how the dominance of the engineer, which entails a fluid adaptability to all that is local, is the ground for a distinctive ideal of knowledge; and in fact for Gropius the key assumption in the text just cited was that a better empirical understanding of life yields a better capacity to build in seamless harmony with the pursuit of life’s ends. The revolutionary character of Gropius’ modernism remains embedded strictly within a systematic approach to understanding the social cohesion and functional structures of public and private spaces; or, in other words, Gropius remains committed to the idea of building a society, and of building it through a social activity that embodies human self-understanding fused with an interest in the aesthetic forms of space. In this perspective, to know oneself is to build oneself, and the proof of self-knowledge—the “first proof of its existence”—is just this capacity to build oneself. The commitment to this ideal is what in turn animates Gropius’ evocation of “totality”: he argues for a democratic, inclusive conception of architecture as a social act, which is in turn opposed to the notion of the architectural genius who stands above the execution of fabrication thanks to some abstract, ideal capacity to represent 49 50

Walter Gropius, “Eight Steps toward a Solid Architecture,” in Architecture Culture 1943–1968, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), p. 177. Gropius, “Eight Steps,” p. 77, also p. 14 of Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Macmillan 1980).

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and command. Again, this gesture of the social is possible only in the form of a specific modality of self-knowledge, one that embodies a positivist ideal of knowledge in perfect harmony with an artistic mode of production realized by the ideal of engineering: “Good architecture should be a projection of life itself and that implies an intimate knowledge of biological, social, technical, and artistic problems.”51 For Baird, as for Arendt, this in the end represents a distorted view. The totalization of the activity of building into a purely technical organon, however otherwise open and flexible it may be, is a fiction, and can only be sustained by an ultimately self-destructive hubris. Yet this point about the questionability of the engineering ideal of knowledge could also be made, mutatis mutandis, with critical reference to Baird’s attempt to interpret architecture in terms of the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss and semiotics. Even if Baird wants to avoid the notion of the building of meaningless, if perfectly designed and employed structures, he still wants to speak of a production of meanings as such. This is either to be taken in a radical sense, where meaning content in a brute form is fabricated, or in a more tempered sense, where what is produced is only the expression of an already given meaning. Specifically, Baird conceives the social gesture of architecture as the production of a “message” out of a given “code,” the generation and decipherment of which thus constitute the warp and woof, so to speak, of the rhetorical matter of architecture.52 In this way, the theme of manifestation or the space of appearance introduced above can be developed in a manner highly adaptable to the ideal of engineering—for any representation of human reality in which it were conceived to be a multiplicity of functions and mechanisms is susceptible to being construed as something consistent with this ideal. And this is precisely what Baird seems to do by understanding human reality not only as “social,” but also as a sociality constituted as a given play of encoded signs: It is because social phenomena are coded as such sets of signs, that the reality of human experience is socially representable. In the most general perspective, one can say that the ultimate signifier is the social phenomenon’s set of signs itself, and the ultimate signified is the ‘reality’ which that set of signs discloses, and which is accessible to us only through those signs.53

51 Gropius, Scope, p. 18. 52 Baird, “Amoureuse,” p. 43. 53 Ibid., p. 46.

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Baird’s remarks are interesting for us, given that he understands explicitly the problem of architecture to be a problem of knowledge. The point is not only to argue that it is through signs that we “get to” reality, or express the “reality of human experience” (a thesis that we will challenge below on a number of levels, above all in Chapter 7), but that sign-expressions (and their coding or production) exhaust the embodied presence of meaning as such. To be sure, Baird’s approach introduces a dimension of fluidity and ambiguity that departs from Gropius, but the basic understanding of the  built world is not all that different: it is just that Gropius assumes that the more we invest in understanding how to develop our machinations, the more clear (and clarified) the human world will be to itself, while for Baird that is not at all the case, given the semiotic character of these machinations as cultural signifiers. Here we can see what makes Arendt’s distinction between work on the one hand, and speech and action on the other, so important: it challenges the very idea of a “production of meaning” that would collapse the force of the meaning of an expression into its produced or instrumental character—as if all that a unity of meaning had to be in order to hold sway was simply to be produced by a given society under certain objective conditions. From Arendt’s perspective, to express and articulate the meaning of an action is not simply to produce a sign that can be read in such and such a manner by those who are able to decipher its coding; it is to reveal a human possibility in a context that involves accomplishments that ultimately transcend the works of expression themselves, and which first find the possibility of their presence in the space of appearance as deeds or actions. Yet Baird’s thesis also raises another issue. For it is not at all clear just what an alternative understanding of the engineered character of built space could be, even if we were to embrace the skepticism concerning the idea of an unlimited engineered character of human reality. If we want to speak of “meaning,” or even of a “space of appearance” that is the genuine environment for an acting, speaking subject, is it simply the case that all the works of the technician merely provide the outer shell, so to speak, of a lived experience that is in itself nothing “thingly,” even if that thing be something as ephemeral as a sign? The modern grip of the technician in all spheres of human existence has, one could argue, in fact intensified the problem of just what it is that we understand of ourselves when we build, and this intensified questionability—the questionability of knowledge itself—is emblematic of the modern fortunes of the distinction between architect and engineer. If self-understanding here does not amount to a recognition of our ability to wield knowledge as the ultimate means to control how it is that we are situated within the spaces that

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comprise modern life, or to produce an infinitely expanding tissue of signs that reveal to us the world in which we live in constant rhetorical shifts of meaning, then what does it amount to? What do we need to understand about built space in order to answer the question of the significance of our knowledge of how to amass such complex, chaotic, wonderful and terrifying orchestrations of matter, space, and time that are both the wonder and the nightmare of modern existence? Perhaps the whole idea of taking the differentiation of the architect and the engineer as a point of departure is misleading. Perhaps it holds out a false hope for some kind of philosophical alternative to the perceived narrowness of the engineering ideal, as if we might discover locked away in the history of the concept of architecture a forgotten treasure. More, it may also be misleading to try to map the distinction onto Arendt’s categories of labor, work, and action, as Frampton does, in order to attempt to illuminate the nature of the gulf between conceiving and making that seems to be so characteristic of modern building. For Arendt, the key issue was the interrelatedness between these realms, as well as their chronic confusion in attempts to reduce action to work, governing to engineering, or even work to the biological rhythms of production and consumption, giving rise to a social fabric that would tend to limit itself to the principles and interests of animal laborans. If so, then even at that point where “architecture” appears to be completely absorbed into the perspective of the engineer, or in a post-Bauhuas hyper-modernism where the buildable is conceived purely in terms of the welding of a given function together with an enhancing form, we must still be able to discern its original tension with the other fundamental sources of the space of meaning and appearance. And in turn, even at that point where “architecture” has been cheapened into the superficial role of adding an aesthetic veneer to engineered structures in response to some vaguely felt (much les understood) need for aesthetic pleasure, there is still hidden at its core a living if distorted relation to the human project of opening a world. Thus the task below will be to begin again, as it were, in order to show how phenomenology may be able to open a way to a reflection on the built world that does not fall prey to the distortions of these distinctions that we have been following, even if they are important to bear in mind precisely as instances of the intensification of the problem of knowledge. Not that phenomenology is without its own distortions and ambiguities. The promise of phenomenology lies rather in the cultivation of a circumspect and sophisticated appraisal of the question of the origins of our embodied understanding of the built world.

chapter 2

Building and Phenomenon

Three Problems: Bearing Reference, Time and Encounter

Exploring the idea of the built world as an embodiment of the problematicity of knowledge through the lens of the distinction between architect and engineer results in a distinctive emphasis on the making of space, edifice, and machine. Yet the built world is not only made, it is also inhabited; more, it not only requires understanding to build, it also requires understanding to encounter and inhabit the built. This applies mutatis mutandis to the problem of the space of appearance that, following Arendt, we introduced at the end of the last chapter. Understanding how to realize the potentiality of manifestation that belongs to the space of appearance is not the same as knowing how to build that space. Thus if phenomenality emerges as an important and distinctive theme in understanding our knowledge of the built world, then we must also look to the experience of habitation and encounter in order to develop a more comprehensive approach to our question. We can begin to do this through the introduction of three specific but illustrative problems concerning the nature of the built. Together they represent distinctive ways in which the built appears that are constitutive of the experience of the built world beyond the act of making. All three turn on the senses in which the human artifice is experienced as that which bears the world, and thus serve to frame a deeper investigation into the Arendtian thesis of the world-making function of homo faber. These three problems are descriptive in character, and even if together they are not exhaustive of the descriptive profile of the built world, they are essential, even constitutive, and will thus provide us with a first formulation of a foundation for a phenomenological analysis of the built world. The first problem concerns what could be called the evident purposiveness of the built world, or more specifically, that of the artifact. Let us consider a simple example. Walking along a beach, I happen upon a stone that, for reasons I cannot readily put into words, strikes me as standing out in a peculiar fashion. It is shaped more or less like many of the other stones I find around it: it is oblong, yet has slightly smooth, curved indentations on its sides. It also has a similar color as the other stones (a light sandy hue), similar properties (very hard and moderately heavy), but all of these aspects seem to be coordinated in a way that is directed towards something, as if its characteristic features were

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primed to be used or employed in a particular way. Its shape, heaviness, and hardness seem more regular than in the case of the others, as if the properties that they all share had been gathered together and amplified. Yet there is no apparent evidence, at least for my untrained eye, of anything having been done to the stone itself that had brought it to such a condition, such as scrapes or chips of any kind that produce a clean edge, or other signs of being hewn by a chisel made of some even harder substance. The stone remains in an obvious sense like all the others, its look more likely than not the result of having been rolled countless times among the others in the tides. However, its singular regularity and order enlivens my imagination, and I fancy that I have in my hand some kind of tool or instrument, perhaps for use in fishing or hunting in some way that I have not yet understood. Following Kant, we can formulate the question of what the form of the stone excites in our imagination as a decision between which of two senses of purposiveness to ascribe to it. The first sense is what Kant, in §63 of the Critique of Teleological Judgment, would call relative purposiveness (relative Zweckmäßigkeit): given its form and physical characteristics, I can imagine the stone as useful for something, say being employed for hammering open the shell of a lobster, or serving as a weight for a fishing net. The second sense is what Kant would call an inner or intrinsic purposiveness (innere Zweckmäßigkeit): here its form, or better structure, is itself thinkable only as being organized with a purpose as a goal or an end. In the case of intrinsic purposiveness, the purpose is the cause of the form of the thing, while in the case of relative purposiveness, this does not hold. Kant understands intrinsic purposiveness to be a fundamental characteristic of artifacts, to the extent to which an artifact is something that has been shaped by an intelligence in pursuit of a purpose. The idea of an intrinsic purposiveness is complex. Kant takes great pains to flesh out a distinction between an intrinsic purposiveness that belongs to artifacts, and a conception of a natural purposiveness that belongs to organized beings such as living organisms. The distinction here is between an ordered complexity that is produced from something other than itself, such as my imagined ancient fisherman shaping a stone, and one that is self-producing, or self-organizing, such as a biological organism. With respect to the given object under consideration, the distinction amounts to different ways in which the parts that make up the thing are judged to relate to one another. So for example if, again walking along my beach, I were this time to come upon a watch, then what I encounter is something the parts of which are interrelated in such a way that aims the whole towards a specific end (thus the purposiveness of the whole is “intrinsic”). Yet in the case of the watch, this whole and this end are

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not present as formative, since the causality that gave rise to the watch remains external to it—that is, it lies in the one who made it: In a watch, one part is the instrument that makes the others move, but one gear is not the efficient cause that produces another gear; [and hence] even though one part is there for the sake of another, the former part is not there as a result of the latter. That is also the reason why the cause that produced the watch and its form does not lie in nature (the nature of this material), but lies outside nature and in a being who can act according to ideas of a whole that he can produce through his causality.1 Kant’s emphasis here is on the causality of intelligence, or reason; the watch does not simply bear the mark of the hand of the craftsman as a mere thing, but as a hand guided by a conception of, in this case, an instrument for tracking time on one level, and a mechanical coordination of gears and levers in the unity of a machine on another. What we enter into, or follow, in tracing the relations between the parts and the forms of the components of the watch is the movement of the thinking that went into its production, as if this movement were present as a material trace in the object itself—we encounter, in short, concepts, but only through present material effects that can only be conceived in terms of their having been conceived by those who made them. This present, material effect of a concept grasped by an intelligence can also make manifest the most abstract instances of reasoning, so for example in the drawing of geometrical figures: Suppose that someone coming to a seemingly uninhabited country perceived a geometric figure, say a regular hexagon, traced in the sand. As he reflected on this figure, working out a concept for it, reason would make him aware, even if obscurely, of the unity of the principle [required] for producing this concept. And so, following reason, he would not judge that such a figure is made possible by the sand, the adjoining sea, the wind, or 1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft. Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Wihelm Windelband (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1908) (hereafter cited as KdU); Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) (hereafter cited as CJ). The quote is from Part ii: Critique of Teleological Judgment, CJ, p. 253/KdU, p. 374. Cf. CJ, p. 84/KdU, p. 236, fn. 60, where Kant, in the midst of a discussion of beauty, evokes the example of “stone utensils sometimes excavated from ancient burial mounds, which are provided with a hole as if for a handle,” and which “clearly betray in their shape a purposiveness whose purpose is unknown […].”

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even animals that leave footprints familiar to him, or by any other nonrational cause; for it would seem to him that coming across such a concept [a regular hexagon], one that is possible only in reason, is so infinitely contingent that there might as well be no natural law for it at all, and hence that such an effect could also not have been caused by anything in nature, which operates merely mechanically, but could have been caused only by the concept of such an object, a concept that only reason can provide and compare the object with. It would seem to him therefore that, although this effect [the figure] can be considered a purpose, it cannot be considered a natural purpose, but can be considered only a product of art (vestigium hominis video).2 Vestigium hominis video—I see the footprint of a man. Kant is here alluding to the story of the philosopher Aristippus, which Vitruvius recounts at the beginning of the preface of Book vi of De architectura. Shipwrecked on Rhodes, Aristippus notices geometrical diagrams drawn on the sand, and exclaims to his fellow unfortunates: “bene speremus! Hominum enim vestigia video” (“We have hope! I see the footprints of men.”)3 What Aristippus sees is something that evokes that dividing line between forms that occur as orders of purposiveness that are not explicitly intentional, and those orders that are, and which can thus be seen as the product of a conscious, directing intelligence. For Kant, this distinction plays an important role in our investigation of nature, in that it marks out two possible sources for that lawfulness which determines the course of observed phenomena: natural laws that regulate immanently the nature of things on the one hand, and an imposed order originating in the intentions and interests of rational beings on the other. Though in a sense we do it constantly, just how one draws such a line between natural and artificial order is not as easy a matter as it seems. What Kant is attempting to understand in The Critique of Teleological Judgment is that curious dependence of our cognition of order on the figure of a purpose or a goal, a final state of completion that projects order back into the process that led to its emergence. We are so strongly oriented around the idea of an orienting end that even natural lawfulness seems to come into focus for us only if we entertain the judgment that it aims at some kind of “natural purpose” for the sake of which it is produced.4 Form itself, in its concrete natural manifestation, seems to make sense to us at all, only if we manage to set it 2 Kant, CJ, pp. 248–249; KdU, p. 370. 3 Vitruvius, On Architecture, 6–10, p. 3; see discussion in McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 135f. 4 Kant, CJ/KdU, §68.

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within the horizon of a reference to such a goal, whether the achievements be those of human fabrication or natural development. Yet this tendency of ours can in turn lead us into error, into ascribing to nature a Technik, an artifice, where there is only natural law; thus the necessity for a critique of judgment in its specifically teleological functioning, in order to both affirm its regulative, and with that reflective role in scientific reasoning, and to fix the limits of its application and legitimacy. Our example of the ambiguous stone found on the beach is aiming at a somewhat modified version of Kant’s problem. It points to how things sometimes form the basis for a reference to purpose, even when the referent remains utterly ambiguous, perhaps at most a fiction; the footprints of others can be very faint, mere specters. Thus the issue is not so much the justification of our cognitive dependency on the idea of a purpose, as to question how it is that our experience of things provides the conditions for the possibility of the technical purposiveness of things to have any traction at all, justified or unjustified. How deeply rooted in things, in their manner of manifestation in experience, is this potential to bear vestigia hominis? To give the example some more heft, let us stipulate that I am not attempting to understand why the stone is shaped the way that it is; I am not coming to it as one stone among others and submitting it to a hypothetical explanation of those causes that have given the stones on this beach their characteristic look. Thus the stone stands out, not because it fails to fit into my hypothesis about why the stones found on this beach are shaped the way that they are, thus perhaps leading me to the conclusion that it must have come from a qualitatively different set of causes, say the hand of a craftsman, or another physical context of nature entirely. It stands out thanks to another order of attunement, one that mobilizes resources that belong to the thing itself, that allow it to cut, so to speak, the particular profile that it does. We would already prejudice our treatment of this example if we were to decide right away that this profile is visible only from within the horizon of the intellectual practices of explanation, as if there were a frictionless jointure between the perceived and the interpreted. This also implies that we should not prejudice the status of practical horizons. So let us also stipulate that I am not approaching the stone from the perspective of a specific practical task, say the construction of a wall. When building a wall, the perspicacious appropriateness of the shape, size, and weight of a given stone is determined by a given joint to be made, which would in this case (namely using irregularly shaped stones found on a beach) be defined by the contingent state of affairs constituted by the manner in which the preceding course of the wall had been laid. The stones already in place become, in a sense, masters of the appropriateness of the next stone,

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together with which they determine the flow of the next course, unless they themselves are removed from the wall in order to effectively reset the problem. But nothing comparable is the case in our example; here the “reference” remains ambiguous, right down to its formal home (theory or practice): the stone points ambiguously to some potential purposiveness or other, perhaps to its role as a keystone to an arch, perhaps as a tool, perhaps as a symbol. The example thus aims at the minimal, and evokes the possibility of a thing carrying an ambiguous reference to a focused end that is somehow only present for me in the form of a perceived, apparent plasticity that belongs to its immediate being as a thing resting in the palm of my hand. Thus the first problem to be addressed is how to provide a rigorous descriptive vocabulary for a reflection on the nature of this peculiar plasticity of things, that is, how things not only bear references (to ends, to projects, to synthetic realities), but how their plasticity concretizes an access to referentiality as such. The second of our working problems has to do with time. The plasticity that I discover in the peculiar stone has a specifically temporal dimension to it. This is true of anything that relates even in a marginal way to a purpose, of course, insofar as a purpose aims at something to be done, either in the form of an initial achievement or the endurance of the fulfillment of a function. The hand drill refers to the removal to-be-done of material within the circumference of a circle of a particular diameter; the stone sitting in its mortar is what it is only if it is intrinsically aimed at the future duration of the wall to which it lends its weight, hardness, and dimension. Even the ruins of the foundation of an Etruscan temple abandoned in a field are, despite our acute awareness that they belong to a world that no longer is, stubbornly oriented towards the future continuation of the long vanished site of worship. Yet the relation that the stone found on the beach has to time is complicated, something that can be brought out by reflecting on the status of its past. Its regular form excites in my imagination the possibility that I am holding what was once the instrument of, say, an ancient fisherman who once brought his catch here to the beach for cleaning or selling; perhaps when my hand grasps the curvature of the stone, discovering thereby a surprising balance of weight, I am tracing a basic motion of work that had been routinely characteristic of the daily life of some person long dead, in the performance of a task long since forgotten. The “past” of the stone thus potentially bears within it the entire depth once established by the duration of these activities, including the sense in which a life of an individual or community itself bears such durations, and is accordingly characterized by a specifically temporal depth. To be sure,

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Figure 1  Etruscan temple ruins (Orvieto, Italy). Photo by author.

the past is in this sense something given only indirectly, animated only by its having been unlocked by my imagination. But things bear time in more direct, intuitive ways too, such as the movement of the hand of a clock that marks the passage of time in accordance with units of spatial intervals, or the passive, immobile weight of an obelisk that symbolically marks the war dead of a Portuguese village. The ways that time infuses things, and the manner in which things open up perspectives on time, are manifold and complex, indirect and direct. And these perspectives are keyed in distinctive ways to our experiences. Thomas Mann, in a chapter of his novel Der Zauberberg titled “Exkurs über den Zeitsinn” (“Excursus on the sense of time”), describes how, when traveling, time is experienced as enlivened, quickened, refreshed, and above all extended, thanks to the break in the monotony of habit that characterizes everyday life. Habit condenses time, shortens it by muting sensibility to its presence; to break habit is to disrupt its calm indifference to time, thereby allowing time to linger in our senses. This enlivened lengthening of lingering time remains in effect for a brief period upon returning home, lending the contours of one’s everyday

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Figure 2  “To the heroes of 1809” (Vila Nova de Cerveira, Portugal). Photo by author.

existence a renewed temporal tempo—not as something past, but precisely as a present experienced as a lingering of past time.5 The status of things as bearing time is not irrelevant here, and we might extend Mann’s description in the following way. Returning from a long voyage, one meets the very passage of the duration of the time of one’s absence as a 5 Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991), Chapter 4.

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palpable presence that infuses home and its objects. The very regularity and familiarity of things speak, upon returning, of the traveler’s long absence, not in spite of but because of their normal profile as a world oblivious to the horizons, temporal and spatial, experienced during the journey. This is not simply because we project the idea of having been away onto the things around us when we return, like some ritual in which we habitually look to things to welcome us back. Past time is not an appearance generated by a subjective overlay imposed upon an otherwise impervious now, but belongs in an essential way to the things that we see around us—just as the aged face of a friend I have not seen for a very long time makes visibly manifest to me the passage of that shared, common time of our being apart. Thus if one can be said to experience a lengthening of time, or a heightened sensibility to the passage of time (Zeitsinn, in Mann’s language), then one can cite the artifice of the home as an example of a locus where this enlivened time-sense allows us to linger in the grip of that span between our absence and our return. Thus our second problem has to do with how it is that things bear and make manifest time, and what role this plays in our understanding of built space. The third problem has to do with something that we have already touched on in the first, namely the potential for encountering others through things. Handling the stone on the beach, imagining it to be the remains of the daily life of an ancient fisherman, I take myself to be in relation not only to a time that once was, and with that a purpose once pursued, but also to a life that once was. Purpose and time are in effect abstractions from a more fundamental space of encounter (to employ an expression of Daniel Libeskind’s), one that is intersubjective in essence and borne by artifacts and the built world generally. Again we can emphasize the ambiguity of the stone found on the beach, an ambiguity that is also an important point of departure for framing the theme of intersubjectivity in a way that would be sensitive to the manner in which the space of encounter can be operative, but nevertheless falls short of a faceto-face encounter with the other. The encounter in this example is at least a viable fiction, at most potentially something more substantial, but for certain it is neither something stable nor secure. That there is an encounter at all remains contestable, and the nature of what is thereby intimated indeterminate: not only is the other’s presence not fully in view, but just what of the other is given, what vestige or footstep remains lightly preserved in the stone, is left open. Yet the complexity here is not only true of ambiguous encounters that rely more on imagination than actual recognition. There are tensions and ambiguities that fix the character of any space or artifact as something in which one encounters the presence of others, even where the lines that connect things

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and the presence of others seem to be clearly established. This is the case because all such encounters of others in the realm of the human artifice give shape to the look, so to speak, of what is possible, both for myself and for others. That is, to encounter others in things is to aim not simply at their presence as given individual beings, but precisely as beings who live in the pursuit of their possibilities. One encounters others in the world through artifacts, only because these artifacts are not simply signs that announce their presence, but are more deeply involved in our engagement with things as live attempts to shape our future horizon of possibility. The vestigium hominis that assured Aristippus of the presence of human beings on Rhodes is only the initial, opening manifestation of what immediately unfolds as a much more complicated space of reference and encounter. The space these footprints begin to pace out determines not only Aristippus’ perception of the given presence of others, but also the unfolding of the course of his experience as a castaway on the island of Rhodes: the significance of the others as sources of aid, as being members of an educated world with whom one can communicate rationally, are as embodied in the geometrical figures drawn in the sand as their function of communicating to Aristippus that other human beings are near. The implication here is that the dynamics of such encounters go beyond the embodiment of function in form, at least if the latter is narrowly understood. The figures drawn in the sand are certainly representative of the having-beenthere of others, but they are not limited to fulfilling the function of representation. As drawn figures concretely present, they provide leverage, so to speak, into a possible course of action; they draw us into a possible future. The same is true in principle for any built form, which is thus both a building in space and time, as the architect Peter Zumthor emphasizes: Architecture is a spatial art, as people always say. But architecture is also a temporal art. […] Let me give you an example, in connection with some thermal baths we built. It was incredibly important for us to induce a sense of freedom of movement, a milieu for strolling, a mood that had less to do with directing people than seducing them. Hospital corridors are all about directing people, for example, but there is also a gentler art of seduction, of getting people to let go, to saunter […]6 Similarly, Louis Kahn, discussing how he conceived the chapel he designed for the First Unitarian School in Rochester, New York, expresses, in his characteristically cryptic fashion, the fact that the encounter relevant to the chapel 6 Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres, pp. 41–43.

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has more to do with its forming an eddy in the flow of an existence, a life, than with its representation of a particular activity, that of prayer or worship, through a set of devices or conventional architectural forms such as mosaics or stained glass. This mode of encounter is not external to the meaning of the chapel, Kahn argues, but internal to it, forming part of its essence. For, Kahn asks, just what, considered precisely, is the “meaning of Chapel” in the context of a university? “Is it the mosaics, the stained glass, water effects and other known devices?” Or is it not the place of inspired ritual which could be expressed by a student who winked at chapel as he passed it after being given a sense of dedication to this work by a great teacher? He did not need to go in.7 Let us think about this for a moment. Kahn’s student passing by does not simply recognize, thanks to the signification of a particular form or formal indication, the given presence of the world of the chapel, of the community of spirit it “represents.” Instead, he encounters the chapel in the wake of his own inspiration, in an enlivened dedication to “this work” (the chapel? his own studies as a student?), and it is this that animates the manifestation of the space of the chapel as he passes it by. This for Kahn is architecturally relevant, to the extent to which the “inspired ritual,” the spirituality of worship, finds resonance and sources for expression in the spiritual community of the university itself—the student, inspired by his teacher to dedication, and by extension to the pursuits of the mind, represents the heightened experience of the essence of the university. But more important than the idea that the meaning of architectural forms is expressed through resources that we bring to them is Kahn’s emphasis on not needing to go in. The possibility of not going into the chapel, not taking it up as an instrument of prayer, figures into what Kahn is attempting to express with the structure itself: “It [the meaning of Chapel in a university] may be expressed by a place which for the moment is left undescribed and has an ambulatory for the one who does not want to enter it.”8 This factor of non-engagement is important, because it illuminates an essential dimension of any space of encounter—namely, its potential for being essentially suspended, for being a distance that orders what one is not doing and which has been placed between oneself and others, a distance that 7 Louis Kahn, “Form and Design,” in Louis Kahn: Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), p. 67. 8 Ibid.

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nevertheless shapes the understanding of the presence of others that determines this space. There is a kind of axis of seduction that captures both what one is doing and not doing. A similar species of distance is arguably present as well in Aristippus’ figures drawn in the sand, and represents an essential aspect of its concreteness, even if in this case it is not suspended or passed by but entered into with obvious relief. The point is that entering, engaging, taking up, realizing are not the sole determinants of concreteness that would somehow vanish if such activities were suspended. The concrete reality of spaces is not somehow diminished by a “passing by” that is more evasive than engaging, but is in fact amplified, amounting to an exercise of encounter in the very suspension of explicit articulation that makes up the essence of its evasiveness. This bears directly on the problem of meaning, in that it shows that we cannot limit meaning to representation, but must instead project its dynamic within a broader horizon. We can meaningfully speak of a representation as being “passed by” only if we are no longer talking about it as a function, but as embodied in a concrete situation that can both give sense to its accomplishment as well as its potential dormancy. The student who does not enter the sanctuary, but only winks at it passing by, is as affirmative of the essence of that space as the one who enters in order to perform a prayer or attend a service. The act of non-entry encapsulates the whole of the reality of the chapel in a specific fashion, and belongs (at least for Kahn, in this case) to the very order of the space itself. Thus the third problem is how to describe, in as rigorous a fashion as possible, the manifold sense of distance that constitutes the reality of built space as a space of encounter, where this encounter is understood as a phenomenon basic to intersubjectivity.

Five Gestures of Phenomenological Philosophy

The argument I wish to make is that these three problems—how the built, whether artifact or space, bears reference, how it bears time, and how it bears the distance of encounter—can be approached as distinctively phenomenological problems. The three problems interlock, specifically around the joint of manifestation, and in this way they point to essential dimensions of the space of appearance: the manifestation at play in the built is always a matter of meaning, the time in which it is established, and the encounter with others in a horizon of understanding that it promises. Formulating and expanding these three problems phenomenologically will thus be our task in what follows, the chief goal of which will be the development of a descriptive vocabulary for the analysis of built space.

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There are at least five gestures basic to phenomenological method. The formulations of these gestures here will be closest to Edmund Husserl’s conception of phenomenology, but with modifications they are equally applicable to the phenomenology of many other philosophers in this tradition, including the early Martin Heidegger; and in fact the figure of a “gesture” is here being deployed in order to try to capture features and elements of method shared by a wide variety of phenomenological approaches that, in other respects, may differ greatly. Thus much of what follows is central for thinkers such as Max Scheler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. In fact, one could argue that these gestures or theses can be taken as so many points of contention around which the debate among the founding generations of phenomenologists turned, and which to a great extent continue to define the foundational debates in the field to this day, so for example in the work of a thinker such as Jean-Luc Marion.9 The first, and most important gesture is to recognize our three problems as problems of meaning. A problem of meaning is understood primarily as a problem of clarifying something that is already understood, at least implicitly. We might think of this in terms of what is at play in a question: to ask a question about something, one must already be working with a comprehension of what is questionable, or what can be aimed at in a meaningful manner by a question. The more this pre-comprehension is explicit, the better the question, the more it seems to encompass, and with that the more satisfying and meaningful it is once answered. Questions are thus partial articulations of understanding, and a “problem of meaning” poses to us the task of clarifying, or fully articulating what is implicit in this partially developed understanding at the origin of something that we have already come to recognize in the form of a distinct theme or question. Thus to grasp our three problems above as problems of meaning is to attempt to orient ourselves explicitly to what it is that allows the problems to have any traction for us in the first place, or what we have already understood in order for the questionable as such to become an issue. The idea of clarification or articulation in phenomenology should be taken broadly, and as standing in tension with other, more limited senses of what is meant by a clarification of meaning. So for example the engagement with a problem of meaning does not have to take the form of addressing the need to introduce conceptual consistency, as if the recognition of conceptual or 9 For more comprehensive introductions to Husserlian phenomenology, see Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993); Robert Sokolowski, Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

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logical inconsistency were the only manner in which a meaning or sense could become problematic. Nor does clarification have to take the form of an elaboration of what is implicit in the conventional usage of terms, as for example when we trace a legal concept back to a past usage of a particular expression in order to illuminate hidden but operative aspects of what may be at work in its semantics. To be sure, both of these senses of clarification are in themselves legitimate, and in various forms have played a significant role in the history of philosophy. One might think here of Aristotle’s argument in the Nicomachean Ethics that what we mean by the “good” differs in different contexts and relative to different things, thus demanding, if we are to submit the concept to a proper investigation, a full survey of the possible usages of the expression; or Kant’s adaptation, in the Critique of Pure Reason, of a conception of “deduction” from legal practice as an alternative to a more strictly inferential paradigm of formal logic.10 These alternative senses of clarification are by no means irrelevant to the problems sketched above. Just in what sense “purpose,” for example, entails intent, and to what extent intent can be said to be lacking, while a sense of “purposiveness” remains, is crucial to the discussion of the first problem. In phenomenology, by contrast, the idea is that meanings can be problematic in a manner whereby they aim at more than what is either articulated or understood in a given usage, that there is an excess of what is linguistically mastered at any given time, an excess that constitutes a basic dimension of the life of meaning. No catalogue of the usage of terms can exhaust all of meaning; we thus need to cast as wide a net as possible to capture what one might call the operative excess of meaning. A notion of conceptual clarification that would downplay the potential role of such an excess is too limited for the descriptive demands of phenomenological method, above all if such a clarification were to be pursued in such a way that amounts to extracting what is clear and distinct (or alternatively what lends itself to standardization and formalization) at the expense of that which is at play in meaning, though not yet secured in accordance with the mastery of understanding. Meaning can be problematic, because explicit conceptual understanding, however complex and developed, 10

Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1096a30ff; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Nach der ersten und zweiten Original-Ausgabe, ed. Raymund Schmidt (Hamburg: Meiner, 1990) (hereafter cited as KrV); Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) (hereafter cited as CPR), A84-130, B116-169. See Dieter Henrich, “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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does not necessarily determine the full horizon of sense, above all what can become manifest in the form of a problem, or a question. From this point of view one can suggest that a specifically philosophical problem be characterized as premised on a prior accomplishment of sense, but where we have not yet fully mastered what is meant, or what we have seen. We move instead in a realm where descriptions have not yet become standard, or where standard descriptions are unsettled by a sense of something being consistently left out. In this sense, the philosophical represents the realm of the deeply questionable; it is where full, stable expressions are lacking, yet where our attempts to speak are nevertheless infused with a comprehensibility that raises them above the level of the subjective and arbitrary. Descriptions are here concrete and objective, but nevertheless operatively problematic. That ambiguous referentiality of the stone found on the beach in our example above, or the peculiar presence of lost time after a long journey captured in Mann’s Zeitsinn, are instances of such a problematicity of meaning: they bring into play both a suggestiveness and a questionability, where a vague apprehension finds traction in an otherwise solid grasp of things. Such problems are born from an inherently retrospective, or reflective sensibility; they emerge not when our concepts fail us, but when we find ourselves asking questions oriented to a broader horizon of what we sense and see. As we have already encountered in the discussion of the concepts of architect and engineer, such problems often have to do with knowledge—again not with respect to its technical success or failure (by whatever standard), but instead its significance, its worthiness to be questioned. Philosophy does not always begin when things fail; it often finds its most enduring impulse when they succeed. In the wake of the successful achievement of knowledge, it is often the very success achieved that lends itself to questioning. What does it mean to know the mathematical properties of the infinite, or the history of one’s nation, or the psychological origins of one’s desires, or what it is like to be seriously ill? What, in the wake of the accomplishment of such knowing, such thresholds of the formation of coherent unities of sense, is the significance of what has come together into a unity of something meant? Similarly, the most simple, easily comprehended concepts are often most animated within a horizon of questioning of this kind. What does it mean, for something to be true—whether it be the truth of a theorem, the truthfulness of a statement of fact, or that genuineness of which we become aware when we recognize the insight and concern of a “true friend”? Again one thinks of those various senses of “the good” canvassed by Aristotle—once we have surveyed the different ways it is employed, and become conversant in the many ways in which the good is spoken, just what position have we thereby put ourselves in? What is at

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work, or opened to us in the meaning of truth, or of the good in its apparently polymorphous (or polyphonic) manner of manifestation? The issue that the maturation of such a sensibility raises is more than a question of how we use words, or what we understand by them when we use them. To explore the semantics of the historical distinction between engineer and architect exclusively through an analysis of the use of words would be hopelessly limited, even if more clearly grounded empirically (that is, based on secure textual or other historical documentation). Such an approach would limit the question of meaning to the regularity of a specific nuance of sense, or to the context that selects for a particular tone or, in some cases, decision. The questioning germane to phenomenology, by contrast, aims at something implicated in both use and context, but which only truly emerges in the horizon of an understanding that realizes the possibility of reflecting on a life of meaning that is not reducible to use and context, but which is ultimately governed by a characteristic surplus. We can see what this question of surplus aims at, to the extent that its potential is circumscribed, if not defined, by our sense of what is questionable, and not because we have incorporated it into an analysis of our concepts, our practices of use, or the contexts of reference that would embody it as something to which we could lay claim. One should distinguish this approach, as oriented around the problem of the excess of meaning, from what could generally be labeled “a-philosophical” sciences. This is important, since in all sciences one begins with something seen, yet not fully understood or articulated. All science is a questioning. The difference is that, in a-philosophical sciences, the aim is from the start to provide an explanation for what we see, or an account for what the experience of seeing (in a broad sense) has established in the figure of the seen. The very posing of the problem takes the lead from a given standard of what it is to have genuinely understood something. To have understood something is to be able to give an account, to be able to explain why it is that the seen has been seen in such and such a way—or what, given the way it is has been seen, must be the case. In this perspective, what is accepted as seen takes the form of evidence, whether empirically observed or rationally demonstrated, and it is approached by explicitly framing what is thereby given as an explanandum. In this manner of framing the questionable, there remains, to be sure, that excess of meaning, the questionable in the question; yet it is admitted into consideration, or reflection, only in the specific form of the explicable, or what it is to be, but has not yet been accounted for. A-philosophical questioning thus takes form in the wake of what amounts to an original answer to the deeper problem of how to engage the excess of meaning in what we see, in that it accepts the seen only

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from within the horizon of what takes the form of empirical or conceptual evidence. It is important to stress that this gesture of a-philosophical science does not limit reflection to the confines of mere conceptual analysis, at the expense of other sources of truth, such as experience or imagination. The point here in drawing the distinction between philosophical and a-philosophical questioning is not to contrast a supposed conservative fetishism of concepts on the part of science against some putative intellectual liberalism of phenomenological seeing. On the contrary, part of the genius of modern science lies in its discovery of a way to limit and confine the unfolding of a questioning within a rigorous method without tying it up in concepts. This can be seen most readily in the central role played by experiment, which amounts to a conceptually articulated set of anticipations of experience in which theoretical concepts are in principle revisable or modifiable in the wake of extra-conceptual pressures. This flexibility of scientific method ultimately allowed science to free itself, at least minimally, from the pretensions of a more restrictive mode of natural philosophy that would enshrine the concept as both its point of departure and ultimate end. The result is that the a-philosophical attempt to explain emerges as a manner of thinking that is open, yet at the same time highly selective, to the point where the full horizon of seeing—that original occurrence of the intuitive presence of something, even of the world in general—is always already partially excluded. The success of this exclusion has led to a refined ability to focus and master what we see around us that has had no equal in the history of human understanding. Not only the things that we encounter, but also all the paths and spaces of such encounters equally lend themselves to a powerful articulation within the mastery of the scientific perspective. We have become the possesseurs et maîtres of both nature and ourselves through science, which has become nothing less than a totalizing modality of inhabiting both life and world. Nevertheless, however it may be otherwise orchestrated by science, the experience of meaning is ultimately not something exhausted by method, as if meaning were constructed from the ground up by decisions we make concerning what is important and unimportant. Nor does the manner or attitude in which we inhabit the horizon of sense ultimately determine the full extent of its hold on us. Philosophy emerges where the original complicity of seeing and meaning, deeper than the refinements of evidence we are able to accomplish through the methods of science, begin to give rise to a questioning of the basis and ground of our successful understanding of things. The life of seeing thus

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remains on the fringes of the scientific pursuit of explanation as a kind of subjective flux, both submitting to and yet resisting the pressures and demands for explanatory clarity and rigor.11 Seeing submits, as it were, by fading into the calculated seen, the weight and validity of its presence subdued in favor of what it brings about as the fundamentum for the formulation of the scientific object; but it resists total oblivion in its continuing functioning as the origin of the excess of sense or meaning itself. Philosophical problems, in contrast to a-philosophical problems of explanation, are thus not limited by the attempt to explain or to give an account for what is seen. But that only means that they arise and have force when the experience of seeing itself is allowed to take the manifest form of a problem, one that is not determined in advance by the more focused project of explanation. Philosophy carries out a problematization of the seen by attempting to carry the accomplishments of seeing, what we encounter in the space of our existence, beyond ambiguities that are structurally endemic to an intelligence that inexplicably finds itself able to have a sense for the meaningful that lies “ahead of itself,” so to speak, ahead of and beyond its own ability to conceive and to understand, much less explain. Philosophical problems are, in this peculiar sense, eminently “foundational” problems—they involve the full breadth and mystery of what makes knowledge at all possible, thinking and seeing itself at all real. The possibility of knowing, thinking, and seeing is not meant here in the sense of something we could fix by way of a retroactive justification and explanation, in the sense of the meaning of a being that finds itself originally in the encounter with what it does not understand, but nevertheless has the resources to see, to grasp in the form of an engagement that from the outset seeks to deny the possibility of its very incomprehensibility. What makes seeing at all possible, and what needs to be clarified in reflection and thought, is the emergence of a horizon of sense or meaning that is more original than the uniform and univocal movement from the unexplained to the explained. Philosophy lingers, as it were, in the span opened by a pull of meaning that exercises its force even before a phenomenon is taken up as something “to be accounted for” from within the systematic approach of a research program or empirical investigation. This also means that foundational problems lie outside of the purview of the a-philosophical, explanatory sciences. More, they do not involve, or at 11

See Part II of Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, Husserliana VI, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976) (hereafter cited as Hua VI); Crisis of the European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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least not necessarily, a challenge to the overall legitimacy of such sciences. The problem is instead the clarification of their meaning. Philosophical reflection alone does not open, or for that matter presuppose a “foundational crisis.” At most, foundational problems serve to delimit the appropriate domain of a given science, grasped in terms of the sense of its proper objectivity. In Husserl, this moderate critique of the purview of science originally took the form of a critique of psychologism in logic and mathematics, or the critique of the idea that the problems of meaning represented by the mathematical and the logical can be clarified by an attempt to account for these forms strictly in terms of empirical laws of the mind that would in principle be established by the science of psychology.12 But phenomenology must also be contrasted with metaphysics, in Kant’s sense, as the attempt to clarify the ultimate nature of reality out of the resources of reason alone. To argue that philosophical problems are problems of meaning is to attempt to turn instead towards our sense of what it is to intuitively inhabit the world, or towards the inner movements of the life of understanding that serves as the ground and motivation for our conceptually articulated experience of things. The chief methodological problem here is thus to develop a sensitive enough appreciation of not only that experience thanks to which thinking has a ground or a basis, but more: the experience of thinking thanks to which experience itself receives its broadest horizon of comprehensibility. To argue that all genuine philosophical problems are problems of meaning amounts to the claim that all philosophical problems entail the explicit, reflective engagement of the horizon in which what has come into question has its sense, precisely as something seen. This leads us to the second gesture, thanks to which the horizon in question is more specifically identified: meaning is originally the accomplishment of the intentionality of lived experience. This gesture is explicitly Husserlian, but it brings along a corollary claim that is arguably central to the phenomenological tradition as a whole, namely that meaning is not restricted to language. What is meant is not merely what is said, nor indicated by a word or a sign; nor is what is meant necessarily embodied in a convention, or a practice that finds its expression in human communicative behavior. If meaning, as act, is access to the meant, then it is misleading to presuppose that this access can only take the form of reading signs or interpreting expressions, or of participating in specific forms of communicative 12

See Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Huserliana XVIII, ed. Elmar Holenstein (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975) (hereafter cited as Hua XVIII); “Prolegomena to a Pure Logic,” in Logical Investigations, volume 1, trans. J.N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001).

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interaction. The theme of intentionality, so basic to classical phenomenology, should always be taken as a title for the task of delimiting the widest possible sense in which something is meant, or aimed at in a direction that grasps it in the horizonal unity of articulate concept and anonymous excess of sense. This horizon is not simply given to us in the form of a given language, vocabulary, or discourse, however complex and nuanced. Husserl thought to have identified it instead with a conception of lived experience (Erlebnis) as a fundamental directedness of consciousness, or what he also calls intentional life. All consciousness for Husserl, as it was for Brentano, is a “consciousness of…,” which means that all lived experience “means” something, either as intending or on the way towards the intention of an object. As a directedness to…, intentional consciousness is already on the way towards that which, in reflection, can be delimited a possible horizon of the encounter with and determination of objective sense. It is important to emphasize that, understood in this way, “intentional analysis” should not be considered a species of explanation, but instead a methodological means to articulate a problem of meaning. Nor does intentional analysis amount to a mode of interpretation that would reveal for us what a given experience is about, as something external to the raw stuff of the empirically, contingently given that supposedly makes up the real content of experience. Instead, lived experience itself, when grasped in terms of its original unfolding as a manner of being, is likewise an original unfolding of things in sense. This means that it is itself already the accomplishment of an orientation to the givenness of sense, an approach to things in terms of how it is that they are given thanks to their emergence in the horizon of meaning. Experience just is the primal form of that self-directed existence that engages things in the fold of their meaning. The theme of intentionality, always broader than the classical theme of the understanding in empiricism or transcendental philosophy since Kant, is the theme of a living modality of being, where it is never a question of the world articulated in mind, but of the mind as being in the world. One can of course argue (and one certainly does) over whether the “being” in question here is the being of a consciousness, and whether or not the world is best understood as a horizon of present things.13 But in the end the debate is over just how to understand the insight about the givenness of sense that is articulated in a preliminary fashion in the idea of intentionality itself. 13

One of the more interesting explorations of the issue of the centrality of intentional being as object-consciousness in classical phenomenology to have appeared in recent years is Jean-Luc Marion’s Reduction and Givenness. Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern, 1998).

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All this is not to deny the central importance of language. When I pick up that stone on the beach, lingering (perhaps philosophically, perhaps not) in my curiosity over its form, the potential for bringing this experience to language, for putting into words what it is that I have encountered, is not irrelevant, but an essential dimension of the intentional structure of perceptual experience. This is in fact a central phenomenological point. Historically, phenomenology begins with a reflection on language, with the publication of the first of Husserl’s Logical Investigations, “Expression and Meaning,” in 1900.14 And Heidegger returns to the problem of language again and again, not in order to reduce philosophy to a reflection on language, but to recognize the fact that an awareness of the place of language in the unfolding of the meaning of being is indispensable for philosophy.15 This is above all because language breaks the silence, the anonymity of sense, and with this breakthrough we have a fundamental phenomenon of properly human existence. But from a phenomenological perspective, and this is again an important philosophical gesture, the point will always be that language yields the articulation not so much of things, as of a pre-given sense of things that always implies more than what it becomes thanks to its being expressed in language. And in turn, language is what it is in part thanks to an original tension with sense, with meaning, and if we fail to recognize the distance between the accomplishment of meaning and its subsequent emergence in the form of meaningful speech, then we fail to fully grasp essential contours of its human significance. All of this however only heightens the question of the nature of this surplus of sense, and how it stands in relation to the articulated meaning that properly falls within the purview of the linguistic, or even of thought in general. We will have more to say on this below, but the basic idea is that even though the horizon of sense transcends both explicit understanding (concepts) and language, such transcendence does not imply a functional independence, as if meaning represented some “other place” in contrast to either language or the understanding. The surplus of sense only sends us back to language and our attempts to understand, where this falling back on language is not a retreat but, on the contrary, represents an important advance. For language so to 14

15

Husserl, “Ausdruck und Bedeutung,” in Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis, 2 vols., Husserliana XIX, ed. Ursula Panzer (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1984); “Expression and Meaning,” in Logical Investigations, vol. 1. See for example Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993) (hereafter cited as SuZ); Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1962) (hereafter cited as BT), §§32–34; also the essay “Die Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1959); “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1975).

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speak bears meaning upwards (“my words fly up…”), lending to it a manifest robustness it would not ordinarily have; it brings the sense of something into its own as a revealed meaningfulness, instead of the unaccomplished aura of a surplus or excess. For example, when I discuss a painting of Caravaggio with a friend, I take up what it is that I have encountered as something originally seen, and give it a force and a presence it could not possibly have had thanks to the resources alone that made up my first, raw viewing of the painting. What had unfolded in that first perception of the painting, with all of its depth and breadth, is given a new body, a new voice it would not have had if it had remained below in that quasi-passivity that harbors all the mute richness of perceptual experience. This is in part the effect of translating my impressions into more explicit terms, and in part the success of my friend in deepening and filling out the implications of sense already brewing in the pathos of my experience. My astonishment, say, at the striking depiction of a mixture of suffering and, oddly, relief in the face of the severed head of Goliath is given new depth and significance by my friend’s learned suggestion that Goliath may in fact be a self-portrait of the artist. And when I take this now articulated body of sense from my discussion with my friend back to the act of viewing the painting, the perception itself is richer; it makes more sense, enlivened not only by clarification, but by what still remains implicit in the interpretive suggestions of my friend. My viewing is now, as an intentional unity, infused with a newfound articulateness that is in place, not thanks to perception, but to the unique contribution of my accomplishment of actively putting sense into words. This is related to an important feature of the built world that we will endeavor to describe more precisely below. It is obvious that the reality of the built is dependent upon its articulation in thought and speech in order for it to be fully real for us. We are, in other words, dependent not simply on an order of things available as a sum totality of instruments that allow us to pursue our interests and purposes; we must also be in command of a discourse that brings this order to a more sophisticated and reflective visibility. Language, as Arendt also emphasized, thus belongs essentially to the space of appearance constitutive of a properly human life, for visibility is something that must be cultivated in language. Yet this contribution of language does not change the fact that it is significant only as a kind of making sense of sense, or as a re-accomplishment at a higher level of the fundamental accomplishments of intentional experience in the encounter, or the event of the given in general. Perhaps we should even be suspicious of Arendt’s emphasis; perhaps language does not ultimately give us a world, however much it may shape the one we are in, however much it

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introduces us to a more lucid, active articulation of what we see. To assume language as an independent origin that bears no relation or responsibility to something other than its own accomplishments of lucidity threatens to beg the question of the essence of language, in particular if we are interested in how language figures into the intentional structure of our experience of the built world. In the end, we are not interested in speaking only of what we have already found spoken about clearly and evidently, but of things that belong to a wider scope of life and its living. The idea of lived experience as the original articulation of sense supports in this way the idea of conceptual clarification that does not limit itself to the re-crafting of concepts to fit a standard of clarity that belongs either to formal or systematic expression, or even to the understanding generally. Instead the idea is to return to what “remains below,” the original constitutive sources of sense in lived experience. This in turn yields a critique of logic, above all the neo-Kantian attempt at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to articulate a “logic of experience” that would show once and for all the hegemony of the conceptual or the logical in the very constitution of experience as such.16 The critique of this project was summed up in the battle cry of early phenomenology—zurück zu den Sachen selbst! Back to the things themselves!—that is, not back to Kant, or to the claims that reason and the understanding are constitutive of the field of experience. To be sure, there is a legitimate sense in which both conceptual categories and language can be said to clarify, and even constitute the varieties of perception, but the opposite is equally true: an analysis of perception yields an original, irreducible description of the unities of sense to be clarified, as well as the fundamental horizon thanks to which all sense lends itself to both conceptual and linguistic clarification as such. The life of language is ultimately lived among the experiences of the world, and it is in experience that the origin of its validity and force is to be found. This methodological primacy of experience, however, leads to a problem. If we cannot fully rely on language as a guide to the intentional accomplishments of lived experience, then on what basis can these accomplishments be made a theme for philosophical reflection in a more systematic way? How are they visible, if not solely in terms of the grammar of articulation we find instituted in language? The response of phenomenology to this question, which is 16

So for example what is known as the Marburg school of Neokantianism, including figures such as Hermann Cohen, Heinrich Rickert, and Paul Natorp. See Hermann Cohen, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung (Berlin: Dümmler 1871); Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenshaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Freiburg: Mohr, 1896).

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also the origin of its name, is that intentional life is an original instance of an appearing, or phenomenal being. Thus the phenomenality of intentional life is to provide the fundamental ground for analysis. Let us look closer at what is meant by this thesis. It is essentially an expansion on the idea that sense is originally accomplished in lived experience. But what does this really mean? On one level, the accomplishment in question is not so different from what is accomplished in language. When my friend understands what I am saying as I describe my struggle in learning Portuguese, she grasps what it is that I am saying, not simply by understanding the meaning of the words I use, but by following and taking up the movement of my expressions. That is, she grasps what I say by, in an important sense, inhabiting my speech, becoming involved with what it is that I am saying, and in so doing bringing her own relevant motivations for understanding to bear. Perhaps she has had similar difficulties with navigating the complex uses of subjunctive verb forms in other Latin languages, and my difficulties recall the memory of her own struggles, and inspires her knowing sympathy. Or take another example: if I help someone understand successfully how to apply the method of mathematical induction in a variety of different contexts, there is here something grasped as well, though in this case inhabiting my expressions takes the form not of a knowing sympathy but rather of an insight—the student sees in my explanations that which is to be understood, and thus “gets it.” In both cases something comes to one thanks to the lucidity of language. The object of sympathy or insight is “placed before” the intellect in a quite literal fashion: my student sees “all at once” the general case of induction in a denouement of realization; my friend “immediately” feels sympathy towards my plight. And in both cases the movement has an important double structure: there is on the one hand what is arrived at, the something shown in whatever form of “being there before us”; and on the other hand the trajectory, or path of its emergence, thanks to the unfolding of either the insight or the knowing sympathy themselves in the course of speech. Something similar happens in lived experience generally. First, and most basic: to say that experience is intentional is at least on one level just to say that it is a living through of the manifestation of something as it shows itself, as it is placed before us. The term Erlebnis in Husserl, usually translated as “experience” or “lived experience,” evokes just this sense of a transitive living-through life, or er-leben. Second, in such a living through, and basic to the very sense of experience, is the being-apprehended of what shows itself. For the given that shows itself is not left without a response, so to speak, in which its self-showing is taken to be what it is in an apprehension which in turn offers the given the opportunity for emergence in a strong sense. The student passing by Kahn’s chapel, not entering but only winking, enables the chapel to be “what it wants

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to be,” to use Kahn’s language, in part by living through its manifestation in an apprehending manner. And here too we have a double structure. For example, if something on the street appears to be a mural depicting the figure of a beautiful woman, then there is first the “manifestation as” the depiction of the woman, but also my “experiencing of” the self-showing thing as what it is. Something’s showing itself is only genuinely such in the wake of that which takes it in, opens itself in a way that gives the showing an opportunity, the time and the place, to be what it wants to be. If we go on to talk about self-manifestation with the language of “appearances” and “phenomena,” then we must do so only by thinking of such appearances not as something we need to pass beyond in order to grasp things themselves. It is just the opposite: appearances are the very woof of our experiences of things, the space of the original accomplishment of their having sense, or their showing themselves “as” what they are. To abstract appearances off from the being of experience in the vain hope of securing some putative freestanding function of indication or reference betrays the very sense of what we live through when something appears to us. The space of encounter, in other words, can only be what it is as the reality of an appearance. Something else goes with this. Experience, understood as living through the appearance of things, is primordially governed by structures of sense, at least to the extent to which it unfolds as intentional life. The unity of intentional sense is rooted in the unity of appearance itself. If the given did not offer itself up in the mode of an “as something”—if the given were not given “as” a depiction of a woman, “as” a person I turn to in order to ask a question, “as” a sign directing me to the location of the meeting—then the very accomplishment of givenness would lack direction, collapsing in on itself as a kind of vanishing point of emergence. With these remarks in mind we are in a position to formulate the thesis that lived experience is itself something that appears. The thesis is that the unity of the direction of intentional sense originates in, or is accomplished by, the consciousness of an accomplishment of living through the appearances of things thus understood, or encountered in the horizon of the direction of an understanding. In other words, implicit in our consciousness of things as what they are, is the experience of the weaving together of such “appearances as…,” or the contents of experience, with a manifest flowing of experiencing itself. This means that the accomplishments of lived experience are in turn experienced as more than a given set of results or objective parameters of understanding; they are approachable as living accomplishments in reflection, though in a way different from, yet continuous with, the phenomenality of the given as such.

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However, the thesis that the phenomenality of the given is continuous with its own ground of manifestation assumes not only the possibility of reflection, but that the present and constitutive sense of the very experiencing of experience is co-given, co-evident in the sense or meaning of what is grasped in any perceiving or understanding. Our description of the “appearing as…” of the depiction of the woman, or the grasping of the significance or meaning of someone who turns to us to identify the image as that of a famous contemporary actress, is fundamentally distorted if we do not recognize its unity with the “taking in” of the appearance or the active “grasping” of an understanding that occurs in its wake. If we keep this in mind, then it is clear that “consciousness” does not function in phenomenology as some kind of explanatory device that would allow us to account for an intentional relation or stance. Rather, the claim is always that the being of intentionality is itself intuitively manifest as a mode of originarily given being in a flowing continuity with that towards which it is directed, or possesses as its inner theme. The being of seeing is always phenomenologically implicated in the being of the seen. This idea is what lies behind Husserl’s insistence on the descriptive, as opposed to explanatory, orientation of phenomenology. The phenomenality of the phenomenon, the openness that allows for its self-showing as such to “be,” is an intuitive given that originally lends itself to description. Thus the point of phenomenology is not simply to describe things as they are experienced, but that the descriptivity of experience provides access to its essential resources, or the field of possibilities that the existence of intentional being has always already engaged. The significance of this gesture also lies at the heart of many traditional disputes in phenomenology. For what is really lending itself here to description? If one takes seriously the idea that the very living through of lived experiences, and with that the appearing of appearances, is itself something that is in some sense intuited or seen, and if one then goes on to admit that the manifest manner in which one relates to what it is that is grasped is constitutive of the meaning and sense of what it is that one sees—then what is the best way to articulate the implications of this species of self-manifestation? Can one really assume that everything that is at play in this dimension of subjective existence can be captured with an analysis of the life of consciousness and of the ego, as Husserl attempts to do, or is any appeal to “consciousness” somehow already misleading? Is not perhaps the language of existence, or of the body, or perhaps history and selfhood closer to what is seen in this intuitive encounter with the seeing of any seen, which is after all not a seeing of which one is simply conscious, but above all the seeing of intentional life itself, namely the seeing that in some sense one is?

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Even in Husserl, one needs to recognize that the theme of consciousness is not pursued without perplexity. We can cite here the V. Logical Investigation, where Husserl struggles to establish a coherent conception of consciousness, and with that of lived experience, that avoids what he takes to be lacking in the concept of consciousness that one finds in the work of his mentor Brentano. More, this situation in which one may not have immediately at one’s disposal the best means by which to pursue a faithful description of the phenomenality of the phenomenon does not just involve the task of choosing the proper conceptual terminology. Nor is it simply a question of grappling with the advantages and disadvantages of traditional philosophical discourse, or the contingencies of that historical or social situatedness that inevitably conditions any attempt to engage philosophical problems. There is a deeper problem that lies in the essence of intentional life itself. This leads us to the fourth gesture, which can be expressed in the following thesis: the phenomenality of intentional being is obscured by its own natural tendencies, against which philosophy must secure itself methodologically. Not only historically conditioned traditional discourse, but also the very directionality intrinsic to the being of seeing is implicated in the obfuscation of the self-manifestation of intentional life. To be sure, this does not contradict the interpretation of intentionality as originally a being-directed towards things, or towards the world. On the contrary, it is a consequence of emphasizing this directedness, for any “being-directed” always lets something fall out of focus. Intentional life, one could say, always falls out of its own focus. The view of the Manhattan skyline from a ferry on the Hudson, for example, finds its terminus in the Manhattan skyline, not in the living accomplishment of the relevant ensemble of manifestation that is realized, even necessarily so, in the perceiving activity of a conscious being. Perceiving is that which enables the skyline to unfold in its own self-showing; this means that if perceiving itself proves to be an instance of a self-showing, it is only insofar as it is a self-presence directed towards or for the sake of a givenness that is not its own. It represents the mystery of a worldly being that is never closed in upon itself, thus of a being that is able to exist as its own mere center and periphery. An accomplished experience is never “about” the experiencing that provides the space of phenomenal emergence, and likewise the subsequent phenomenon is never “about” its own phenomenality. Though intentionality is never its own theme, nevertheless its being carries with it the implicit possibility of its own reflective thematization. Reflection in phenomenology is never a mere self-reference, but always that return from a worldly directed act of thematization to what precedes it, to what forms the

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conditions for its very emergence, without occupying the same space on equal terms with what it makes visible. There is thus a natural conflict between the original focus of intentional consciousness on what lies beyond itself and the possibility of consciousness turning towards its own nascent givenness as a genuine theme. It is in this sense that the possibility of the being of intentionality is obscured by tendencies constitutive of its very being, even as this possibility is itself always given a place, a kind of shadow dimension that tails every becoming of a lived experience. The necessity of this receding character of the ground of the phenomenon, thus of phenomenality in general, means that the accomplishments of meaning that stand at the origin, and which constitute the conditions for the possibility of the experienced world as a horizon of meaning, originally take the concrete form of a self-obscuring and nonthematic dimensionality of experience. The question then arises as to how it is that this promise of making phenomenality a descriptive theme can be realized, how intentionality can be a genuine theme and not a mere latent presence, at best only dimly apprehended in the emergence of what “stands there before us.” Phenomenology—the logos of the phenomenon as phenomenon, of phenomena in their phenomenality—is only possible if this hidden dimension of the visible can be brought into the very open of the phenomenality that it itself originally constitutes. Here we can already see what looms as a paradox for any such project: for the demand seems to be that phenomenality itself must be brought into its own open, that we must find the means by which it can share the same space of focus with what it itself has brought into visibility by retreating into a kind of shadowy, background functioning. The working thesis of Husserl’s phenomenology is that intentional consciousness includes, among its manifold ways of self-modification, the possibility of working against this natural tendency of the intentional away from itself. The original space of phenomenality, the rhythm of its accomplishment, allows for a recalibration, a shift of direction within intentionality that counters its own natural tendency towards latency, though without breaking the circuit of its accomplishment, without losing its sense of ground. To be sure, intentional life will always remain latent with respect to the original intuitivity of things, the articulated presence of a world manifest in its sense-governed appearance. Yet despite this there is a unique manner in which it can be made reflectively or descriptively “patent,” a way secured by a unique modification of the intuitivity of lived experience. Again the classical controversies among phenomenologists rage—how is such a recalibrated intuitivity to be understood? Husserl speaks of a “transcendental experience” as a manner of seeing that must be learned, arguing

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that the being of intuitivity never simply unfolds before us in an unambiguous manner, but reveals itself to a reflection in which the philosopher only slowly learns how to inhabit the latent spaces of a self-obscuring origin. This is again a fundamental gesture of phenomenology: the attempt to think seriously about the task of learning to reflectively inhabit the space of our own vision, instead of taking it for granted as an unambiguous, simple “given” presence of the visible—it is the visibility of the visible that is the question here, and that is something first and for the most part invisible. This in turn leads us to a fifth, and the final gesture of phenomenological philosophy that we will sketch here. From the above, it is clear that phenomenology does not amount to a mere descriptive empiricism, in part given that its point of departure is the insight into the intrinsic limitations of our natural vision to keep in view what is given in its givenness. It also begins with the realization of the possibility of an unnatural or counter-natural potential to emphasize and fix for our vision the latent phenomenality of the constitutive accomplishments of lived experience. Accordingly, this last thesis amounts to the claim that the unnatural character of phenomenological method does not distort the accomplishments of sense, that realizing the thematization of intentional being against its own natural tendencies does not amount to the loss of anything essential. This thesis could be stated thus: secured phenomenal being illuminates the constitutive accomplishments of lived experience as the origin of meaning. One might ask: what in the end is really meant by “securing” phenomenality, against its own natural tendencies to be, so to speak, lost in what manifests itself, the phenomenon proper? The question here is fundamentally methodological in nature, but not in the sense of a methodology that would limit itself to the outline of a procedure, or even to some commitment to a particular mode of analysis. “Method” here designates the question of the possibility of a reflective orientation that anchors itself in both insight and questioning, and which can never be summed up in a list of principles.17 The insight is that 17

Not even in the case of Husserl’s famous “principle of all principles.” The central operative concept in this famous passage from Ideas I, intuition, is precisely what is under question in these sections with respect to its genuine breadth and even sense. For Husserl, it was always the case that the ultimate illumination of the possibility of the method as such was to be the result of its concrete employment in individual phenomenological investigations, which necessarily implies that any “methodological principle” is more of a title of a problem than some axiom or procedural rule. See Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, 2 vols., Husserliana III, ed. Karl Schumann (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976) (hereafter cited as Hua III]; Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and

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phenomenality emerges from sources that are richer than any given inventory of aspects and features of “given” experience or objects of experience; thus description here is exploratory and experimental, and never limited to a classification that would leave the question of its own possibility unasked. The questioning practiced in phenomenology seeks to orient reflection towards these richer dimensions of experience that are overlooked but harbored by the very experiencing of experience itself, thus always turning us back to the potential for as yet undiscovered resources that remain implicit in the horizon of intentional life. Yet these dimensions and their promise are not lacking in ambiguity; the field secured by such explorations is inherently unstable, since it comes into view only when we leave behind our common familiarity with given ways of talking and thinking about experience in favor of a questioning that demands that lived experience stand for itself, reveal itself from its own origin. So when Husserl speaks of “phenomenological reductions,” which we will discuss below, the point is not to reduce something complex to something more simple, or analyze wholes into their elements, or to explain away secondary features in favor of what is primary, but rather: to reduce, to bring back, a given accomplishment to the movement of its very being-accomplished, and to ask: what is the being of this “being-accomplished,” what is the very face of the movement of accomplishment itself?

The Problem of the World

These gestures—pointing reflection towards meaning, experience, phenomenality, obscurity, and origins—together form the basic phenomenological parameters for developing the problem of the built world that we will pursue below. Accordingly, they can be employed to revisit the three problems concerning the manner in which the built world bears knowledge outlined at the beginning of this chapter. All three of those problems were instances of a need to recognize a depth that is not immediately evident, but which is nevertheless somehow at play in our understanding of the artifact world. The question of this depth had to do, in each case, with a sense in which things can be said to bear various unities of sense, whether of purposiveness, temporality, or the presence of others; this in turn promised to fix better the landscape for reflection in which those choices concerning the nature of architectural knowledge, exemplified by the architect and engineer, take place, and ultimately draw their sense. Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014) (hereafter Ideas I), §24.

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Thus the first problem aimed at a depth of referentiality that would allow for the apprehension of a purposive object the purposes of which were entirely obscure; the second at a depth of presence that allows for a vivid encounter with lost time; and the third at a depth of distance that would enable us to grasp the intersubjective character of the built world as the space of encounter. The suggestion is that the depth relevant to each case represents a problem of meaning, in the sense of something implicitly grasped in its questionability but not yet fully articulated; and that the clarification of this meaning can be pursued through a description of the intentional structures of the lived experience in which it is originally articulated. Turning to lived experience is also a turn to the problem of its phenomenality, or its manner of manifestation. Since lived experience is identified here as a title for the problem of the origin of meaning, then the question arises as to how this sheds light on the specific problems of bearing purpose, time, and encounter. One might be tempted here to bracket the whole problem of the self-manifestation of intentional life, in favor of a more local description of the intentional sense of the built. Yet this would be misleading, for reasons that have already been brought into partial view through our reflection on the contrast between architect and engineer. It became clear that what was at stake in the distinction was not simply how to define the practice of building, but rather what building tells us about human beings—the issue, in other words, comes down to understanding what a human being is. This is equally true once we develop a phenomenological perspective of the meaning of the built: what is manifest for us in our experience of the built world will be inextricably bound to what of ourselves, our own being in the world, is co-implicated or comanifest within the same horizon of appearance. The senses of depth relevant to the problems of how things bear purpose, time, and encounter will prove to be bound to a fundamental depth of subjective life itself, one that is a constant if often unacknowledged issue at the heart of the problem of understanding the essence of human dwelling. Finally, this subjective depth is self-obscuring, in ways that will be essential to elaborate in the course of our reflections below. Self-obfuscation is not simply a methodological hurdle that needs to be overcome to make something clear; rather, it is a concrete expression of another sense in which things “bear” manifestation that we have not elaborated in sufficient detail. Namely, things not only bear purposiveness, time, and encounter, but in a more primal sense they bear the world. We have already met this idea as something implicit in the thesis of Arendt’s that the human artifice opens a world, and with that provides the substructure for the space of appearance the reality of which is brought to fruition in speech and action. Its further articulation, which is the task

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of the next two chapters, will be critical in establishing the sense in which the question of the manifestation of the built is intimately bound to that of the manifestation of subjective life. For the worldhood of the one, basic to the depth that allows it to bear meaning, has as its ultimate sense the being-in-the-world of the other.

chapter 3

Phenomenon and World

The Pyramid and the Labyrinth

In Chapter 1 we already encountered Arendt’s argument that homo faber not only fabricates individual things, but also constructs a world, that to build is not merely to add more and more objects to an already assembled aggregate of entities, but involves a more fundamental generation of a space in which human words and deeds appear as the first proof of their existence. The worldly character of built space, in other words, is not determined by a world-indifferent nature, or at least not exclusively. But what does it mean, to build a world? What is at stake in Arendt’s assertion? Or more: in what sense is the built world a world, and not just a cordoned off piece of an otherwise allencompassing nature? Arendt gives us some important suggestions about how to understand the concept of a world. In The Human Condition, as we saw, she emphasizes the world as a context of action, of distinctively human events that find both expression and permanence in a space measured out and embodied by artifacts. The very concept of an artifact, accordingly, implies a world; and it was the problem of how things bear this implication that closed the reflections of the last chapter. It was also in play at the beginning: the intimate bond between thing and world is already evident in the example of the stone found on the beach, teasing us with its possibilities of purpose. The promise of the stone as an artifact, even if only imaginatively sustained, was the opening of the possibility that it points to a vanished world of use, and with that of meaning. Pursuing this thought, one might conceive of the world as the unity of a symbolic space, understood as a network of artifacts that give symbolic expression to the various dimensions of human existence—so the things of work, of leisure, of history, and of memory might all find expression in a totality of symbols and symbolic forms. And if we add to this symbolic function an emphasis on the permanence that is established thanks to the materiality of built things, then the world could be identified as the horizon of a permanent symbol that, among other things, preserves the memory of past words and deeds. However, is this all there is to the idea of a world? There is in fact more at stake in the concept than the question of the durability of a specific class of symbolic forms. Consider, for example, Bernard Tschumi’s discussion of what he calls the “architectural paradox” that arises from two competing conceptions of

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the world that can be represented by the metaphors of pyramid and labyrinth respectively.1 In Tschumi’s reflection, the metaphor of the pyramid expresses the order of a world as an intellectual projection; the world is here identified as something fixed by idea and concept. This is in itself a particular development of the sense of the world as a symbolic order: the world as pyramid dances, so to speak, within the strict if also dynamic confines of its representation, where its existence as a mere symbol of intelligence amounts to the affirmation of the potential for material space to be the projective plenum into which ideas can be introduced in the guise of something real. The pyramid in this way defines the common horizon of the architect and the engineer, to the extent to which they represent unique but at the same time overlapping comprehensions of the manner in which things submit to order. The built world is in turn distinct from nature, in that it represents the world as what it is because of its having been explicitly thought, conceived, understood, and shaped accordingly. In contrast, Tschumi argues that we also tend to conceive of the world, or rather experience the world, as a labyrinth of physical, sensuous materiality that is given in a non-cognitive immediacy. The labyrinth in this way serves as a metaphor for the world as it is, indifferent to its being the plenum of conceiving and understanding, forever resilient against the inroads of conceptuality. Here, instead of the world as the given plenum of projective potentiality, the world is represented by the given plenum of sensibility, which is in turn contra-symbolic in a fundamental sense. Matter in the labyrinth does not submit to idea and form, but refuses, stands independent, and traps us in the grip of dimensions that belong specifically to our bodily existence. The labyrinth, too, represents a common horizon for both architect and engineer, to the extent to which it gives expression to the friction of limiting conditions to the very possibility of the material manipulation of things that ultimately conditions the practical concerns of both. Tschumi is clear that, from the point of view of practice, the contrast between pyramid and labyrinth should not be taken as an either/or. Yet at the same time it is just this disjunction that proves to be necessary, thus yielding a paradox of mutually exclusive, yet interdependent elements: To restate my point, the paradox is not about the impossibility of perceiving both architectural concept (the six faces of the cube) and real space at the same time but about the impossibility of questioning the nature of space and at the same time making or experiencing real space. Unless 1 Bernard Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox (1975),” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996): 27–51.

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we search for an escape from architecture into the general organization of building processes, the paradox persists: architecture is made of two terms that are interdependent but mutually exclusive. Indeed, architecture constitutes the reality of experience while this reality gets in the way of the overall vision. Architecture constitutes the abstraction of absolute truth, while this very truth gets in the way of feeling. We cannot both experience and think of what we experience.2 This is, of course, rather overstated. Yet one could concur that there is certainly a tension that has its origin in the fact that architectural practice always en­gages both of these truths of the world, expressed metaphorically by the pyramid and the labyrinth respectively. Architecture is an active enhancement of the grip of idea on matter, of the realization of the expressive potential of the real, thus staking out the fundamental claim of the intellect as that which provides shape and form to human experience. But the world of homo faber is also, as something lived, the orchestration, and often intensification of sensuous experience, with its open-ended extension into ever more complicated patterns of immediate, non-expressive elements of life. The “world” this engenders is both the realization of the perfection of reason, symbolized by the pyramid (as the perfect symbolic expression of the culmination of reason), and an experiential labyrinth. What Tschumi calls the architectural paradox thus represents both the liberation of insight and the constraint of the sensuous, both the fulfillment of form and the stubborn indeterminateness of material existence. The paradox that results is that of a world that is both transparent and opaque, rational and resistant to clarity, embodying the freedom of a master understanding and the facticity of being lost in an inescapable course of obstructions. To be sure, there are plenty of problems with this schema. For one, it seems to reproduce an uncomfortable dichotomy between mind and body, intellect and sensuous life, which for many reasons both philosophical and political might perhaps be best to avoid. It also seems to rely on relatively naïve employments of the metaphors of pyramid and labyrinth, ignoring the sense of the closed character of the former as inimical to freedom (emphasized famously by Hegel), as well as the rational, planned character of the latter. The labyrinth is, after all, the achievement of the original master architect himself, Daedalus, and in ancient times served as the very symbol of architecture. Nevertheless, what this opposition does serve to introduce is the idea that some sense of projection belongs to the very meaning of the human world, and with that the notion that the sense-unity of the world must be dependent upon some kind 2 Ibid., p. 48.

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of intellectual activity, if in fact the intellect is that within us which is fundamentally projective. This is of course something we will have to question; the world is not only what we project, but is something “in which” we exist, or that into which we have always already become enmeshed, even lost. So the question we can pose through this contrast of Tschumi’s is the following: how must we understand the world, such that it can be recognized as both something that belongs to thought, thereby something that embodies an outward projection away from ourselves, but also something in which we find ourselves? Is it simply a question of finding ourselves in our own thoughts, limited by the bounds of the sensible, or is there another way to pose the question of the meaning of the world?

The Labyrinth of the Natural Attitude

We can turn to a notion of Husserl’s to develop this question more explicitly, and draw out its methodological implications—namely, the concept of the “natural attitude,” which Husserl develops in Ideas I and elsewhere.3 For both the elements of projection and givenness that generate the crux of the contrast between the pyramid and the labyrinth are brought together into a descriptive unity in Husserl’s concept of the natural attitude. The function of the concept of the natural attitude is to stage a reflection on what it means to begin—to begin a decision, a thought, a reflection, even (for Husserl, especially) philosophy. There is something basic and universal about all beginning: we begin “in the natural attitude,” with the “given” world, the world in which we find ourselves in specific relations, both with respect to the world in general as the open horizon of encounters with other things and persons in the immediate circuit of our actions. To describe this world and the attitude that reveals it originally as natural emphasizes that it is something already in place, always already in the grip of its own having-been; that it is what it is, almost without the need for any movement towards its discovery. This means that, in a strict sense, I do not find the world, but only my already being-in a world. Likewise, I do not find myself in the world in the grip of one discrete event among many, as when I find my keys or find my way through a foreign city. Such modalities of being do not establish a natural whole as that 3 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §§27–32. See also Husserl, Crisis/Hua VI, §§28–55, as well as the Nachlaß material published in Husserl, Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlaß (1916–1937), Husserliana XXXIX, ed. Rochus Siwa (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008).

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within which all events are inscribed as their common ground. The attitude, or positioning (the word Husserl uses in German is Einstellung, which can also suggest attunement) that belongs to the natural world is one that comes without thinking; it belongs to who and what we are as a matter of course. This means that the significance of the natural attitude is not so much a position that one takes with respect to something or other, as a kind of intended focus of attention, but has more to do with the positioning of a placement. We begin—the day, thinking, living, acting, closing—but only in the wake of having already been placed before this beginning, which had thus first made it at all possible. This is what Husserl’s descriptions at the beginning of §27 in Ideas I are aiming at: he is endeavoring to open a perspective on natural being that emphasizes its function of putting one somewhere, where one is always already found in the midst of things. To reflect on the natural contours of our place among things, in the world, is necessarily to reflect on something established, but an establishment that is marked by an effortlessness that conspires with an anonymity and which seeks always to withdraw into an un-reflected background. Put simply (and here speaking in the first person is necessary, as well as a dose of patience in what may strike one, again necessarily, as utterly trivial): in the natural attitude, I am here, in a place that is in turn in a world. From here, things and concerns are given to me according to patterns of proximity and distance (“right here,” “over there”; “not yet, but soon”). Persons and their orbits of engagement are also present to me, in a variety of arrays of the near and the far. This given world is one that extends itself around me in space, but also in time: my here is also a now, which is in turn in a place or location that belongs to a flow of time with its coming future and its going into a past. Yet this multidimensional hic et nunc is not limited to coordinates of spatial or temporal multiplicities; it is also a place of and for things that are near and far according to value, to interest and concern in general, thus of things that have significance or meaning in a wide variety of ways. Take for example the light in the reading room of a library. The light, say emanating from a window, is contextually significant in reference to activities I pursue, themselves dependent on what I find in the scope of its illumination— light enables me to see and be seen by others, to read the words on the page of a rare manuscript, to organize my thoughts in a notebook, or even to just let them wander in the enjoyment of that quiet mood that belongs to the library as a sanctuary for the intellectually absorbed. Light is here significant as something that takes the form of a kind catapult aimed at something else. Artifacts can also be described as such catapults of action, as the availability of a piece of chalk for writing diagrams on the blackboard during a lecture shows.

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As “something in the world,” the piece of chalk is not just a mute given bit of substance, but a “something for…”—for the drawing of a diagram, or perhaps a bit of stage prop for the animated lecturer. The light, the chalk, are objects that have already been absorbed by their functions, which in turn point to the various dimensions constitutive of the space of this or that activity. All of this is “given” to me, not as a concluding representation that I encounter at the end of a string of identifying judgments or inferences, but as that which comes with my being already located among these possibilities and already directed along conduits of activity that have accrued to these functionalities of things. I look to them as a matter of course, reaching out to them in full expectation that they will respond to me as needed. The world around us is in this way “natural”: in the sense of its being obvious, like the unremarkable accomplishment of taking a breath while turning to the next page, sitting in the comfortable light of the library, among the readers. Equally “there” for me, and also constitutive of the order of my placement in the world, are persons and things that are given outside the immediate circuit of my perception, things which lie in what, following Husserl, we could call its horizon: “What is currently perceived, what is determinate (or at least somewhat determinate) and co-present in a more or less clear way is in part pervaded, in part surrounded by a horizon of indeterminate actuality, a horizon of which I am dimly conscious.”4 The concept of horizon is crucial in any description of the manner in which things bear the world, since it expresses an important sense in which what is not here is also here, as an enrichment of the here that is here. Let us take a closer look at what this might mean. Sitting in the reading room of the library, I am aware that, between where I sit and the door, there is present for me the implicit possibility of crossing a distance, that distance which would come alive for me in a more explicit manner were I to stand up and walk over to the door. When I see the door over there, at a certain remove, this “remove” just is the very presence of that possibility. Were I to realize the implicit potential of that remove, then the whole of my environing perception, 4 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 49; Hua III, p. 49. Also cf. Edmund Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1918–1926), Husserliana XI, Margot Fleischer, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966) (hereafter cited as Hua XI); Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. Anthony Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001) (hereafter cited as APS), §§1–4; and Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil. Untersuchung zur Genealogie der Logik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1999) (hereafter cited as EU); Experience and Judgment, trans. Spencer Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern, 1977) (hereafter cited as EJ), §§8–9, 22–46.

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or what I see around me when pondering the distance between here and the door, would shift in accordance with a fixed set of patterns. This is of course no surprise; I anticipate, and on the heels of that follow just these patterns when I direct myself towards the progressive realization of the possibility that they articulate. This involves a fundamental dynamic of manifestation. The implicit possibility of crossing the distance is in part the possibility of another look of that very distance, and the environing perception that has it in view, one that becomes progressively manifest as I cross from here towards the door in making my way outside the room. I do not literally see these shifts of pattern in advance—how the door would look if I were four feet closer is not explicitly seen from ten feet away, as if I could see now what I would see were I to pursue this intuited possibility of crossing. There is here a labyrinthine element at play: the actuality of the present look in its concrete partiality represents a barrier to what it nevertheless will yield itself to later. Nevertheless, I do see these patterns of emergence, even in an anticipatory mode, in the sense that I can see how to set their realization into motion from precisely the conditions of concrete partiality that are also conditions for their beginning. I am, in advance, in tune with the possibilities of the shift in the look of things as they are set into motion: they are present to me as a pre-delineation of possibility inherent in that actuality of what it is that I do see “now,” occupying my discrete place in the reading room of the library. Looking at the distance from my seat to the door, I can see, so to speak, so many openings for modifications of what it is that I see, modifications which are present as pre-delineations of a “beyond” or horizon of the realized, actual look of the room, with its door “over there.” This horizon of pre-delineation, of openings of modified givenness, does not end at the visible door, nor is it wholly wrapped up within the actualized look of the things that I have in my immediate, perceptual grasp. The beyond that haunts the actual confines of a given perceptual appearance of things penetrates towards an ever more distant “outside.” I am aware, in the form of an ever more widening circle of pre-delineated being, of a space with its things that lie just outside the door, in the hallway; likewise the space with its things in the library taken as the entire building; then to the street outside, and again to the city I am in, the country, and so on out beyond to encompass the labyrinth of the world itself—all the places, persons, and things that are for me unrealized, indeterminate actualities, in the sense that they are not seen by me right here and now. And, like a labyrinth, each step towards realization must begin inside a partiality, with its obscurity that initially holds me at a distance from something present yet still to be seen.

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All these potential spaces and the things in them are given, and in such a way that they have a structured, patterned connection to what it is that I actually do see. This means that “not seen” is not equivalent to “not given”: every point of occupied space is an opening to an opening and beyond, a beginning situated in a given, all of which is in place in the perfect obviousness of the grip of the whole. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about sitting in a library unreflectively confident that one can get up and go, from here, to a home where I am not, that is not here, and from home on to … the more and more. This is an essential aspect of the labyrinth of the world, namely, the full presence of an inexhaustibility that is borne by the consciousness of the modifiability of a present environing circuit of relations constitutive of the perceptual field. The natural attitude and its world also constitutes a fundamental, given background that is operative even when I turn to things that cannot really be encountered in the perceptual world at all.5 For example, when in mathematics I investigate properties that belong to the set of natural numbers N, or to a symmetry group of a Fano plane, I am not concerned with anything that I in fact find or even could find as something I would run across in the world. The ideality of such objects excludes them from those patterns that characterize the overall style of the givenness of entities in the world; I must begin, as it were, elsewhere. Things are a little different when I set about to measure something, say the distance between my seat in the library and the door, since the actual measurement of bodies is not a purely mathematical affair. Measurement takes place through a taking up and negotiation of patterns of realization that belong to something in perception that does not belong to a pure mathematical order. Measurement is a repetitive joining together of things, itself a kind of building, which lends itself to mathematical articulation and expression. By contrast, when sitting at the reading table occupied with a difficult proof in pure mathematics, I am in the midst of exploring possibilities that do not reside in the horizon of the world, but which have as it were a merely intellectual phenomenality. Any distance that I could measure between here and the door accordingly has no “real” place in this intellectual world, since in such a world there are no doors or even perceptions that would be poised to unfold a progression of possible perceptions. The intellectual world of pure mathematics thus requires another kind of attitude than the natural, another “being placed” in order for the things that populate such a world to be explored. Most importantly, if I do not purposely adopt the attitude of the number theorist, then this “world” of numbers and symmetry groups cannot be 5 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §28.

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explored at all, but remains closed. “The arithmetical world,” Husserl emphasizes, “is there for me if and so long as I am arithmetically disposed [eingestellt].”6 The arithmetical world belongs, in this sense, more to the realm of the pyramid, which implies a fundamental dependency on a projecting intelligence in order to become manifest. I do not “find” myself already in such a world; I am there only when I make the horizon of mathematical thinking my explicit ground, allowing me to pursue the object of my activity. Since my engagement is dependent upon an explicit act of grounding, my access to such a world can be easily interrupted—I become thirsty, or I need more coffee, or perhaps someone starts talking too loudly, and such “worlds” effectively vanish as living examples of a nexus of orientation, even if objectively they remain within the horizon of an ideal repeatability. This kind of interruption is precisely what does not, and cannot happen to the natural attitude. The pyramid, one could say, is susceptible to interruption in a strong sense; this is a consequence of its being as a dependent manifestation. This is not the case with the labyrinth of the natural attitude, for this attitude is not similarly dependent; it is not something that I adopt or assume in any way. As a validity for consciousness, it is something that remains true as a manifest orientation towards… The natural attitude is in this sense sui generis. Even when I adopt another attitude, which I would need to do were I to study mathematics in the library, this does not mean that I drop the natural attitude and its world and replace it with the world of an intellectual attitude. The natural remains operative, and valid, even if it is modified into a background orientation that cedes room for the projection of the ideal. Thus in engaging the world of mathematics, I do not in a strict sense begin elsewhere, as I suggested above; this “elsewhere,” this other beginning, is firmly located, as a beginning, in the transformative possibilities of that constant ground of all beginnings, namely the natural attitude. This does not mean, however, that the natural attitude is compatible with all other attitudes, or that it somehow offers a place for them all within its horizon. Its universality or generality is of a different sort. Other attitudes, such as the mathematical, in fact represent fundamental conflicts with the natural. The ideality of the former marks off a constitutive tension of distance with the concrete validity of the latter. But such conflicts are of no consequence to the natural attitude, which always remains in a profound sense indifferent to any tension that I may be able to introduce by actively shifting my attitude, or orientation: 6 Husserl, Ideas I; p. 51; Hua III, p. 51.

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The natural world […] the world in the usual sense of the word is continuously there for me, as long as I naturally live directed toward it. As long as that is the case, I am “naturally disposed”; indeed, both [expressions] say the same thing. Nothing at all needs to change in it if I at once appropriate the arithmetical world and similar, other “worlds” by adopting the corresponding attitudes [Einstellungen]. The natural world remains “on hand” then; afterward I am in the natural attitude just as I was before, undisturbed in this respect by the new attitudes […] The two worlds, simultaneously on hand, are devoid of any connection apart from their relation to the ego […].7 Thus my mind can fly into the most rarefied atmospheres of mathematical idealities, or into the most whimsical daydreams of an overworked academic, in an attempt to do anything but think about where I am, yet without my feet ever leaving the ground, without the natural world ever losing anything that it has always already become for me. The indifference of the natural attitude encompasses in this sense everything, even everything that is what it is only as an exception to what can be found in the horizon of natural life. The thoughts of the mathematician, or the utopian dreamer, remain in the world, they necessarily begin there, even if at the same time they seem to completely transcend it. This incontrovertible hegemony of the labyrinthine world, the absolute indifference of its hold on us to all of our attempts to escape, will be an important element when we turn to the expressive character of built forms. Another way to say that the natural attitude encompasses everything in its indifference is to say that it amounts to what Husserl calls a “general thesis” (Generalthesis).8 The notion of generality operative here can be taken in two senses. First, it can be taken in the sense of encompassing all things in general: the natural attitude thus involves the general sense of what makes a thing a thing, namely that it is “in the world.” But the generality of the thesis can also be taken in the sense of what is not explicitly posed in an individual manner in this or that specific situation, but could be, since it always already holds “in general.” Thus in those relatively rare instances when we do turn and explicitly posit the world as a whole in the form of an explicit assertion or affirmation of its existence (in response to a philosophical skeptic, for example), we do this in full awareness that we are just giving expression to something that is already in place, already valid for us in general. We have always already accepted the 7 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 51; Hua III, p. 51. 8 Ibid., §30; cf. Husserl’s self-critique in §43 of Crisis/Hua VI.

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world before we find reason to accept the proposition that articulates what it is that we have accepted; and if we fail to find such reason, this does not negate or render impossible in any way our acceptance of the world. The natural attitude is, again, quite indifferent to the show trials of an intellect that would set out to either defend or condemn its validity. Husserl’s description of the generality of the natural attitude is thus meant to capture a specific sense in which we are immersed in the world. Everything we do—the whole gamut of words and deeds, to again remember Arendt’s thesis about the world—is done “in the natural attitude,” everything that begins, begins in its labyrinth. This attitude is not limited to our immediate concerns, or our immediate focus, as something that we adopt or assume in order to be so concerned and focused (as in mathematics). Its generality in fact sets it apart from another modality of immersion that is characteristic of individual activities, taken in their specificity. A given activity, with its focus on what is being done or accomplished, represents a kind of secondary immersion, one founded on the primary immersion of being in the world, in the horizon of pre-given reality “in which” one turns to this or that, discovering possibilities of focus and pursuit. This difference between the immersion in the world and the immersion in activities is vital to understanding the significance of Arendt’s thesis that homo faber creates a world for human existence. For it allows us to approach the question of whether the reach of homo faber is limited to mapping out ideal conduits of human pursuits on the surface of an indifferent material world, or whether it brings into play a more basic role of making, one that touches on the origin of the world as the pre-given horizon of all the movements of human existence. Is the world associated with homo faber more like the easily interrupted and suspended pyramid of mathematical ideality, forever dependent on the free act of the mind for its manifestation, or is it on the contrary more like the labyrinth of a world that provides the potential to begin from out of a primordial pregivenness that “places” us in a manner independent of our freedom? How “natural,” in other words, is human making? Let us leave this issue aside for the moment, and instead stress for now that the generality of the natural attitude leads us to the conception of a double structure of worldly immersion. Specific concerns, defining specific activities and experiences, represent a set of foreground immersions that rest against a background of embeddedness in the horizon of the world. As an active being turned towards things of concern, my engagements reflect a fundamental tension between a background horizon of the world in which I find myself and the foreground immersion the scope of which is defined by a given concern.

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Immersed in reading my novel as I sit in a café, I am only as oblivious to the world around me as this tension allows, which thereby enables me to descend into my foreground concern—the world of the novel, its characters and situations, mood and prose—at the expense of what is happening just beyond the edges of my reader’s consciousness. In the Ideas I and elsewhere, Husserl uses the Cartesian expression “cogito”— “I think”—for all of the activities in which one is engaged with things in such foreground concerns.9 Following Husserl, we can take this “I think” in a wide sense of simply putting something before oneself, in such a manner that one is able to direct oneself towards it. Taken in this widest sense, even eating can be said to be an instance of a cogito, since to eat I need to actively put into my hungry mouth the food that I then go about eating; I must directly engage it precisely in terms of its given availability as something to be consumed. In much the same way, this is what I am after when I describe myself as having “devoured” a novel, “immersed” myself in a mathematical problem, or anything that takes a distinct situatedness on my part in whatever form in order to have it “in view,” “placed there before me” as a potential support or terminus for my activity. What it means to say something is “before” me, whether “there” or “here,” is not a simple matter. Take again our example of finding a stone on the beach, and being immersed, imaginatively, in the suggestiveness of purpose that it seems to offer. The stone is here, “before me”; but it is clear that what is before me is not simply the result of my action as an ego, as if the cogito that is operative in this case were the ultimate source of presence. My immersion in the world, and the potential for a foreground interest against the naturalness of this immutable background, conditions this encounter in a fundamental way. The stone, in other words, is something found in the wake of finding myself among things. This is precisely the point of emphasizing the general thesis of the natural standpoint: all engagements of the ego are embedded in a situation, all cogitationes are secondary to the fundamental immersion of intentional life in a pre-given horizon of the labyrinth.

Obscurity, Transcendent and Immanent

Above I suggested that the three introductory problems of how things bear purpose, time, and encounter could be framed phenomenologically as problems of meaning, that is, as problems calling for the clarification of the 9 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §28, also cf. §35.

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accomplishments of intentional experience. A central characteristic of such problems is that intentional life has the tendency to obscure itself, forsaking its own appearance in favor of what it allows to make manifest. We are now closer to being able to elaborate this last thesis in more precise terms. The accomplishments of sense tend towards obscurity, precisely to the extent to which they are subject to, or take place within, the natural attitude. The natural attitude takes the form of an immersion in the world of the pre-given, characterized by a horizon of accomplishments that are in one way or another “already established,” finished unities of sense that do not require explicit decisions on the part those who think, judge, or form concepts. Every cogito—every activity, say eating or reading a novel—is caught in that tension between the nascent visibility of an unfolding accomplishment (I am on page forty in my book; dinner is half over; the painting is finished and I can step back and decide whether it was successful), and something “else” that remains just there on the edge of whatever I see in the circuit of its visibility: the having-been placed of this activity itself as its “given being in the world.” This also means that the way in which things bear the world, and with that a depth that forms the ground and basis for their bearing of purposiveness, time, and encounter, has to do with the manner in which things represent a locus for this obscurity of the natural attitude. That is, the worldliness of things has to do with their being the site of just that obfuscation that leaves unrealized the full manifestation of subjective life in the wake of its fundamental acceptance of the pre-given horizon of being. This seems to amount to the claim that “given being in the world” is in fact a kind of blindness. Is this not evidently an exaggeration? It would be if we did not also recognize the converse. If being given is a kind of obscurity, it is also an original source of clarity. It comprises the pre-given forms of how things are meaningful; its validity or given acceptance shapes what we take as meaningful, even what kinds of questions of meaning strike us as genuine or proper questions to pose. When I ask about something in the natural attitude, I ask about it with a view towards comprehending its sense, but in such a way that is also guided by a particular shape that its sense has already assumed, including what it means for anything to have meaning. The overriding, default tendency in the natural attitude is to want to know how what is being asked about “fits” into the world, as the given horizon of an established way in which things have been understood. What is it, to read a novel, to be engrossed, say, in the narrative complexities of Tristram Shandy? What is different when I return from a long journey, and everything seems both strange and familiar at the same time? Answering such questions in the natural attitude looks to given in­stances of similar things, to the momentum of understanding that is manifest in a

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set of already given objectivities found in the horizon of the world; it looks, in other words, to what we are accustomed to find in the horizon of the ordinary and the unremarkable. The world provides answers, some ready-made and others half-finished, all of which are dependable in their familiarity: it is already known that to read is to read for enjoyment, moral satisfaction, the increase of knowledge, or to avoid boredom. Or, unable to respond immediately in a meaningful way towards our bent to question, the world allows for plenty of room to wait for the strange unfamiliarity of things that has seized us to pass. The striking is always transient, this is part of its worldliness; we are patient for the uncanny mood that has gripped us after our return from a long journey to dissipate, as it always does, since “as experience shows” a sudden burst of strangeness often lacks the urgency to be rigorously questioned or understood. Everything strange is temporary, fated to be reabsorbed into the lack of a need to question. To be always already assimilated or on the way to being assimilated into a general context of events, purposes, and the like is just what it means to appear for the natural attitude: that is, to appear means to be assimilated within a progressive interconnectivity of possibilities inherent to the horizon of the world, and to implicitly reject without question (and without decision, perhaps even without awareness) the very possibility of asking or exploring beyond the confines of this horizon. This natural rejection of the exceptional is not explicitly formulated. It is the natural passing over the chance to entertain the possibility of questioning in favor of the reliable momentum of the obvious. To insist on asking about something in terms other than those of the world risks forgoing all relation to the “real”—even the rather odd and exceptional experience of reading Tristram Shandy is, ultimately, about things (Sachen), about what one is and does in the world. Those most uncanny of experiences, the most radical and destructive distortions of the unity of the world, all ultimately list back to an unquestionable normality that marks the silent constitution of the ultimate unity of worldly experience itself. To be sure, it may be that I can adopt a radically different horizon with its own peculiar contexts (as in mathematics); but any exploration of such horizons, any concrete engagement with their possibility, is saturated in advance by the natural attitude, which establishes a style of immersion in the universal accomplishments of sense thanks to which these very accomplishments escape their own explicit appearance. The world itself represents in this way our own most fundamental and closely held prejudice, and it never abandons us, even when we pretend to have forsaken it in favor of the ideal or the abstract.

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This means that if the methodological goal of phenomenology is to turn to the immanent accomplishments of sense in order to bring into view the full horizon of all possible sense, then this prejudice must somehow be challenged, the obscuring function of this world immersion of the natural attitude must be in some way suspended in favor of a more comprehensive, and with that unnatural perspective on the essence of the horizon of encounter. Since we are after generality (all sense, the widest possible horizon of revealed sense itself), it will not do to simply adopt another horizon in tension with the natural, as in mathematics. We want to engage the world horizon itself, even understand better its role in givenness (in the phenomenality of purposiveness, for example), just not on those terms in which we begin always and only in the wake of the momentum of something pre-given, obvious, taken for granted. More, if we are to understand what obviousness does for us, how our naïveté positively shapes our existence, we cannot allow it to dominate our reflection unquestioned. Thus the methodological problem Husserl faces in Ideas I: how can we openly engage a reflection on the horizon of the world, its implicit structure of meaning and the experiences that correspond to it, without conforming to the natural attitude and its tendency towards self-obfuscation? How can we reflect on the familiar, without being compromised by our deep dependence on its silences? It is important to realize that, even in Ideas I, this is a genuine question on Husserl’s part, and not just a rhetorical introduction to the employment of a methodological instrument. It may very well be the case that there is in fact no alternative to allowing the prejudice of the world to ultimately dominate our perspective on meaning. After all, it is the natural attitude that originally opens for us the horizon of sense; the grasp that we have of the sense of things, in the living of our lives, is precisely the accomplishment that is most monopolized by the world. So for example when we turn to the built world as a problem of meaning, it may very well be misleading to lay the emphasis on building and production, as if the problem had only to do with meaning that has its origin in the how of building and not in the manner in which what is produced is absorbed into the context of the given world. For the world, perhaps under the aegis of “history,” or “society,” or even “being,” may ultimately turn out to have silent mastery over the question about what anything produced by homo faber is going to mean. Thus we need to ask: could at least the theme of the horizon of the world, of world-experience, be approached from another attitude, one that does not abandon the positive accomplishments of sense definitive of the natural attitude, but nevertheless runs against the grain of its natural obscurity? Or are

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there perhaps “natural” constraints to the very thematization of sense or meaning, constraints that would not allow the monopoly of the pre-given world to be ultimately challenged? Is something, in other words, like a “phenomenological attitude” possible, oriented not to the world but to manifestation as such? It is important to realize that the tradition of phenomenological philosophy is by no means univocal in its answer to this question. Sometimes in Husserl, and more often in Heidegger, the negative answer seems to gain the upper hand. There is always something unstable and artificial about the phenomenological attitude, above all because the labyrinth of the natural world must always be given its due, even when and where we seek to reveal what it necessarily obscures. Nevertheless, there is a strong thesis here, one that is central to classical phenomenology: however pre-given and established, the hold that worldly naïveté has on us is not something fixed or static, but lends itself in important ways to modification. This thesis of the pliability of all attitudes, of their ultimately plastic relation to freedom, takes us to a fundamental concept in Husserl’s discussion of method in Ideas I, that of the phenomenological epoché. The strategy of the epoché is to follow essential fault lines that run through the natural experience of the world, in order to effect a modification in favor of revealing the depth of sense at the expense of its natural obfuscation. Thus the perspective to be established will not in the strict sense be alien to the natural attitude, but will in many important ways trace its essential contours. The result therefore does not amount to simply abandoning those unities of sense established within natural life, as if they could be replaced; nor does it amount to turning from one accomplishing origin of sense to another. Instead, the strategy is here twofold, consisting of (1) an argument for a strict parallelism between the subjective forms of lived experience and any givenness of what is manifest in lived experience; and (2) an argument that, despite such parallels, there is an essential difference in being between the two. This difference, Husserl argues, provides the fulcrum for a kind of unique suspension of givenness, one that does not disrupt the parallelism between givenness and the subjective forms of lived experience, but on the contrary shows that subjectivity provides a uniquely clarifying ground for what amounts to a newfound modified visibility of givenness itself. Let us look more closely at this twofold argument by considering the fault lines that run through natural experience just mentioned. Above we considered the simple experience in which, sitting in the reading room of a well-lit library, one is aware of the presence of space and its things outside the door, in the hallway. This is a simple example of how that which is absent can in an important sense be present. The same is also true of things in my more

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immediate environment: sitting in a café, devouring my book, not everything that is immediately available to being seen is “openly” or “distinctly” perceived—even the chair in which I sit, the table on which I rest my arms, remains in the background, present to my awareness in the form of a certain kind of absence, or at least distance. Yet even if they reside in the background, I remain directed towards these same things, though in a different fashion: I relate to them in a kind of non-realizing, or (as Husserl puts it), “non-actional” (inaktuelle) modality: We again recognize then that inherent in the essence of all such experiences [Erlebnisse]—taken always in a completely concrete way—is that remarkable modification that converts consciousness in the mode of a currently actual turn toward something into consciousness in the mode of non-actualization [Inaktualität] and vice versa. One time the experience is so to speak “explicit” consciousness of something that is, for it, objective; another time it is implicit, merely potential.10 When I look up and spot a table across the café, I realize not only its potential to appear by pulling it, so to speak, out of its horizon; I also realize the pregiven possible cogito of seeing, thus the actuality of the perception itself. The two, the possible seeing of the table and the possible being seen of the table, run essentially parallel, where the realization of the possibility of an appearance of the cogitatum necessarily entails the realization of the cogito. The seen as seen is only what it is in relation to the seeing of the seen as seeing. What does this entail? Despite the claim to the neat structural form of a parallel, the relation between cogito and cogitatum here is not free of ambiguity. Do the seeing and the seen, merely by virtue of their lying in parallel, belong to the same “horizon,” i.e., the horizon of the world? No, or at least not unambiguously. Take for example a reflection on an already formed cogito. In order for it to be available for reflection, the cogito must already be “there,” already in place as a given actionality [Aktualität]. When I turn and reflect on my memory of gazing at a couple sitting in the corner at Café Hawelka in Vienna, the “seen” in this case (the memory) stands in an essential relation to something in the world, the actual worldly occurrence of having seen the couple. This is thanks to the intentionality characteristic of the remembered perception. I remember the “seeing of” the couple sitting across from one another at the table, one on the couch and the other in the chair; there is in fact no other way to remember the act of seeing than to recognize what, as an act, it is doing (or in this 10 Husserl, Ideas I, §35, p. 61; Hua III, p. 63.

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Café Hawelka (Vienna, Austria). Photo by author.

case, has done). So in this sense the seeing (“of” the couple) is “in” the world, as directed towards something in the world that it has “in view.” Nevertheless, this act of seeing itself is nothing that I am going to find “in the world,” realized in the same actuality of being as the couple seen. Its pregivenness, its being-there that in turn makes it available for reflection, is essentially marked by an important element of discontinuity. In the wake of its parallel with something worldly, the seeing as seeing nevertheless lies apart, or at least bears one side of an almost imperceptible fault line. The act of seeing is in its essence the tendency of something world-alien, even if at the same time it is an act that is given, and can only be given as, immersed in the world. This alien character means that my seeing of things does not arise out of the horizon of the world in the same way as do things seen; it has a distinct modality

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of “being”—it is a being in the world that remains other than the world, and from this position provides access to things in the world. If I close my eyes, sit back in my chair, and in thought assemble an inventory of my office, I would not naturally list my “perceiving” of each individual item along with the items themselves. Seeing as seeing, perceiving as perceiving lie on a separate plane, somehow situated but not counted among the things in the room. To be sure, my gaze is real; it may have even made the couple in the café feel uncomfortable. But my gaze does not interrupt them by virtue of an appearance that could be likened to something that appears hovering “alongside” or “above” the table over which they are holding hands. Even when we think of built structures that expressly conform to the pattern of the gaze, such as theaters or Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the gaze itself is not somehow superimposed on the built forms, as a final ornamentation: it inhabits the space in accordance with the logic of a basic tension of being. Husserl employs, for better or for worse, the traditional contrast between the “immanence” of consciousness and the “transcendence” of things in order to fix terminologically this crucial difference in being between world and experience.11 We need to be careful here, and be on guard against some potential misunderstandings. Phenomenological immanence does not in any way imply a subject locked up somewhere “in the mind” with its ideas, as if the mind were a box into which we put things that we have gathered in our wanderings about the world, as if experience were just the transfer of content from one box (called the “world”) to another (called the “mind”), which just happens to be a subset of the former. Thus “transcendence” does not designate what lies outside the box, waiting to be put inside or left behind altogether. Rather, it is meant to fix the sense in which a difference in being can be captured in terms of a difference of givenness: the manner in which givenness is enacted, in which presence is itself something manifest, is different in the case of the immanence of perceiving than in the case of the transcendence of the perceived, and the contrast marks a given distance between the two. Take another example, that of someone playing the violin in a concert hall. The sound coming from the violin is, in Husserl’s terminology, something transcendent. It is not, however, something outside of consciousness; after all, I am listening to it, attentive to it, and thus have it perfectly “in” my auditory immanence. If the instance of “consciousness of…” in this example just means the being of this view, then the transcendent is in a fundamental sense inside. More, it is inside in a manner that belongs to its essence. I would need to radically re-interpret the entire situation, think myself out of the experience of 11 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §42.

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hearing, in order to ask the question how it is that the sound got from the violin “out there” into the “in here” of its being perceived. The phenomenological question is instead: in what manner does the progressive unfolding of the sounds coming from the violin appear for my consciousness, in what mode of “being-in” its being-experienced is it present, manifest? Again we need to be careful—the question is not: how did it get there, but rather: what is its way of being in view, how does it go about presenting itself that allows for my being directed to it in this or that manner? Posing the question in this way, we realize that there is a great deal that one can say in response. For one, the sound does not present itself all at once. It is distributed—its appearance has a beginning and an end, and its moments in between, all of which are however present to me, just not all at once. More, each of these moments, distributed in time, mark opportunities for a variation in content; they are open to being shifted and modified, and in a variety of ways. One set of ways in which content can be varied is involved with the positioning of my body: at any moment or point in listening to the music, I can move closer to the violin, whereby the sound gets crisper, and I can begin to make out better the echoed reverberations of the music in the body of the instrument; or if I move further away, the sound of the violin takes on other characteristics—it becomes more sonorous, or reveals itself in complex, intimate relations to its own echo coming back from the walls of the hall. Each moment, each phase of this temporal sequence, is in this sense “presentive,” in that each sets the stage for the manner of appearance of the sound of the violin in a given way, contributing to its overall manner of givenness in the form in which it is contained “in” my view of it. Husserl uses the German word Abschattungen to describe this span of multiple presentations embedded within a network of potential variability. The word Abschattungen can be translated as “profiles” or “adumbrations,” though the rich metaphor of the German Schatten, which means “shadow,” gets lost in translation.12 Abschattungen make up the very flesh of perceptual vision, encompassing its spectrum of variable and moving appearance. They are, in fact, appearances in a particular, more narrow sense of the term, comprising in turn the specifically sensuous element of appearances that have been descriptively arrested, and with that abstracted from the life of the perception as the moving play of the manifestation of what is transcendent, in order to open us to a description of the deeper structure of this manifestation. Adumbrations are “in” consciousness in a pre-eminent fashion, constituting the basis thanks to which we can say that the ongoing appearance of the violin tone is something 12 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, § 41.

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that, in listening to the music, I have “in view” or that of which I am “conscious” as that which is in consciousness, but not of consciousness. So on one level one could say that, thanks to the way that adumbrations fill out a temporal span of my perceiving, something like the “appearance of” the sound of the violin can be said to be “in consciousness” as transcendence. Nevertheless, as appearances operative in a presentive mode, adumbrations are also departures from what is given in them. For on another level, the sound of the violin is “in” consciousness only given the particular fashion in which each phase of the adumbration represents a particularly structured departure, or even negation, of what it is, as a whole, given as. Were I to separate out a slice from the continuum of adumbrations, as if it were a single frame out of a movie reel, the presentation to which it otherwise contributes would be lost: the thing would accordingly no longer “appear,” or be present. A single frame of a filmed movement, for example, is in itself at most merely the promise of movement, or one promise among many others that, together, contribute to the unfolding of the appearance of movement itself. Lifted out of the continuum of transitions from one promise of the whole to the other, the adumbration would at most stand before me as a whole aimed at, which would be precisely its very loss of a genuine sense of being an adumbration. It is, at best, a shadow of movement. In the perception of movement itself, I do not see any shadows, and the insistence on seeing such shadows would threaten to lose the thread of the perception of movement to which they nevertheless contribute. In a similar way Duchamp’s nude does not move; she is merely a collection of static promises of movement, all broken from their living unity, from their adumbrative flow of promise and departure within the immanence of a perception. Likewise, the whole of the sound of the violin is immanent to its being heard, but only as what is being aimed at by the adumbrations of presentive, perceptual consciousness. This means that it is equally transcendent with respect to any given adumbration of its presence: it is what, in a wholly presumptive manner, is given “in” adumbrations.13 An important consequence of this is that we never “see” adumbrations, we never fuse them together in order to realize the arrival of what they promise. They are the unique contribution of the sensuousness of immanence to the manifestation of the transcendent; and with that they remain invisible, since they do not usurp the space of appearance at the expense of what is other than consciousness. More, the promise of adumbration is not left unfulfilled, nor are the pretensions of perception wholly unresolved. Each new adumbration could also be said to fulfill the promise of the adumbration that came 13

In this sense, as Husserl remarks, perception is “presumptive.” Cf. Husserl, APS/Hua XI, §1.

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before—though only in such a way that effectively reinstates the promise of the whole. There is thus a complex weave of local and global promise that makes up the flow of a perception played out among the differentiations of its adumbrations: the beginning promises both the end and what comes in between, whereas the end promises a return to the beginning, through the unity of a consciousness of the path that has been traced. All these are resolved in a manner that, at any given point or moment, the promise of the whole is continuously present as more than the mere legacy of a past anticipation. Yet for all that, what it is that we are directed towards in perceiving is never simply a local affair; this is why the shadowy structures of adumbrations are so descriptively abstract. We see primarily what is promised globally, only the whole, the thing: here the music being played on the violin, perhaps part of a Beethoven sonata. If my attention is turned to a given phrase of the sonata, or how well the violin is tuned, then in each case it is the whole attended to that is my theme. We should not confuse the specificity of a focused perception with the necessity for any perception to be distributed through a multiplicity of localizations of its presentive functioning. I never “see” such localizations or adumbrations, only what it is that I am turned towards through these subjective localities of presencing. The question here is not what it is that I see or perceive, but again how such contents of consciousness are given. Thus to say that it is only through such localizations that the sound of the violin can be given to me, is just to say that there is no non-adumbrated perceptual perspective that would be consistent with the being of the sound of the violin as such. To be the very kind of object or thing that the sound of the violin “is,” is precisely to be given in an adumbration of perspectives. What the sound of the violin is, its quidditas, what I have as a perceptual theme when listening to the Beethoven sonata—this is not a question that can be answered by any reference to adumbrations or even appearances in general. Thus the point is not to claim that all that the perceived world amounts to is a multiplicity of references to a transcendence that is never fully “there.” Nor does the idea of presentive adumbrations in any way imply a kind of picture theory of perceptual consciousness, where some analogue of an external object would be fashioned in the mind as its representation. The descriptive concept of adumbration is instead meant to capture the manner of being characteristic of a certain type of transcendence. Namely, the particular manner of the being of transcendence characteristic of the sound of the violin is, as appearing being, inherently unstable: all the promises of “the next” determination of an aspect or feature continuously introduce, precisely as “promises,” the potential foothold for an uncertainty, or a suspension of a basis or ground for being directed to the whole. This essentially belongs to the being of any such

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transcendence: it can potentially present itself as what it is not. What it presents itself as, what it promises to be, can turn out to be otherwise. Fulfillment here is never univocal, nor irreversible. The music that appeared to have been coming from the violin can “turn out” to be coming instead from a set of speakers underneath the stage; the promise represented by the end of the piece, that it will in some way resolve a tension introduced in the beginning, can be forsaken; what seems to begin as a late Beethoven string quartet can “turn out to be” a pastiche of ironic references to all of Beethoven’s music. Transcendent being is in other words inherently falsifiable being, and the evidence of this falsifiability is in part dependent upon its perspectival, adumbrated character—and not because our relation to transcendence is reducible to images and representations that are potentially false. Therein for Husserl lies an essential contrast with subjective being, or the being of consciousness.14 A lived experience—the experience of, say, listening to a musician play the violin—is not something given in adumbrations, or progressive presentations. As such, it is not falsifiable; even if the music coming from the violin turns out to have been an illusion, the lived experience of perceiving, as an experience, is not thereby rendered illusory as well; not having seen what I thought I saw is not the non-event of having seen altogether. The sound coming from the violin did not happen, as my subsequent experience tells me, but my perceiving of the sound certainly did, my living through of the experience in which something was apprehended as sound coming from the violin is in no way negated, even if the validity of what it promised has been modified. The modification of the meaning of what has come to presence in a lived experience leaves something essentially untouched with respect to the presence of that experience itself. A lived experience is in this sense something “absolute.” I grasp it in an immediate perception, in which the experience is not “presented” to me in profiles or adumbrations, or something that I approach in a continuum of unfolding perspectives or promises of a presumptive givenness of a whole. I live through an experience, which as an experience is what it is in an immediate, incontrovertible sense. Again we need to be careful: the point is not that experiences are unchangeable, or that they are free of all internal tensions or contradictions, or that they do not “unfold” in any sense at all. The point is rather that, in living through an experience, I fully inhabit the whole of the experience at once—it does not hold back from me, keeping a part of itself hidden from my view, something that can only be approached through the promises of the given face that is turned “towards me.” I cannot walk around a lived 14 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §44.

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experience and note how it unfolds in shifting perspectival adumbrations; I cannot turn the experience of a pain, for example, around and see what is present “on the other side” (and perhaps find that it is “really” a pleasure). What shows itself here cannot, as in transcendent givens, show itself “again,” in ever more different appearances of itself that turn around the axis of its being and its being-perceived. In a lived experience, there is no analogous tension between “being” and “appearance,” esse and percipi. The result is a radical paucity of any possibility of approximation or distance when it comes to pure lived experience; it is tied to an inwardness that relinquishes any unambiguous claim to transcendence. This means that any talk of orchestrating or even producing an experience in this sense is suspect in principle. Its very availability involves something other than what can be directly fashioned or produced. If experience proves to be something plastic, expressible, even controllable, it will be in a sense very different from the plasticity of things, since the relevant modes of our access to this plasticity are necessarily phenomenologically distinct. I cannot, for example, literally return to a lived experience in order to live it “again,” in the same way that I can return to an object, a thing, such as the sound of a violin, or a score of Beethoven’s; the being that is given to me immediately in a lived experience is an immanence that is not recoverable in its individual being once it has “passed” in time. My access to an experience once it has passed, namely memory, is not a literal re-living of that experience, but a recalling that preserves the sense of the irretrievability of the individual lived experience. This difference between immanent and transcendent being is wholly insignificant from the perspective of the natural attitude. The natural attitude is in fact indifferent to anything that may undermine the completeness of its hegemony. If anything, the being of transcendence tends to have more weight in its obviousness, and the peculiarities of immanent being, including its absolute character, are of no great import once it has been immersed in the presence of worldly things. What finds importance in the natural attitude is what is in the world, and what is in the world fits in the world as that plenum of objective, pre-given being experienced by a living consciousness as a naïvely accepted dimension of its engagement with things. Yet there still remains that implicit fault line that runs between these two modalities of being, and Husserl’s methodological strategy is to enable it, to bring it to life, in order to effect a revaluation that will expose a potential for independent manifestation that is latent in the being of immanence. The idea is that the immanence of experience, and what can be discerned in terms of purely immanent structures, will provide us with the broadest perspective possible on the theme of meaning. This is, in short, a plea for a renewed focus on

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the subjectivity of experience, not as a theme separate from the objective world, but a resource for turning with fresh eyes to the fundamental question of the meaning and role of the objective in human existence. Yet how is such a perspective to be secured? And what could the perspective of phenomenological immanence offer with respect to our problems of how things bear purpose, time, and encounter? Let us end this stage of our reflections by describing what might be the case if the phenomenological perspective could not be secured, or if it fails to find the kind of traction it needs to support philosophical reflection. At the end of the last chapter it was argued that what is needed in order to grasp the sense in which things bear meaning is a way into the depth of things, or better, the depth implicit in their manifestation. Another way to think about this depth is that it is implicated in the obscurity of the pre-given horizon of things immanent to the natural attitude. This would be a depth that is not only pre-given, as some kind of context or framework of experience, but one that would also be a movement that characterizes the worldliness of things, a movement that constantly pulls the life of manifestation back into obscurity in favor of its results, or what is encountered as something settled and understood, even if only in the form of a naïve familiarity. The promise of phenomenology is thus to discover and realize a hidden potential for clarity that lies implicit in the subjectivity that forms a fundamental dimension of the rhythm of this worldliness of manifestation, not by eliminating the labyrinthine functioning of its obscuring movement, but by illuminating the essential features of its life. If this attempt were to fail, then this depth of manifestation would prove to be something unapproachable, a fundamental limit of reflective life, and with that of phenomenology itself. This would not necessarily mean that philosophy would have no other way into the depth of manifestation; there are in fact many roads in philosophy. But it would suggest something not only opaque, but closed with regard to given, worldly meanings. It is part of the thesis of this book—phenomenological in its core—that the opacity of the built world is primordially open, that its very being as built is the truth of this openness.

chapter 4

At the Edge of the World

The Art of Suspension

Husserl’s thesis, we saw in the last chapter, is that the tension between immanence and transcendence, between the subjective accomplishments of intentional life and what such accomplishments make visible, allows for a modification, or what Husserl calls a revaluation (Umwertung).1 First it should be emphasized that the absolute character of immanent being alone is not a sufficient basis from which to effect this revaluation. No mere insight into the being of consciousness as absolute can modify the natural attitude. The “absolute being” Husserl has in view here neither guarantees nor negates anything; consciousness does not, as something absolute, direct itself towards objects in their transcendence in such a way that would lend this transcendence some specific value or other. At most what we have is the absolute givenness of the directionality of intentional lived experience, a directionality that, taken in the barest of senses, neither confirms nor denies its object; it only serves to open the subjective horizon within which affirmation and denial can meaningfully take place. The absolute givenness of my perception of an apple does not assure me in the least of the reality of the apple; it can still turn out that, once I bite into the apple, it in fact turns out to be made of marzipan, or plaster. Moreover Husserl, unlike Descartes, does not turn to the certitude of the “I think,” or to the being of the cogito, to serve philosophical reflection as a kind of first truth or foundation, a fundamentum inconcussum that would allow for the construction of a system of true propositions. The absolute character of lived experience is significant only as an indication that it is possible for us to adopt a perspective, an attitude, that does not take its lead from terms dictated by the given world, if by “given world” we mean the totality of unfolding, given transcendent beings that we are directed towards in our experience. The inward independence of the subjective, its potential for a practice of indifference as to what guides its reflective regard, is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for a change or shift of attitude. Instead, and in an explicit appropriation of Descartes, Husserl turns to a conception of a modified act of doubt as the key to the possibility, not for the establishment of the absolute character of the cogito, but for the fulfillment of another necessary condition for the suspension of the natural attitude. Husserl 1 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §31. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340015_006

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is not, however, interested in being a skeptic, not even a mere methodological skeptic. Instead, there is something that belongs to doubt, an implicit resource, that he wants to appropriate for his own analytical purposes, but all the while falling short of an explicit skeptical position. Let us look more closely at Husserl’s attempt to appropriate Cartesian thought in Ideas I, §31. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes employed doubt in a strictly methodological sense. The intent was not to deal individually with this or that actual, motivated doubt arising from our experiences with things, but to attempt to doubt everything that it would in principle be possible to doubt, based upon some general reason or other, including what one in fact has no real motivation for suspicion of falsehood. Here is how Descartes describes this posture: [But] inasmuch as reason already persuades me that I ought no less carefully to withhold my assent from matters which are not entirely certain and indubitable than from those which appear to me manifestly to be false, if I am able to find in each one some reason to doubt, this will suffice to justify my rejecting the whole. And for that end it will not be requisite that I should examine each in particular, which would be an endless undertaking; for owing to the fact that the destruction of the foundations of necessity brings with it the downfall of the rest of the edifice, I shall only in the first place attack those principles upon which all my former opinions rested.2 The aim of this comprehensive destruction of the foundations of opinion, based solely upon ascertaining “some reason” to doubt the origin or principle of whole classes of ideas, is to find something about which one would not be able to sustain doubt, a truth that, once brought before the mind in an intuitive fashion, would evidently undermine any attempt to hold it to be false. Descartes, in the second of his Meditations, believed to have found such a truth in the very mental act of doubting itself—which he then construed as the proof of the certainty of the existence of the subject who doubts. Husserl is not so much interested in finding something that resists doubt in this way, and which could thus serve as an unshakable foundation for knowledge. He is more interested in an important implication of the Cartesian notion of an attempt to doubt universally. That is, the universality of Descartes’ method rests on a peculiar aspect of any attempt to doubt, and which in its obviousness is routinely overlooked. Namely, in order to put myself in a 2 René Descartes, Philosophical Works, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 145 (Meditation I).

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position from which I can either successfully entertain a doubt or find that I cannot in fact do so, either accept something or find out that I cannot accept it, necessarily entails an initial suspension of whatever is in question. It is this suspension that supports the very attempt that Husserl is after: It is likewise clear that the attempt to doubt anything (of which one is conscious that it is on hand) necessarily entails rescinding in a certain way the thesis [i.e., that it is on hand]; and precisely this interests us. It is not a transformation of the thesis into the antithesis, of the positive into the negative. It is also not a transformation into conjecture, suggestion, into indecisiveness, into a doubt (in whatever sense of the word), the likes of which, indeed, also do not belong within the realm of our arbitrary will [Willkür]. It is far more something sui generis. We do not give up the thesis that we have posited, we alter nothing in our conviction. […] And nevertheless it undergoes a modification—while it continues to remain in itself what it is, we place it as it were “out of action,” we “suspend it,” we “bracket it.”3 Husserl argues that the act of aiming at the truth of something entails a certain kind of freedom with respect to what it is to be decided. Thus even when, following Descartes, I find that I cannot doubt my very doubting, this failure is something that can be realized only in the success of its being attempted at all. This means that I have already suspended an obvious given in order to set into motion its possible affirmation, or alternatively the consciousness of the absence of such possibility. The very failure to hold something in doubt in this way assumes the success of this suspension operative in the attempt; for any failure to doubt presupposes the possibility of its own attempt. This means that even the most radical certainty—a certainty that cannot even be doubted, that undermines any move to negate its validity—is nevertheless open to this peculiar suspension operative in the attempt to doubt: to find that I cannot doubt a conviction can only occur if I have already put it into question. This is equivalent to recognizing even something like the absolute certainty of the ego as something illuminated in its own modification—that is, a modification established by the attempt to take it as something dubitable, and the subsequent failure to think it in the mode of a doubt. Husserl wants to extricate, and isolate, this moment of suspension operative in the attempt to doubt, and employ it as a basic methodological principle that frames the field of phenomenological description. In particular, he wishes 3 Husserl, Ideas I, pp. 53–54; Hua III, p. 54.

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to appeal to its possibility as the basis for “suspending”—not doubting, not denying—the general thesis of the natural attitude discussed in the last chapter. This suspension is what he calls the epoché, the bracketing or putting out of play of the general thesis of the natural standpoint. In the epoché, we accordingly do not reject the natural attitude as such, but rather situate ourselves in that peculiar limbo of suspension that inaugurates both doubt and affirmation, of that questionability in which the thesis is for us neither simply valid nor invalid, but uncoupled by the non-negativity of freedom from its moorings in validity. We refrain from naïve acceptance, but in an important way also from doubt: the general thesis remains what it is, valid within the scope of its natural acceptance—it is just that we make “no use” of it, we put it “out of action,” thereby effecting its non-negative revaluation. Refraining from a belief we continue to hold, the natural attitude is no longer to be allowed to frame naïvely the manner in which we pose questions and pursue the meaning and significance of things. Refraining from doubt by lingering on its threshold, the essential function of the natural attitude in the constitution of the horizon of sense remains operative, but now in accordance with the logic of an essentially modified attitude that takes its lead from the suspension of natural naïveté itself. We have already seen that Husserl describes the natural attitude as a modality of attunement (Einstellung). The natural attitude is a guiding attunement that opens for us a way to approach, or have access to things. Husserl’s conception of suspending the natural attitude involves (to again indicate an important difference with Descartes) modifying the guiding light of natural attunement, putting it out of action, finding for it a background of suspension thanks to which it no longer takes the lead in determining the kinds of questions we can pose. Yet something needs to take over in the wake of this withdrawal, or else reflection would remain in an unnatural limbo, one in which we do not follow the lead of any approach or access to the sense of things; attunement needs some fil conducteur to organize itself as a posture. For Husserl, this necessity of approach means that the universality of the epoché needs to be limited; something present in natural life must be left operative in order to continue to attune, and with that show the way into sense, though now under different conditions. By contrast, Descartes takes for granted the step of subjecting what is suspended in the attempt to doubt to a critique: the question for Descartes is whether everything thus suspended, or put into question, could also be held to be false, all the while maintaining rational consistency. Descartes’ goal, in the end, is a universal reflection in the form of an analysis, one organized in accordance with his method. Husserl’s procedure is very different, since the

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question is not immediately one of truth but of a broader approach to sense: if I do not take the natural attitude as my guide for making sense, then what can I take as my guide? What modified form of attunement is possible for a reflecting subject that orients itself from within the suspension of the epoché? Here the aim is not a mode of reflective analysis so much as the elements of a reflective description. Let us pause here and think about what it is that we stand to lose, when we suspend the natural attitude. We can do this by again considering the falsifiability essential to the being of transcendent things. We noted in the last chapter that the givenness of transcendent things in immediate, raw perception is in a sense unstable, in that at any moment one is in tune with the presence of something that takes the form of a promise that offers itself for the exploration, and ongoing fulfillment, of an identity that unfolds in accordance with the characteristic style of a whole. Now, it is also important to emphasize that the manifestation of something, say the example of “sound coming from a violin,” or the stone’s “regularity of shape,” must be followed in order for this exploration of presence to be possible at all: it needs, in other words, to be engaged and apprehended in order for it to be what it wants to be. Not just that one needs to pay attention to it; one needs to be absorbed in the horizon of being that allows it to present itself in accordance with the manner of its adumbrative presence. Thus to be given at all, the sound and the stone must be implicitly accepted as part of a world in which their presence unfolds progressively, even if only in imagination. As transcendent beings, they can emerge in experience only if this experience takes the explicit form of an attempt to be in tune with what it is able to make present, or what it allows to come to itself in appearance from out of the pre-given horizon of things. The whole drama of something presenting itself as something, only in order to turn out to be something else, is also dependent on that immersion of acceptance of presumed existence in the horizon of a pre-given world in which it has a place. The very logic of encounter that we began to explore in Chapter 2, from the contingent finding of a peculiar stone on the beach to Kahn’s winking acknowledgment of the presence of a hidden sanctuary, is grounded in this acceptance. Without that presumption, without that acceptance, in short: without the validity of the general thesis of the natural standpoint, such an attunement or understanding is essentially hors circuit, disengaged. The epoché is just such an establishment of a status of acceptance hors circuit. It does not amount to a rejection of the existence of the natural world, nor the negation of a pre-given horizon of the manifestation of things. That would amount to a philosophical gesture well on its way to skepticism, understood as a rejection of the truth of the world, one that would effectively amount to a

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rather harshly instituted refusal to explore its meaning or sense—why inquire into the meaning of what does not exist, or into something about which we have just decided to suspend our judgment? Husserl, on the contrary, wants to establish the methodological conditions for the exploration of the broadest possible horizon of sense, including the sense of sense operative in the natural attitude, for this is precisely where he intends to pose the question of the dependence of the logic of encounter on the acceptance of the world. This means that in phenomenology we only distance ourselves from the natural attitude just enough to be able to challenge its natural hegemony over any approach to the theme of sense. We do not suspend judgment on the natural world so much as our natural dependence on its role as a guide. To exercise the epoché accordingly means: I will not rely on my acceptance of this pre-given horizon to explore and articulate the sense of the world; the world still has sense, even the natural attitude itself as a making sense of sense, but now it is a sense held at bay, “in brackets,” suspended in its functioning as a basis, starting point, or departure for the articulation of meaning. All of that is fine, but once again it is clear that something needs to be left in place in order to have a coherent theme for reflection at all. What do I turn to, in order to continue talking about meaning? Even in the epoché, I have only departed from my naïve reliance on the world as a guide, but the world in an important sense is still my inevitable beginning. That is, in the epoché one still begins with the world, it is just that now one no longer begins from the world as that unmodified placement in the horizons of encounter with things and persons. This is where the difference between the being of immanence and the being of transcendence becomes particularly significant for Husserl’s reflections on method. In the natural attitude, this difference is not significant, due precisely to the monopoly of the general thesis of the natural standpoint: immanence is here absorbed, it is at best an anonymous presence in the articulation of things in terms of the horizon of encountered being, factual experience. Here things given in experience take precedence over the pure experiential immanence of lived experience: we never begin “naturally” from the subject, only from its world; we begin from a particular prejudice for how the whole question of being-in-the-world is to be posed in reflection. Husserl’s claim is that, after suspending the natural attitude, a new attitude becomes possible, one that takes up the implicit potential of this subjective anonymity of the immanence of consciousness, or lived experience as such, to itself serve as a guide for approaching the sense of sense. The establishment of this basis for an analysis of meaning is what he calls the phenomenological reduction: the systematic unveiling of pure immanence as a guide to the explication and elaboration of the universal horizon of sense-accomplishment

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as such.4 The claim—or perhaps better the hope—is that such a project of reduction, or description guided by a new-found sense of subjective existence unencumbered by the natural attitude, will yield the fullest scope of the phenomenality of the phenomenon.5 Still, one might ask, is this rather torturous establishment of an epoché really necessary? The claim seems to be simply that there is something to say about meaning and sense in terms of lived experience alone, that we can put aside explanations that seek to connect what we are describing into a more “causal” or “worldly” picture, or that we can remain within the circuit of immediate subjectivity and still have something to say—about everything else. That subjectivity represents a perspective on the whole, one that is characterized by the integrity of immanence, is hardly a new gesture in modern philosophy. Nevertheless, Husserl’s point in these sections of Ideas I that we have been following is more radical than the familiar call to include a subjective perspective in philosophical reflection. His contention is that we have a natural tendency to undervalue the subjective, that we tend to re-interpret whatever we glimpse in subjective being back into terms that belong more properly to the world, thereby obfuscating its real significance by seeing it as something that needs to be understood in reference to transcendence, as opposed to being a potential basis for understanding alone. For the secret of subjective life is not that it adds another dimension to the breadth and scope of the worldly, thus in fact amounting to an addendum or supplement to an understanding oriented to the real, but that it harbors within its being a radical alterity that refracts the very sense of the world, thereby forming the potential basis or ground for a radicalized perspective on the sense of the worldly in general. The meaning of the world—of the world as the very sense of sense—potentially enjoys a uniquely manifest visibility in a subjectivity that shows itself as other than the world. What is the scope and nature of such visibility, or what Husserl in Ideas I calls the “phenomenological residuum”—the field of being illuminated or emphasized once the epoché has been put into place? Here is where the promise of phenomenology for providing the descriptive vocabulary that will open up the three problems of purposiveness, time, and encounter can be pursued. The idea is that a description from out of the immanence of subjective experience, revealed by the suspension of the epoché and the focus of the reductions, will illuminate the complex meaning-structures of the relevant phenomena 4 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §§33. 5 See Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §§56–75; also Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, Husserliana VIII, ed. Rudolf Boehm (Hague: Nij­ hoff, 1959); and finally Bernet, Kern, Marbach, Introduction, Chapter 2.

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in a uniquely powerful way. But what, precisely, do the epoché and reduction make possible? What does the world give us in this newfound phenomenological attitude, which it normally hides from us in its “natural” guise?

The Suspended Labyrinth

As we have seen, the phenomenological epoché inaugurates the peculiarly “unnatural” standpoint of phenomenology, not by denying the natural attitude (which in the end is a meaningless gesture, given its fundamental indifference to all opposition), so much as suspending the natural tendency it fosters to situate the themes of experience in terms of a world accepted as pre-given (where we would ask after a cause in light of its given effects, or for a purpose in light of a given act or ordered arrangement, and so on). The reduction explores the possibility of unfolding an immanent-subjective perspective of nonnegative freedom within the being of lived experience itself, revealing through the revaluation of its validity latent resources for asking the question of sense on a register different from that of explanation. This means that the reduction does not cut us off from considerations of objectivity, but re-articulates them into a set of descriptive analyses that Husserl refers to collectively as analyses of constitution.6 This is consistent with the fundamental thesis of intentionality: if we understand phenomenological immanence as the immanence of consciousness, this includes everything that is immanently contained in the being of consciousness as consciousness, including the ways in which consciousness is consciousness “of” something. This structural element of the “of…” points to the face of transcendence that finds its unique place within immanence itself—or to use the terminology from an earlier set of reflections of Husserl, it represents the site of what could be called “transcendence in immanence.”7 6 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §§149–153; cf. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution, Husserliana IV, ed. Marly Biemel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991-reprint) (hereafter cited as Hua IV); Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989) (hereafter cited as Ideas II). Also see Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl’s Concept of Constitution (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970). 7 See Husserl, Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen, Husserliana II, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. L. Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010). For a helpful presentation of these issues see Jan Patočka, “Cartesianism and

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We now have before us the basic elements of classical Husserlian phenomenological method: the suspension of the natural attitude in the epoché; the reduction of the sense of the given to the patterns of its pure immanent givenness; and finally the program of a systematic descriptive analysis of the constitution of this pure givenness in consciousness, or of transcendence in immanence. In Ideas I §§76–96, Husserl takes a further step, and presents phenomenological analysis as oriented around a twofold structure constitutive of intentional consciousness taken in its phenomenological purity. On the one hand, there is the description of the structures responsible for the directionality of the accomplishment of consciousness, or what Husserl calls the noesis. Lived experience articulates the sense of the given in the movement of an act; noeses cover everything that belongs essentially to these movements that allow lived experiences to be accomplishments of an articulation of things unfolding in their presence. Much of what was considered in the last chapter under the heading of adumbrations belongs here: to be that for which a thing in the world can be something manifest, the noetic dimension of consciousness must be structured around those adumbrative shadings-off of appearances that characterize the basic manner in which a thing unfolds in perceptual experience. On the other hand, that which is accomplished in such noeses is not simply the empty movements of consciousness as given being, but the coming to presence of what is intended or aimed at in such movements. The accomplished, articulated correlate, taken as such, of accomplishing consciousness is what Husserl calls its noema.8 So for example in perceiving, the corresponding noema is the “perceived as perceived,” or the perceived as it is grasped, or present, or manifest within a noetically constituted perceiving. To take the “perceived as perceived” as our theme is not to focus on the perceiving alone, but rather the place that the perceived has “in” the perceiving, where this “place” is understood as an accomplished opportunity for the perceived to be perceived. Phenomenology,” in Jan Patočka: Philosophy and Selected Writings, trans. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 285–326. 8 The concept of the noema has been extensively, and often rather hotly debated in the phe­ nomenological literature. Though there are interesting early precedents to this debate, notably Aron Gurwitsch’s 1966 Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (The Hague: Nijhoff), it begins in earnest with the publication of Dagfinn Føllesdal’s essay “Husserl’s Notion of Noema,” in  Journal of Philosophy  66/20 (1969). For significant contributions to this discussion, see David Woodruff Smith, Husserl (New York: Routledge, 1997); John Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Noema and Object (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990); and Claire Ortiz-Hill, Word and Object in Husserl, Frege, and Russell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1991).

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This twofold analysis of noesis and noema is extended to types of lived experiences other than perception, such as imagination or logical thinking, as well as complex relationships between different noetic domains. Thus for example the stone I take to be the tool of an ancient mariner is as much imagined as it is perceived, and the noetic-noematic structures that constitute this collusion of perceiving and imagining is an essential dimension of my consciousness of its (potential) purposiveness. These constitutional structures themselves are phenomenologically immanent objectivities of reflection: the esse of the noema, the perceived as perceived, is its percipi—thus in that sense the noema is experientially immanent, and the reduction represented by the isolation of the noema a reduction of the “object” (the transcendently perceived, seen) to immanence. Yet this does not amount to a “real” reduction to immanence, where the reality of the perceived would be identified with either the reality of the perceiving or some structural subset of the same. The reduction takes us from an externally posited given being (taken as indifferent to all accomplishments of consciousness, though not to the world) to an immanently given, yet still transcendent “sense.” Thus constitution here has to do with the manner in which structures of immanent being establish the very basis for the sense of transcendence. In this way, the noema, the perceived as perceived, remains something “transcendent,” yet as a transcendence in immanence the noema is not a real transcendence (ein Reales, in Husserl’s idiom), if by that we mean something that is taken in the context of the “world” as the sum total of reality. This also means that the noema is not a real part of consciousness, if by “consciousness” we mean our mental life as it is interpreted or understood in terms of a sense of the “real” governed by the natural attitude. The noema, so to speak, is transcendent neither in the mode of the reality of the world, nor even of the reality of consciousness itself. More, if we mean by “consciousness” that region of being that has been, through the revaluation of the epoché, essentially purified of any sense of “reality” governed by the natural attitude, then even here the noema must not be confused with a constituent of immanence, as something “really” a part of it (ein Reelles, again in Husserl’s idiom). The noema is indeed immanent, but nevertheless in tension with noetic immanence; it is something caught in a peculiar twilight that Husserl uses the somewhat odd term irreell to designate.9 In terms of sense (Sinn), Husserl’s fundamental claim is that nothing is lost in the reduction; it merely amounts to a reorientation with respect to the way that we universally approach our engagement with the theme of sense. 9 Husserl, Ideas I/ Hua III, §97.

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We move from the prejudice of an empirical dynamic of understanding realities to an immanent, descriptive-reflective point of view made possible by the phenomenality of a consciousness modified by the epoché. Tracing sense back to this phenomenality, what Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction, amounts to the recognition of a nascent visibility of subjective being in a manner that is incongruent with, but nevertheless revelatory of the essential structures of natural experience. For what is immanently contained in the phenomenological residuum (sensations/hyle, noetic forms of apprehension, the noema itself) is not present expliciter in natural, unmodified experience, or in any field of presence governed by the natural attitude. What we take up as our subject matter in phenomenology is, to be sure, in many important ways ultimately the world itself, but in a more proximate sense everything has taken on a kind of non-worldly, even ideal hue. This means that phenomenological descriptions should not be taken as face value reports of “how things are experienced,” since in the end phenomenological descriptions remain strangely out of sync with experiences that naturally proceed oblivious to their phenomenological “how.” The perceptual noema of the blossoming tree in the garden, to use Husserl’s example from Ideas I, is not the same object or thing as the blossoming tree in the garden—the latter can be burnt down, the former is an ideality, an essence that governs the articulateness of an experience that allows an experiencing consciousness to approach the tree in its givenness. Nevertheless, we do not thereby have two objects: the tree in the world, and the tree as a unity present in immanence. Not all tensions within the scope of appearance that manifest a non-identity implies the positing of two things. We need to think of the noema in terms of the same understanding that we arrive at in an object-directed experience, but now reflected, made thematic in terms of the way of access that makes an object at all possible as something “meant”—something of which I am conscious, thus is manifest as an intentional unity. The noema is the meant as meant, taken within the reflective confines of a thematization of its being-accessed as something towards which I can in turn meaningfully experience. The being of the blossoming tree is thus “reduced” in phenomenological analysis to the being of its “sense,” or to its own intentional being as a correlate of consciousness, one illuminated in the reduction as standing in essential correlation with structures of noetic accomplishments that together constitute the apriori framework of its phenomenality. Everything here turns on our capacity to be sensitive to the different nuances of meaning that govern our idea of an object. If we hold ourselves artificially fast to one fixed conception of what an object is supposed to be,

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above all to the prevailing tendency to fix the objectivity of an object in terms of its inclusion in a set of individuals defined by a univocal morphology, then we will ultimately fail to appreciate the promise of phenomenology. Phenomenology relies on the recognition that an individual being stands in a complex relationship with a variety of senses in which it can be said to “be,” and that the complexity of this relationship determines the manner in which an individual being can be said to be “given.” Meaning here is never a question of which predicates to include within the morphology of a set, as if we could simply capture the structure of givenness through an overlapping of concepts and an abstract logic of combination that would govern what is allowed in the mapping of properties. Instead, the core problem for a phenomenological account of sense or meaning remains the problem of transcendence, and its logic is a decidedly transcendental logic. One of the chief virtues of Husserl’s conception of the noema is that it aims to capture many of the nuances of objectivity in a descriptively systematic fashion, thanks to the consistent manner in which noeses are descriptively coupled with noemata. Every perceiving has its perceived; every valuing its valued; every loving its loved—the “object” in each case (the perceived, valued, loved) is conceived in terms of its relation to a particular noesis (perceiving, valuing, loving), which emerges specifically as a relation of access. When in valuing I access the valued, the “valued as valued” amounts to the manner in which something is accessible as valued. The point then in identifying the noema as in some sense “objective” is to emphasize that, implicit in any talk of “objects,” there is some form of an attempt to grasp how it is that they are accessible—that the very core of the theme of objectivity, of givenness, is the question of access. The notion of a completely inaccessible object, a phenomenological Ding an sich, can only be a limit case of the problem of access that lies at the core of the very concept of an object. However, if we think about the noema (or sense in general) in this way, then it is clear that the modes of access animated in the noetic accomplishments of lived experience are more often than not interweavings of various different modes of access. The access embodied in the givenness of a given object of experience does not take the form of a unidirectional ray of intentional articulation that lays claim to its “given” in a hermetically sealed fashion. So the example of a value, say the “delightfulness” of the blossoming tree, to again evoke Husserl’s example in Ideas I, §88: the delight I take in the tree, as an experience, has its “delightful as delightful,” the noematic moment of delightfulness that marks the “manner” or “way” that the delightful blossoms are manifest or given in the experience of their enjoyment. Yet it is clear that I can take no genuine delight in my blossoms unless that delight is somehow caught up in

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the perception of them; more, their delightfulness and their perceivedness do not stand apart, side by side, in separate acts of consciousness, but belong to a unified conscious apprehension. The perceived as perceived and the delightful as delightful are phenomenologically distinct, but not objectively separate; again, not every tension that announces a non-identity yields two individuated things. Likewise, my imagination of an instrument in the hands of an ancient mariner infuses the object I hold here in my hand; the tool imaginatively given to me is not a scene acted out in my mind, but a projection of what is given to me that is perceptually based on both what perception and imagination allow to appear. To use Husserl’s language, the one (delightfulness, imaginative projection) is “founded” on the other (perceivedness), as a kind of distinct but non-independent moment of the same. Yet the sensuous delightfulness of the blossoms and the animations of my imagination can be said not only to inhabit, but also to develop the very perceivedness that lies at their foundations, though in a direction that also represents a departure from both perceiving and perceivedness. They are tightly woven in their difference, in a complex relation of foundedness that constitutes the mode of access to the “delightful tree blossoms” or the “tool of the ancient mariner” as unities of noematic sense. The unity of this internally complex access lies behind our tendency to speak of valuing or imagining as if they were modalities of perceiving; which in many cases they are, insofar as their pursuit finds its opportunity in the horizon of properly perceptual experience. This idea of noematic embeddedness or interweaving points to a more general phenomenological theme of “overlapping,” or horizonal implication, that will prove to be very important for us as we develop the problem of built space. A key insight in phenomenology, developed in different ways by different figures, is that there is no clear dividing line between our sensuous, perceptual experience and the concepts we use to interpret and express what it is that we see, or the emotional life we lead, or the modalities of valuation we engage that give our experience the full sense of being a “life.” Perception is already a primordial, universal accomplishment of sense; in particular it accomplishes a mode of the unity of sense that allows for the development of complexity— not just thanks to the introduction of more intentional content, but as the result of an interweaving of different kinds of already constituted sense. This means that noemata do not represent a set of core meanings (nor are they forms in the Platonic sense), but dynamic points of orientation around which a multiplicity of different typologies of sense determinations combine into unique syntheses of accessible manifestation. The perceived as perceived is the given manifestation of a transcendence, thus it “arrives” at an object as perceived; but it is also the point of departure, or basis for the enrichment of

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its own sense through other strata or layers of sense, with their own specific noetic-noematic structured correlations. The noema of perceiving is thus not only the manner in which its perceived is accessible; the noema in turn sets its being-perceived on the threshold of an infinite expansion of different modalities of sense, in the development of ever more complex unities of sense in lived experience. Perception, in other words, far from being the simple registration of an inventory of given being, reveals itself in this way to be the origin of the very sense of the labyrinth of the world. Also of interest for the problem of built space will be the fact that not all enrichment of sense is the function of an assimilation of an additional sense or meaning, if by that we mean something along the lines of a valuation founded on a perception. Enrichment is not always an expansion of content. The phenomenon of expression is perhaps the key example of this for Husserl. An expression of a sense is, in an important way, “founded on” what it expresses: when a historian gives a lecture on the battle of Stalingrad, the expressions employed are founded on the content of the lecture—the meaning intended for the audience, and aimed at as something articulated for their comprehension. As founded unities, expressions are not identical with the meanings of what is being communicated, say the brutality of the battle or the surprise of the Russian encirclement of the German Ninth Army. There are many different expressions available to the lecturer, and in order to be successful, the lecture must gravitate towards those that are as conducive to a clear understanding as possible. These available expressions are distinct from what is being said, but they are not separate. Moreover, expressions, and the lecture itself as their sum, are not supplements of meaning grafted onto what is meant. The expressions are a peculiar “layer” that add nothing to the sense, Husserl argues; expression is in a characteristic sense intrinsically unproductive, it does not take us anywhere else than where the sense expressed can be found. Husserl: Apart from the fact that it precisely lends expression to every other intentional factor, the layer of expression is not productive—and that is what makes up its distinctiveness. Or if one prefers: its productivity, its noematic accomplishment, exhausts itself in the process of expressing and in the form of the conceptual dimension that newly arrives here with this process.10 10 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 247 (§124); Hua III, p. 258. See the discussion of this passage in Jacques Derrida, “Form and Meaning: A Note on the Phenomenology of Language,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Also see the

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Nevertheless, at the same time expression brings the sense being expressed into a distinctive sphere of manifestation, that of articulate thought or speech. The lecturer paints the events of the Battle of Stalingrad in speech, to borrow a metaphor from Socrates in Plato’s Republic. Expression may not add to sense—as if what one is trying to say and the saying of it were two accomplishments of understanding, of meaning—but nor does it leave sense untouched, unmodified. On the contrary, expressing, trying to say what one means, brings what one means to say into its own, as if for the first time. More, this gift of expression to meaning, which in a sense merely gives meaning to itself, marks the difficult distinction between expressed and unexpressed meaning. This is not merely a matter of speech: that student of Kahn’s walking by the chapel and winking thus “expresses” the meaning intended, or embodied in the chapel itself. This silent expression, to the extent to which it is faithful, goes only where the meaning of the chapel is waiting, but at the same time it modifies this direction without changing it, painting it with a form and an appearance it would not otherwise have had. Expression is a special case of intentional accomplishment, one that will be pursued in more detail in Chapter 7. Here it is important to emphasize what it shares with other relations of founding and founded, namely the being of a unity that is open to a dynamic internal complexity, something that is a fundamental theme of phenomenological description. Perception, expression, and experience in general are not inert, only patterned into an order that is imposed from without; they are movements that are essentially ordered in accordance with their potential for contributing to intentional complexity. It is also important to emphasize that the dynamic internal movement of founding and founded is not limited to the noema, but is also operative on the noetic side of lived experience. There is a depth of experiencing which shadows that of the experienced. I do not approach the labyrinth of complex givenness piecemeal; I do not first take in the tree and then, having banked the apprehension, move on to its delightfulness. Noeses themselves are interwoven in parallel relations of founding and founded; there is no unidirectional sequence of acts that pick out unique features of the environment only to be re-synthesized into a “picture” of how things are. Any conscious act matures, so to speak, from some basis, some beginning in world encounter that is always already saturated with a multiplicity of accomplishments of meaning. Phenomenologically expressed, consciousness is always already a departure more recent manuscripts on the problem of expression published in Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband, Zweiter Teil: Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Logische Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94–1921), Husserliana XX/2, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).

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from its own accomplishments, not only in the form of complex structures of noemata, but also complex structures of acts within the flow of lived experiences (Erlebnisfluß) as a whole. This point also brings us back to Husserl’s argument in Ideas I, §91 that there is a strict parallelism between noesis and noema (also see §98). As we have already seen, this can be expressed as a parallel between transcendence and immanence, phenomenologically understood. The epoché and reduction do not drive a wedge between the subjective and the objective; on the contrary, the harmony between the two is emphasized in this notion of an eidetic parallel between noesis and noema, between the subjective animation of sense and its objective transcendence. At this point we can perhaps begin to understand some of the implications of this thesis: the argument is that the complex interweaving of a given multiplicity of noeses are structurally related to a parallel complex of interweaving of a multiplicity of noemata. That is not quite the same as saying that ordo et connexio idearum idem est ac ordo et connexion rerum, for the unit of analysis here is intentional experience, and the distinction between noesis and noema is drawn immanently. However the transcendence characteristic of the noema is to be ultimately understood, it is a transcendence that presents itself strictly within what belongs immediately to lived experience. There is another aspect of the parallel between noesis and noema that is important. The designation “parallel” does not in this instance mean equivalent; the two sides here are not mirror images of each other, two individual instantiations of the same structure. The claim instead is that experiencing has to take on a certain kind of shape in order for the experienced as experienced to be accomplished, to be animated in light of what it is; there is no one-size-fits-all intentio. Let us look at this more closely, by considering briefly the discussion of the concepts of “object,” “noematic core,” and “sense” in Ideas I, §§97–127: “The Set of Problems Pertaining to Noetic-Noematic Structures.” First consider the notion of “object,” or what Husserl would call the “straightforward object,” the “object simpliciter.”11 Remember that one can think of the noema as a mode of access: it is the way to something, the fulfillment of which constitutes the terminus of the accomplishment of consciousness as a “consciousness of…” Noematic analysis charts the path to something, in itself taken “as it simply is.” One might ask: does this not smack of the natural attitude, since what else could “object simpliciter” mean apart from some object in the world, in some way “external” to the impressions of a perceiving consciousness? 11 Husserl, Ideas I, p. 181 (§91); Hua III, p. 189.

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Husserl’s argument is that we can consider this notion of the object-telos of consciousness as a structural feature of the movement of consciousness itself, thus wholly in immanent terms, or taking into consideration only what is to be found in lived experience as it appears to us in the focus of the reduction. And here we can see that the very “sense” of an object is itself directed to the object, or put another way: we are conscious of transcendence as that which manifests itself in the manner of bearing its own sense, presenting itself to us in terms of a sense or meaning that is directed towards what in turn bears it. Here we can again turn to the classic phenomenological description of a perceptual object given in adumbrations: the content manifest thanks to those adumbrations, the various features and aspects of the thing that unfold in their movement, is not a set of mute, indifferent givens, but is precisely adumbrated as being borne by an “object,” an “x” of determination towards which the multiplicity of determinations are arrayed in the unity of progressive approximate determination. This “x” of determination, or the “object simpliciter,” is just this structure of progressive enrichment that places us among things in terms of their accessibility. Were such enrichments, or for that matter accessibility itself, not borne by this structural moment designated by “x” or “object simpliciter,” there would be only a random accumulation of aspects and features held together by the span of their duration, and not a genuine becoming-present of a given in the specific form of an accessible transcendence. Next let us look at Husserl’s refinement of the themes of “sense,” and “noematic core.”12 The term sense (Sinn) can be taken to designate the full scope of all noematic determinations, all those possible layers of sense that can arise thanks to the relations of founding-founded. The “full noema” covers the unified field of all possible determinations—for example all possible perceptual determinations as well as all possible value determinations—in short the field of all meaning that a thing could possibly “bear,” taken as the outer limit of its determinability as unified by the structural component of the object “x” of determination. The idea of a “core” rests on the insight that a founding stratum that supports the whole edifice of the full noema, a kind of nucleus of determination, is functionally necessary. The core represents the bare minimum of what needs to be in place in order for the enrichment of sense to be possible at all. Insofar as phenomenology is interested in the foundations for knowledge and sense in general, it is very interested in the function of this “core” as a kind of logical subject—again taken in a transcendental-constitutive sense, as the condition for the possibility of sense-enrichment in general. It is, so to speak,  from its core that a unity of sense, as transcendence in immanence, 12 Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §§98–99.

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constitutes itself as the site of a complex, multidimensional unfolding of sense enrichment. The picture of sense or meaning that emerges here turns on the key distinction between the “object simpliciter” (again as a structural feature or principle of the unity of sense, a kind of pole of determination) and the “noematic core” as ground for the opening up of all sense-possibilities of a given, or the “object in its how” (Objekt im Wie). Now, all of these determinations—from the core to its full noematic determinability—have as essential counterparts structures and complexes on the noetic side that are necessary for any “being accomplished” of sense determination in general in lived experience. The whole picture is thus of a complex of interwoven directionalities (noeses) that have as their correlates a set of sense-unities (noemata), which are in turn directed to an object-pole as the point of unity (object simpliciter). However, as André de Muralt has argued convincingly, it is important to emphasize that for Husserl there is no equivalent to the object simpliciter on the side of the noeses.13 The noeses of consciousness are not determinations or sense-formations of some “subject x,” they do not approach that which in turn plays the structural role of “bearing” them. There is however for Husserl indeed a “pole” on the side of subjective noeses—namely that of the ego, or the I—but this pole does not bear lived experiences as so many determinations of its essence, but instead “lives through” these experiences, forming them into a unity of a different kind than that of the full noema. The key insight here is that it is not only the case that sense or meaning must take shape in a certain manner in order for objects to be given to us, but that lived experience in its living, in its being a life as such, must also take a certain shape in order for the accomplishment of the very manifestation of being in the form of that which has sense to be possible. Subjectivity is not univocal. More, this “shape” that experience must take is of a different kind than the shape of objective things, of objective sense—the two sides run in parallel, but they are not mirror images of one another. When we begin asking what “shape” experience must take, in order for the kind of complexity of embedded meanings that we experience to be possible at all, we come upon an important limitation of Husserl’s presentation of 13

André de Muralt, The Idea of Phenomenology: Husserlian Exemplarism, trans. Gary Breckon (Northwestern: Northwestern University Press, 1974), especially §§52ff. Muralt draws from Husserl’s later writings on logic as well, in particular Formal and Transcendental Logic. See Husserl, Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, Husserliana XVII, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974); Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).

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phenomenology in Ideas I. Namely, it tends to be far too static—it represents an approach to the problems of the complexity of meaning that tends to overlook the peculiar sense that we have of the “becoming” of our experiences, of their emergent character, and how this seems to play an important role in our encounter with things as meaningful. The noetic accomplishments of consciousness are not just simple, present givens that are structured in accordance with a certain set of principles or apriori regularities; they do not sit there in consciousness as a set of enabling acts that animate the noematic interplays of givenness that populate a life of experienced things. Instead, all noeses bear within themselves some sense of their own becoming—not just in the sense of their “act character,” of their bare unfolding in time, but in an important sense the very density of the act itself, the way it fills the time of its activity as such, has a distinct presence. When I return to my reading of Tristram Shandy, I am not simply setting into motion once again the articulation of a unity of sense that comprises the fictional narrative; my thinking itself is now different, the very encounter with this text is in turns burdened and opened up by the manner in which the fluidity and prejudices of my understanding inhabit this renewed temporal space of the act of reading. This is because the accomplishments of experience do not only result in the manifestation of given being, but also give shape to its own possibility as a further, progressive opening up towards different kinds of manifestation. Consciousness is not only consciousness of something or other, but also the horizon of possibility into which this “consciousness of…” is itself set. This in turn opens up a more profound way to make the observation that intentional life must take a certain shape in order for certain kinds of complexity of meaning and manifestation to be possible. Included with consciousness, as a dimension of its own presence, is a “consciousness” of its own having-become what it is; part of the maturation of a life, of its taking the shape that it has taken in order to be what it is, is the sense of having crossed a distance of itself in order to arrive at a possession of its own accomplishments, or to inhabit its own possibilities in a way that gives them a distinctive manner or shape. It is in the wake of a reflection such as this where the idea of a “horizon” of sense or meaning becomes important—not only in the sense of a horizon of what we have, with Husserl, been calling noematic determination and enrichment, but more importantly the horizon of egoic or personal life itself, which ultimately forms the horizon of accomplishing subjectivity in Husserl’s thinking. In the end, the noema is always in a sense referred to the being of a consciousness as its circumscribing horizon; but in the static analysis outlined in Ideas I, it is not at all clear just what this horizon of consciousness itself is supposed to be. One is still left asking: what is the origin of the sense of

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self-becoming, what circumscribes consciousness in its own becoming, in such a way that it can be said to be manifest to itself as the shape of a life in which things and the world come into view? Husserl attempted to pursue such questions with a different kind of constitutional analysis that he pursued under the rubric of a “genetic” phenomenology (as opposed to the “static” phenomenology of Ideas I).14 The genesis in question is that of the being of consciousness itself, pursued in terms of an excavation of that implicit awareness that consciousness has of its own becoming, of having crossed a distance of itself to arrive at and engage the possibility of its own being. Here we can already see how the idea of a genetic phenomenology will allow us to frame a question that we began to articulate in the Introduction: namely, the possibility of something like our own understanding or knowledge of things to become problematic will be fundamentally rooted in those conditions for the possibility of developing a mature sense of the character of consciousness as a becoming. That this sensitivity to the becoming of consciousness is not simply the effect of explanatory stories that we tell about the origins of things, but is a specific modality of self-consciousness, is a central thesis of phenomenological philosophy. Yet with the introduction of the problem of genesis we already touch on another key problem, one that has inspired a number of critiques of the Husserlian approach that we have been presenting here. For if it is the case that the very possibility of my relation to things—taken phenomenologically, the being of intentionality as an access to things by way of their sense—is not something simply given, that the being I am must in some way be brought to itself in order for something like an experience to be possible, then it is not at all clear that Husserl’s notions of “genesis” and “constitution” are compatible. For does not the necessity of becoming suggest that my being, or the sense I may have of the being that I am, is not at all univocally oriented towards its own mature form, but is precisely something that is originally in question? And if so, then is it not prima facie suspect to approach the problem of the 14

Here we again cite the lectures published in Husserl, APS/Hua XI. Another essential group of manuscripts for genetic phenomenology can be found in Husserliana XXXIII, Die “Bernauer Manuskripte” über das Zeitbewußtsein (1917/18), ed. Rudolf Bernet and Dieter Lohmar (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001). For a sample of the literature on the topic see Anthony Steinbock, Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1995); Bruce Bégout, La généalogie de la logique: Husserl, l’antéprédicatif et le categorical (Paris: Vrin, 2000); and Anne Montavont, De la passivité dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999).

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ground of sense immediately in terms of a phenomenology of conscious life, or of life as interpreted as the unity of what are essentially cognitive acts— however expanded our notion of “cognition” may be? Does not the entire Husserlian formulation of the problematic simply prejudice the accomplishments of knowledge (of that intuitive bringing to clarity of something in the form of the “known”) over all other modes of understanding and grasping of things? Do not all of these nuanced reflections on experience, world, and intentional life, which seem to unlock the secrets of the labyrinth, bringing into view what it has always obscured, in the end amount to examples of the creeping hegemony of the pyramid?

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After all of these methodological ruminations, which have taken us from the natural attitude to its suspension, from the reduction to pure phenomenological consciousness to the problems of constitution and genesis, what are we in the position to say about the concept of the “world”? Have we come any closer to a deeper understanding of Arendt’s thesis that it is only with homo faber that we have something like a world at all, as the potential for the constitution of a space of appearance in the unfolding of speech and action? Let us consider again some aspects of Arendt’s thesis about the world, in particular its dependence on homo faber. Arendt sees in the human capacity to build, to create, the possibility of securing a space of exception with respect to the burden of natural existence, if also short of its complete suspension; it is an exception that opens up a unique horizon in which action, speech, and memory become possible as distinctive, free forms. The world of these free forms is something that we inhabit in a way that would not be possible in the limited space defined by the rhythms of nature, that is, where the patterns of nature remain determinative of how we establish the foundations of our basic physical existence. The human world is in this sense not defined by the burdens of mere life, but by interests and decisions that belong to another order. Accordingly, the establishment of the human artifice also entails for Arendt a condition for opening a horizon of understanding that transcends the concern with securing the means of biological existence. This world made, and its being-understood, is in turn something we are born into: we understand things in terms of how they fit into a world that is already given, already in place; we pursue our understanding of things in the care of a given comprehensibility. It is in this sense of a pre-given context of understanding that we can speak of the world of homo faber as providing for the material preservation of words

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and deeds. For it not only preserves by recording and transmitting in signs and symbols; it also preserves those networks of dependence that tie us to traditions, to our sense of self, to the political and social conventions on which we depend, and ultimately to history. This modality of world understanding has its logic, one that both illuminates and obscures. Above all we should not be misled by the association of world and fabrication to reduce matters to a question of control—that making and artifice play an important role in securing the human world does not mean that everything that belongs to the unity of the world is somehow subject to our mastery. Making only allows us to set things free, as it were, from the predetermined rhythms of nature; where they will lead us, what we will do in the space given us, we do not and cannot know in advance. This is preeminently the case when it comes to understanding, and what primordially ties understanding to making. When I encounter that stone on the beach, and it inspires me to question its purpose, the task before me is “what do I make of this?” This is not, so to speak, a “natural” question, since the stone is already revealed to me in the horizon of a world that has been set into motion by making, understanding, shaping, seeking access to things “as” what they are, and projecting possibilities of what they might yet become. It is only out of a world that has already been made, and that also lends itself to being made, that the task expressed by “what do I make of this?” can emerge in just the form that it does. In this sense we can say that the world is that by which things are illuminated—the “world” is the horizon in which things either make or fail to make sense to us; it fixes the parameters of our questioning, just as it creates the space in which we find ourselves often unable to fully understand, or perhaps understand at all. However, contrary to this illumination, the world also brings with it a certain naïveté, and with that an obscurity. This is part of its sense as not simply a horizon, a context, but something pre-given, to use Husserl’s language: the world provides us with an opportunity to begin in the wake of an obscure decision about what it means for something to make sense at all. That is, to make sense just means to fit into the “world,” as the sum of what is; that there is a world is a simple prejudice that we have no genuine motivation to shake out of its natural validity. There is thus at the core of life the obscure embrace of the world as a kind of original plenum of full being, in which there is no real “before” or “after,” no introduction to things or escape from things that is not already inscribed in the world, only a continuation of the same within a fixed horizon of a given and established sense of sense. Yet, however natural, what we are describing here, following Husserl’s reflections on the natural attitude, are only tendencies, however basic and established; as such they are not wholly immune to modification. They are

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open to problematization by a reflection that seeks a deeper perspective on the ordering of things they influence; accordingly, phenomenology is the methodical attempt to radically orient descriptive reflection around these possibilities of modification, problematization, and re-orientation. As an example of a phenomenological reflection of this type, we can here cite an essay by Edward Casey, in which he describes what he calls the “continuist principle” and “plenarist passion” that guide how we conceive and experience the world.15 The continuist principle, as Casey describes it, expresses an abhorrence for all gaps of relation; it states that the world as such is a “whole” in the sense that all parts stand in some relation, in one way or another. This is a good way to describe the naïveté operative in Husserl’s concept of the natural attitude: what characterizes this attitude is not so much the naïve acceptance of the validity of the existence of the world, as the acceptance of a validity that is fundamentally seamless. Closely related, what Casey calls the “plenarist passion” is the embrace of the feeling that not only are all things in relation, but that there is “nothing” that is not in relation—there is no void that would be exempt from the order of the world, or that would somehow represent a limiting “outside.” The world just “is” a pure, continuous plenum. Together, the principle and the passion describe the hold of a sense for a world that extends seamlessly and indefinitely, fortifying an indifferent acceptance of plenarist continuity that refuses to be cut up or off, and which can only be challenged at the price of anxiety. In his essay, Casey puts pressure on both the principle and the passion by focusing on the phenomenon of the edge. The world is full of edges, they belong to the very form of our encounter with things; they even define how we relate to the world as a whole: Despite their delimited and focal character, edges are found everywhere; little, if anything, in our experience comes unedged, and the range of edges is enormous: from the edge of the earth (and its many regions) to the edge of the most mundane object (these pages). The world as we know it is rarely if ever edgeless. Every thing, every place has its edges. Of very few concepts can such a scope be claimed.16

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Edward Casey, “Looking Around the Edge of the World: Contending with the Continuist Principle and the Plenarist Passion,” in Chora 5. Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007): 151–178. Ibid., p. 152.

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Casey goes on to emphasize the role of borders and edges in geography and cartography, so for example the river Okeanos in ancient maps: limitless and surrounding all things, Okeanos sets up a firm border of the world—in this way the limitlessness and vastness of the world is inscribed within the figure of a border, an edge, a limit. It is not beyond edges, but in edges that this vastness is present, just as the line of the horizon holds within itself the limitless beyond. This is not paradoxical. Edges do not stop, nor bring to a close in a univocal sense, but are in fact constitutive of the manner in which we can speak of any horizon as something opening up. There is an angularity that belongs to the very figure of the horizon, and which provides the necessary ballast of an element of adversity, of resistance, that constitutes the sense in which the horizon is something that projects outward (or, alternatively, but just as angular, inward). But this adversity is manifestly a discontinuity, and with that an emptiness, a patent refusal to be filled and made “whole.” With Casey’s emphasis on the ubiquity of edges in mind, and their relation to horizonality, we can turn again to Tschumi’s opposition between pyramid and labyrinth. If the tendency of thinking and conceiving is to pull together a multiplicity into a unified representation, or a concept, then perhaps this angularity of the labyrinth does not necessarily contradict this tendency, as situate it in a richer context that problematizes or resists the attempt to bring it into a mastered unity. Dematerialization, the flight into pure conceptual projection that Tschumi describes under the heading of the pyramid, can be seen as a rejection of the place of this resistance, or as a reaction against the labyrinth as an edginess that forces things open. Yet things are perhaps not so simple. One can, and perhaps should, think of the labyrinth as descriptive of an original experience of the whole of the world, not only as open but also as bounded. At every turn, the whole of the labyrinth is announced as the other side of the edge, whether that edge takes the form of a frustrating dead-end or the beckoning of a new possibility. It is always a question of navigating through the aporeitic, the strains and stresses of materiality, in order to reveal within the resistance of things the potential not so much for unity, as order. And in fact this seems to be part of the original sense of the image of the labyrinth in the ancient world, as McEwen argues in an essay that we have already cited above: The Labyrinth, it is essential to realize, appears under two very different and seemingly self-contradictory guises. When we read about it in the ancient sources, the narratives always stress its complexity and confusion. […] Yet the image of the Labyrinth, as it appears on Cretan

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coins as well as in all later representations from Roman mosaics to the floors of the Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance gardens, is not confused at all. Whether circular or square, it invariably has a very clear and regular configuration. The image of the Labyrinth, its eidos—the thing seen and therefore known for certain—is the choros.17 Choros, as McEwen explains, is an ambiguous term, meaning both dance and the dance-floor, both the activity of dancing and the space ordered in order for the dance to occur. The mythical first architect Daedalus, in exile on Knossos, is not only the builder of the Labyrinth, but also of a dancing-floor for Ariadne, and these two built spaces are closely associated with each other. And they are both clever constructions wrought from edges, which is essential to understanding their association: they are both instances of a built form in which order is made or built out of the discontinuity marked by an edge. Order is made manifest not by erasing this discontinuity, as if building were a matter of smoothing out the rough edges of the world, but by harnessing its force. Neither choros nor labyrinth is the result of a concept imposed upon matter, robbing it of its discontinuous being, but the revealing-showing of the very discontinuity of matter and ordered space. And in both choros and labyrinth the space revealed and shown retains its character as that in terms of which something random, open, free, even confused and perplexing, can take place, whether in the free movements of a body in dance, or the confused wanderings of an unfortunate trapped in a maze of mutually echoing edges. The theme of phenomenological experience that emerges out of the methodological reflections of Husserl that we have been following above also yields, I would argue, an example of an “edge,” one that in turn belongs to the being of the world. Here the discontinuity, or fault line, belongs to the essence of appearance itself. The edge here gathers appearing (the taking-in, the attunement constitutive of the perceptual life of consciousness) and what appears (the objectivity of the object) into a unique perspectival horizon. Yet this is an edge that tends to be smoothed out by a conscious life that has always already accepted the world, that projects sense always already in terms of the pre-given world. To the extent that this naïveté is part of the necessary existence of consciousness, it is something that can only be artificially suspended for the sake of reflection. It is thus a barely visible edge, and its faintness frustrates taking phenomenality as such as a theme for reflection; more, its faintness frustrates an understanding of how the relation between world and making is governed 17 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, p. 60.

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not only by the human capacity to manipulate matter, or nature, but also by an openness and attunement to how things appear. Here we can perhaps begin to understand what these methodological reflections have opened for us with respect to Arendt’s thesis about the relation between homo faber and the human world. The issue has to do with two interlocking subjective accomplishments. The first is that human beings make their world; they create an environment that provides the material foundation for speech and action. The second is that lived experience constitutes the warp and woof of appearance, by figuring and prefiguring those horizons of intentional life thanks to which things are given. Understanding how the two fit together, how the one draws from the resources of the other and vice versa, is the task of a phenomenological analysis of what Arendt called the space of appearance. In the end, these methodological reflections of Husserl represent a kind of optics, in the sense of a shift of focus with respect to the description of the worldhood of the world. Appearance is brought into focus, by shifting description away from appearance taken as a mere image in the mind to the dynamic unfolding of manifestation in lived experience. Meaning is brought into focus, by shifting description from its function in language and communication to the fundamental intentional structure of perceptual life. And finally the world itself is brought into focus, by shifting description away from the world as the anonymous functioning of pre-given being, to its phenomenological illumination within the edge it shares with conscious being. Yet what comes into focus in these methodological reflections at the edge of the world is not limited to the theme of the world, or even to subjectivity, but clearly also involves the description of things. And in fact the entire reflection began with the question of how things bear the world. If anything, one could say, these reflections have shown that we need to turn to a more explicit reflection on what makes a thing a thing, or to how a thing functions as the axis of both world-making and world-appearing. For the space of appearance is not only a world, but always first and foremost a world of things; their depth is not only a function of their worldlhood, but equally of their thinghood. So it is precisely to the question of the thing that we turn in the next chapter.

chapter 5

World and Thing

Questioning Thingness

The three working problems outlined at the beginning of Chapter 2—the problems of how things bear purpose, time, and encounter—all receive a distinctive articulation in light of the methodological securing of phenomenological consciousness established in the last two chapters. But to make this clear, we need to shift our analysis from the theme of the world back to a more nuanced reflection on the phenomenality of individual things, thus from the question of the built world to the built artifact. Take again the example of the student walking past Kahn’s chapel, winking in acknowledgement of the spiritual significance of the sanctuary. It is not at all transparent that this description has anything to do with “architecture,” apart from appearing in an essay by a well-known architect. Yet it does capture something that happens in and among the realm of the architectural, to the extent to which the chapel is something built. But is this “built thing,” the chapel, really in view here, or only the action of the student, or perhaps the comprehension of an idea (the “meaning” of the chapel)? Even if, following the notion of constitution that we outlined in the last chapter, we were to emphasize that the experiential meaning of the chapel was something made present, made available by the perception of the transcendent thing we call “chapel,” the actual building, the description still seems to have more to do with the perception of the thing than with the thing itself. Is that what a phenomenological approach amounts to, the forsaking of real, concrete things in favor of subjective experiences, which we have already emphasized are in no way “things”? The problem, however, runs deeper, and challenges a basic assumption that we have been operating under up to this point: namely, the assumption that “being built” designates a unique status of thinghood, and that somehow we need to bring to bear special conceptual instruments to handle the description of built things. It is one thing to take the stone on the beach as a thing to be grasped as this or that, with such and such a look and set of properties that define its physical existence, and quite another to take it as something that belongs to the “built world,” as the total instrumentum of human agency. But is this really the case? Perhaps “built space” is in the end an ambiguous expression, and with that related expressions such as “built world” and the like are at best equivocal. Perhaps we don’t build space any more than we build a

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world, despite Arendt’s thesis; perhaps we only build upon things in the world, and then only by manipulating given natural attributes that remain decisively rooted in the non-built world of nature. The things we make are to be sure spatial and worldly, but not to the extent to which they are built, but simply to the extent to which they “are.” Such an objection relies on a very particular conception of what a “thing” is, as well as a very particular sense of what it means to speak of space, worldhood, and building. It is inspired by the natural assumption that things are things found in the world, and are manipulated in accordance with patterns that come with being a thing. So for example the properties of wood make it an excellent material for load-bearing structures requiring joinery, as is also the case with cast metals, which when machined properly allow for a great degree of precision. We build, construct, manipulate within an environment already for the most part determined by the natural properties of things—and to be a thing is just to be what bears these properties. But this is precisely what we need to question, in order to see if it makes sense to emphasize the built character of the world we inhabit beyond merely recognizing external signs of our activities somehow inscribed in the things we encounter in the world. This is an essential step on the way to understanding what we could mean by talking about a built space; more, as we will see, it folds back into the question of whether or not what makes a thing a thing leads us inevitably back to the question of the subjectivity that makes an experience an experience. What is a thing? Like edges, we have no shortage of examples. And the very obviousness about what is meant by “thing” is in fact what constitutes the difficulty of posing the question in the first place. It would perhaps be easier to begin with a concept of the built: the built is whatever is produced in the activity of building, which we can approach theoretically in terms of its techniques, programs, ends, motivations (political, social), and their governing principles. But this already situates the problem rather far downstream, and leaves behind a more basic question, namely, what is a built thing simpliciter, what in its most minimal manifestation is constitutive of the essence of the made? We leave the object of this question behind when we immerse ourselves in the attempt to reconstruct the Greek technique for tapering columns just as when, like a Boullée, we project a grandiose vision of architectural form or a radical modern project of the fabrication of forms. In all such cases we may have the properties of things in view, and likewise we may express the motivations or inspirations that drive us into building, but the sense of the thingness of the thing is left untouched, unreflected. However, turning to the thing as a thing, we seem to run up almost immediately against a wall of mute obviousness—a thing is just, that. To talk about

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a thing as a thing, a “mere thing,” would seem to be an empty exercise; for to talk about something meaningfully, we need to talk about what is relevant, or what is recognized as belonging to the whole human world of thinking, living, and acting. For example, say one were to try to place a thing, any thing, in a context in which its character as a thing were emphasized, somehow made more evident and compelling—where the thingness of the thing were the focus of attention. Would that even be possible? Take for example something like light, which has arguably been a central element of architecture since the earliest constructions of human beings. Could light as a thing, as a given being, be presented in such a way that its thingness—not this or that characteristic, modality, or determination, but its being as a thing—were the overriding point of interest? The task would not be to emphasize the materiality of light, or its naturalness, or its functionality. The question is not how light as light could be the theme, as in the work of an architect like Steven Holl, or its careful arrangement in medieval architecture, but instead its thingness, that which makes light a thing. Martin Heidegger’s reflections at the beginning of his lecture course on Kant, What is a Thing?,1 raise two issues that are of interest here, and which we can appeal to in order to sharpen our focus on the theme of thingness. The first has to do with the general status of thingness as a theme; the second has to do with the fact that thingness is something practically invisible to us, not because it is hidden, but because it is, so to speak, too visible. Let us first consider the status of thingness as a descriptive theme. Heidegger expresses an important insight, one that is in a sense simple, though its philosophical consequences are deep. The insight is that the “thingness” of a thing is not itself a thing. What makes a thing a thing, what shows us its thinghood, is not a thing. Put another way: the condition, the ground for a thing to be a thing, is not itself a thing: In inquiring this way [“what is a thing?”], we seek what makes the thing a thing and not what makes it a stone or wood; what conditions [be-dingt] the thing. We do not ask concerning a thing of some species but after the thingness of a thing. For the condition of being a thing, which conditions the thing as a thing, cannot itself again be a thing; i.e., somehing conditioned. The thingness must be something un-conditioned (un-bedingtes).2 1 Martin Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding. Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987); What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967). Here we are drawing especially from Section A: “Various Ways of Questioning About the Thing” (“Verschiedene Weisen, nach dem Ding zu Fragen”). 2 Heidegger, What is a Thing?, pp. 8–9; Frage nach dem Ding, p. 7.

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Figure 4  Romanesque church (Travestere, Rome). Photo by author.

In his use of the expressions be-dingt and un-bedingtes in this passage, Heidegger is evoking two, related ideas. The first is that things are what they are only under specific conditions (in German, Bedingungen). Thus to say that things are conditioned (bedingt), is to emphasize their dependence on

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something other than themselves to be what they are. The second idea plays on the fact that the word Ding, which means thing, appears in the word for condition, or Bedingung; thus implying that the very concept of a condition is that of something that enables a thing to be the thing that it is. Thus the question “what is a thing?” is asking about the enabling conditions for thinghood, or alternatively what it is that a thing is dependent upon to be specifically a thing. The thesis is that these enabling conditions are not themselves enabled by what makes a thing a thing—that is, that to enable something to be a thing does not imply any dependence on the conditions for being a thing, and thus represents an example of something un-conditioned (un-bedingtes). So if I were to succeed in shaping a thing in such a way that brought out what makes a thing a thing, presenting the thing in such a way that emphasizes its thingness, it would not be because I somehow found a way to put “that thing” that makes the thing a thing in the foreground. Things are different with the materiality of things. I can present something in such a way that its material character—the roughness or smoothness of its surface, the torque under which its constituent parts strain to maintain a particular form—are given emphasis and prominence. A car left to decay until it is a virtual heap of rust is an example of a visible unity of function slowly passing over to an expression of the brute materiality that supports it; or a piece of unfinished furniture made of coarse, untreated pine eases the switch from looking at the piece as a functional whole to looking at it as something “made of wood.” The material can come into the foreground, become a theme on its own, because in important senses it has a thingly being or reality separable from what it is employed to compose. As Aristotle already emphasized in his Physics, matter has a claim to a life outside of what is made out of it, or what it makes possible. The wood is a thing that conditions, or makes the cabinet possible; not as a thing, but as a wooden cabinet, or a cabinet as that which must be made out of some material or other within some range of specific properties in order to be. This idea of condition also lies behind the interactivity of materials, which Zumthor has emphasized as an essential dimension of architecture. For materials are not simply combined, stacked atop of one another; they act and react in a myriad of possible ways that define differently constituted situations: Materials react with one another and have their radiance, so that the material composition gives rise to something unique. Material is endless. Take a stone: you can saw it, grind it, drill into it, split it, or polish it—it will become a different thing each time. Then take tiny amounts of the same stone, or huge amounts, and it will turn into something else

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again. Then hold it up to the light—different again. There are a thousand different possibilities in one material alone.3 Not so with thingness: it is not like materiality, it does not react and transform into different kinds of itself, nor is it some base or substratum that co-inhabits the same space as the thing to which it gives rise. Yet for all the ambiguity that Heidegger’s reflection discovers in the meaning of the thing, things are not a mystery. Let us consider a way of thinking about things, one that follows the expectations of an ordinary understanding of what it means to encounter things at all. In everyday life, we don’t expect thingness to appear alongside of things, or even for something like “thingness” to be a theme in their presentation or look. This is not because we don’t know how thingness would appear, but because in an important sense “thingness” is simply another expression for thinkability. A thing as a thing is just a “this,” located at a particular position in space and time, which offers the point of departure for thought—or a multiplicity of such points of departure, to the extent to which a thing comes together for thinking as the bearer of properties.4 “That there” is a thing: say a chair located in “that place,” with its specific properties that enable me to describe, and with that to think, “what” it is. Thinghood is obvious because it is “just” that, thingness being “nothing more” than the givenness of something in a particular place, at a particular time, in such a manner that lends itself to being explicated through certain features and properties. Nothing could be simpler. Even our very language is set up in such a way that reflects this obvious being of the thing: what is being spoken of, what bears properties, is reflected in the subject-form of a sentence; what is spoken of it, or those properties borne by the “thing,” is expressed by the corresponding predicate-form. The thingness of the thing is just its determinability, its thinkability, and by extension is expressibility in language. So we seem to have an answer to our question. We can emphasize the thingness of a thing to the extent that we can speak about it, engage in a discourse about it, and with that bring out its being as a thing. This answer is however not adequate. It does not fully cover even our everyday sense of the thing, so for example the sense of a thing as a “this.” As Heidegger emphasizes, each thing is every time, in each case, a “this” (je dieses), and necessarily so.5 This in turn belongs to its obviousness: a thing is obvious in the form of something spoken about, something that can be “pointed to” as occupying some place or other 3 Zumthor, Atmospheres, p. 24. 4 Heidegger, What is a Thing?/Frage nach dem Ding, §8. 5 Ibid., §6.

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“here and now.” Insofar as I can see, and experience, what I see and experience present themselves as “things”—in the form in each case of a “this here and now” that I can speak about by forming propositions of the form “this S is p.” As such, this yields a distinct manner in which I can emphasize the thingness of the thing: I need not pull it out of its obviousness, or put thingness in the foreground in an unexpected way, for by simply standing in a given place talking and pointing I generate the very presence or emphasis of the “thingness” of the thing. This includes the wink of the student walking past Kahn’s chapel, if we understand it as an act of pointing: all the emphasis needed for thingness to be in view is captured in the mute obviousness of the fact that the chapel is “just a thing” that forms part of the intentional unity of the act of recognition borne along by his wink. Obviousness is here a clue to thingness, but it is also an obstacle, one that, if it is to serve as a guide, must be opened up in a questioning manner. This is not an easy thing to do. Heidegger offers a number of moves to render this obviousness more questionable in the first part of his lecture course on Kant that we have been citing. Two are of particular importance for us. The first is to ask more searchingly just what the “here and now” of thingness amounts to, or in what sense we can ascribe to a thing that it is at a here and a now. For example, there is an important difference between what I do when I turn my attention to the here and now, the place and time of a thing, and what I do when I describe a thing in terms of its features or properties. The “here” that I indicate with my finger when I point is not a property of the thing. The place in space that is obviously essential to thingness is nothing that I will find in the thing; it is not a defining property, even if it is a principle of determination. Location in space is not the same as shape or figure, but points to something else, something that cannot be found by breaking apart the thing either concretely or abstractly. Something similar must be said of time, or the “now” of the thing. The now of things, as we saw in the example of returning home after a long journey, is not even something that things occupy in an unambiguous way. The things I return to belong to a time, a passage and an absence the presence of which I can sense in and through them “now,” as that which bears the manifestation of the temporal. To be sure, it makes sense to argue that only one thing can occupy one “place” or position at one time, that a multiplicity of things must take the form of partes extra partes. But even here, “a time” is not exclusive to a given thing; things do not exclude one another in time, which after all at any given moment is “simultaneous” with all things “of that time,” not excluding them from one another but including them “in” the same temporal spread. So it is not simply the case that things can take part in times that are past, but they also take part in a time that is their own but also that of others located

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elsewhere in space. To make sense of all of this, we need to ask the question in a more rigorous way about how it is that a thing both occupies and bears or sustains space and time, something that will lead us to a more nuanced conception of both. The second move of Heidegger’s is to argue that the very obviousness of thingness is something historical.6 Namely, the obvious reflects a certain, particular way of inhabiting both space and time, and of orienting oneself towards the being of the thing. Here Heidegger quotes Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things, both of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.” The truth of things—the manifestation of the things that are, that they are, and so on—is “determined” by the human being. But this determination is neither static nor merely given; how a thing is a thing for us has to do with the situated manner in which humans inhabit the horizon of the determination of the thingness of things. This horizon, Heidegger argues, is historical, insofar as it is the result of human becoming, or the becoming of the measure which must be taken into consideration in order to fully understand just what it is that makes something like “thingness” visible. Heidegger’s move is to argue that what is most obvious to us—the thingness of the thing, what makes a thing a thing—is open to being questioned, to the extent to which everything that is obvious is ultimately historical in character. This means that, on the one hand, as obvious, thingness resists questioning, to the extent to which it is “too visible” for us to work towards its clarification; it is the immediate result of our becoming, thus as much its result as we are ourselves. This means that there is something inherently irritating about this kind of reflection, since it seems to insist on finding something deep in superficialities, trying to open questions where everything seems settled. But on the other hand, the historical essence of accepted visibility in the end does provide enough traction for a question to take hold, even a fundamental question. Thus to place the obviousness of what a thing is into question is both to question the manner in which we inhabit this horizon of determination, as well as to engage in an historically oriented questioning. At this point let us turn again to Husserl, since we now have an essential aspect of the question of thingness in view.7 Later we will have more to say about both space and time, and the manner in which a thing needs to be questioned in terms of its spatiality and temporality. Right now let us focus our efforts in 6 Ibid., §10–12. 7 An alternative route would be to explore more deeply the theme of “thing” and “thingness” in the later Heidegger, following Christian Norberg-Schulz. See his Architecture: Presence, Language, and Place, pp. 111ff.

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understanding just what this notion of the thingness of the thing emerging out of a manner of habitation, of inhabiting the horizon of our encounter with things is supposed to mean, and whether it really makes sense to argue for its essential “historical” character.

Adumbration, Sensation and Movement

In many of his analyses of the constitution of thinghood and reality—and here we can cite as characteristic the 1907 lecture course Thing and Space8—it is clear that Husserl works with the traditional conception of a thing as a “bearer of properties.” His analyses also turn often on the parallel between the propositional form “S is p” and the ontological structure of the thing as a substance bearing properties, and it is probable that the target of Heidegger’s preliminary remarks in his lectures cited above is Husserl just as much as it is Kant. Yet the traditional picture of the being of the thing as a property-bearing substrate is not left wholly unchallenged by Husserl. Above all the orientation toward propositional form is not exclusively determinative of the course of Husserl’s descriptive analyses. On the contrary, on the basis of Husserl’s presentation, it is possible to construct an argument that the manifestation of the thingness of the thing is not something that first comes into view in language. There is another sense in which thingness can be emphasized, one that is more basic than the availability of things “to be spoken about.” But first we need to look in more detail at some basic concepts that Husserl develops in lectures such as Thing and Space. Most of the analyses that we find in these lectures fall under the heading of noetic analysis. Let us recall here briefly the difference between noetic and noematic analysis covered in the last chapter. In the case of the perception of a thing, a noematic analysis would focus on the manner in which the thing and its properties are given in lived experience: the thing would be taken as a unity of meaning that unfolds in the various types of determinations that are ranged under the general heading of “having a property.” Noetic analysis focuses instead on those structures of activity that lived experience must assume in order for this thing with its properties to be properly manifest as something “intended to” in the course of the experience. Thus the experience of the thing is described as an ordered flow of experiencing that provides the basis for the unfolding of the determinations that define the givenness of the thing. 8 Husserl, Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907, Husserliana XVI, ed. Ullrich Claesges (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973) (hereafter cited as Hua XVI); Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907, Collected Works VII, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997).

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As an example of such a noetic analysis, we have also already met in Chapter 3 Husserl’s description of the adumbrations of the perceptual given. A thing is given “in” adumbrations, in which it is intended by consciousness in a characteristic mode of individual departures from a whole that, given in a continuous progression, together constitute the grasping of the whole as such. Recall that Husserl’s description of the adumbration of the manifestation of a given thing does not imply that somehow the subject pieces together a representation of the thing, but rather the emphasis is on how, at any given moment, perception grasps the thing through a given, finite selection of the phases, or adumbrations, of its phenomenal unfolding. One needs to keep in mind that this dynamic of unfolding, basic to the phenomenality of the thing, is not the same as speaking of the thing as given through its determinations—the color of a flag waving in the air is not the adumbration of a flag, nor is it its symbolic value, personal significance, or the like. Adumbrations are not perspectives defined by the intellectual representation of selected determinations, but are constitutive of the “how” of the experience that makes manifest the thing in the phenomenality of its thingness. The properties, aspects and features of a thing that make up the content of a perceptual experience are by contrast what can be grasped through an intellectual faculty that is in tune precisely with what determines a thing as what it is. Each of these aspects of a thing, however, in order to be experienced, or given as present to a perceiving subject, must be in turn adumbrated: the flag is determined by its color (it “is” black; it “has” a picture of a skull and crossbones painted on its surface), and its color is perceptively present through its adumbration in my perception of it. This adumbration does not belong to the color, the same way the color belongs to the thing; it belongs instead to the perceiving of the color taken precisely within the limits of what makes up a “perceiving.” Thus to get closer to understanding what adumbration means in Husserl is just to figure out what he thinks a perception (Wahrnehmung) is, or more precisely, a perceiving (Wahrnehmen). But how did we get from the question “what is a thing?” to the question “what is a perception/perceiving?” Have we not changed the subject? No—the question aims at what makes a thing a thing, or wherein lies the thingness of the thing. Husserl’s answer is in part the one that Heidegger identifies with the tradition: a thing is a bearer of properties, thus what makes it a thing is what forms the condition or ground thanks to which it bears properties. But for Husserl being a “bearer of properties” is a particular species of a unity of sense, one that cannot be fully understood unless we investigate that in which this unity of sense is originally encountered— which includes the adumbrations of perceptual lived experience. What is an adumbration? What is a perceiving? Husserl’s point of departure is to think of the being of the thing as a presented being (ein Vorgestelltes).

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That is, the “meaning” of “having properties” is to be given in light of how something is made visible, or the manner in which a thing is manifest “as” such and such a thing. Thus it is not just that the wall is white, a fact of the world to be affirmed or denied in judgment; the being-white of the wall has another, deeper dimension, in accordance with which it actually stands before me as white, or is properly presented to me as what it is. Such standing-before and presentation are functions of the movement of lived perception. Accordingly, the descriptivity of things, or the being-such and being-so of things, is originally animated by the movement of perception that grounds their manifestness. Let us take a closer look at what this entails. How does the notion of presentation (Vorstellung) help us understand adumbration? Husserl’s thesis is that the descriptivity of a thing, its availability as something to be taken up as the bearer of properties, is brought out by a lived experience (perceiving) that is originally presentive or intuitive. The course of a series of adumbrations marks off the unfolding of a presentation of the thing, of the thing in its intuitivity. Presentation is not the thing itself, but its manner of presence, described in terms of how the presence of the thing unfolds in a lived experience. Husserl’s term for this is, in the case of perception, Darstellung, or the manner in which something emerges in a given perception, plays itself out, and so to speak exits the scene. These processes—emergence, unfolding, exiting or effacement— are not contingent extras, subjective overlays on the surface of objectivity, but belong essentially to the manner in which a thing is a thing. Yet what Husserl really brings into view is not so much the manner in which the thing is a thing, but more specifically: the manner in which thingness is “played out” in perception. In that sense, adumbrative presentation has as much to do with the manner in which a perceiving is a perceiving, as it does with the manner in which the thing is presented or set before us. This bears directly on the (rather controversial) distinction that Husserl insists on with respect to the noetic side of perceptual consciousness (or what makes up perceiving as perceiving): the distinction between “apprehension” (Auffassung) on the one hand, and “contents of apprehension” (Auffassungsinhalte), or equivalently “presentive/presenting contents” (darstellende Inhalte), on the other.9 9 Husserl, Thing and Space/Hua XVI, §§14–18; cf. Husserl, Ideas I/Hua III, §85: “Sensuous hyle, intentive morphe.” The distinction finds one of its earliest formulations in the Fifth Logical Investigation, but most notably plays a central, and complex role in Husserl’s analyses of time-consciousness, where its limits are tested. See Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins, Husserliana X, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969) (hereafter cited as Hua X); On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, Collected Works IV, trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994). Also see John Brough, “The Emergence of an Absolute Consciousness in Husserl’s in Husserl’s Early Writings on Time Consciousness,”

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An exhaustive consideration of the nuances of the debate over the cogency of this distinction falls outside of the purview of our remarks here, but it is useful to at least make an attempt to understand what motivates Husserl to make this distinction. One important motive of Husserl’s is the conviction that we need to move away from thinking of perceiving as a pure intellectual spontaneity, one that would sharply distinguish itself from a mute passivity of mere sense data. This is arguably the motivation behind any kind of sensualism, or the insistence on a functional concept of sensation as an essential part of the architecture of perception. Perceptual experience is “sensuous” to the extent to which, at least in part, it is made up of whatever is not of its own making or doing. Any given “act” of perception is thus in an important sense (on this view) passively given to itself, through that which is not fully itself, or which has emerged out of itself as activity. If perception is “sensuous” in this sense, then the being of perception is not that of a pure activity, but of a functional whole in which activity shares space, as it were, with a constitutive passivity. Husserl’s argument is that what is not active is not itself “presentive,” but nevertheless plays a positive role in the movement of presentation. In Thing and Space and elsewhere, the task is to describe just what the passive dimensions of perceiving contribute to the unfolding of the meaningful unities of things in perceiving. In an attempt to clarify this role of the passive, Husserl proposes that we identify the active aspect or face of perceiving as the apprehension (Auffassung) of a thing, or the grasping of the presented given as what it is, and the passive element as among the immanent “contents” of that apprehension. Yet “content of apprehension” (Auffassungsinhalt) can have a double sense. Take our black flag: to perceive the flag as black, or the flag in its blackness, involves an apprehension: I take the flag as what it presents itself to be, namely colored black. Yet this “taking as black” has as its intentional correlate the “being black” of the flag. The orientation of this apprehension is determined in our example precisely as a perceptual “taking as”—which means: it takes place in accordance with the perceptual character of presentation. The flag presents itself as what it is “through” adumbrations, which must be engaged by apprehension in order to be precisely a perceptual apprehension and not, say, a direct intellectual apprehension in thought alone. The apprehension can be oriented, in other words, towards what it apprehends (the black flag), only if it is at the same time embodied, so to speak, as a moment of the very presentation of the apprehended in perspectives. in Man and World 5 (1972): 298–326; and Nicolas de Warren, Husserl and the Promise of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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This yields, Husserl argues, a double conception of “content.” The first refers to the quality of the thing, the objective determination belonging to the unity of the thing as something apprehended as such. The second belongs to the character in which the encounter with the thing emerges in perceptual experience at all, precisely as something given adumbratively. The former we can call, following Husserl, “intentional contents” (the meaning-content secured by the intentionality of the perception), while the latter can be called “presentive contents” (or that which is included in the presentation itself, taken as a presentation—and not as a thing). Husserl never tires of insisting on the distinction between the two. A sensation is never to be confused with what is sensed. The “black”-sensations of adumbrative unfolding are not to be confused with the black of the flag; the sensations that make up our experience of roughness are never to be confused with the roughness of the surface of the thing. Objects are not experienced as being made up of a composite of sensations; yet it is only through sensations that the characteristics of things are “given” to us in experience. This means that the kind of description that we are aiming at in examples such as the suggestive stone found while walking on the beach situates itself within the immediate perception of the stone in its sensuousness, but it does not limit itself to this dimension as a preferred aspect of thingness—for the entire question is what, on the basis of the givenness of the stone constituted in the fold of perceptual sensation, can come into view. So for example, though purposiveness is not something that in any way belongs to sensation, it is nevertheless through the manifold of sensations of the surfaces of the stone I hold in my hands that my judgment of purpose makes its home. Likewise, when we approach more complex examples of built-forms, such as the monumentality of ancient pyramids or the modular forms of modern architecture, in each case there will be something to learn from the description of how the structure of sensuous perception provides the point of departure for the apprehension of different kinds of complexity. And the most basic, primordial phenomenon of perception that needs to be understood is precisely the intrinsic distance between sensation and what is sensed—this differentiation is, as it were, an exemplary distancing or spatialization that represents a key theme for any phenomenology of space. In order to justify the distinction between intentional and representing contents Husserl often appeals to a class of examples in which an identical sensuous schema provides the basis for different, even contradictory apprehensions. One of Husserl’s frequent examples of this runs something like the following: walking around at a carnival, I turn a corner and see a tall, beautiful woman sitting at a counter selling tickets—she has striking, exotic features, and is wearing colorful clothes that speak of being from some far away place. Enchanted, I move closer, only to discover that she is a cleverly constructed

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mannequin, complete with a motor and gears that produce a sequence of arm and hand gestures, head and facial movements, and the like. The illusion fully breaks apart only when I get close enough to notice the jerky, mechanical character of the movements of the figure. Yet these mechanical aspects also disappear from view when I return to the spot where I had first seen the exotic woman; here the mannequin again looks “just like” the woman that I thought she was, but who I now realize does not “exist.” At the original place from which I spotted her, the place where she first emerged as an exotic woman, there is an identity of presentifying contents, or sensuous contents, between my perceiving “then” of the exotic woman and my perceiving “now” that what I see is in fact a mannequin. Thus the same content, the same perceptual or sensuous base, can serve as the basis for two opposing “interpretations” or apprehensions (Auffassungen).10 Yet it is not quite Husserl’s argument that this sensuous basis “gives” me both apprehensions. On one level, it does not give me an apprehension at all, as if I just read off a group of sensations what is being seen. Sensations for Husserl are presentive, or exhibiting (darstellende), they are not images. They do not record a presence that has already taken place, but play a role in the unfolding of a presence that is happening in the moment; they do not mirror an outside, but play a role in how a window of visibility is being opened on the given. Yet if sensations are not images of the thing, just what are they? What is the role that they play in the manifestation of things? Let us look again at the example of seeing the exotic woman at the carnival, and start at the beginning of the story. At a certain point I see her: I turn around the corner and there she is, selling tickets. The intentional object proper, to adopt Husserl’s idiom, is the state of affairs (Sachverhalt) “exotic woman selling tickets,” the content of which is composed, among other things, by the objective determinations of the concepts “woman,” “exotic,” “selling,” and whatever else makes up the concreteness of the perceived given, whether on the level of the strictly perceived or various founded judgments. However broad and complex the unity of meanings may reach beyond perception, the presence of the exotic woman is nevertheless here distinctively perceptual, which means in part that the apprehension of the intentional object unfolds in step with sensation. The whole world of the exotic woman beckons me when I originally spot her, and in the modification of this consciousness upon the discovery that she is just a mannequin, this whole world is subjected to the modalization of negation—and all of this occurs thanks to conditions put into place originally by sensations as presenting contents. But what does that actually mean? 10

See Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil/Experience and Judgment, §21.

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The key to understanding the way Husserl talks about sensation here is to move away from thinking about the sensation-complex that is given when standing at point x as a bundle of non-interpreted data. This would be too static, an unjustifiable reduction of the function of sensation to a mere input value. Sensations for Husserl are not bundles of data that we gather at one point or another to be subjected to an identifying interpretation. Rather, the key to the essence of sensation lies in what I do next in the story—it is s­ omething very simple, but at the same time extraordinary: I begin to walk over to where she is sitting. That is, I move. Husserl’s painstaking (and, truth be told, often quite tedious) descriptions in Thing and Space aim at capturing the deep truth that the movement of subjective comportment—the movement that I am as I initiate my progression towards what I see—is not something extraneous to the being of sensation. One could in fact argue that the insight that Husserl is struggling with in these lectures is the fact that sensation, that ground of passivity basic to the body of perceiving as an experience, just is a primordial movement, one that plays an essential role in the concretization of the movements of subjective life as a whole. This movement, following Husserl’s mode of description, can be characterized as multi-leveled, so let us take it level by level.11 First, in a direct sense, the emergence of the appearance of the woman has its own characteristic movement: it unfolds and develops along a particular line of manifestation. In fact, it unfolds along a certain line of manifestation or presentation thanks to which it will precisely “turn out” that she is not a woman at all, but a mannequin; modality thus finds a distinctive place in the phenomenality of the perceived thanks to this movement. More, the line of presentation that structures the course of appearances unfolds as a series of ordered modes of what could be described as intensifications and minimalizations that are animated through the progression from empty to fulfilled intentions. At any given point, what I have seen recedes in intensity in order to give way to the intensification of what it had emptily promised; this coming and going, arrival and passage of the sensuous takes, as a movement, the form of a unified spread. Sensations are “presentive,” or have the function of presentifying contents, thanks to their organization in the form of a series of elements that conjoin together into the unified spread of a field. Sensations are thus presentive as the moving organization of unfolding lines of development within the unity of a perceptual field in which intentions and fulfillments are played out.12 11 12

Here see Husserl, Thing and Space/Hua XVI, §§44–57. See Husserl, Thing and Space/Hua XVI, §§19–25. Cf. the discussion in Ulrich Claesges, Husserls Theorie der Raumkonstitution (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964).

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The notion of “field,” which we have already touched on in Chapter 2 in the description of the environing perception of the library, is not meant here in a static sense, along the lines of coordinates organized on a geometric plane, but precisely in the sense of a tension of movement, one constitutive of the intentionality of perception itself. To perceive means to aim at what is meant through the tension of a progressive unfolding of appearances that are constituted within the movement-field of perception itself. Thus the “basis” on which the two apprehensions in question are made possible—the apprehension of the exotic woman as opposed to that of the mannequin—is the basis that ­sensation is thanks to its projection outward towards further determinability in the wake of the animation of this movement-field. However, it is not sensation alone that “moves”—sensation is in movement, Husserl argues, only in conjunction with its being-animated by apprehension itself. It is not its being-apprehended as this or that, but as the enlivening by an apprehension that engages the perceptive manifestation of what is intended in order to intend it at all. Sensation alone, abstracted from this structure, is not intentional; it is a multiplicity basic to intentional life, and as a multiplicity that saturates the being of intentionality, it is the origin of a specific profile of variability and indeterminateness that is functionally indispensable for the unfolding emergence of the properly perceived thing. Here we have the rudimentary beginnings of a specific way to think about the thingness of the thing. A thing is a thing, thanks to the movement of its ­being-perceived through endless but structured fields of differentiation. It is, in other words, a “thing” as that animated theme that is opened up by a lived and living progression of determination, and not simply the mute collection of determinations around some kind of solid, impenetrable core. Things are in this way open to us, an openness that can only be sufficiently brought into view if we situate description within the horizon of the subjectivity of experience. There is a second sense of the movement of presentation that is relevant here. Instead of the movement of a course of determination, constituted as a “field” or spatio-temporal spread of sensuously presented givenness, we can point to the non-presentive localization and movement of the presentation itself. As illustrative of the first sense of movement, think of the early cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, or again Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase that we discussed already in Chapter 3. As we saw there, the movement of the descending nude is represented by breaking out the various phases of the movement, or in our language the dismantling of the adumbrations that make up the wane of the perception of the descending figure. On one level, the “movement” aimed at here corresponds to the first sense of the movement of presentation just outlined: the painting arrests in representation the synthesis of this multiplicity, replacing its lived movement with its static presentation

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as a collection of simultaneous, contrasting areas on the surface of the canvas. The painting breaks down and reassembles the movement into a snapshot or collective aspect-image that counts off, as it were, phases of the descent. But what is not “represented,” at least not on the same plane as the profiles of the nude, is the multiplicity of positions or places “in which” each of the phases is in turn localized, or better: passes through in the unity of living experience. The subject of the painting is the spatiality of what is seen, and this subject is approached aesthetically by emphasizing, in abstract representation, the underlying movement of the determination of the seen; it accomplishes this by effectively replacing a foreign form of simultaneity with the simultaneity that actually defines the perceptual unity of the movement itself. But what is not the subject of the painting, at least not expressly, is the localization and movement of the perceiving of the perceived, or that through which the perceived passes in its becoming. What the painting highlights is what is immediately available, as it were, to the painterly, arresting gaze, namely adumbrated intentional contents abstracted out into profiles; but what is not emphasized is the placement of these adumbrations, their localization in an order of spatialization that forms a fundamental aspect of the movement of a perceptual emergence as the unity of a perceiving. Duchamp’s nude as it appears on the canvas is the result of the emphasis on a dimension which, separated off in abstraction from the lived experience of movement, amounts to a kind of “phantom” appearance that has been set free from its moorings in the perceptual field. To be sure, one might say that at least the gaze of the artist is implied in any painting, thus should count as the presence of the perceptual field, and that might be true; but even if it is true, the presence of a perceiving is only implied, and it is not the experiencing of the perceived that is presented in the painting. For to be in an experience is to be in a place, which is to be located in a here, not to be either implied or simply to be present through an adumbration of a feature or characteristic that unfolds in the phantom space of the ideal visibility of the painting. This brings us to a very important descriptive concept of Husserl’s, one that leads us to the more general problematic of the body. The concept is that of kinaesthesis, or better, kinaesthetic sensations. The descriptive difference between the movement of sensation and the sensation of movement will serve to mark out more precisely the phenomenal structure of that experiential “space” in which the field of adumbration is localized within perceiving.13 13

See Husserl, Thing and Space/Hua XVI, §§46–47, 54–57; Ideas II/Hua IV, §§18, 35–42. Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), Part Two; also the discussion in Bernet, et. al., Introduction, pp. 130–140.

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The term kinaesthesis comes from what at the time Husserl was presenting these lectures (1907) was still the relatively new science of proprioception, or the psychological-physical study of the perception of one’s own body in space. Husserl’s usage is related, but also somewhat unique. Kinaesthetic sensation is not limited in Husserl to the direct sensation of the placement of the body, even if expanded to include whatever orienting function the body may have in the system of perception. Kinaesthesis in Husserl tends to have more to do with a basic structure of the sensation of the flow of perception itself. In Thing and Space and in later manuscripts on the body, Husserl is seeking to describe a dimension of sensation that determines the manner in which any given sensation is localizable in a context, not just of other sensations, but circumstances that determine or fix its “passing over” into other possible sensations. Accordingly, this “movement of sensation,” sensing captured in its passage, is recognized as a primordial phenomenon, and not the result of a given psychological act, such as judgment. Returning to the example of Duchamp’s nude, the juxtaposition of the depiction of the “first” profile across the canvas from the “last” profile suggests more than just a given arrangement of a multiplicity that passes between them, which in turn suggests more than just another set of given profiles that “come before” the last or “after” the first. If we look at the painting in a way that uses it as a vehicle to describe the lived experience of seeing a woman walk down a staircase, the span of adumbrations in question also mark that space of potential that grounds the possible emergence of the next and the re-emergence of what is past in memory. That is, the “space” in question represents a kind of place to go, to be enveloped in, where adumbrations carry us forward, thus making possible in a concrete manner the pursuit of a sensuous multiplicity. If the image in the painting nevertheless amounts only to a mere phantom, one estranged from this space in which a perception is enveloped in movement, it is this only because, as a depiction, we can take it as something complete in itself, as placed in a kind of “no-place” where there is no “here” that is in tension with a “there.” The descriptive theme of kinaesthetic sensations is accordingly meant to capture the multiplicity of circumstances that, when engaged, “motivate” the fulfillments that the profiles represent and abstractly present on the level of spatial phantoms. In other words, kinaesthetic sensations provide a sense of the real ground, or place, for presenting sensations; they are thus indispensable for presentation, yet they are not in and of themselves presentive, since the “place” in which a thing is given is not a part or aspect of the presented thing. Here we have perhaps a better answer to the question: how could we emphasize, bring to the fore, the thingness of the thing? It is not simply our

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speaking of it, though that does serve to mark out at least one aspect or dimension of thingness that is phenomenologically essential: its availability for becoming a theme at all for consciousness. But nor is it simply that a thing is something that unfolds in perceiving, whereby we would turn to the event of perception as itself an emphasis of thingness. A thing is a thing, not simply because I point and look, but more fundamentally because it is there to be pursued: when I walk towards my exotic woman, I pursue her, her presence unfolds for me thanks to the availability of manifestation within a system of places, of “here” and “there” available as a motivating nexus for the emergence of the appearance of things. The work of the architect Steven Holl is interesting to consider in this context, in particular his use of “parallax,” or the arrangement of structures of juxtaposing planes, often illuminated in striking ways, that situate the perceiver in a state of perceptual irresolution. The intent is to discover a means of architectural expression that has as its reference the movement of the visitor through the built space, where the visitor is conceived precisely as an embodied, perceiving subject, thus in a strong sense a part of the reality of the space, and not simply an indifferent “observer.” Consider Fred Rush’s description of entering the lobby of the Bloch Building, Holl’s addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City: It is possible to enter the Addition in many ways, but all of them will lead you to a central lobby that is the point of connection between two broad, gently sloped ramps, one leading upwards and one downwards in the same direction. […] The floor of the downward slope is hand-troweled, dark granite and glass terrazzo, which is slightly uneven and which thereby imparts a sense of aqueous movement to its surface. The upward slope is composed of a compound angle with a rise of twelve degrees and a slight tilt at its midway point away from the axis. A view from the base of this upward slope illustrates Holl’s use of parallax in the building and the resonance of that use with his emphasis on other phenomenological qualities of the interior structure. As one walks up the ramp, one is drawn up into the building, as it were, by shifting points of perspectival resolution composed by the plane surfaces and the way in which light models them. Walking up the compound slope puts one’s balance a bit off-center and reinforces ever so slightly the off-kilter feeling of perspectival irresolution. The experience is both richly pleasurable and uncanny.14 14

Fred Rush, On Architecture (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 38–39.

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The Atkins Museum addition, like much of Holl’s architecture, relies on techniques of putting the perceiver slightly off balance, precisely in order to lend expression to the dynamics of kinaesthetic perception as that nexus of movement in which the determinateness of things unfolds. This is, of course, a special case; the structures of perceptual life which are comprised of the relation of kinaesthetic sensations as motivating sensations and presentive contents as motivated, provides an essential framework for the question of the thingness of any thing, whether our perception of it is “off kilter” or not. Thus in an important sense, Holl’s architecture can be thought as involving an essential dimension of the thingness of the thing, but it does not necessarily constitute an example of how one could bring this thingness to the forefront. The sloping ramps of the Bloch Building, with their striking perceptual playfulness, are no thinglier than the far less conceptually overdetermined entrance to a simple Shaker home. The latter also responds to its visitor on the level of kinaesthetic orientation, but here the vocabulary of addressing needs—where to hang one’s hat, or store the broom—takes precedence over a more reified vocabulary of perceptual movement and the uncanny experiences that parallax is able to provoke. The emphasis of thingness involves a different horizon, one that is indifferent to giving a thing or a sequence of things a new shape or form that would put their thingness in the forefront. One does not make a thing “more” of a thing, even if there are important senses in which a reflection on the sensuous aspects or features of the materiality of things do avail themselves of such an emphasis. Rather, thingness becomes emphasized, one could say, precisely in the intensification of openness to what can be explored in the experience of a thing, where the thing is grasped as an open possibility of discovery, and not as the target of an act or a system of organization. Experience alone, one might say, amounts to the emphasis that we are looking for, and not a particular m ­ anifest pattern of an object, whether on the level of the haptic or the visible. However, we do not yet have a sufficient overview of the manifold senses of movement that belong to the phenomenological constitution of the thing. Consider again the apparition of the exotic woman at the carnival. Walking towards what I see, I do not simply unfold the movement of sensuous determination that defines the visible and the movement of an unfolding perceiving, but in a more naïve sense, “I” move as well. What is it, when “I” move, what makes up the specifically phenomenal character of my awareness of myself as being in motion? To answer this, we need to develop a more detailed description of the context of encounter. This will, in turn, take us from the theme of the thing back to that of the world, but this time from a perspective that will open the question of the spatiality of the world.

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Orientation, World and Spatiality

We began this chapter with the question of the thingness of the thing, building on Heidegger’s reflections that attempted to open the question of the thing in a fundamental way. Following Heidegger, part of the task is to take stock of the obviousness of thingness, and the difficulty of bringing it into view as a theme; more, the task is also to recognize how the hold this obviousness has on us is something historical, which in turn holds out the promise for the possibility of finding an unexpected fluidity with respect to what is implicit in what is usually taken for granted. Our reflections then shifted to a more Husserlian register, where we sought to illuminate thingness from within the horizon of a description of the subjectivity of lived experience understood as a kind of primordial movement, and in more than one sense. That is, we were led to a double determination of the character of sensuous experience as both motivating and motivated: lived experience incorporates a double movement of motivated sensation-presentations of adumbrated thing-characteristics on the one hand, and the kinaesthetic sensation-structures that constitute the open spacing of the placement of motivations on the other. This in turn suggests a conception of thingness as a spatialized possibility, or a spacing that opens up possibilities as genuinely intuitive spans for the encounter with the sense or meaning of things. One should nevertheless emphasize at this point that the Husserlian inspired descriptions presented above still remain abstract. They are limited to a dimension that can be picked out of a perceptual experience (or the unity of human existence) only thanks to a kind of willful simplification. This simplification was necessary in order to illuminate how fundamental the theme of movement is in the phenomenological analysis of perception: movement circumscribes the most basic, simple elements that compose the very “body,” so to speak, of perceptual life. To see, to hear, to touch, to feel in the most primitive of senses is to be in motion, to exist in the form of the very being of movement. Yet the question of what is in motion, and with that the full scope of the elements that are taken up and made concrete in the movement of human existence, has as a result been forced into the background. We thus need to push the description further. We can do this by again turning to Heidegger, and emphasizing the important theme of “interest,” or to use Heidegger’s language, “concern” (Besorgen), that is essential to understanding the space in which things are encountered.15 15

See Heidegger, BT/SuZ, §§39–42. Also Heidegger, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Heidegger Gesamtausgabe 20, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1994)

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The theme of concern has been largely absent up to this point, despite the introduction of a structural moment of motivation. Kinaesthetic sensations are motivating, yet taken alone, in abstraction from the body of lived experience, they motivate only formally; they correlate with patterns of emerging presentations of things, or appearances, but in a completely relative manner that, at any given point in the course of a perception, is limited to at most a sense for a tension between what is “given now” and the indeterminate horizon from which the given emerges. What actually determines the relative significance or weight of a present appearance is effectively invisible, for such a determination requires more than a moving-sensing—what is needed in addition is a concern in the given perceiving “for the sake of” something else, something that is in no way itself a sensation proper. This was already clear, at least implicitly, in the example of the illusion of the exotic woman at the carnival: the real terminus of the modalization of the perception, however it may otherwise be grounded in fundamental structures of the sensuous field, is a unity of interest that reflects a subjective investment that moves quite beyond ­perception itself—such as curiosity, desire, a given project of belief. Also the stone that I find on the beach, the home I enter after a long journey, the familiar chapel I pass with a feeling of spiritual connection, all of these are what they are only given an investment that makes concrete and articulate those motivations that animate the sensuous contours of their givenness. Even Rush’s description of entering the Bloch Building cited above is saturated with the interests and conceptual investments of an intellectual approaching his experience, his seeing, in terms of the attempt to understand the principles behind the space of encounter, or how the idea of the architect has been achieved in the built space of the museum. Interest and concern do not erase the relative character of a given appearance; but they do interpret it, and inscribe it within a wider view. They raise an appearance to what we might call a specifically worldly significance. Thus with the introduction of the theme of concern we can move from a consideration of the phenomenality of a field of appearance to the phenomenality of that “aroundness” (what Heidegger would call Umhaftes) that is constitutive of the manifestation of things as a surrounding world-context (Umwelt). This also implies, as Heidegger argues in §25 of The History of the Concept of Time, that we can bring the determinability of that indeterminate spatiality that we have brought into view with our discussion of sensation out of the confines of the question of what makes a thing a thing. Here we return to the problem of the (hereafter cited as GA 20); History of the Concept of Time. Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985) (hereafter cited as HCT, §§27, 31).

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last chapter, namely the question of what makes a world a world, or what in Heidegger’s language we can call the “worldhood of the world.” For space is, Heidegger argues, ultimately comprehensible through the world, not the other way around. This is the case even if, in accordance with certain epistemological motivations, it is often the case that we first approach the problem of the world through its spatiality. Heidegger: We thus did not begin [the analysis of worldhood] with extensio, with the definition of reality which can be obtained in an extreme epistemological orientation. This possibility nevertheless remains of such a correct definition of the world primarily on the basis of extension and spatiality and with a view to a certain objectivity of natural knowledge. And this indicates that in some sense spatiality still belongs to the world, that spatiality is a constitutive element of the world. But this certainly does not mean that the being of the world could be defined primarily and solely in terms of spatiality, as Descartes sought to do, that all other possible characters of the reality of the world are founded upon spatiality. Instead, the question arises whether it is not just the other way around, whether spatiality is to be explicated from worldhood, whether the specific spatiality of the environing world as well as the type and structure of space itself and its discovery, the manner of its possible encounter, pure metric space for example, can be made understandable only upon the worldhood of the world. And this is in fact the case.16 Let us take a closer look at this thesis. In Heidegger, the worldhood of space is described in terms of its being governed by the concernful engagement of human existence, or Dasein. That which “counts as” near, remote, soon, later and the like, is established through the mode of engagement that is Dasein as a being-in-the-world. This means that the manner in which something functions as a “place” in which something is to be found, or brought to, or arranged, or even encountered in a neutral sense, is grounded in the concerns of Dasein. This surrounding concern, or concern for surroundings, has the circumspective integrity of a region that we can distinguish from the notion of a field of perception outlined above: a region constitutes the spatiality that determines 16 Heidegger, HCT, pp. 223; GA 20, p. 307. Cf. Heidegger, BT/SuZ, §§19–24. For a discussion of Heidegger’s concept of spatiality within the larger context of his thought, see Maria Villela-Petit, “Heidegger’s Conception of Space,” in Martin Heidegger. Critical Assessments I, ed. Christopher Macann (London: Routledge, 1992); also see Alejandro Vallega, ­Heidegger and the Issue of Space (Penn State, 2003).

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the placement of the things of concern in a meaningfully oriented environment, whereas a field constitutes the double movement of a sensing and a sensed that constitutes an essential dimension of the immediate intuitivity of the surrounding environmental complex. Take for example a painter working at an easel on a busy city street. Here everything falls into a certain order of concern, whether it be immediately instrumental (the paints are “in” the box in which they are stored and more or less arranged according to frequency of use; the brushes are “in” the right drawer of the easel, where from habit they can be accessed immediately without thinking), or in terms of the attempt of the painter to focus on the activity of the street at this time of day, or capture something in just this particular light. In a descriptive sense, the field character of unfolding perception represents an abstract dimension of this concrete whole, but in its unity with the region of interest it functions as a supporting ground for the entire concrete phenomenon. This not because the orientation of the region is reducible to the structures of kinaesthesis, but to the extent that the living unfolding of an experience in the surrounding context of regional concern is experientially possible only when embedded, or embodied in the movement of sensuous experience. There is an important sense in which a given space is explained by worldhood, Heidegger argues, in that the concern that articulates space is determined by a being that (or rather who) is essentially a being-in-the world. To be sure, Heidegger’s descriptions of the phenomenon of space as worldly in texts such as The History of the Concept of Time and Being and Time are often abbreviated, since his aim is to move from a description of the concernful being of Dasein to the elucidation and interpretation of its more fundamental onto­ logical structure as care (Sorge). This lies in part behind his tendency to rely on readily understood examples of tools and instruments (such as the radio, construction tools, indications of direction, and so on), which has often tempted readers to think of concern as a purely practical function that serves as the basis for interpreting things (we have things that we need to do, projects that we need to pursue). Tired and hungry while walking along a mountain path, a fallen tree beckons one as a place to sit and eat lunch; the tree as “a place to rest,” a place in which a particular activity finds the basis for its realization, is a relatively simple matter of matching form to function. But there is much more to it than this, in that Heidegger’s point is that concernful existence is the unfolding of a “space” in which it “is” in a primordial fashion. The point is to emphasize that the very discoverability, so to speak, of spaces such as the “place” where I take my rest points to the ontological structure of the oriented spatiality of Dasein itself as being-in-the-world:

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A region of the world can be discovered as such only because disclosive being-in-the-world is itself oriented. This is a fundamental proposition which in its converse formulation gives as essential insight into the primary character of Dasein: Since a region can be discovered only by way of an oriented Dasein, this Dasein itself is already originally being-in-the-world.17 Thus it is not simply that things are oriented around the given initiation of something to be done—I need to rest, thus things are present to me in terms of being more or less useful in the light of places to rest, the tree being much better than the muddy puddle in the middle of the path—but rather that my being as a whole is oriented towards the revealing, or the disclosure of space in terms of possibilities disclosed by orientation. I am just that disclosure, that openness to the whole of what is, of what is possible. Thus what Heidegger is interested in is not simply the locally valid “oriented character” of things, tied in one way or another to the logic of use, but its link to the broader drama of a disclosure, that of a life which opens up the possibilities of meaning as such in the horizon of the world. Thus the real question of orientation is to understand the significance of concern as a being open to possibility. Thus in Being and Time, care (Sorge) is identified as the structure of a being that is a question for itself, that encounters itself authentically as a task to be, and not as a certain, self-contained positive existence that can be given the determination of being “this or that.”18 This means that for Heidegger there is at the heart of concern and engagement a kind of instability, or encounter with a groundlessness or nothingness: as in its ownmost being a task, a question, Dasein is always its own “not yet,” before it is what it has begun to be, which in turn always carries with it a possibility of “nothing.” This is the point of the analyses of fear and anxiety in §40 of Being and Time: fear points to the fragility of our individual projects of concernful engagement, to the possibility of their “coming to nothing”; anxiety points to the possibility of everything that I am, the disclosedness of myself as a task as such, “coming to nothing”—or better, being affirmed as the nothing it always already implicitly is.19 Here thing and world come into contrast through the two existential modalities of disclosure represented by fear and anxiety, respectively. I am afraid before things specifically disclosed in my surrounding world of concern: I fear 17 Heidegger, HCT, p. 229; GA 20, pp. 315–316. 18 Heidegger, BT/SuZ, §§39–43. 19 Cf. Heidegger, HCT/GA 20, §30.

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the tree left leaning precariously towards my house after a strong, windy storm; I am growing steadily more consternated, paralyzed before the menace of the rising waters of the river that threaten the town. Anxiety, on the other hand, the experience of the uncanny, has no specific thing in the face of which I experience that peculiar helplessness before a future which I fear—it is instead an unfolding state of helplessness, and with that a restlessness, in the face of the disclosure of the world as a very different kind of unity of meaning than what is met in the frightful borne by things. Yet this unity of sense of the world met in anxiety is not wholly unrelated to things, to the extent to which the attunement of Dasein to its condition saturates everything it encounters. So in anxiety, everything in a way becomes indifferently threatening, as if the very manifestation of things as a whole has been turned against me, emphasizing the impossibility of my being in and among things in a non-problematic way. Now all such phenomena, as phenomena of the disclosure that Dasein is as a being-in-the-world, determine the manner in which the spatiality of Dasein unfolds. So for example fear manifests itself in the form of a disorientation in which nothing, no thing, has a proper place, and everything is thrown into disarray: running from a burning building, I grab “whatever,” seizing the most useless items in a completely arbitrary manner, the possibility of my purposeful engagement with the things of concern being completely disrupted; or a soldier, beside himself with fear (a phrase that captures the experience well), runs directly into the line of fire. Heidegger’s point is that disclosure, openness itself, is not always open, and orientation is not always oriented; we must keep in view the potential for the fundamental instability that Heidegger emphasizes to form the basis for dystopic surrounding environments or Umwelten. The case of anxiety is more complex than fear, since anxiety is not played out in terms of things having no place, but Dasein itself taking the form of a threatened place—anxiety is the threat of the very “thereness” of Dasein coming to nothing. Heidegger plays on the prefix Da- of Dasein, which means “there” or “here,” whereas Sein means “being”—thus the term Da-sein, or (human) existence, can be glossed in awkward English as “there-being” or “being-present.” Anxiety is spatial to the extent that it represents a negative placement, or a displacement of the Da of Dasein, representing a distinctive modality of the being of the Da. Even in such disorientation, whether that of fear or anxiety, the world is present in its worldhood, as a horizon of meaningfulness. For it is precisely the formation of meaning that remains in question for the anxious, and in its most fundamental ground. And this in turn means: things are present in their “where,” they are given in accordance with the orientation that constitutes the potential articulateness of their meaningfulness, even in its most radically

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distorted forms. “Belonging to a where, to an oriented where, is given with the meaningfulness of the world.”20 Heidegger also makes the important point that the scope of this orientation is not something fixed. Neither worldhood nor orientation can be understood as a set of coordinates mapped onto an indifferent multiplicity. Orientedness can expand, but it can also contract: the “aroundness” of the world is plastic, even spread historically, and its formation represents the formation of a manner or style of habitation, of being-in (the world). Even a broad existential worldphenomenon such as modernity, for example, can be characterized as a particular manner in which this plasticity of the world is actualized. So for example Heidegger describes what he takes to be a specifically modern form of this plasticity as an “overcoming of distances,” or a characteristic “frenzy of nearness,” that constant acceleration and intensification of what comes into play as “around us,” constantly expanding, destroying all separateness in space and time in favor of a mode of environmentality that seeks to suppress all potential separateness and distance in the maintenance of a scope of a total visibility.21 Yet the particular plasticity of worldhood is not limited to modernity. We can also think here of the radical change in the experience of the world by the introduction of horses in societies living on the steppes of central Asia during the bronze age, or similarly for the native peoples of the North American plains much later. Here the transformation of the world emerges out of an experience of the vastness of space to be brought near, initially articulated in light of an interest in crossing the expanse of the steppe or the plain—for hunting, for wandering, for warfare, for life. What emerges thanks to the horse is the development of the modality of an interest, a horizon of concern, that had already been in place but which has now been fundamentally transformed. Now one does not seek so much to cross a spatial expanse as to suspend the pressure of a resistant distance through its dissolution in speed. There is here an overcoming of space, one that transforms that which had once been a burden absorbing vast amounts of time and energy into a landscape of movement that supports a very different register of action and habitation, and with that making possible a remarkably different mode of social existence. This leads us to a key insight of Heidegger’s, one that must be kept in mind in any phenomenology of the built world. The idea of “distance” implied in this phenomenological complex of orientation and region, which is clearly as determinative of the built world as it is of the world in general, cannot be interpreted in terms of a given set of differentiated points on a plane. The concept of region found in Heidegger is that of a value-laden space, thus representing an 20 Heidegger, HCT, p. 226; GA 20, p. 311. 21 Heidegger, HCT, p. 227; GA 20, pp. 312–313.

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order qualitatively different than a geometric plane.  More, the insight is also that this idea of distance cannot be taken as a given order of value, if by that we mean simply an existential property that determines a given ontology of living being. Regions become value laden only in the wake of engaged Dasein, and Dasein is what it is only as disclosive of a world of significance or meaning. The distance, as well as the proximity, that Heidegger is seeking to describe is thus intrinsically transitive in nature: it is always a value on the way to something, a value both from which and towards which that actively crosses the world as an expanse of things. And it is precisely Dasein, as being-in-the-world, which constitutes that tension of bringing-near and pushing-away that makes up the questionability of the world as a horizon of the manifestation of the possible. The world itself, in other words, is the primordial “distant,” and it is towards that or against that distance that Dasein “is” or exists towards itself: The nearness and distance of environmental things among themselves are always grounded in primary remotion [Entfernung, distance], which is a character of the world itself. It is because world in its very sense is “remote” that there is something like nearness as a mode of distance. In other words, Dasein itself as being-in-the-world, as a being which makes present, a presentifying being intimately involved with something which is the world, is itself in its very sense of being a being which “remotes” and so at the same time nears. I thus use the word “re-motion” to a certain extent in a transitive, active sense: re-moting [Ent-fernen, etymologically “removing distance”], making distance disappear (nearing as bringing forward or bringing itself away), bringing forward such that the bringingitself-away becomes available on an average at any time and with ease.22

The Dimensions of Orientation

From a phenomenological perspective, not only is spatiality something that should be understood as transitive (in a certain sense), as active (in a certain sense), but also this transitivity must be recognized as complex and multi-­ dimensional. There are three essential, though interrelated levels of transitive orientation that are characteristic of the being of subjective life. An outline of these levels will serve as a guide for the elaboration of the problem of built space in the next chapter, and will complete the presentation in this chapter of an outline of a phenomenology of thingness. Here we will again return to 22 Heidegger, HCT, pp. 227–228; GA 20, pp. 313–314.

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Husserl as a guide, in particular to his analyses of the lived body in texts such as Ideas II and elsewhere.23 The first level of orientation has to do with the sense in which the unfolding of a perceptual lived experience is oriented in a distinctively bodily fashion. Perceptual experience can be described as bodily in more than one way. First, the perceptual experience, say of the performance of a Beethoven sonata in a concert hall, is bodily motivated according to those forms and patterns that emerge in the manner of the kinaesthetic/adumbrative sensations considered above. As kinaesthetic, the body is in a fundamental sense that turningtowards what is emerging in the acoustic sensations as a formed objectivity of attention. The continuous turning-towards is the maintenance of a motivating posture that, as long as it lasts, “continues” to provide the basis for the motivated presenting of the unfolding sonata as an object of concern—here again is that interweaving of field and region that brings together thingness and world within a constitutive whole. This includes in turn the kinaesthetic outlines of the possibility of, at any time, turning away towards something else that may catch the eye—I suddenly see someone I know in the front row, the sonata fades into the background as I try to catch her look; or I become bored with the performance, and let my attention wander across the faces of the audience across the hall, or to features of the room we are sitting in; or I seize on that always available possibility of simply leaving the now uninteresting performance of the piece altogether. All of this is partially—and only partially!—captured by the notion of kinaesthesis, and what it captures is precisely that aspect of the body as a “freely moved” aesthetic organ, or unfolding of sense: the sensuous, as the being of a movement, is intrinsically determined by a moment of a distinctively corporeal freedom. Second, the body also represents a particular kind of “place.” The move­ ment of corporeal freedom occurs in accordance with a system of placements, or the movement of placements that takes the form of a bodily orientation that has a basic structure of the tension “here-there.” It is from the “here” of the body as freely-moved organ that the “over there” of the chair that I need for sitting is open for its articulation in terms of whether it is “near” or “far” in the wake of the transitive spatiality of its disclosure. In this nexus the body occupies a uniquely absolute here, what Husserl calls a fundamental zero-point of orientation.24 The body is a “here” in an originary sense that, without ever 23

See in particular Husserl, Ideas II/Hua IV, §§18, 35–47, 56. Also cf. Husserl, Die Lebenswelt, Hua XXXIX, Texts 53–58. 24 Husserl, Ideas II/Hua IV, §41a. Also see Casey, Getting Back into Place, pp. 52–53. Casey expands on the descriptive concept of zero-orientation, delimiting five distinct modes of “here-being.”

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relinquishing its position as that out from which my activity flows, sets into motion a trajectory of emergence in which things are encountered as “here” or “there” in a secondary sense: the door is here to my left as I pass around the corner on my way to the study over there, this entire complex of orientation ordered by a flow that has my body as its originary here. In this way Husserl attempts to distinguish descriptively the “here” at which I stand from the “there” towards which I move in pursuing something. The movement itself becomes understood as the whole in which this herethere distinction is relativized: in listening, I am continuously bringing the object of listening “close” to me, making it “here” in the sense that I am, in listening, really “over there.” I am with the violinist, immersed in what he is doing, fascinated and continuously following him as he descends more and more into a difficult part of the sonata. Or I am “pulled back” to what someone next to me is trying to say as she interrupts my concentration, and with that my ability “here” to be immersed in the “there.” As active, I am always on the way from one here to one or another there, shifting their significations according to a negotiation between the freedom of my will and the demands of my circumstances. Thus to call the body a “zero-point” is not to liken it to some kind of anchor that cuts into the flow of things, but rather aims at the sense in which the body is the opening that allows for the flow in the first place. I “am” this “on the way” to the there; I am never simply the body located in some arbitrary, measured off and enclosed “here,” but that distance that bodily orientation has opened in the nullity of its zero-status. This body is a kind of nothing: the zero-status, the “here” of the body, is the original, un-eradicable origin of all my movements from here to there; it is a “here” that I am always leaving but from which I never break away in order to be fully “there.” As such, it is a zero point, never relativized, never approached or left behind, and which can be fully occupied only in the modality of a kind of absolute submersion in inactivity. Third, the body is also a kind of thing, one that not only represents an example of a unique sense of thingness, but one which is also inextricably bound up with all of the senses of thingness that we have considered up to this point—including the important coordination of the concepts of thing and world. Husserl, again following the schema of the thing as a substrate or bearer of properties, emphasizes a critical aspect of this complex: the body is thingly in the principal manner of being the bearer or localization of kinaesthetic and adumbrative sensations. The body also lends itself to being reified as a mere thing; yet it is only through an act of abstraction that we can treat it as a mute bearer of physical properties. The smoothness of a cheek, the coarse rasp of a callous palm, are properties embedded in a corporeal reality that is as much a local sensing as it is a locally given sensuous determination. This is as much the case with the

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bodies of others as it is with one’s own: to touch one’s own hand with the other is as much to encounter a property-laden thing as it is to open up a pattern of sensing in which sensing itself finds an opportunity for its own appearance in the world as a given, local phenomenon. The body of the other I touch is likewise that opening for the experience of being oneself touched by another that transcends the abstract schema of determinant thing.25 From Husserl’s perspective, if we operate with a conception of thingness that neglects this complex localization of the act of sensing and the thing sensed, then the body becomes the mere ghost of a thing and disappears from view as a living presence. As the place or placing of sensation, the body is in turn the localized functional substrate of all the intentional functions of perceptual life, even if these functions are not themselves properly localized. Husserl’s analyses in texts such as Ideas II amount to a sophisticated phenomenological defense of what is for the most part a traditional representation of the body: the body is a basis, a foundation, for an activity that aims itself beyond the limits of corporeal presence; as such, to be is to be beyond the body, to exist in a manner in which the body disappears from view while remaining rooted in the world, retreating from the seeing that it makes possible. The transitivity of lived spatiality depends on this double aspect of the body as both necessary point of departure and tendency towards its own invisibility: as body, life projects itself into its environment to the extent to which it passes through its corporeality, which thus represents a kind of originary existential fluidity. This brings us to the second dimension of orientation. For the body is not of its own actively fluid, nor is it of its own a projection into an environment. Equally essential for the transitivity of spatiality is what we will call ego-­ orientation. The orientation of the ego can be conceived as analogous with that of the body, though the axis of projection here is mapped out in accordance with a more complex temporal order than what is the case when describing a given flow of perceptual experience. The analogy is the following: just as the body is a turning point from motivating to motivated (or sensing to sensed), so the ego is the turning point from a discrete noetic act of consciousness to the manifestation of abiding sedimentations of noetic activity.26 The transitivity of spatialization is constituted not only as the orientation of embodiment as body-thing (Leibkörper), but equally as the orientation of embodiment as self. 25 Husserl, Ideas II/Hua IV, §36; cf. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Evanston: Northwestern, 1968), pp. 133f. Also The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 93f. 26 Husserl, Ideas II, pp. 112–113; Hua IV, p. 106.

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So for example when I see something that I have already seen many times, such as a flower shop at the corner of my street, or the familiar skyline of a much visited city, this “having been seen” constitutes a given presence for me of the sedimented acts of my seeing and having seen, all of which form an organic part of the dynamics of my perceptual environment. To comport oneself within an already familiar environment is to project oneself into an already accomplished existence; this is part of what it is to be a self, to be the “one,” the “I,” who has walked this street, visited this city since he was a child, bought flowers at this shop for a friend long since forgotten. The “self” of consciousness is accordingly more than the mere sum of noeses: all intentional acts are embodied in the I-self as a kind of substrate, though one that is essentially different from the substrate of “things” and “bodies.” In fact for Husserl the sense in which we can speak of the ego as a substrate is in fact quite limited. The ego turns out to be much more a function of the very transitivity of spatiality itself. This point might raise some questions. Heidegger, after all, emphasizes the transitivity of spatiality in order to differentiate it from the ontological category of res extensa, which in Descartes is in turn differentiated from the being of the ego, or res cogitans. Thus to turn around and argue that transitivity points us to a kind of ego-accomplishment would seem to again confuse the movement of human existence with a specifically intellectual activity. But this objection misses the point. The theme of transitivity for Heidegger in Being and Time ultimately points the way to the thematization of selfhood: the point is to understand how the fundamental worldly movements of human existence constitute the type of being that encounters itself as the question of “who”? Accordingly, one can argue that we have something similar, mutatis mutandis, in the thought of Husserl: if we are to speak of an “ego-orientation” in the context of Husserl’s phenomenology, the idea is to grasp how it is that a self takes up residence, so to speak, in the horizon of the perceptual intentionality of consciousness. Let us take a closer look at what this entails from Husserl’s perspective. In those sections of Ideas II where Husserl discusses the being of the I, the central theme is that of “approximation” or “making near”: the I draws the given, from within the constituted span of the environment, towards itself. This is what Husserl means when he speaks of the pure I as a pole (Ichpol).27 The I polarizes the manner in which things are manifest in acts of consciousness from out of their passivity: for what the I draws towards itself, or what it “turns towards,” is described by Husserl as always already passively pre-constituted in the horizon of its own intentional life. Accordingly, to be conscious of something means 27 Husserl, Ideas II/Hua IV, §§22–29.

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that the I “takes itself up,” so to speak, in the sense that it takes up the passive potentiality of conscious life to place the I before the opportunity of apprehending its object. This would not be easily conceivable if we reduced the being of consciousness to the being of the I, or set the being of the I in stark opposition to the being of what is perceived. When the I turns towards things, an essential aspect of its movement-to…, its taking up this or that, is a dimension of passivity that provides the very traction for “taking up an act.” This is a key aspect of Husserl’s account of the egological structure of consciousness: his point is not so much to emphasize friction or distance between mind and world, as to bring into view the constitutive function of the friction between consciousness and itself, or intentional consciousness and the “self” of consciousness that takes the form of the “I.” Accordingly, Husserl describes the I, as center of orientation, “receding” and “stepping forth” from the passivity of its own selfhood into which and away from which it sets itself. What this suggests is that there is more at work than a mere metaphorical sleight of hand when one speaks of “settling” into a conversation, “sitting down” to work, or “slipping” into a familiar routine. We come to our activities, they have a density of presence that is not a mere shadow cast on things by otherwise ephemeral, spontaneous acts of the intellect. If the body is more translucent and fluid in lived experience than is often recognized, then it is equally the case that subjective acts of egoic life are more leaden and viscous than one might assume under the influence of Cartesian intellectualism. If so, if the noeses of consciousness are not simply functions of the organization of the contents of consciousness (say into categories of the understanding, or conceptual schemes), but themselves have a given density of present being, then we have an important clue for understanding how “consciousness” is not only something that “is,” but something that is inhabited. Habitation implies the opposition of a neutral being-placed-among-things, and this must also include the orientation of being within the given presence of oneself: we are, in other words, not neutrally placed in our own skins, nor in our own consciousness. Heidegger emphasizes this as well. Dasein is not only an orientation in space, but also in “time”; how Dasein inhabits its own spatiality and temporality, how it lives through the potential tensions of space and time, is constitutive of duration, of the manner in which “a time” as “lived through” actually unfolds. “The time which I myself am each time,” as Heidegger puts it, “yields a different duration according to how I am that time.”28 Returning home from a long journey, to recall one of our original three guiding problems, sets into motion 28 Heidegger, HCT, p. 231; GA 20, p. 317.

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a set of temporal contrasts that have their origin in the time that I am, which is also the time that I bring to things, to the extent to which it is as time that I come to my self, to the encounter with “who” I am.  Depending on how I “exist,” this “who,” opening that door to face the peculiar presence of lost time, may either mark a decisive end, slicing off a duration as a fixed span of time I shove away from myself in order to pursue a more pressing task; or it may gently float into a curious nostalgia that allows the past to intermingle with the present, set against a completely indifferent future; or it may gather together in a particularly intense way the issue that I am for myself, bringing myself face to face with a time I must urgently seize in order to come to terms with the necessity of my future. If the example takes into account the question of selfhood, then there is no “one” phenomenon here, but the basic structure of an entire class of phenomena that have to do with the different faces of the palpable presence of the passage of time in “things.” This brings us to a third dimension of orientation. If the problem of selfhood has to do with the manner in which the I (or for that matter Dasein) inhabits its own being as the spatial-temporal disclosure of the world, then it is clear that this problem has a precise analogue in the present being of others: I not only encounter myself in the horizon of my own being, but in that of others as well. What does it mean to be oriented by the presence of others? The progression of the analyses in Section Three of Ideas II, “The Constitution of the Spiritual World,” yields an interesting suggestion: just as the being of consciousness is not the being of the ego, but is modified by the ego, so is the being of egoically modified consciousness not the being of others, but is modified by the presence of others. Modification is a key theme in Husserl’s phenomenology. What is modified is not always erased, but remains operational precisely in its being-modified, often in important ways in tension with its new condition. Such tensions form many of the salient characteristics of modified intentional structures. Thus the intentionality of consciousness, taken up and pursued by the interests of and within the scope of the habitualities of the I, is not replaced by a system of references that would be ultimately reducible to such interests and habits. Intentionality, in other words, remains as the more primordial horizon of phenomenological presencing, and it is within this horizon that the complex conceptual formations of egoic life take hold and find their place. The problem of my being with others is analogous. Husserl develops this problem in Ideas II through a reflection on the theme of motivation, including the phenomenon of normality.29 What is “normal” is obviously relative; to recall an example from Aristotle, what is a “normal” amount of meat for Milo 29

See Husserl, Ideas II/Hua IV, §52; also 54–61.

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the wrestler is not a “normal” amount for an average person. The normal is also something that has duration, that is, that maintains its relative validity through a multiplicity of experiences. Relative to the particularities of a life, what is normal takes hold in accordance with the specific characteristics that are born by the density of the life of an I. The enduring character of the normal is a direct reflection of the enduring character of an egoically constituted consciousness, forming not a permanent (the normal can always be challenged), but an enduring substantiality. This means that normality is more than a mere “consciousness of…,” it is not an intentional objectivity per se, but a modality of duration that determines the style of a particular manner of inhabiting intentional life. Normality endures, but is not permanent; more, it is opened to being challenged in a way that intentionality is not. As long as consciousness is consciousness, it is always a “consciousness of…”—simple intentional presence is in a basic sense impossible to dislodge, forming a non-relative horizon that is presupposed by all conscious life. Whatever the look of things, however they may shift or confuse us, there is always a basic complicity of consciousness and objectivity that is never shaken. What counts as normal, by contrast, is always open to being shaken. It can be shaken from within, as for example by a modification in the wake of empirical experience, thanks to which what counts as normal is reshaped and posited in a manner contrary to what had been in force before. This can occur, for example, when I learn to see in the apparently timid behavior of an animal what is in fact a complex strategy of aggression, or when a foreign city opens its arms to me once I learn its language. But normality can also be shaken from without—and it is this openness or exposed character of normality that for Husserl forms an essential dimension of the phenomenality of others, and with that the axis of an intersubjective orientation of spatiality. But in what sense does the exposure of normality situate the orientedness of conscious life in space? The key is to understand these analyses of Husserl’s as forming an important basis for the deepening of the theme of “interest” as the manner of occupying the horizon of thingness. To be sure, Husserl’s more immediate concern is to fix the phenomenological origin of the important idea of an intersubjective confirmation of a belief, and ultimately the communal character of scientific understanding, even reason as such: the universality of reason, in other words, is intersubjectively constituted in accordance with its very sense, and not simply intersubjectively communicated. But what is important is that the analyses themselves are oriented around opening a field of investigation that has to do with the manner in which an interest is pursued in the most general of senses, which means that it is not limited to the question of the affirmation or negation of a belief.

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For example, it is clear from Husserl’s account that I do not have to submit to others in order for the manner in which I pursue an interest to be irrevocably changed from without. The modifiability of the normal does not limit itself to the experience of a direct challenge or contradiction, where another forces me to replace one belief with another. My engagement with others is far wider in scope than this. Take the case of teaching. To teach is not simply to transmit information from one person to another, or even to show someone something or other, if we take “showing” in a narrow sense of simple ostension. To teach is to anticipate a path or trajectory of understanding; to teach well is to have this path, along with the spectrum of possible variations, sufficiently in view so that one can both guide and follow a student’s progress. If a teacher does not anticipate a problem, or better a solution, then suddenly the teacher becomes another student, clumsily engaged in the attempt to understand. Likewise to be taught—and here the example points to something that will be of great importance for the chapters that follow—is to encounter the field of one’s own unfolding understanding as something anticipated, and on the basis of that shaped, by the understanding of another. When I seek a teacher, I seek someone who “knows all about this”—all about carpentry, or all about how to write a novel, not as a set repository of information, but as a concrete understanding that projects ahead of itself the path on which I am about to embark. In other words, what I seek is an understanding that in some sense is able to project me. It is not an accident that the example lends itself to being articulated in spatial metaphors (“field of understanding,” “path on which I am about to embark”).  An essential aspect of the presence of the understanding that belongs to the other is that it is constituted along the pattern of a modification of my self, of my life as an ego, on the basis of the distance that separates us, and through which our own proximity to ourselves is given a different form, a differently defined environmental order. In this way I become myself through the other as much as through myself; I encounter the very task of my own understanding as an environmental phenomenon through the presence of the other as much as through my grasp of myself in reflection. As the result of our encounters with others, we come to inhabit our own subjectivity in a way that represents a fundamental modification of the ground of our very ownness—but only insofar as the passivity of the solus ipse is already something sufficiently plastic, not only to be open to encountering “others,” but to being shaped and modified by their significance. Normality, the extent to which the self is settled in its jointure with the world, forever subject to modification through encounter, is the general expression in Husserl for just this plasticity: the manner in which the normal is exposed to being modified from without is the fundamental form of

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a constituted transcendence that establishes the basis for an intersubjectively determinate manner of being-in-oneself. Something else goes with this third dimension of orientation. It is clear that the body and the ego are not untouched, but in fact conditioned fundamentally in intersubjectivity: the spatiality of corporeal comportment and selfhood is implicit in the state of exposure that grounds the phenomenon of normality. But at the same time it is also clear that this exposure, or openness, is a unity of sense that is sustained, not by the solus ipse of my own subjectivity, but uniquely by the other, a phenomenon that Sartre describes so powerfully in his chapter on the “look” in Being and Nothingness.30 Husserl, and Heidegger as well but for different reasons, would reject Sartre’s radical notion of my beingfor-others as constituted by the radical alterity of the other, as if my own being suddenly had value for me as something that belonged to another world, or better, that the world as a whole belongs to another subject, and with that something radically alien for me if at the same time remaining something for which I am responsible. Nevertheless, it is also the case for Husserl that intersubjectivity radicalizes the experience of distance, and with that of the spatial in all its forms. We are attuned to even the faintest traces of this radicalization of distance, and seek them out in the very presence of things, such as an odd stone sitting in the palm of my hand that just might be the instrument of an ancient mariner. The significance of the experience of others for the phenomenon of space is that the transitivity, the movements of spatiality, are not all my own, though they all provide the context in which my own pursuits of things must take shape. Without the presence of the distance of others, without it ever having been injected into the very life of my spatial being, all of the powers of imagination or judgment would never have the grounds to make the image of the other have even the remotest tinge of the possible. In this way a phenomenological reflection on the meaning of the thing, on what makes the thing a thing, has, through the introduction and elaboration of the fundamental importance of the theme of movement, led us to a threefold articulation of the phenomenon of subjective orientation. Armed with these three elements of orientation—body, I, and intersubjectivity—we now have the basis for formulating the problem of built space in a more direct manner. This is the task of the next chapter.

30 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Part Three, Chapter IV.

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The Idea of an Exemplary Phenomenon

Though guided by the threefold problem of purposiveness, temporality, and encounter, much of the last few chapters revolved around more general methodological considerations having to do with the phenomenology of perception. The very generality of such considerations can be misleading. Phenomenology, as a philosophical adventure in method and not a mere analytical technique, is more often than not drawn to specific problems and investigations—such as the origin of the work of art, the foundations of logic, the forms of social life, and, as will be argued in this chapter, the built world as well. On the other hand, these guiding problems are not mere instances of methodological application. Were we to survey the history of the phenomenological movement, we would find that even what looks like cases of the application of general phenomenological tactics to a given problem really speak to the question of the very possibility of phenomenology as such.1 The basic, underlying truth throughout is that phenomena are not uniform, that the story of appearance cannot in every instance be tracked by the same kind of narrative. The result is that the question of method in phenomenology reveals itself to be essentially polymorphic, that foundational gestures of analysis are always woven together with the particularities of a given encounter with the individuality of phenomena. If the very idea of method demands a general perspective, in phenomenology it can only be one that at the same time sends us back to the concrete individuality of what appears. Yet the point is not simply to be sensitive to the particular. Phenomenologists have been drawn consistently to phenomena that stand apart, that provide unique examples that shape the general investigation of phenomenality. There are phenomena that are primary, even exemplary instances of the being of appearance, and which in an important sense indicate the origin of the richness 1 So for example the problem of the body and corporeality in the work of Merleau-Ponty (Phenomenology of Perception), Didier Franck (Chair et corps. Sur la phenomenologie de Husserl. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981), and Jan Patočka (Body Community, Language, World, trans. Erazim Kohák. Chicago: Open Court, 1998); also Eugen Fink’s work on imagination and image-consciousness (“Vergegewärtigung und Bild,” in Studien zur Phänomenologie. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966).

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of the givenness of the given. These phenomena constitute the subject matter of what have traditionally been called, since Husserl and Heidegger, the “basic problems” of phenomenology.2 Though it has not yet been clearly recognized as such, I wish to argue that built space can be considered an exemplary phenomenon, and must therefore be counted among the basic problems of phenomenology. What is an exemplary phenomenon? One might object that there is no phenomenon that is any “more” or “less” a phenomenon than any other. To be sure, there are senses in which things can be said to appear along a spectrum of more or less; I can have a better view of a figure in a painting, for example, depending on where I stand to look: the face of the image of the old man comes “more” into view from several feet away, the general composition more into comprehensive focus. Similarly in perceptual experience generally, to the extent to which objects or themes of varying scales are said to come into, and pass out of view: on the hike through the mountains, “more” of the valley appears before us from the top of the ridge, from which we can also gain a better sense of our altitude. But can one also say, without equivocation, that it is possible to have a better or worse perspective on the phenomenon of the painting or the valley, as if one could so to speak find a place from which the phenomenon is more or less brought into view in its very phenomenality? For here we are not speaking of the more or less of something coming into view, but that the view itself comes with its own “more or less” with regard to its being as a view. This suspicion is lessened considerably if we are careful not to limit ourselves to a uniform sense of appearance. Some phenomena can be said to be exemplary in the sense that the phenomenality of the phenomenon is itself already partially articulated, or made thematic, but in a sense different from the manner in which what appears in the appearance is on its part something manifest. The idea is that there are some phenomena in which phenomenality has already been made into an emerging or incipient theme, thus representing a kind of proto-phenomenological reflective emphasis in the very structure of appearance. This does not mean that such phenomena would be “more phenomenal” than others, but it does imply that the manner in which 2 As exemplary let us cite Husserl, “Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie,” in Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität, Husserliana XIII, ed. Iso Kern (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. From the Lectures, Winter Semester 1910–1911, trans. Ingo Farin and James Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), and Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm van Hermann (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 2005); The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

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the phenomenon is grasped as phenomenon stands apart from the manner of an appearance that has not been set within a comparative horizon of its own thematization as such. To put this thesis another way, the claim is that there are certain appearances that fulfill their function of making something apparent only within the horizon of an explicit consciousness of what it is for something to appear. The question is thus one of emphasis; one might say, after all, that we always move within an understanding of what it is for something to appear, that a sense for the phenomenality of the phenomenon is not something alien to even the most mundane of experiences. Everything we do, everything that we are, is situated in a world of manifestation, thanks to which things are set before us along an axis of what they are and what they are not; to understand this is just to live in the world. An appearance that would be wholly unfamiliar to us as an appearance, that appeared in such a way that made appearance as such something strange, would be something radically alien to such a world. Nevertheless, we must here distinguish a pre-reflective understanding from a properly reflective seeing: one may only see something at all thanks to an orientation towards the potential of seeing, but that does not mean that, in order to see, one must explicitly articulate that understanding in a way that would project it for seeing as an explicit theme. The philosophical projects of Husserl and Heidegger to a great extent begin with this insight, which does not belong to them alone but which finds expression, one way or another, in much of the history of philosophy: the insight that the task of knowledge is often to translate what it is that we know because we live, because we exist, into what we know because we think, reflect, and conceive. There are of course many questions here, but let us for now at least fix a working concept: an “exemplary phenomenon” is an appearing, a manifestation, in which the reflected being-grasped of a manner of appearing forms a genuine dimension of the manifestation in question. Thus in the case of an exemplary phenomenon, what “appears” can be said to appear in a twofold sense: something appears in its appearance, but also in the appearance of its appearing, the latter thanks to a reflective understanding that is sensitive to the unfolding of the event of the phenomenon as a whole. This reflective understanding can be described as organic to the exemplary phenomenon. Organic, however, does not necessarily mean seamless. As I hope to show in the case of built space, such a reflectivity can be something forced, or at least unstable, resulting in a characteristic tension that will mark the built as an exemplary phenomenon. This tension between what appears and the appearing of its appearance disrupts the otherwise uninterrupted rhythm of a pre-reflective understanding of phenomenality, calling reflection forth, as it .

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were, to settle a matter that cannot be left as a matter of course. In this way exemplarity implies the exceptional, thus the way that such phenomena stand out in contrast with other instances of manifestation. In perceptual life, a naïve, unreflected grasp of phenomenality is more often than not the rule. In fact, as was already pointed out in the more general considerations of method above, there is much in phenomenality that naturally resists the form of becoming a reflected theme. When we engage the things and places in our environing world—the pen and the paper in writing, the sidewalk under our feet as we make our way through a city animated for us by the tasks of the day—we look precisely to things, and this is a looking that is grounded in appearance. But looking to things, understanding pens and sidewalks, is not the same as looking at the appearances of things, which is in most cases a difficult and deeply ambiguous exercise. Understanding conditions that determine the exception, that is, how some form of looking to the appearance of something becomes characteristic of how the thing looked at emerges, appears or is placed before us, will be one of the central tasks in what follows. On the other hand, though this exceptionality is something rare, it is also something that, paradoxically, finds its home in the familiar. Perhaps the most important example of an exemplary phenomenon is simply that of perception itself, since something like the perceiving of a perception forms a fundamental component of any perceptual experience, as Aristotle already pointed out. My perception of a row of tables in an outdoor café hugging a strip of shade along the side of a building, or of a crowd of people moving slowly down a city sidewalk, does not only articulate the row of tables or the crowd, but itself as well, in a manner that blends the “how I see” into an organic if only partially active part of the “how things look.” To be sure, it is the perceived—the row of tables, the crowd on the sidewalk—which ultimately forms the principal terminus of the perceiving, or what Brentano would call its “primary object.” Nevertheless, the perceiving is itself something that is present for me as well, as a kind of secondary theme that reflectively illuminates key aspects of the emergence of the primary object as something visible, or given. The perceiving of the perceived is for me, present for me, with sufficient density, so to speak, that it can be said to be itself experienced; it is not simply an instance of a shadowy “experiencing” as a self-vanishing act of an otherwise obscure consciousness. Interwoven with this density, founded on its perceivability, is the sense of the manifestness of what is given in perception as appearance. The tension here between appearance and the appearing of appearance is ordered in a specific manner, according to which the perception itself is always approached only from out of what appears in a primary intentional sense, namely the perceived. The two themes—the appearing of the perceived,

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and the appearing of this appearance woven with perceiving—are not equivalent as values of manifestation, but they are locked together in an order of differentiation that favors the former. This means that turning to a perception—the being-perceived of the row of tables in the café, the crowd on the street—presupposes what the perception, as a phenomenon, has in turn accomplished: the very making apparent of the café and the crowd, of the given as perceived, as that which lies beyond itself. Thus if the phenomenality of the perceptual given finds its articulation in the originary appearance of perceiving, it is something that can be reflected upon only by working in tension, as it were, with an essential transcendence that belongs to the total immanent structure of perceiving-perceived. Other key examples of exemplary phenomena, broadly construed, are space and time themselves. They can be considered exemplary for what are at least in part very traditional reasons. Space and time, as has been recognized since the birth of geometrical thinking, both bring into play a complex weave of relation and form. Things stand in relation to one another, and to themselves, “in” space and time; what things are or become takes shape according to specific modes of spatiality and temporality. These modes are not uniform across objectivities within the flow of lived experience—the forms of spatiality and temporality characteristic of a Beethoven symphony, for example, are something very different than those of a Rembrandt self-portrait. The spatiality and temporality constitutive of manifest objects thus represent articulations of their intentional essence that are an organic dimension of their manner of appearance. To be conscious of something is to be conscious of it in its place and in its time. In fact, space and time are so fundamental to the forms and relations constitutive of the manifestation of things that it is tempting to take them to be merely the basic structures of appearances in general. This was at the heart of the debate over the reality of space and time that culminated in the classic Leibnizian and Kantian positions on the question. For both, space and time could not simply be taken as given realities, but had to be considered from a perspective that sought to grasp just what made reality “real.”3 This idea of space and time as constitutive of our access to the real is an expression, if imprecise, of their phenomenological structure: the manifest character of space and time, the sense in which both can be said to appear, is intricately bound 3 See for example Leibniz’ “Third Letter to Clarke,” in Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, Correspondence, ed. Roger Ariew (Boston: Hackett, 2000). Cf. Section III of Kant’s 1770 Inaugural Dissertation, De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis formaet principiis, in Kants Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1912); also KrV A 275f. Also see the “Definitions” section in Newton, The Principia, trans. John Machin (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995).

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up not simply with the empty appearance of things, but with the “reality” or “evidence” of things in experience. That is, to be temporally or spatially manifest is to be that which has a kind of hold, or claim on experience. Likewise, to reflect on how the world is ordered, or on how things stand in relation to one another, is to be cognizant of how it is that space and time form the horizon of the ordering of the real as such. This is the case to such an extent that one could say that space and time “appear” only because the order of things, those relations into which things are set in the coherence of a whole, is itself something that appears. The order that constitutes the exemplary phenomenality of space and time must appear, in order for anything at all to appear. Things accordingly do not stand in relation only after the fact of their appearance, as if we could have spatially or temporally uncoordinated givens that were then only subsequently set into the moulds of the manners in which they would subsequently stand one to another in the coherence of an experienced whole. We will have much to say about space and time in what follows. In this chapter I wish only to emphasize the peculiar twist to these themes that is introduced when we turn our attention to the special case of built space (and time).

The Concept of Built Space and a Skeptical Objection

We are perhaps in a better position now to clarify the sense in which built space represents a specifically phenomenological problem. The issue at hand is not simply the precise description of the phenomenality of built things, of constructed or fabricated objects, but of space itself as something “built,” and precisely from within the manifold horizon of orientation that we began to outline at the end of the last chapter. But before we launch into a more precise account of the spatiality of the built as a horizon of orientation, we need to pause and reflect on a more basic, preliminary question: what does it mean, precisely, to “build” a space? One way to think of this would be to argue that to build a space is to construct and give shape to its appearance as space. A built space would thus imply that, in experience, we look not only to things in space, or even to their coordination, but first to what coordinates—those forms and relations constitutive of space as such. Thus things set into space are coordinated by that space, given that space is the necessary ground for any such coordination, and their presence brings into focus the space itself as what coordinates. Space, in other words, does not remain wholly indifferent to what is built within its horizon, at least not on the level of this coming into view; thus we can say that, from the point of view of experience, a space itself is “built” according to the

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logic of its own progressive manifestation. So an “interior,” or an “enclosure,” for example, is not simply descriptive of a relation among elements that function as its geometrically defined boundaries, but retains its own integrity of manifestation as a built phenomenon and thus is descriptively distinct. This idea is not uncommon, and one can find many instances of theorists who conceive of architecture just as the building of spaces in this sense. It arguably has its ancestor in the Vitruvian mythical image of the weaving of walls that encloses the first primordial space of a primitive house.4 Yet at the same time we should realize that this does not necessarily amount to a stable, or even coherent conception of space. The situation is in fact much more complex, and does not preclude a practice of building, of giving shape to space, that occurs in the context of an essentially unstable and changing conception of just what space “is.” In fact, architects like Louis Kahn point precisely to this instability as a source of inspiration: “Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces. The continual renewal of architecture comes from the changing concepts of space.”5 Space “thoughtfully made,” which includes being made within the horizon of an engagement with a shifting understanding and experience of the spatiality of space, is thus potentially more than simply revealing the presence of space as 4 Vitruvius, De architectura, II.1. The importance of such archetypal acts of spatial formation should not be underestimated. See Robin Dripps, The First House: Myth, Paradigm, and the Task of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT, 1999); also Joseph Rykwert’s wonderful On Adam’s House in Paradise: the Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). 5 Louis Kahn, Perspecta IV 1957, pp. 2–3, quoted in Cornelis Van de Ven, Space in Architecture: The Evolution of a New Idea in the Theory and History of the Modern Movements (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1980), p. xi. Van de Ven argues that a specifically articulated conception of “space,” as something independent from general practical, theological, and political interests, is a relatively recent development in architectural theory and practice, developing essentially as a response to an over-reliance on the idea of historical styles that was dominant in the 19th century: “Only when the idea of space was introduced as fundamental to architecture, the architect was able to de-emphasize the application of historical styles, or the treatment of matter in favor of its content: the space within.” (Ibid.) The trend essentially takes shape in the 1890’s with the work of Hildebrand and Schmarsow. This is in turn significant for us, in that the aesthetic theory developed by these and other figures drew strongly on the various trends within empirical psychology of the time, above all studies on the consciousness of place, of movement (including kinaesthesis), and perception—some of the same sources from which early phenomenology drew much inspiration. See in particular August Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft am Übergang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter (Leipzig: Teubner, 1905); also Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung (Leipzig: Teubner, 1893). On Schmarsow, see Mitchell Schwarzer, “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung,” in Assemblage 15 (August 1991): 48–61.

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a universal manner of coordination that belongs to things as things. More, the maturation of this thoughtfulness, as an engagement with the shifting sense of the spatial, has a direct impact on both the constitution of the built world and the manner in which it is inhabited: spaces effectively emerge as new realities, shaped according to the shifting history of our understanding of what it is to exist in space. Thus what is of interest here is not so much a particular conception of space, call it phenomenological or whatever, as this idea that in built space we have an instance of an engagement of those experiential resources of our existence out of which any conception of space is ultimately formed and given voice, or better, becomes an organic part of an emerging reality. Let us try to clarify what is meant by such a conception by first raising some doubts as to its general cogency. A skeptic might well argue in the following way, by raising the issue of what might be called the truth of space. Things are what they are, our skeptic would say, and in the right context or set of conditions they appear in such a way that is relatively more true to what they are. The yellow or ochre used by a painter in a particular work, say Caravaggio’s The Calling, is seen best under a particular illumination; the foundational structure of a cathedral is best grasped in a schematic that represents its form in abstraction from irrelevant supplementary structures or adornments. Space and time, precisely taken in terms of the question of relation and form, make up at least two basic dimensions of the appearing-as of things—the ensemble of colors look best from a particular distance, the pattern definitive of the structure of the cathedral from a certain angle, the table is most useful for the most things when built to a certain height. Something else goes with this: things can also appear as what they are not. In the twilight colors all look gray; looked askance perfectly balanced structures seem to be in disequilibrium. The street scenes from Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari, for example, are exaggerations of just this potential for distortion and falsity; and it is important to recognize that such distortions are also instances of an appearing-as, and that they also involve space. Nevertheless, our skeptic might continue, the falsity at work in a distorted appearance is not the falsity of space and time. The nightmare space created by the exaggerations of the artist or the filmmaker is not a new space, one unique to a world of horror or confusion, but remains the same space that orders and coordinates the truthful and the normal. This implies (so our skeptic) that space and time are best considered to be invariant, underlying principles of relation and form; it is just that in one case, things appear as they are, in another as they are not. From the point of view of space, illusion is just as “true” as the “real” truthful appearance; it is the same space, with the same form, the same lawfulness that allows for encounters with both the evident and the false.

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Thus at best one might say that we fabricate “in” space and time, we “build” in the sense of achieving effects of form and relation that are more or less true, beautiful, or practical, but for all that we remain within the confines of a natural, given spatiality and temporality that are uniform to any effect that we might be attempting to achieve. Space as such, not to mention time as such—that “in which” such effects are achieved—surely these are in no way “built,” if we want to define this term with any reasonable level of precision. Thus to say that we thoughtfully build spaces, our skeptic might conclude, is in the end a misleading turn of phrase: to be sure, when building things, we must take into consideration what is possible “in” space, but understanding the possibilities of space when building and building space are very different things. Thinking about space may lead us to a better knowledge of space, and with that a capacity to build things that take advantage of this knowledge (either directly, as in the tapering of columns in order to yield a particular visual effect, or indirectly, as in the development of methods of surveying that allow for a more efficient material organization of a building site), but it will not lead us to a space that would be fundamentally different. This skeptical doubt about the validity of a strong concept of built space need not be dependent upon on a specific, univocal concept of space and time. It is dependent, however, on what might seem to be a perfectly reasonable conviction: namely, the idea that the understanding of space and time is limited to concepts, or ways of looking at “what is.” What we do in space, especially our ability to manipulate and give shape to things, must accordingly be carefully distinguished from our comprehension of space and its representations. Thus it may be that our approach to thinking about space changes, and that in the wake of such changes we build differently, but this does not permit us to conclude that the flexibility or plasticity of the one is analogous to that of the other. We do not, in other words, build our way into an understanding of the nature of space and time. The sources of our potential for re-orienting our thought are different from the sources of our capacity to shape the physical world; the former may assume the flexibility of speculation, or be revolutionized through genius or rapid cultural transformation, but the latter must always conform to a logic of discovery. Is this not obviously true? Let us begin by responding problematically, with the following question. If our understanding of space and time amounts to a grasp of the manner in which things take shape in relation to one another, then why must the formation of this understanding stop at the limits of the formation of a concept? What if built space is the result of a further, and deeper, making manifest of the very phenomenality of things, of the very manner of their taking shape in relation to one another—but in a way that is irreducible

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to any given intellectual construct that in the end can only take the form of a “concept of space”? What if, in other words, the experience of space, which is neither concept nor thing alone, proves to be the real point of departure for understanding the being of the built world? Perhaps we do not fabricate space in a strong sense, but perhaps we do discover in the experience of building an essential plasticity that belongs to our experience of space, one that potentially illuminates a limitation of concepts with respect to grasping what it is that we set into motion when we build, not to mention inhabit the spaces of our world. With our discussion in the last chapter of three dimensions of orientation we began to fix what the theoretical parameters might be for the explication of the nature of this plasticity. These included bodily orientation, with its various levels pertaining to the relation between sensation and intentionality; “ego”-orientation, which in turn includes the important dimension of selfhood, as well as the orientation of habitual life grounded on the affectivity of consciousness; and finally the dimension of intersubjective orientation, which introduces a new sense of distance into the picture (the distance between oneself and others). In the rest of this chapter we will employ these three senses of orientation in order to describe the phenomenality of built space in a more systematic fashion, thereby adducing enough evidence to at least unsettle the obviousness of the skeptical objection just articulated.

The Phenomenality of Built Space

Husserl often presents his analyses summarized under the headings of “body,” “ego,” and “others” together as different layers or strata of the constitution of the sense of the thing in lived experience. “Strata” or “layers” could be read as architectural metaphors, of course, but they are really geological, as when Husserl speaks of the “sedimentations” of habit, or of meaning. This language of strata and layers also has a place in the analysis of built space, but only with a word of caution. First, it is important to emphasize that the analysis of built space, described as being comprised of these three strata, has a unity that is more than just a composite of different descriptions of the same thing. The aim here is no mere taxonomy of our experiences of place, however useful that might otherwise be; instead, these three modalities of orientation are meant to represent a set of relations of mutual intentional foundation structured in certain definite ways in the case of the built world that we will have to investigate more closely.

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A second point to emphasize regarding the aptness of the metaphors of strata and layers is that the whole of built space is constituted in such a way that one can become absorbed into one or another of these directions or dimensions at the apparent exclusion or at least the diminishment of the others. This is a function, I would argue, of the resistance of naïve experience to its own becoming explicitly thematized: the directions it offers us tend to lure our reflection into an all too ready conclusion. We need to constantly reconnect with the insight that the built world is more complicated, that it offers many more directions of reflection than might seem, at first look, to be the case. Lived space always bears another look, another attempt to formulate a new point of departure. The same is not true of the objective space of physics: its manner of representation is uniform, and with that ordered in a way that suspends the subjective tendency to become absorbed in the reflective richness of the qualitative. Reflection here cannot retreat into depth at the expense of breadth and height. We always take them along, as it were, even if only in thought; they remain always emphasized in exactly the same way. This is why the metaphor of strata has no real use here. Even if the dimensionality of space becomes something theoretically pliable, as in string theory, it is still the case that its elasticity is fully in view from the perspective of more sophisticated mathematical instruments, and does not represent that peculiar subjective motivation to emphasize and discriminate. In our reflections on lived space, by contrast, we can retreat into the intersubjective at the expense of the bodily, without being fully in command of the conditions under which our departure from the theme of the body occurs; likewise, we can become absorbed in the possibility of a perspective in which we habitually translate the immediately given into the mediated, third person constitution of its sense, without being fully aware of the consequences of the modification of the first person perspective. We can shift our perspective, in other words, while leaving the terms of such shifting wholly ambiguous. With this in mind, let us turn to the first stratum of description that we have already begun to formulate in the last chapter, that of intersubjectivity. The difficulty in any discussion of intersubjectivity is our tendency to take the theme in too narrow a sense, one that cleaves too close to how things directly indicate or mark the presence of others. It is clear that others leave their marks on things, such as a wooden threshold of a doorway worn away from years of human and animal traffic; and it is also clear that others have an impact on how we go about moving around in space, as for example when we follow a network of signs and indications that lead us along a walking trail in a park.

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The narrow sense of the theme of intersubjectivity thus limits the issue to understanding the different ways that we can “read” things so as to trace their properties and features back to the actions of a particular individual or individuals. The crux of the limitation is that this tends to be taken to the point where we can approach the involvement of others in things around us in a relatively formal manner: the construction or ordering of things is traced to the actions of those who built them, as when archaeologists, for example, try to reconstruct the techniques of Egyptian pyramid builders based on clues provided by the given structures themselves, or functionally map the properties of objects onto the known capacities of tools from the same historical period. This point of departure is not in itself objectionable. It arguably makes up an essential dimension of the meaning of a “thing”: part of what makes a thing a thing is this potential for being rendered an artifact of this or that kind, which includes an actual or possible having-come from the hands of others. The thing-character of a brick wall, or a worn doorway, captures and absorbs into its thingness those activities that shaped it; the very plasticity essential to thingness emphasized in the last chapter allows for this. Yet just this plasticity in turn invites a certain kind of limitation of the theme of intersubjectivity, where we take to be relevant only what this capacity of things to bear the mark of others has brought close to us: so for example I can “see,” manifest in the ordered pattern of the brick wall, the trace of the movements of the active being of the bricklayer, and recognize as a result of these movements the characteristic pattern of a stretcher bond. This trace of the other is manifest not only as something we can see when recognizing the usage of technique, but can take more symbolic forms as well—the monstrous mass of the pyramid evokes the unbearable burden and pain of slavery; the grace of the columns and facades of the Parthenon in turn that fateful mix of industriousness and ambition of ancient imperial Athens. What is brought close to us in such examples is also wrapped in narratives, in what we know and do not know about the lives of those who somehow remain present in these structures. One could perhaps argue that this proximity is precisely what brings seeing and thinking together when we look, for example, at a Greek temple. John Onians puts this well at the beginning of his essay “Greek Temple and Greek Brain”: We all know that when we look at a building with our eyes, we are also seeing it with our heads. This is why when we look at a Greek temple, we cannot do so without seeing it in terms of our preexisting knowledge of its conventional attributes. These include its underlying schemata, as represented by its proportions and measurements; its embedded history, as represented by the wooden origins of the Doric order; its construction

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out of a collection of elements, such as base, column, and capital, or echinus, dentil, and torus; and even the analogies with which it is associated, such as that between the column and the human form. Confronted with a Greek temple, we see it in terms of numbers and origins, names and correspondences. Most of these have entered our heads from books, typically in the form of words.6 All of this is sustained by the proximity of the other achieved by the “thing,” here the Greek temple, as the expressive bearer of the presence of the other. Everything that we know of Greek historical existence is somehow involved with what is there before us, taking as an opportunity for expression the thingly remnants of the activity of ancient Greek civilization as instances or examples of “conventional attributes,” that is, formal, historical, and cultural designations that define what it is for a thing to be an “ancient Greek” thing. There is much to consider within this focus,7 but it is still premised on a limitation, and when pursued to its logical conclusion invites a distortion of the meaning of intersubjectivity. For in the end, what is essential with respect to the theme of “others” should not be limited only to what is brought close to us, but must include a consideration of what is and remains distant. The entire force of the presence of others is more than the result of what we know about what others have said and done having an anchor, so to speak, in material things and places, or in the potential for things to serve as instances or evidence of the known. Intersubjectivity is also constitutive of a specific experience of distance, one that is operative for us even when we have no idea “who” constructed something or why, or even if something is really an artifact at all. In order to try to capture the dynamics of this kind of distance, it is important to articulate the theme of intersubjectivity broad enough to capture the full breadth of its role in the constitution of our experience of built space. This by no means a simple matter. What does it mean, that others are distant, and how can distance be understood as a force of presence? Do not others have presence for me precisely to the extent to which they are situated among things, just as I am? And if they are no longer “here,” how could they 6 John Onians, “Greek Temple and Greek Brain,” in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), p. 44. 7 Onians’ project in the essay we are citing is worth mentioning: taking what we know of the Greeks (for example the central importance of warfare in Greek civilization) together with recent experimental and theoretical advances in neuroscience (above all the evidence pertaining to the formation of neural pathways structured in accordance with repetitive behavior and perceptual input), Onians attempts to reconstruct that blend or pattern of “seeing” and “knowing” characteristic of the ancient Greek “viewing” of the same temple.

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remain involved in any way with the sense of things, if not from the fact that they have left their prints, so to speak, on the surface of things, as a kind of mark of their past presence? A key insight of Husserl’s, developed in other phenomenological philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre, but in different ways, is that others not only leave their marks on things, but that their presence represents a fundamental dimension of the total significance of things as such. This means that the presence of others is not something limited to local effects—that is, it is not limited to only certain aspects or features of things, as if the presence of others were relevant to only certain kinds of objects, those that can be demonstrated to have been fashioned by others, such as instruments and buildings. Everything that things are, everything that the world is, is always already there “for others.” What is shaped by the presence of others is thus not simply a subset of things we encounter in the world, but in an important sense the very manner of possible encounter itself. This means that the space of encounter does not belong first and foremost to me, but also has already the sense of for the other. Others have in this way a fundamental priority, whereby the very sense in seeing things is to see them from out of their having been made available to others. This global significance of the other is an essential, but not a sufficient condition for grasping the modality of distance relevant for built space. To illustrate what this involves, let us consider an architectural example, but one that is much simpler than temples, or even brick walls and thresholds. Walking along a path in the mountains, I come upon a stone bench that looks out over a view of the valley. As I look around, I notice that this spot must have been chosen precisely because it is the position from which one has the best view of the valley, and that the bench has been placed in the optimal orientation that the location has to offer. If it had been turned more to the left or the right, it would have been more difficult to take in the full force of the view; or if it had been facing in the opposite direction, I would have been left staring at the side of a relatively uninteresting rocky cliff. The space in which, sitting on the bench, I take in the view of the valley is, I would argue, built. Not because anything located in this space has been built by others. The bench is of course a built thing, but the manner in which it is built into the space under consideration has more to do with its function in orienting my perceiving, as a bodily orientation, in accordance with the potential view of the valley. What is built is, beyond the organization of elements that belong to the structure of the bench, the “view on the valley” itself. The view is built, though in a manner in which things, taken as objective unities of sense in themselves, are not. It is built in the minimal sense of a patterned orchestration of the visibility of things that emerges directly out of the simple

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Figure 5  Mineirinhas (Portugal). Photo by author.

act of placing a bench that faces “towards” a view: the result of building is that the view now has a unique phenomenological presence within the experience of the surrounding space. The view without the bench would, of course, still be there, reverting back to its “unbuilt” mode—yet (again minimally) it would remain related to the possibility of being built (“a bench would be excellent right here…”). This space—whether built (with the bench) or potentially buildable (without the bench, but clearly calling for one)—is intrinsically intersubjective. It is intersubjective, not because there are others there who experience it with me, with whom I compare notes (I am alone on my walk); nor is it intersubjective because someone is present, even as a proxy thanks to the bench, pointing at the view. The space is built not because I have interpreted a sign, nor is it buildable because it is communicable. If I had come upon a large sign with an arrow pointing towards the view, with the words “NICE VIEW” printed below it, the space would not be revealed to me in the same manner as it is when the view is built from out of the placing of the bench. The space of signification proper is only a “built space” by analogy, even if at the same time signification and its potentialities are clearly interwoven with the built, even in this example.

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There is a threefold sense of intersubjectivity operative in this example: the view composed by the placing of the bench is intersubjective in the sense of something that has been (1) lived through, (2) understood, and (3) shaped in such a way that embodies this understanding—and that all three are determinative of the accomplishments of others.8 This threefold sense still cleaves close to the manner in which things bear the marks of the activities of others that can be re-constructed to explain why things are put together in such and such a way, but again there is an important phenomenological difference that we need to fix more precisely. First let us consider the intersubjectivity of this built space of the view from the bench as something lived through by others. Here it becomes evident that the first sense immediately implies the second. Together both living through and understanding represent a modality of the global character of intersubjectivity that we have already emphasized. Intersubjectivity is global in the sense that there is no element or dimension of the interest that I take in things that is not determined by the manner in which all things “of the world” are constituted in the experiences of multiple others. The space in which I move, the things that I deal with, always have the significance of “for others” as a fundamental determinateness. Even alone on this path, things are what they are, the world is what it is, for others as well, whether actual or potential; the unity that things are qua worldly bears the sense of their being sustained by the intersubjective multiplicity of consciousness as a living horizon of encounter. But that does not mean the whole world is built. For the bench to be placed, to orchestrate the view, requires that another understand its potential, or understand the possibility that that particular place offers “for a view.” It is that realization which lies at the origin of the built space; for it is only in an explicit understanding, and not merely a global simultaneity of intersubjective presence, that the “here, not there” as a discernment of possibility is achieved. That intersubjectivity is a total phenomenon implies that the possibilities of visibility and manifestation are equally available to others, but not necessarily understood, which alone allows for a genuine accomplishment of access. Once understood, these possibilities of manifestation take a modified form that raises them to the level of explicit experience and encounter. The final element is the shaping of the space in a way that embodies this understanding, or realization of its possibility. In our example, the catalyst for this embodiment of understanding is the placing of the bench. This can take 8 And if I were the one who functions as builder? Here, too, I would argue, there is presupposed a distance to myself—to that myself-as-other who inhabits the past implicit in the built for which I am responsible.

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a more complex form than the sudden inspiration of some past wanderer in these mountains. So for example the others themselves may have only become gradually aware of the power of the possibility—perhaps for a long time this has been a spot that people have returned to again and again for the view, for picnics or lovers’ meetings, for contemplation or meditation. The common familiarity of the spot, and its view, something that had never come suddenly into the possession of any one yet came to belong gradually to everyone, can form a kind of proto-form of inhabiting this place, one in which the space gradually takes shape in the repeated performances of the knowledge of what is possible “from here,” performances that realize the potential of the space as a place to “take in the view of the valley.” This gradual formation of local know­ ledge does not yet yield a built space proper; the force of manifestation is limited to the repeated actions of those who are in the know, who carry with them the knowledge that serves to articulate the possibilities of the place. The view of the valley would, as it were, shift back and forth between the indifference of its being shaped to the live possibility of its manifestation being explicitly formed as a built space proper. To be built in a proper sense, I would suggest, is a formation of this space that embodies this knowledge of those who realized its potential and possibility in a form that can be experienced by those who do not know in advance, and who approach this knowledge as something other—that is, across a distance marked not only by the possible, but by the presence of the other who does know and has accordingly given this place its particular shape or form. It is this character of otherness, originating in the primordial distance that others are for each of us, which is essential to the sense of the space as built. There is a silence in built spaces across which the knowledge of others has been gathered for us, from out of a distance that can belong only to them.9 If we know too much, or allow what we know of the others who build to command our reflection by limiting us to the visible thing as an instance of what is known (for example the techniques of wooden post and beam construction preserved in the architectural forms of the Greek stone temple cited by Onians), then we 9 Or do all built spaces, on the contrary, have their own sound, thus representing an absolute refusal of silence? Peter Zumthor: “[…] imagine extracting all foreign sound from a building […] if we try to imagine what that would be like: with nothing left, nothing there to touch anything else. The question arises: does the building still have a sound?” His answer, at least in this meditation, is yes: “They have sounds that aren’t caused by friction.” Atmospheres, p. 31. They have sounds, in other words, not caused by the grating together of material things, by movement, by the struggle of entities to occupy space. On architectural silence, see the same author, Thinking Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010), p. 34.

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risk overlooking the essential role of this silence in the manner in which built space is manifest. Sitting on the bench, what the other understood in living the possibilities of this space are silently articulate in what unfolds in front of me; I take up temporary residence, as it were, in the mute understanding of the other that is present, embodied in what is manifest before me, but which is not my own, and which only speaks to me in the silent gesture of the lonely bench looking out over the magnificent valley. Without this sensitivity to distance, without the realization that what we encounter in the space around us is not only a collection of the effects of what people have done, but the very embodiment in the transcendence of an architectural silence of what they understand (in the broad sense of Husserl’s cogito—what they have thought, felt, willed, suffered), we risk trapping our reflections within the narrow confines of a misleading proximity in which only part of the full breadth of the present-being of others is at play.

Access and the Space of Encounter

The intersubjectivity of built space thus describes not only the emergence of such spaces “from others,” but the very manner in which others, including myself, encounter this space. But what do I have to do, or to be, in order to enter into such “spaces”? How is it that, walking along the path, the built as the shaped embodiment of the understanding of the other makes itself known or manifest to me? How is this engagement with understanding at all possible? This brings us to the second and third strata of orientation, that of ego and body, which represent two further, fundamental conditions for such an engagement. Let us stay for a moment with the example of the bench overlooking the view of the valley. If what is at play here is an understanding that is not my own, then this can have weight or value for me only if I come at it in a certain way, or from within a certain attitude. On one level, this is an attitude in which what I am interested in, or the manner in which I am concerned with things, is borne by the sensitivity to the manifold ways in which I stand in relation to others. Yet on another level, even this openness to others, or an awareness of the significance of the transcendence of others, is something that presupposes a certain kind of maturity of interest, so to speak. I need to be experienced enough in looking for something to absorb the full import of what its “being available to others” can contribute. Just as was the case with the oddly shaped stone on the beach, I need to already have a certain stake in things for the presence of others in any sense to even begin to mean something to me.

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This implies that the orchestration of the view into a built environment becomes manifest to me only insofar as it gives me something that I am already in a sense looking for, as if it were the satisfaction of an interest, or the relative valuation out of an engagement with a concern. The phenomenality in question is dependent on my open engagement with its possibility. Were I rushing down the path, desperately attempting to avoid a pursuer, the built space crystallized around the park bench would not even exist “for me”—not because it is not there, but because in my unbalanced state I am not situated properly to enter into it. The accessibility of a space is thus a very complicated matter. A pile of rubble in Stalingrad, for a homeowner returning back after the war, offers the former inhabitant “no way in,” as well as no place to be; the ruins stand in the way of any entry, blocking its access. But for the soldier seeking cover during a pitched battle, desperate for something to slow down the progress of the attacker and shield his body from the deadly metal filling the air, the rubble is a welcome opportunity for cover; the same blockage of the rubble that frustrates the one satisfies the other. It would be too much to say that landscapes are literally carved by interests, but it is the case that they are first opened and made accessible only through them. Yet the issue is not limited to how I enter into or take up a position in space. Essential is also the fact that I need to first inhabit myself in a particular manner. This is at the core of the phenomenological notions of interest and concern as they are articulated in the work of Husserl and Heidegger. The self inhabits its awareness, and pursues the possibilities of this habitation, in the form of the constitution of a life defined by the gradual sedimentation of interests—of ways of being among beings that form the basis for the style and manner of a given existence. Alone, the intersubjective being of built space lacks the resources to become manifest in consciousness unless the self takes an interest, or better: is the interest on the basis of which the encounter with built space is possible at all as an event. Imagine a group of friends arriving at the spot with the bench for a picnic, say the three students, one female and two male, from György Lukács’ dialogue in Seele und Form titled “Richness, Chaos, and Form.” They are engrossed in a discussion about how to assess the literary significance of the work of Lawrence Stern, and are equally engrossed in the tensions that constitute an effective, if unacknowledged love triangle. The entire excursion, from the walk to the country to the arrangement of the food, represents a manifold of opportunities for the conversation to shift, a point to be made, a knowing glance or a false gesture to fall, noticed or unnoticed—all of which constitute a given, finite dynamic that unfolds within the environs marked or laid out by the setting

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of the space. One might be tempted here to say that the scene represents the animation of an otherwise empty place, giving it a life and purpose it would otherwise not have had; yet one also might have the opposite temptation, and instead insist that the ordering of the space itself anticipates the needs of the young triangle in conversation, thus shapes them with a view towards their own possibilities. Both interpretations would risk exaggeration. The question cannot simply devolve into making the choice of which reality—the actions of a group of young people or the organized space around the bench—plays the role of form and which that of matter. The question of both richness and chaos is here instead one of access: how is built space made accessible, in its being, whether we approach it from out of its own, or from what the group of young people brings to it? Part of the answer lies in what we have already introduced above with the concepts of interest and concern: the built space is accessible through the manner in which human being accesses its own being, or has itself in view. This having oneself in view effectively folds the question of forming and shaping into the question of access. Recall that neither interest nor concern are meant to be presented as given, fixed interpretive forms that stamp meaningless matter with sense; instead both amount to relative decisions about what is important and not important, and thus set more into motion than a simple act of determination. There is an orientation at play in interest and concern, and in that sense a forming and shaping of encounter, which is more of a pursuit than the projection of a finality. This implies, among other things, that our encounter with others has the impact it does because, as subjects, we are invested in our interests as something open or exposed to being challenged and modified. This is an important theme in Heidegger’s thinking: the concerns of Dasein are rooted in what is first and foremost the being of itself as a task, or a question. Committed to the question that it is for itself, Dasein is oriented in a basic manner towards the significance of others (and the world: Mitsein, being-with-others, brings with it its Mitwelt, the world of this being-with). Accordingly, for Dasein, the significance of others constitutes a potential horizon for encountering and pursuing the question that it is; the drama of its existence turns on the basic possible modalities of its questionability. Yet Dasein’s exposure to its own modification implies in turn that interests, as collectively constitutive of the manner in which we inhabit ourselves, are fundamentally fragile in nature. When I sit down on the bench, my interest in the view is taken up by the built space, and given an articulation in light of the knowledge of the other embodied in that space, which is actively present in the articulation of the view itself. To be sure, the implication here is that

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the space is what it is only because of my interest; but that does not negate the sense in which the interest is modified by the space, not just as result, but in its very manner of being-pursued. I don’t come to such spaces to have them be understood in terms of my interest, as something given, even behind me; I come precisely in order to actively pursue my interest, as something that is much more in front of me—I seek in the space the further progression of the potential development and maturation of what I am in the midst of in my living. If so, then it would be misleading to say that the view is orchestrated by the other, as if the one who built this space were able to call forth those patterns of manifestation that are in the end dependent on my own being in order to emerge at all. The distance that the other is for me is matched by the distance that I am for the other who builds—what the built space is to be in an experience that can only be mine is in the end an unsurpassable determinant of the very phenomenality of the space itself. If the space—in this sense of the embodied knowledge of the other—opens up room for the pursuit of what it is that I am invested in, then in a curious way I also become invested in the space itself. This is an important sense in which built spaces are exemplary. Not only is their phenomenality tied in with the pursuit of a given particular interest (here, the pleasure of the view, supported by the being of the one who sees it as invested in its value), but they also achieve a kind of stability and permanence of phenomenality in the form of a uniquely intersubjective visibility. The two are related, in that intersubjective visibility takes shape as the manifestation of the very possibility of pursuing an interest. And it does this in the manner in which this possibility is given a taste, so to speak, of its actuality, its realized accomplishment; built spaces are in a sense the visible immediate future of an interest. As such, built spaces beckon to us as the manifestation of an intersubjective anticipation of a successful future in the pursuit of who we are. Entering into the built space, I enter into the space of an understanding that is embodied in the world itself, as a habitation among things that seems to have at least partially transcended the struggle to inhabit itself, and which sets itself before me as a realization of what I am not yet, but strive to be. There is thus a distinct tenor of hopefulness in the built, one that should not be underestimated with respect to its significance for a life that pursues interests: built space is in this manner existentially related to promises, both kept and broken.10 10

This is equally true even of the bench with its view, for we are in fact emphasizing something essential to thinking about the relation between architecture and landscape. Landscape is not neutral, it contains us, it embodies our history, and this is the foundation of its relation to what we build. See Zumthor, Thinking Architecture, p. 95: “Landscape also

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If interest is something intrinsically exposed, then that implies that built spaces are likewise fragile. My articulation of my interest in the space, my living, also exposes my interest, not only to change but also to failure. This failure of my interest to realize itself as a genuine form or style can happen in a number of ways. It can take the form of the simple inadequacy of the manner in which a space is built that frustrates what I am trying to do, or what I am trying to be. This could be due to a failure of the understanding of the other (the bench is in the wrong spot; it would have been better over there), or my own inability to find a way into the space that is compatible with the manner in which it has been organized according to the understanding of the other (I abhor nature, or I fail to see anything attractive about looking at a valley). The failure can also be neutral, where two engagements with the potentiality of built form that are nevertheless incompatible co-inhabit, side by side, the same horizon in a state of mutual obliviousness and misunderstanding, so for example when I find a use for a piece of clothing the original purpose of which I do not understand. Likewise the failure can also take the form of an outright distortion, where the aims embodied in the original built thing are forced into something very different, as a fundamental rebuilding of the built—so for example the Roman reconstruction of the Egyptian obelisk into a gnomon by placing a globe at its top: the original shadow-devouring/deforming pyramidion, uniquely timeless, is thereby transformed against its original purpose into a time-tracking device.11 More striking is the fact that built spaces, as exposed interests, are open to being destroyed. Such spaces are fragile precisely to the extent to which they are infused with interests, not qua values, as statically defined determinations of the status of things, but pursuits. We have already noted how Rousseau, commenting on the tragedy of the destruction of Lisbon by an earthquake in 1755, argued that the reason why so many people died was because they kept going back into the flames to retrieve their belongings—unable to part from their possessions, they transformed the reorganization of earth and material as a pure physical event into the “destruction of Lisbon.” The building of spaces, then, is a modality of the cultivation of interest, ultimately of the manner in which the subject, the I, inhabits its own life; and as such, it is the origin of the

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contains history. People have always lived in landscapes and worked in landscapes. Sometimes the landscape suffers from having us live and work in it. Nonetheless, for better or for worse, it is there that the history of our involvement with the earth is stored. And that is probably why we call it a cultural landscape.” Also see Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996). See the discussion of the Horologium-Augusti in McEwen, Vitruvius, p. 248. Also see Edmund Buchner, Die Sonnenuhr des Augustus (Mainz: Zabern, 1982).

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fragility of things, of their destructibility, taken as a formation of their meaningfulness or significance. At this point one might have the suspicion that the built character of built space is best characterized as an example of a higher-level determination of objectivity that contrasts with the phenomenality native to sensuous perception, or with the dimensions of thingness explored in the last chapter. Perhaps built things, as embodiments of understanding and investments of interest, represent a stratum of “cultural objectivity” that cannot be reduced to relations pertaining among things perceived, even if it might be founded on the perceptual, or somehow require perceptual tokens to be experienced. The idea might be that built space proper is constituted on the levels of the ego and community of egos, but is not a phenomenon that belongs to the most basic level of bodily, oriented perception of things. Such a thesis would be in error, for a number of reasons. First the more obvious: there are too many features and characteristics of the built environment that are clearly presentive-kinaesthetic in nature that would stand in the way of such a reduction. Take for example the sensuous aspect of mass, so central for the political or symbolic interests pursued in the construction of monuments; or the lightness or grace of structures that seem to float in the air, as a buttress for an interest in a style of communal existence that emphasizes speed and fluidity; or (to again not limit ourselves to qualities of thing-structures) the role of the vast in the potential for a built space to be the site of a spectacle. Even the example of sitting on a bench: the very orchestration of the view is a function of the placement of the body as a freely moved perceptual organ; and in turn the “knowledge” of the other embodied in the site is as much a bodily comprehension as an intellectual grasp of a schematic interpretation of the dynamics of the positioning of the bench—perhaps it is the former even more than the latter. Once we stop thinking of the body as a stimulus-response circuit, or a collector of representations that are then interpreted by an intellect only after the fact of experience, and instead see it as the manner in which the perceptual situation of an embodied being is first constituted in experience, the more we realize that its structures must be deeply engrained in the phenomenality of built space. This point even holds true when we limit our focus to the strictly presentational strata within the phenomenology of perception, that is, if we set aside the body as seat of movement and localization of kinaestheses and describe the unfolding of the spatial “phantoms” of presentational contents (Husserl’s darstellende Inhalte) taken in reflective isolation.12 Sensuous perception 12

On the Husserlian notion of “spatial phantoms,” see Husserl, Hua XVI, §§14–25; Hua IV, §10.

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accomplishes two things on this primordial level that form a fundamental ground for the experience of the world. First, perception here gives or presents things in an originary fashion; second, the manner of this presentifying brings together things as elements within linkages, paths of sense development that constitute the basic flow, so to speak, of perceptual life. This brings out the essential truth that perceiving is already at the level of the most superficial of its phantom appearances a pathmaking, one thanks to which we do not move away from things, but progressively towards things, in accordance with what can be likened to a kind of ascending and descending of determinateness. The result of Husserl’s analyses of sensation is the claim that originary sense perception constitutes a foundational sense of the world, originarily present to us as that towards which we are directed, and towards which we are moving. As we have already seen, this movement of the originary is deepened when we again incorporate kinaesthesis and bodily comportment into the description of perceptual life, constituting the basic presentational nexus within which the theme of “approach,” of “entering” into a built (or any) space can be fixed in terms of the original accomplishments of perception. Perception, as MerleauPonty would put it, enjoys a fundamental primacy with respect to the manifold senses of “approach”—perception is in this way the threshold phenomenon par excellence. As a fundamental structure of all situatedness, all comportment, perceptio is never replaced; it is either the immediate foundation of all other sense accomplishments, or its originary structures inform their constitutive patterns in decisive ways. The more I understand something, thus come closer to it as something known, the more I am just developing that initial “towards which” of intentional directedness accomplished by originary perception. It is because of this that Husserl gives to sense perception the status of “originary consciousness” (Originalbewusstsein); and it is why perception is always present, even if only as a shadow of itself.13 Take for example architectural drawings.14 In a drawing, we no longer have a built space per se, but we do have an artifact that graphically explores essential elements that belong to such spaces. Architectural drawings are, from a phenomenological perspective, extremely complicated; they develop and explore schemas that are as much informed and governed by ideas and abstractions as by an intuition of the dynamics of lived, concrete perception. They can in fact be understood as resting on the evidence of what we have been calling the exemplary phenomenality of built space: for they can be read meaningfully only 13 14

See Husserl, APS/Hua XI, §1. See on this topic the work of Parviz Mohassel, Husserl: Phenomenology of Architectural Drawings (Ph.D diss., New School for Social Research, 2008).

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if one engages the way in which a space sets those manners of appearance and manifestation into the foreground in a way that speaks to the concerns and interests of those who live in them. In this sense also architectural drawings are a testament to the potential for architectural form becoming an explicit theoretical object—whether as a means for investigating fundamental principles of construction, as in Palladio’s reconstruction and refinement of ancient techniques of Roman architectural design, or introducing radically new ideas of the interaction between perception and the built world, as in the Renaissance development of a science of perspective within architectural theory. Architectural drawings thus express a distinctively theoretical intelligibility of built form, not because they reduce the experienced to concepts, but precisely because they are grounded in a lived perceptual intelligibility that has already been articulated as a view. More, the manner in which this theoretical intelligibility of built form finds expression in graphic representations is not tied to the possibility of a one-to-one correspondence between representation and its correlate in reality. Such representations are architecturally significant, even when they represent something that can never be actually perceived “in the world,” or for that matter “built.” Here one might think of the suprematist-inspired explorations of form in the architectural paintings of Zaha Hadid, or alternatively the dark explorations of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings in his Carceri d’invenzione. In Hadid’s paintings the originary presentive function of sensibility casts its productive shadow in every disorienting break of line, every hyper-stylized repetition of forms or planar displacement of orders and directions. Even the body, or kinaesthesis as the movement of a given plenitude out towards the hope of a determinacy, retains its key role in the articulation of these “impossible” spaces, even if it often seems to be forced onto the periphery. So too with the tiny, pathetic figures in Piranesi’s Carceri: though the prisons are represented with a vastness that seems to extinguish the very being of the body, they are at the same time ingrained in a kinaesthetic rhythm that infuses the graphic force of the nightmarish confusion and obscure complexity of their spaces.15 However abstract and intellectualized, as in the case of Hadid, or sensuously determined and dreamlike, as in the case of Piranesi, the originary achievements of perception remain ubiquitous; even their marginalization is the result of what they have accomplished as a source of meaning. Their very 15

See Giovanni Battista Piranesi, The Prisons/Le Carceri (New York: Dover, 2010). Also Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built On Love, pp. 87–88; Marguerite Yourcenar, “The Dark Brain of Piranesi,” in The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Giroux, 1984).

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essence directs intentionality beyond themselves, towards ever more complex patterns of arriving at what is intended.16 Just as we need to move away from conceiving of the body as a stimulus-response circuit, we also need to move away from the conception of perception as a kind of naïve, subjective “picture” of the world, and instead recognize it as the condition for the possibility of the very complication of sense and meaning, in ways that are continuous with the potential for subjective utopias and dystopias. If perception is, as Husserl would have it, originary consciousness, it is precisely because it represents the first foray into an openness to complexity from which the graphic representation of architectural forms draws again and again.

Appearance and Making

In pursuing a conception of built space as embodied knowledge, we have begun to bring into view some of the complexity of built space as an intersubjective phenomenon. Others do not merely accompany us in our experience of the built, echoing back to us what we discover there, or even confirmation and support; the intersubjectivity of built space is constitutive of its being as a space of encounter, to again invoke Libeskind’s expression, one that occurs according to various modalities of subjective distance. More, the problem of built space has been revealed to be a species of the phenomenological question of world access, and the oriented body, interpreted in terms of an embodiment 16

Thus when Pérez-Gómez emphasizes the bodily impenetrability of these etchings, and their subsequent enlivening of the imagination, we can agree with the description, as long as it is not taken to be an exclusion of the role of the body in arriving at our grasp of these graphic representations of space: “Piranesi obsessively darkened his etchings, often adding ink with his fingers. The spaces became highly seductive to the imagination, yet impenetrable to the physical body. It would be impossible to construct such spaces literally, deducing a coherent three-dimensional geometry from the image. These spaces, in short, are paradoxical.” Pérez-Gómez, Built on Love, p. 88. The graphic paradox, I would argue, is not conceptual but bodily, in that it is sustained by the body’s openness to encountering the impenetrable, or in short, to its own fundamental complication as an inextricable moment of perceptual life. And if the imagination plays the ultimate role of access here, it is as a distinctively bodily imagination exploring the limits of kinaesthetic sense. Yourcenar has a better handle for the implications of the role of kinaesthesia in the feel of these etchings: “And perhaps the most singular feature of all this disturbing little multitude [Yourcenar is here discussing the collection of small figures in the etchings] is everyone’s immunity to vertigo. Sure-footed, at ease in these altitudes of delirium, such gnats do not seem to notice they are buzzing on the brink of an abyss.” Yourcenar, “The Dark Brain of Piranesi,” p. 118.

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of the maturing interest of the self as a being-in-the-world, has proven to be a key element in descriptions of the accessibility of the built world. This complex orientation with the nexus body-ego-intersubjectivity outlines the essential basis for a full description of built space as a space of encounter, and it also provides a way for us to understand how built space can be understood as an exemplary phenomenon, in the sense articulated at the beginning of this chapter. Also at stake here, however, as the example of architectural drawings shows, is the question of just in what sense the built world lends itself to being taken up as a distinctively theoretical object, and with that how the built articulated in this way can in turn take on a specifically philosophical significance. For architectural drawings, and by extension the figure of architecture in art generally, point to a deep affinity between what can be known, and what can appear. Building itself is the fundamental intertwining of the two events of knowledge and manifestation in the unity of an experience, and architectural drawing represents a meditation that draws from their respective essences. One can thus discern a thread here that will lead us back to that set of issues with which we began this book, namely what is at stake in the difference between the architect and the engineer, as two related, if competing paradigms of just what kind of “knowledge” architecture is, or what kind of understanding is in play when we build. Taking up this thread back to the problem of knowledge and manifestation, we can also again draw on the work of McEwen, in particular her remarkable essay on the relation between ancient architectural culture and the beginnings of Greek philosophy that we have already had several occasions to cite above. McEwen endeavors in her essay to reconstruct the archaic roots of what she calls the “theoretical event” in ancient Greece, traditionally identified as the birth of theoretical reflection on nature (phusis) among Ionian thinkers in the 7th to 6th centuries BCE such as Thales, Anaximenes, and Anaximander of Miletus, who serves as McEwen’s focus.17 The theoretical event is the birth of theory, of theoria, understood specifically as a distinct modality of seeing, coupled with a conception of the spectacle, that shifts away from what McEwen describes as the “compactness” of the mythic in favor of an articulated perspective on the world. McEwen is here exploring the idea of a shift within Greek consciousness from a reliance on poetic 17

The relevant fragments of Anaximander, along with historical and biographical information, along with interpretive commentary (which contrasts in many interesting ways with that of McEwen), can be found in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 100–142.

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imagery towards a more well-wrought and explicit organization of thought, one that finds its literary home specifically in prose—so Anaximander’s book on nature, of which only the famous Fragment B1 survives, is identified as the first prose work in philosophy, and accordingly takes on a central role in McEwen’s analysis. Prose favors not simply spelling out what had once been poetically compact, but it also rehearses a spectacle of the linkages, the joints so to speak, through which all things are bound to one another. What is thereby articulated is the order of things, the pattern or patterns that belong to the being together of things. In Anaximander, the expression for this revealed, articulated order is kosmos. The sense of kosmos is intimately bound up with an acute sensibility for the visible, or for what can be beheld in the visible in the form of a spectacle. Thus the specific articulation of this order, of kosmos, is just that thanks to which things become visible as what they truly are; and in this sense, the orientation towards pattern and appearing are inextricably linked together in theoria, as the witnessing of the spectacle of the kosmos. Much of this follows familiar accounts of the emergence of theoria as a distinctive pole of Greek philosophical self-understanding.18 But McEwen, patiently piecing together glimpses of the archaic experience of the world that can still be culled from classical literary sources, makes a powerful suggestion that the origin of this complex of visibility and order at the heart of theoria is not so much the independent result of the maturation of a reflective understanding, which is often the thesis, implicit or explicit, that one finds in the literature. Rather, she argues that it must be understood instead as a profound expression of the human experience of making: It is my contention that, with the dawn of Greek thought, the pattern discovered, or allowed to appear, through making was universalized to become the pattern that eventually came to be understood as the one embodied in the cosmos as we understand the word.19 The challenge in understanding this thesis lies in resisting the impact that later Greek thought, above all by way of the Aristotelian concepts of matter and form, has had on our concept of making, and instead following through with the implications of the suggestion of a more archaic experience of making 18

See Andrea Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), for a more thorough, and interdisciplinary account of theoria in a cultural context that augments McEwen’s reflections in interesting ways. 19 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, p. 42.

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having a decisive impact on the origins of Greek thinking as a whole. Above all, McEwen struggles to free us from the assumption that the early Greeks believed that the order and pattern of kosmos was imposed on a mute, inarticulate nature or phusis, along the lines suggested by Aristotelian hylomorphism. McEwen surveys a variety of passages in Homer, for example, which evoke a sense of making as more a question of gathering together, or failing to do so, those conditions under which something can be revealed, thus made visible. One example of this is Homer’s description of Thersites’ speech in Book II of the Iliad as ou kata kosmon, a something “without kosmos,” in the sense of disorderly and disharmonious, lacking in the jointure that is emblematic of harmonia. In the case of the speech, the lack of order comes to light through speaking, which can also be understood as an act of making: for to “make” is in a primary sense to make apparent, through ordering and arranging, that which results in its visibility as well-wrought, or fails to do so. Making is thus that which allows order to become manifest—or fails to do so; not because making is some independent force, imposing a pattern on things, but because it is that which stands as the potential for kosmos to come to light, thus to be visible as a thing of wonder (thauma idesthai). Here we can see that the sense of “order” implicit in kosmos, as in harmonia (which in Homer was originally a shipbuilding term that referred to joinery), is not a neutral concept of structure, but brings with it a sense of the transcendent. McEwen argues that a standard, itself transcendent to making, is implied in the ancient descriptions of wonders of well-crafted or constructed artifacts (daidala). This was in turn the source of the divinity recognized in such artifacts by the ancients: they embodied a transcendence, one witnessed in theoria, in wonder, which was in turn not limited to the simple observation of a specific pattern. Yet this transcendence did not belong to a vision separate from the making, but the making just was the bringing into view of the standard, or better, the making just was the appearing of the kosmos. “In fact kosmos,” McEwen remarks, “at times seems to share the very identity of making.”20 The resulting wonder, as a kind of aura of transcendence, and with that the fundamental orientation of theoria that orchestrates its visibility, remained gathered around the artifact, the well-wrought daidalon itself specifically as something made. Different permutations of the thought that there is an intimate connection between appearance, a transcendent standard of value (the good, the divine), and the movement that brings something into existence as achieving its good, lies arguably at the core of much of ancient Greek thought. It is in the success 20

Ibid., p. 43.

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or failure of the movement of action, including making, that things either fall short of what they are, the standard of their essence, or achieve the successful realization of the same, all within the horizon of a coming into view. To recall an example of Aristotle’s from the Nicomachean Ethics (1103b6–7), one becomes a good builder by building well, a bad builder by building badly; the movement of the activity is both manifestation and constitution of a being, a success or failure that, as an activity, unfolds in phenomenal presence. Likewise for Aristotle the un-virtuous are those who in action, and with that in full view, fall short of realizing the work (ergon) of the human being (1097b9ff), revealing the extent to which the fusion of character and rational principle required for a good life is lacking. McEwen’s argument is, in effect, that an original archetype and source of this idea of a movement that reveals, in which the result of a making-apparent forms the basis or ground for witnessing the success or failure of things to be what they are, is the making of artifacts, symbolized in the mythical well-wrought daidala of the (apparently) eponymous Daedalus. Except that in the more archaic, pre-classical context there is little distance between ordering and order, between arranging and arrangement, which is arguably a defining characteristic of Aristotle’s thought. From the more archaic optics, craft does not simply shuttle between idea and matter, arche and reality, and with that between two, at least implicitly distinct orders of apprehension. Instead craft, the act of making, is the birthplace of a distinctive mode of visibility, one that leaves in its wake a unique and original spectacle of an order (kosmos) that finds its first possibility through an ordering (kosmon), or more broadly, an “arranging, ordering, and adorning” that animates: The marvels Homer and Hesiod qualify as thauma idesthai, a wonder to behold, are each and every one of them daidala. The metalwork, carpentry, or weaving that brought them to light, so that they may be beheld, do so through kosmon, which is simultaneously arranging, ordering, and adorning. Craft gives things life, and it is no accident that tiktein is to give birth, tektein to build, and techne a letting appear.21 The first to articulate in prose the look of the unfolding of this order of appearance (or appearance of order), McEwen argues, was Anaximander, but the one

21

Ibid., p. 55. On the development of the concept of techne in ancient Greece, see S. Cuomo, “The definition of techne in classical Athens,” in Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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who discovered it first was Socrates’ ancestor, the mythical architect Daedalus, the craftsman of statues of gods that revealed the living presence of the divine so powerfully that they had to be tied down. These daidala, one should conclude from McEwen’s discussion, are not themselves divine, and were not understood to be such; they are instead the divine-made-visible, a living visibility that qualifies them as thauma idesthai, things to be wondered at. Likewise, the wonders of a well-wrought breastplate or hoplite shield, or the tight-fitting joinery of a ship, or an image woven into a textile, do not simply amount to things that conform to functions, and which can be identified as such by those who know how to use them. As daidalon, they possess a distinctively animated, living visibility of the kosmoi they provide as spectacles for seeing, for theoria. Their look, not in the sense of the Platonic eidos but in a more fluid, indistinctive sense of a surface put forward, or the birth of an appearing, is what stands out as an offer to vision. In short, thauma idesthai represent, McEwen argues, examples of appearance as skin: [T]o build an ancient Greek boat or weave an ancient Greek textile was to create something that was essentially skin; something that, like the Homeric body (chros), was an epiphaneia: a surface and an appearing.22 An orientation towards skin is not a simple matter of perception, a way of seeing or a sensibility for form, but is often associated with specific techniques of construction. So for example the Greeks, like the Egyptians, did not construct ships by sheathing a ribbed frame, but built the hull out of a solid skin of planks joined together by mortise and tendon, like the famous Khufu ship found at Ghiza.23 Accordingly, such artifacts are not simply things, but things adorned, arranged; they are crafted surfaces that reveal kosmos, bringing it to surface and appearing, either successfully or unsuccessfully. Part of the challenge of this thought is not to immediately think of surface and adornment as superficial and “cosmetic,” thus to undervalue the force of the specifically prepared and built phenomenality of epiphaneia. Built space, crafted artifacts, daidalon are all, I would argue, names for that potential for appearance itself to stand apart from its normal functioning of letting something 22 23

Ibid., p. 71. See Lionel Cassou, The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediterranean in Ancient Times (Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1991); cited by McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, pp. 49–50. Also see Björn Landström, Ships of the Pharoahs: 4000 Years of Egyptian Shipbuilding (New York: Doubleday, 1970).

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be seen, where the being-seen or revealed itself forms an axis according to which something stands apart or stands out from a surrounding context of the ordinary, or everything that falls short of the threshold of wonder. Implicit in this idea of epiphaneia, in other words, of surface and appearing as the revelatory force of kosmos, is the idea of an exemplary phenomenon. As a result of McEwen’s analysis, the figure of Daedalus comes to represent a particular kind of wisdom, an insight into things that takes the form of a knowledge of how to bring pattern and order into a distinctively living visibility, giving them a surface and appearance—or better, a skin thanks to which they come to light. Kosmos is accordingly not limited to the divine being of phusis, which can either be grasped in thought or not. It belongs to making, and thus includes the human order as well, which as a result blends together, into an often-vexed relation, phusis and convention, the order of the world and the human coordination of life. It is important to understand how far this is, for example, from the medieval view of apparent order, in which the theoretical understanding of the structure and form of a natural entity can fix, by analogy, a glimpse into the structure and form of the whole. The potential for a thing to come alive qua daidalon, to bear its visibility in such a way that brings order to light, is a much more semantically indeterminate sense of order than what is expressed in the medieval concept of an analogia entis, even if it presents an essential chapter in its prehistory. The idea that the semantics of kosmos are originally structured according to the dynamic of making is also significant when we turn to the political sphere. For the polis also has its skin, and with that its epiphaneia. “The city was an artifact,” as McEwen stresses, “and the demiourgos, at least in the early stages of Greek consciousness, was as much the legislator who made public order as the craftsman who made the kosmos of things.” This suggests in turn that the “public or political order” is part of a more general order of making, or making appear, of which the kosmos of the polis is only one aspect. The circular seating of elders in assembly (the very embodiment of political kosmos) is but one of several ways in which order may become manifest.24

24 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, p. 46. McEwen then goes on to cite the thirteenth Homeric epigram: “Children are a man’s crown, towers of a city; horses are the kosmos of a plain, and ships the kosmos of the sea; wealth will make a house great, and reverend princes [basileis] seated in assembly [ein agorei] are kosmos for folk to see.” Hesiod, the Homeric

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On the basis of these suggestions of McEwen’s, we can begin to discern a deeper connection between two ideas that we have been pursuing in our attempt at a phenomenology of built space. The first is the concept of an exemplary phenomenon, that is, a phenomenon in which phenomenality itself is in focus, experienced in a distinctive manner as something that sets it apart, as if making visibility itself visible. I take this to be a fundamental truth that is expressed, in a compact and mythical form, in the sophia of Daedalus, and which is articulated on a number of levels in McEwen’s essay. It is essentially a wisdom that concerns itself with the life of surfaces, and is embodied in a craft as that comprehension of the power of the well wrought to bring order into a space where it can be beheld by theoria, and thus enjoyed in its wonder. Secondly, the wisdom of Daedalus in turn allows us to revisit the Arendtian concept of the polis as a “space of appearance.” Above, we described this space in terms of a material coordination of action, of a means for preserving in the artifact world the words and deeds of those who engage in the realm of action. The polis thus represents a publicly accessible space of encounter that allows for the complexity (and intrigue) of specifically political relationships, which for Arendt are intrinsically bound up with problems of meaning, of making sense out of what we do and what we face on the level of our communal existence. In the wake of McEwen’s discussion, we are invited to think of this space as built in a sense other than the preservative order of signs, emphasizing over and above permanence the manner in which the rhythms of political life let the order of the polis appear. The built lets the polis come to light through a rhythm of a making that forms the existential tempo of gathering and meeting, dispersing and canvassing a multifaceted space of encounter, weaving together the horizon of the presence of a political existence as something living.25 In this sense the political world has in the ordered arrangements of its place a skin, a surface and an appearance; but it is a skin that it has been given not only by builders, by craftsmen in a narrow sense, but by all the effective demiourgoi who possess an understanding of the deep connection between making and appearing, and who pursue the ends of the political in a world of

25

Hymns, and Homerica, trans. H.G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). Cf. Christian Norberg-Schulz’ discussion of the ancient Greek colony of Priene on the coast of Asia Minor in his Architecture: Presence, Language, and Place, pp. 95ff, especially the interesting description of the role of the theater on p. 95: “The place revolves around the theater, which—aside from the clarification that it offers to the temple [of Athena]—presents the local world of life in the dramatic form of a representation. Therefore, it is hardly happenstance that precisely from this spot it is possible to enjoy a fine panoramic view of the settlement and the surrounding environment.”

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things animated by their presence. The question of phenomenality here is thus not limited to result, to the products or artifacts of techne, but involves that dynamic of access that we pursued above when reflecting on built space in terms of that which has been shaped in accordance with an understanding of human possibility. The wisdom of Daedalus, one might conclude, has to do precisely with the idea of the surface and appearance of things as constitutive of a space of appearance that invites our engagement in the pursuit of ourselves. McEwen’s project is to reconstruct the archaic origins of Western thought. This is a speculative venture, to be sure, one that far surpasses the exercises in a phenomenology of the built world pursued here. In the end, her essay has to be inconclusive, even if it remains suggestive. The evidence she adduces suggests the remnants of an archaic sense of a tangible, living bond between making and appearing, one that was doomed to be subsumed by a later conception of theoria that did not restrict itself to witnessing glimmers of the divine in the experience of the skillful manipulation of how things present themselves. Classical thought was to put techne under far more stringent demands for an order of a different kind, one fixed in a way ultimately alien to the inevitable vicissitudes of anything made. This inaugurated a very different mode of seeing, with its own unique sense of appearance, that finds, as McEwen argues, its first and perhaps most powerful expression in Plato: For Plato, episteme and sophia no longer had anything to do with skill. Daedalean episteme, the uncertain, elusive knowledge of experience, was subsumed to, absorbed by, the certainty of knowledge as seeing, eidenai, with the eidos, the thing seen, fixed and eternal, as its ultimate object and source. […] The earlier understanding that sophia-as-skill, the complement of a techne that allowed kosmos to appear, was itself the very revelation of the divine in experience, had been lost.26

The Problem of Built Space

The pressure of this new, Platonic conception of knowledge, and the modification of the experience of seeing that lies at its core, represent an essential dimension of the history of the concept of seeing that, among other things, matures into the competing conceptions of knowledge that we explored in Chapter 1 through the opposition between architect and engineer. The phenomenological perspective here allows us to suspend this influence, at least 26 McEwen, Socrates’ Ancestor, pp. 126–127.

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provisionally, in order to attempt to bring out the experiential connection between making and appearing that it obscures. This will allow us in turn to take up again the question of knowledge, though now with a more robust understanding of the experiential dynamics that govern the relation between our understanding of the human world and the reality of built form. This will be the general task of the last two chapters of this work. We can think of the guiding question as taking the following form: How can we think built space as both the space of encounter and the space of appearance? These ideas seem to be moving in two different directions. Built space as a space of encounter seems to push us towards a reflection on its intersubjective character, or that complex of ego-body orientation thanks to which the other is encountered across a distance, or that lived spatiality that can be shaped by another who thereby intends my interested being in his intentions. Built space then seems to be the primal phenomenon of the depth of the world, in that the world emerges in this reflection as something with a distinctively intersubjective depth, carrying with it meanings and interests that transcend my own and which in turn constitute complex contexts or situations of an encounter with others. It may be that this is just what Arendt had in mind with the phrase “space of appearance”—namely, no more or no less than the public character of the world, the realm in which we become visible as those who engage others precisely through the grammar of a space that is constituted as a permanent, if also fragile legacy of actions and words. But if we on the other hand reflect more on the theme of appearance, and learn to recognize its special resonance in the context of the built world, then we seem to be led away from the depths of things back up to their surface and proximity, to the “skin” of a world thanks to which its visibility as such becomes uniquely constitutive of the complex of contexts or situations of encounter that constitute our interested being in the world. The task before us is thus to find a way to mediate between surface and depth, proximity and distance, in order to construct a vocabulary of the built world that will enable us to fix for reflection the nature of its intelligibility. Towards framing the challenges represented by this task, the next two chapters will pursue the issues of depth and surface through a set of phenomenological exercises having to do with expression and presence, respectively.

chapter 7

Built Space and Expression

Towards the Problem of Expression

Faced with the problem of understanding the opposition between surface and depth at the end of the last chapter—the surface of the space of appearance and the depth of the space of encounter—one might think that a ready solution lies at hand in the concept of expression. Could we not conceive of the space of appearance as the expressive skin, as it were, of the space of encounter, in the sense of the relation between a signifier and its signified, an expression and its referential meaning? This would transform the question of the ability to access the one through the other into the question of how to understand the significance of the world through the tissue of significations that would constitute its appearances. This engagement with the world as expression, one might think, might even in the end constitute the fundamental logic that governs any knowledge of the built world. Yet such an appeal to expression, especially from a phenomenological point of view, raises more questions than it settles. Let us look closer at how we might be able to introduce the theme at all, given what we have established descriptively in the foregoing chapters. Above it was argued that one could approach the idea of built space in terms of a threefold orientation that constitutes its subjective, lived Gestalt. The first of these elements of orientation is that of the body, understood as comprising a field of spatial potentialities that have as their structuring basis the kinaestheses of the perceiving body and their motivated correlates in the sensuous manifestations of things. As we saw, the salient characteristic of this dimension of orientation is a distinctive figure of a unity of “spatiality” that is much more the unity of a movement, an unfolding development of the objective features of things, than the unity of a given plenum of space as something static, a fixed set of objective features that could be represented in the manner of a kind of inventory. The one is however not completely unrelated to the other; in both cases, that of the subjective unfolding of givenness and of the fixed world of coordinated objectivities, the relevant concept is of space as partes extra partes. Likewise, in both cases the aim is to find a way to articulate manifold senses of distance, distribution, and coordination. The phenomenological elaboration of lived spatiality and more traditional analyses of the built world that rely on geometric representation thus overlap in salient ways; the point is not to take this overlap as evidence of an underlying identity, or to interpret © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340015_009

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our success in the rigorous theoretical articulation of geometric space in the principles and techniques of mapping and surveying, for example, as the effective negation of the productive phenomenological tension that exists between the lived and the thought. Both the pyramid and the labyrinth have a right to stake claim to this ground. To focus on the geometric at the expense of the lived is to make the mistake of placing order over movement, when in fact the spatiality of the body is as much about movement as it is about order; or, to evoke the discussion in the last chapter, it is as much about the engagement with the revealing or uncovering of order as it is an example of an order brought into view. The second essential dimension of orientation discussed above was the egoic or personal, which was understood as comprised of a field of practical potentialities. The key here is not to base our notion of the practical on a conception of a free subject that confronts the world as an object of its will; more important is to grasp the sense of the subject as something concrete, laden with habitualities and given patterns of behavior and interest that orient choice and will at any given time. There is no such thing as an orientation in space, in the world, that does not draw its very possibility from the being of someone, of a life that does not simply overlay an object world with interpretations, but represents a complex structured access to things. Whereas with the body we needed to guard against a notion of corporeal existence as dense and fixed in favor of a fluidity of movement and dynamic engagement with the possible, with the ego or self we need to guard against an emphasis on disembodied freedom and choice that would overlook the friction of concretely situated, personal existence. At any given moment of encounter with things and others we not only face a world that has already taken a certain definite shape, but also our very selves that have likewise already taken a certain definite shape, and as that shape form a distinct dimension of orientation. The third essential dimension of orientation discussed above was that of intersubjectivity, which was understood as comprising a complex of different modes of sense or meaning that amount to what could be called a transvaluation of the subjective. Whatever I encounter, whatever I see and do, however I see the world, whatever in short comes to have a sense or meaning “for me,” also undergoes necessarily a determination as a sense or meaning “for others.” This can play itself out as either the direct involvement of others in my activities (as partners, opponents, or the peculiar influence of the indifferent), or as the bare exposure of my understanding to the potential for such involvement—and with that the infinite variety of examples that fall between these two poles of concern and indifference. This necessity of the responsiveness of the horizon of meaning to the presence of others yields a distinct pattern of orientation: whatever I experience “for me” is oriented by the intrinsic potential of being

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experienced “by others,” as a constant accompanying pole of potential determination, or better, the susceptibility of all determination to recalibration. We thus live in a world that is as much for others as for ourselves; we are conscious of the sense of things as exposed to an “inter-” subjective structure, which excludes in principle any perfect integrity of a distance from others guaranteed by some putative interiority of our minds. This transvaluation of the intersubjective always represents a challenge and a promise—a challenge to the flow of understanding, to the forward moving cogency of experience, and a promise of an invitation to enrichment, thus making the world not only a space of encounter but equally a space of discovery. Out of a reflection on these three dimensions of orientation the problem of built space can be seen developing along several tracks. First, any built space offers, just as does any environment, a set of potential encounters with things in the field of perceptual life, all unfolding in accordance with the potentialities represented by the subject as a lived body. The problem then is whether there is something bodily distinctive about a specifically built space, or whether in the end our encounter with things in the horizon of what is not built instead provides the dominant paradigm. An interesting intermediate case in this context would be that of the buildable: what, on the level of the body, is distinctive about the piece of wood or stone that the craftsman grasps as potentially buildable? What kind of distinctively perceptual possibility does this involve, if any? Take for example the activity of building a wall out of fieldstone: is the perceptual dimension of this activity neutral with respect to the whole of the activity of construction, of building? Is perception merely the neutral identifying intuition of the stone as stone, which is then simply synthesized with or combined with the practical interest of finding some material means to mark off the separation between one field and another? Or is the projection of a pile of stones gathered after the plowing of a field “towards” their placement in the wall as much a function of the eye and the hand as it is a function of the practical principles behind construction? That is, is there something distinctive about the perceiving that sees in the stone its movement towards the built, and with that something distinctive about the phenomenality of the buildable, and which can be described (at least in part) on the level of kinaesthetic orientation? A second track of the problem hinges on the thesis that built space can be encountered at all only through an interest in it that one takes to it, that is, from out of the horizon of concernful engagement with things that embody the concrete self. Built spaces in general are meaningful only from out of the primordial fact that they are inhabited by persons. The problem here then becomes again whether personhood is neutral vis-à-vis the built world,

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thus fundamentally transplantable from one site to any random other, or whether there are particular structures or forms of personhood necessary in order for a particular concrete built space to be habitable at all. In other words, the question here is why we take so much interest in spaces. Are they mere instrumental supplements to an action, to a world, that are essentially determined in advance? Or do we have here in view a far more fundamental level of constitution, where the very life of interest itself achieves or comes to its essence in part thanks to a particular history of inhabiting the built? This is all the more pressing when we realize that it is possible that interest and concern can lead to a kind of building in which space becomes fundamentally uninhabitable, the built world something closed to an estranged subjectivity. If personhood were effectively neutral, then it would relate to space as if to a random container; any relation to the built would be limited to questions of functionality or instrumentality, where habitability could be expressed in terms of a set of functions or needs universally relevant to “anyone.” But if not, if the question of who one is lies at the very heart of the reality of the built world, then there is much more at stake here than mere serviceability for life, and the problem of how the world can become uninhabitable much more complex. The third track of the problem, following the earlier reflections on the intersubjective dimension of oriented life, follows the structural consequences of the experience of the world as accessed by others. Built space is here conceived in terms of a nexus of possibilities, of potential experience, that has been already lived through, understood (interpreted by a subject, grasped as what it is), and shaped in accordance with that understanding, in the form of an organization of space that embodies this understanding, thereby rendering it distinctively concrete. Thus it is not simply that I encounter other embodied subjects in the world, that across things I greet or am able to greet the presence of others; but in an important sense the world as built, as shaped out of that making which is the legacy of other lives, represents the very comprehension of things achieved by others, one that I inhabit in the form of the built world. The world in this sense is the very embodiment of “understanding,” and along with that also misunderstanding, error, struggle, conflict, and disaster. Could, taken together, this threefold structure of orientation allow us to develop the question of expression on a phenomenological register? It can, but it will also point us to a rather different approach to the expressivity of the built world. Let us again consider each dimension of orientation in turn, and what it seems to suggest about expression. The experience of the built world is distinctively kinesthetic—could this mean that the built world is expressive of the kinaesthetic body?

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The architecture of Steven Holl, which we considered briefly above, might suggest just that. Holl’s work systematically explores the latent potential of built form to bend our attention towards a more direct self-regard that emphasizes the functioning of the lived perceiving body. This expressiveness can be complex, in that we can see in the graceful, perspectivally intricate forms of Holl’s parallax-constructions both the representation of complex patterns of perceptual experience and the performative living through of these patterns in the experience of the buildings themselves as specific concrete encounters. Likewise, this dimension of performativity at play in such structures can also be quite complicated, as for example Richard Serra’s Band sculptures, which pose a series of challenges for the visitor that mobilize a complex pattern of negotiated orientations around the perception of ordered spaces, the physical sense of mass, and patterns of ambulation. If the kinaesthetic body can find such explicit resonance in the patterns of the built, could we not think of the built world as a kind of second skin of the kinaesthetic body, the second skin that just is its expression? Second, the experience of the built world is oriented around life, around the person—does this not too suggest that the built expresses who we are, that it makes symbolically manifest that which constitutes the decisive elements of our existence? Here one might think again of Vitruvius, for whom the meaning of architecture was inseparable from the meaning of empire. Vitruvius presents explicitly, and repeatedly, the ten books of his De architectura as evidence of the glory of Augustus, the “divine mind and power” (divina … mens et numen) of “imperator Caesar.”1 For Vitruvius, architecture is first and foremost what it is only as the expression of this civic—or in this case imperial—spirit, the implication being that any understanding of a given architecture requires a grasp of whose architecture it is, or whom it is supposed to be for. And so in fact historical, ideological, social, aesthetic and philosophical concepts of who we are, or what human beings are supposed to be, have always been among the most important driving forces behind the theoretical elaboration of architecture beyond the more defined concerns of the engineer; or even, as we saw in Chapter 1, behind the development of the engineering ideal itself. Could we not therefore think of the built world as a kind of material testament to what it is that we have become, or hope to be? Third, the experience of the built world is intersubjective—does this not, as well, imply a modality of expression, to the extent to which any artifact is a sign not only of the presence of others, but of their interests and comprehension of things? Here one might think of a different Roman example, something with which Vitruvius was very familiar from his experience in Gaul, namely 1 Vitruvius, De architectura, I.1.

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the building of the military camp. The military camp was characteristic of the Roman way of war; it served not only various strategic and tactical purposes, such as the function of a rallying point for an orderly retreat or a base for reinforcements, but it also had the symbolic value of expressing the advance of the Roman vanguard into enemy territory. Through the camp, this advance, with its threat of conquest, becomes manifest as a visible force, with all the psychological and political value such a show of strength has in the context of an offensive war. This implies that the content of architectural expression is not limited to communicating abstract ideals that “define” who one is, but is able to express the more dynamic and open-ended manner in which we intend to engage others, and with that respond to their presence. Could we not therefore think of the built world as a fundamental means of communication, not only as expressing whom we are but, more specifically, as an expression of our intentions? The idea is deceptively simple: built space is made up of a web of significations, and as such it expresses meanings. Yet this is only part of the story. Though taking built spaces and forms as expressions in this sense is important, it has become an all-too dominant way of approaching the theoretical discussion of the built environment, one that is insufficiently mitigated by supplementing the analysis with a reflection on aesthetics or the philosophy of art. With the rise of semiotics and post-structuralism, which brought a renewed emphasis on language as a point of departure for thinking the nature of human reality itself, there is a tendency to approach built space and architecture as a text to be deciphered, and that accordingly the task of a philosophy of architecture tends to be understood in terms of how to read the structures that we build as so many experiments in signification or attempts at expression. A characteristic example of this tendency is the 1977 essay by Jorge Silvetti, “The Beauty of Shadows.”2 This text illustrates well how complex and all-encompassing the idea of built form as text can be. Silvetti begins by distinguishing two different ways to approach criticism, which essentially comes down to two different modes of reading. The first seeks to evaluate the fitness of a structure as a solution to a particular architectural problem: such problems are often theoretical, usually practical, but can also be guided by distinctively ideological concerns. Theoretical problems often involve an attempt to understand the meaning of architecture, of finding in building some satisfying expression of ideas and concepts of an architecture that already exists or that might exist in the future. So for example Louis Kahn’s ideas about the metaphorical power of materials find expression in a surprisingly versatile 2 Jorge Silvetti, “The Beauty of Shadows,” Oppositions 9 (Summer 1977), in Architecture Theory Since 1968, pp. 262–283.

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use of concrete in a number of his architectural projects. Practical problems, on the other hand, often involve the functional coherence of a structure, or its relation to an already composed environment. An example of the latter is the question of the stylistic cohesion or disruption of a building project in the midst of other buildings in a city district, a problem that can be illustrated with Hans Hollein’s postmodern Haas Haus in Stephansplatz in Vienna. The Haas Haus stands directly across from the cathedral in the center of the oldest part of the city; it stands apart stylistically, but it also, on an aesthetic level, engages the cathedral and surrounding architecture through its reflective glass exterior and the impact that its location has on the ambulatory morphology of the square. Ideological problems involve not so much the meaning of architecture as the meaning of an event, a history, or a social phenomenon. As is the case in more pure theoretical problems, the question revolves around what such structures are to “say,” what they are to be taken to “mean,” but now the point of departure has to do with ideas of history, culture, and experience, and are not limited to the meaning of architecture as such. Here we might think of Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin: the fundamental architectural problem in this case has to do with the challenge of events that defy or disrupt meaning, to such an extent that makes problematic the very attempt make sense of things, straining the expressive capacity of architecture to rise above confusion and empty abstraction in order to take a stand, or accomplish a recognizable posture with respect to what the structure is taken to be “about.” On some level, monuments or memorial structures that attempt to express the meaning of complex events always risk confusion or distortion, a risk that can either lend a sense of depth and significance, as is arguably the case with Eisenman’s memorial, or be manipulated for overtly political or ideological ends, so for example in the case of Trajan’s Column. Another mode of ideological criticism seeks to place architecture into either an historical or a social context, thus situating theory within a larger thematic framework or body of understanding. One might think here of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, or Stephen Barber’s Extreme Europe,3 both of which seek to situate a reflection on architectural space within a larger discussion of what has come to be called “cultural history.” Delirious New York seeks to grasp the reality of Manhattan as a built environment in terms of the violent and unstable consumerism characteristic of late capitalism, while Barber’s essay seeks in the visual culture of the peripheral regions of the European urban environment expressions of the social, economic, and political struggles that define 3 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York: Monacelli Press, 1977); Stephen Barber, Extreme Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2001).

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Figure 6  Stephansplatz (Vienna, Austria). Photo by author.

post-1989 Europe. It is significant that both of these works, and many others like them, effectively take the form of travelogues—the theoretician walks us through an urban landscape that functions as so many concrete signifiers of the various cultural phenomena that have been identified by a particular theoretical discourse as significant. Here it is not so much the representation of

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architectural form, as the given state of our artifact culture that serves as an effective rhetorical organization of analysis, in ways that are not that far from the techniques of classical rhetoric with its focus on the strategic use of images to persuade. The state of a built environment, say Manhattan or the workingclass suburbs of Paris, functions as a place in which to anchor a thought or an idea, providing the general argument about society or culture a certain weight and presence.

Figure 7  Holocaust Memorial (Berlin, Germany). Photo by author.

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This mapping of different modes of critique (or reading), however, is all just preliminary to Silvetti’s real interest, which lies in his proposal for an alternative form of criticism that contrasts to this first group of more traditional styles. This alternative form responds, in part, to a perceived gulf emerging between the activity of building and the activity of interpreting architecture. Silvetti argues that the interpretive activity of reading should be folded into architectural practice itself, thus allowing for the creation of symbolically charged cultural artifacts that embody what he calls “criticism from within.” By this Silvetti means a criticism that finds traction within the act of building itself, and which is not limited to approaching the problem from the outside in the form of a reading that takes up the built as an already accomplished artifact. This criticism, or reading, would take place within and as the building process, exploring ways to engage the fact that to build means to have in view the built form as something to be read. Here the self-conscious and self-critical architect effectively assumes a position in which the meaning-determinations germane to the theoretical perspective can be influenced through the instruments of building—the architect finds, so to speak, in the constructability of the built world the expressive means for engaging its readability, as if construction itself were analogous to a language, and building an effective form of writing with meaning. What is interesting about this idea of a “criticism from within” is the figure of a built form commenting on itself, as if building could be thought of as an activity, a praxis, that shapes its own interpretation without having to first step back, so to speak, and adopt an external perspective. The promise this holds for Silvetti amounts to a particular mode of architectural independence, and with that his suggestion fits into the modernist tradition of architectural autonomy,4 though at the same time, as Silvetti himself emphasizes, it holds much in common with Mannerism. However, it is important to recognize that Silvetti’s point is not to find a means thanks to which the architect is able to determine, in advance, how something is to be read; but instead the idea is that the realm of the built is plastic enough, and our experience of it dynamic enough, that architecture can take the form of a text that reads itself as we read it, and with that retains its right to be a player in its own meaning-determination by continuing to point to itself-as-read. Building, in other words, has for Silvetti the potential

4 For a history of this idea, and its invention in architectural history, see Anthony Vidler, Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

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to be distinctively dialogical—with all the anticipations, evasions, challenges, and openness to determination that entails. The idea of a “criticism from within” can be thought of as the challenge of opening up the closed, mute character of the “text” that is characteristic of the relation between architecture as signifier and the form of criticism that progresses through the means of language alone. This can be taken in either a strong sense, or in a weak sense. The weak sense is just that the expectation of being read ought to be built into the process of design as a “critical” element. But then the kind of reading in force would in effect be no different than what is found in the interpretive criticism of cultural symbols that have not been produced “critically”: meaning would remain that already-prepared fund of determination encountered by the one trying to understand. More, if the “reading” thus pursued and elaborated is effectively the production of a kind of knowledge (a cultural, social, political knowledge and understanding, so to speak), then the point is as old as Vitruvius: architecture just is the knowledge of how to build for the kinds of citizens who know who they are, like the Romans, and who are capable of reading the familiar myths of their foundation and destiny off the temples, statues, and plazas of the marble city. The stronger interpretation would collapse the differential between the activity of building, with its critical self-anticipation of being read, and the finished product. This would then entail an understanding of building as the embodiment of a critical element as a living engagement with its own being-read in a more persistent, enduring and dynamic fashion. The built would thus not be the mere locus of a given expression of meaning-content, but an unfolding of an ever-renewed accomplishment of sense that would be governed in part by the enduring legacy of the architectural expression itself—as if the movement of sense, the shifting of one meaning to another, were the constant fulfillment of the critical intention from within, where architecture would effectively become a unique presence within the discourse of its sense, as a signifier that puts itself forward qua signified in a dynamically unfolding discourse of determination. This stronger reading surfaces in Silvetti’s discussion of the Mannerist 16th century architect Giulio Romano, specifically his Palazzo del Te in Mantua, Italy, which ironically manipulates the language of form, balance, and scale so central to classical architecture, but without falling outside its horizon. Romano achieves this through a systematic introduction of disturbances, inconsistencies, and “errors,” such as the famous loose triglyphs at the Palazzo del Te, which both reproduce the code of classical Renaissance architecture but at the same time hold its standards in ironic suspension. The result is an architectural space that is simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable,

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forcing on the one who encounters it into a state of confusion, but also posing a demand to be thought and interpreted. Silvetti’s description: Shocking at first, the object impatiently unfolds before us a universe of meanings hitherto hidden from us; and our initial feeling of disturbance gives way to a pleasurable sensation of intellectual complicity between the architect and ourselves after we have, not without effort, succeeded in disclosing the building’s arcane messages. The object appears as a revelation, not of sacred but of heretical nature because it confronts us with a subversive meaning whose opaque effect proposes and obliges us to perform a certain intellectual task of deciphering. The object cannot be consumed, but must be interpreted; indeed, we must wander along the same path that the architect followed; we must work with it.5 But if this stronger reading is the point, and what Silvetti has in mind is something like a text that, in a way, openly speaks to us as what is being spoken about, then in what sense are we still talking about “reading”? For the point is not simply to create puzzles, but to reproduce meanings in a way that opens them up, critically, towards new possibilities. Inner criticism would, so to speak, demythologize a language that it nevertheless continues to speak. But in what sense are we still working within the metaphor of a text, if it effectively amounts to an expression that is open to re-articulating itself, effectively rewriting itself in and as read? To be sure, there is nothing surprising about the self-referentiality of a text, or any expression, even one that engages how it is to be read. More, it is clear that this is not a mere accidental feature of texts; however naïve, inchoate, or primitive a text, its very existence is an expression of its being something to be read, or at the very least seen. It is only at a higher order that the potential for complex patterns of reference unfold, including expressions that express what as expressions they stand in relation to. One might also think here of music as a more obvious example of this than architecture. Gustav Mahler would draw heavily on familiar styles and motifs from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart into his symphonies; these are not simple references to other composers, but exercises in expressing a relation to the tradition, and in complex ways: these notes on the past stand not only as instances of commonality, of marks of influence, but the music itself is remarking on its own relation to tradition, it is playing with it, and in that sense both fusing itself with it and freeing itself from it. 5 Silvetti, “The Beauty of Shadows,” p. 270.

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These elements are references in both senses of a commonality, an identity, but also to the emphasis on that identity. Of course we might also think here of language itself, since in a key sense Silvetti’s discussion of criticism from within really is just about the idea of building as a form of language, and of criticism as a meta-language that uses the elements of construction as an expressive resource on the meaning of construction, or the interpretation of contemporary architecture. But this also raises questions, above all given the fact that the structuralist reflection animating Silvetti’s discussion has as its aim a sense of how, within language, one may strive to subvert its functioning, thus to create not so much a space of autonomy, as an effect of freedom within the horizon of “normal” signification. In what consists the potential for a free exercise of meaning in language taken as such? Any linguistic expression is a complex space of encounter: to speak, I must formulate what I want to say, “in” language; I must find the words, even before I am fully clear on what it is that I will say once I do. What does that mean? There is what I want to say, and the role language plays in enabling me to even know that I want to say it; so on the one hand there seems to be a freedom, in the sense that there is a choice behind my saying “Mahler’s orchestration of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ is remarkably successful,” and on the other hand there is a given set of possibilities of expression provided by language to say just that, and in more than one way. Language as expression makes possible a particular manifestation of freedom; but language itself is not something that I freely generate, even if at the same time it opens for my freedom a distinct field of expression as a field of open possibility. In language, I am both free and unfree, open and closed, released and bound; thus critique, as a meta-linguistic exercise of the problematization of the semantic codes that fix the character and style of languages, can be thought of as a higher order manifestation of the interplay between this freedom and this bondage. One might want to say something similar about architecture, at least if what we have in mind is the act of building as a means of expression. However, given what we have explored in previous chapters, we might at this point wonder whether the theme of “expression” is being thought of here in too limited a fashion. This appears to be the case, at least if we have in mind only a movement comparable to what occurs between the writing and the reading of a text. Or better, perhaps we pose the problem even of “reading” and “writing” insufficiently, if we limit them both to the production and interpretation of a multiplicity of expressions that somehow bear or carry meaning, as so many rhetorical placeholders of sense. What seems to emerge here is the picture of the built world as a universe of ciphers, a world of symbolic artifacts

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being reproduced continuously as the opportunity of so many gestures of interpretation. This is certainly true enough on one level, but it nevertheless falls short as a totalizing gesture. More, one might wonder whether the entire analogy of the text, even of music or language, is misleading when it comes to built space. For do we not inhabit the built world in a fundamentally different way than we inhabit the world of texts? Can the meaning of habitation be articulated in a built world described as a symphony of expressive forms? Specifically, does the composition and interpretation of something like a text model exhaustively the manner in which the expressivity of built space provides the basis for the experience, even for the meaning of the built?

From Textual to Hodological Expression

The task before us, in other words, is to free ourselves from the limits of the analogy of the text that we have been following, and attempt to delimit a sense of expressivity that cleaves closer to the phenomenality of the built world described in previous chapters. This will provide us both with a reaffirmation of the importance and cogency of the analogy between the expressivity of the built world and textual reading and writing, as well as mark off where the analogy weakens and ultimately falls short of reaching what is essential. It is obvious that, at least on the surface, the themes of expression and manifestation are closely linked. Yet this proximity is also a source of confusion: our ideas about expression tend to be much more precise, much more ­reliable as tools of analysis than our ideas about manifestation. One might even be tempted to say that expression represents the highest grade of meaningful manifestation, and mean by that expression precisely in the sense of a language. There is some truth to this, but it is phenomenologically important to recognize forms of manifestation that are prior to or other than expression, as well as forms of expression prior to or other than words. Much of the preceding chapters are contributions to the former, and now the task is to understand what might be meant by the latter. The thesis here will be that the expressivity of built space can be phenomenologically elaborated in terms of the given, concrete character of the built world as a situation. The fundamental infrastructure of the situation remains the oriented space of the body, egoic interest, and the intersubjective, but its full essence comes into view only when one understands the dynamic unfolding of orientation as both historical and in terms of its event-character. The thesis is thus that the expressivity of the built world resides in the manner in which it provides the historical density and event-character of situations with

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a distinctive morphology that tracks, not meanings posited by an author (or any social agency), but the unfolding of the situation itself. To explain what this means, let us turn to the example of the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Or rather, let us turn to a description developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Volume One of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, which opens for us a way in which we can think of the manner in which the expressivity of the built world plays a concrete, constitutive role in human events.6 Sartre takes up the example of the Bastille in Chapter I of Book II, “The Fused Group” (“Le groupe en fusion”).7 This chapter explores how groupings of individuals, or collectives, inaugurate a qualitative change in the kind of action characteristic of the mass or collective, one that shifts from the aggregation of individual acts to the concentrated focus of a genuinely collective course of pursuit. Sartre’s discussion is in part motivated by a Marxist interest in the phenomenon of class consciousness and its role in the mechanics of collective action, but he is also keen to develop an account of how given, material factors of whatever kind—historical, physical, biological—provide inescapable conditions for the dialectical determination of action, and thus specifically situate and individuate any given historical event. The given historical event in this example is the French Revolution, more specifically its beginnings in actions such as the storming of the Bastille and the Tennis Court Oath; and among the inescapable conditions germane to the analysis of this event for Sartre, and the reason why his account is of interest to us, is the physical geography of the city of Paris. Before reconstructing Sartre’s analysis, we need to sketch some of the basic concepts that he develops in the Critique and which find application in his account of the Bastille. The most important is perhaps the idea of the practico-inert, which describes the manner in which the current concrete situation is conditioned by the legacies of past praxis. The continuing legacies of past events, actions, and human projects not only lend the concrete present its specific historical density, but also shape its possibilities through an inertial pull that both constricts negatively and pushes positively forward. What we have done in a space, or a place, is in this way as “material” as the stones that make up the buildings that provide its most approachable outward order. The practico-inert is not simply a question of memory, but is constitutive of the sense of something having been done that is activated by memory, without being reducible to it. The practico-inert is for Sartre a fundamental condition 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 2004) (hereafter cited as CDR). 7 Sartre, CDR, pp. 351–363.

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of the human world; the world is primordially for us something worked, or better its fundamental being is that of worked matter. The practico-inert thus forms the potential horizon for the alienation of praxis, for the encountering of one’s own being and labor as other than oneself, and constitutes the primordial historical character of any action in the field of material life. The possibilities of praxis are determined and conditioned by the constant pressure of an inertial impotence that has its origin in what has already been done as something ingrained in the very materiality of our existence. This includes our sociality, the produced character of our modes of labor and existence, and likewise the produced character of the artifact world in which our existence, our praxis, is carried out. The field of the practico-inert establishes in turn the essential conditions for the tendency of human groupings to be constituted in the form of what Sartre describes as the structure of seriality (la structure sérielle).8 Serial groupings describe the collective situation defined in terms of the placement of each individual in a definite position within a context in which all stand as distinctly “other” to one another. Seriality in Sartre’s sense is neither disunity, nor fragmentation; on the contrary, it describes a distinctive modality of unity, but where the grouping is a unity, a whole, which takes place in terms of the mode of an inertial separation, an internal negation that characterizes its structure. The inertial separateness of seriality, as a proto-unity of human organization, forms a modality of synthesis that can in turn bear functional patterns that take on ever more complex strata of determination. So for example standing in line at the subway, individuals are “together” constituted as the unity of traffic that can be described in terms of definite patterns of movement through the station; the crowd here, as in the case of foot traffic moving down a sidewalk or automobile traffic along a highway, bears within its very anonymity both the dynamic of inertial separation and that of an organized pattern of unity. It is anonymous because everyone is “anyone,” and it is inertial to the extent that each encounters his or her own existence, own being, as given, and with that determined by patterns external to but nevertheless ingrained into one’s own free movement. Thus in seriality one encounters one’s own action as over and against oneself qua exemplar within a given, concrete social pattern. To some extent, what Sartre has in view with his conception of seriality is that anonymous mass of the city explored by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project and texts such as “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire,” where he emphasizes 8 Sartre, CDR, pp. 256f.

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its phantasmagoric character and seductiveness.9 Benjamin’s reflections on the city are helpful in this context, since even though the seriality of the mass, of the collective, is in some sense mechanical in nature, this should not obscure its complex aesthetic and mood. Serial being is not a totalized, unconscious, unthinking, frozen externality, but needs to be grasped in terms of its essence as, in Sartre’s terms, a “société créatrice de masses,” a creative society of the mass. In the Critique Sartre contrasts the inertial patterns of seriality with a modality of grouping, and with that of group action, that transforms the anonymous inertia of seriality through a modification of the kind of distance that constitutes it inwardly. This can be thought of as the transformation of the proximity that is effective in social existence from a serial proximity that isolates action, individualizing agency in an atomistic fashion (one compatible with its peculiar unity), to a proximity that de-individualizes action and thus suspends atomization in favor of its opposite, fusion. This result of this local, temporally limited but concrete transformation of action that dissolves seriality into something qualitatively different is what Sartre calls the fused group. In the fused group, seriality is overcome, or at least suspended, through the movement of an event, without which a fused group would not be possible. The event that allows for, even calls for coming together absorbs, so to speak, each individual into a relation with the whole thanks to which each represents, not an instance of contingent separation, but a fusion with all the others—every member of the collective is immediately identified as oneself, and oneself as all the others. What happens to “them,” even to “one,” happens to “me”; as a fused group, organically relating to itself through and to some extent as the movement of an event, what one faces and how one responds is inwardly significant as bearing within itself the forward momentum of the action of the group. It is important to stress that fusion falls short of solidarity, and most importantly it lacks basic conditions for proper organization; both solidarity and organization involve for Sartre a complex interweaving of different orders of the practico-inert. Rather, the ordering of the group in fusion has a distinctively unplanned, spontaneous character, and in this sense the fused group cleaves more to the movement of its event-character than around any kind of self-identification, organization, or strategic plan. The fused group has a direction, it does not come from nowhere; but its capacity to project itself into the 9 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002); “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. IV (1938–40), trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003).

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future along a sustained course of effort ultimately requires that it assume the benefits of seriality, through which it becomes more plastic, more manageable, more organized, and more enduring. In the Critique, Sartre is interested in the concrete conditions of the movement from seriality to fusion, and onward towards what he calls “the pledge” (le serment)—that grouping the unity of which is founded on the expressed allegiance of each member to the functional unity of the group, which in turn is oriented towards a future action or goal. For our purposes, it is the concept of the fused group that is of interest, especially given the example Sartre uses to describe its conditions of formation—namely, the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Again, this example is of interest, given the prominent role played by the city of Paris, not only as a set of concrete material conditions (qua concentration of population, or even in more strategic terms as a pattern of streets and buildings that determine a set of conditions for street fighting, etc.), but specifically what comes into view as the unique potential Paris represents as an expressive space of encounter. Let us now turn to Sartre’s analysis of the events of July 1789, which culminates in the emergence of a fused group of Parisians that storm the Bastille. The account divides into three phases, and we will take each in turn. The first phase begins with the King, Louis XVI, who, in response to the growing conflict with the Third Estate, makes the fateful decision to send troops to Paris in order to prevent disturbances. By 11 July the King’s soldiers surround the city, concentrating in Versailles, where the National Assembly was meeting, as well as in Sèvres, Saint-Denis, and the Champ de Mars. The action is a risky one, since in aiming at the suppression of dissent, Louis at the same time puts pressure on the populace of the city, creating a situation in which the action of the King takes the form of a distinct threat. The threat, to the extent to which it has no other real target than Paris itself, or the body of citizens in their serial existence, has a distinctively spatial determinateness: the threat of siege determines the space of Paris itself as a kind of “container.” This is in effect a specific determination of the seriality of the citizens, one that is defined in terms of an order grounded in the action of the “group” that represents the political authority of the King, namely his army. The dynamic of this threat comes to a head on 12 July, when word spreads of the King’s dismissal of the finance minister Jacques Neckar, which is interpreted widely as a sign of an impending attack on the Third Estate and the National Assembly itself. The second phase Sartre describes unfolds as frightened, individual citizens, in order to safeguard their lives, begin to arm themselves by looting supplies of weapons in the city. To be sure, the threat represented by the organized group of the soldiers, and with that the actions of the King that they project, is in

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many senses diffuse, and above all it is certainly not directed at the random individual in Paris; but the political climate is unsettled enough, there is enough uncertainty about the actual aims of the King, that the unfolding events in their externality put enormous pressure on individuals to secure their safety, precisely as individual persons. This still remains on the level of seriality, in that there is no collective decision, there is no coming together as a group in the form of a distinctively asserted “we” that takes as its task the protection of the whole (of Paris). All of the inertia and anonymity of the serialized collective called “the people of Paris” remains in place, even, and perhaps especially, with respect to their collective relation to the King. Nevertheless, this seriality now undergoes a modification, as a result of the clear anomaly of the situation in which an expression of the authority of the King motivates masses of individuals to seek the means to protect themselves. Namely, the progression of individuals arming themselves results, once it has reached a certain critical mass, in the collective phenomenon of “the people have armed themselves against the King.” Let us look closer at what this entails. At this point in Sartre’s reconstruction, the people are not in revolt. It is not even meaningful to speak of them as actively resisting the authority of the King. Their status as armed is obviously the result of collecting weapons, but that they are armed “against” the King is a concrete factor that each still encounters as something external, and not something that has flowed from an internal decision, individual or collective, to resist. It is, one could say, an extension of the logic of being contained in the city of Paris by the threat embodied in the King’s troops; the fear of personal harm coupled with the specter of a siege motivates a response that leads to the practical consequence of a body of citizens who have been armed. But this body is not armed “for” anything; at most, the weapons themselves have become, in the hands of individuals, symbols of a potential resistance, one that might (and certainly did) raise an alarm within the conservative circle of ministers around the King. Thus the phenomenon “the people have armed themselves against the King” does not take the form of a resistance that has been decided upon, but it is one that now stares individuals in the face as a potential decision to be made “by the group.” But the group that could make such a decision, or that would form around the force of that decision, exists at most only as the potential for overcoming seriality. And in fact it is the possibility of this overcoming of seriality that has now taken a concrete form as a tension within the serial being of the populace: the track into a possible future of resistance, so to speak, has been made manifest within the political situation, something that is recognized by the police (in alarm), and that forms the axis of (re)formation for the collective

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of the citizens. This is what I would like to emphasize as decisive about the event-character of collective action: it is not an “event” simply in the sense of the occurrence of something as the result of a series of actions or preceding events, but an event in the sense of something that first involves a threshold, a coming into manifestation of a prefiguration of its own possibility, thus as something that, as an event, takes shape in a horizon of emerging concrete possibilities of action or experience. The third phase that Sartre describes emerges in the wake of the escalation of the expressive, symbolic significance of the weapons in the hands of the populace. The more the threat of the King’s soldiers becomes palpably urgent, the more potent becomes the expressive potential of the arms; they are, so to speak, the conduit through which the recognition and identification of the threat of the King and the potential for the people of Paris to oppose this threat—or become its ultimate victim—unfolds. This means that, as artifacts, as part of the concrete reality of socially worked matter, the weapons do not merely express a given meaning, but rather form a distinctive symbolic resource within which the sense or meaning of the events are to be decided, and with that encountered as a concrete possibility of action. What is to be decided is in part what they are to mean, something that is not fixed in advance; this implies a phase in which the expressivity of the weapons takes on a specifically ambiguous character. The citizen, nervously keeping an eye on the confusion in the street, clutching in his hands a stolen musket he barely knows how to use, or even if it will work at all, in a sense does not yet know what it is that he is holding in his hands. At most he is aware that the situation is dangerous and seems to call for the musket, but he does not yet know what the response to the situation is really going to look like. As a point of historical fact, the decisive determination of the sense of the events unfolding in July 1789 was in favor of overcoming seriality towards fusion, resulting in an instance of collective action in which the people embraced open rebellion; this embrace took the specific form of the storming of the Bastille. Yet the intelligibility of this event, for Sartre, does not amount to the simple recognition of the necessity for action on the part of the populace, one that would take the form of a collective insight and response. Instead Sartre seeks to emphasize the contingencies of individual freedoms, and how these contingencies constitute the manner in which the people faced the potential for their own collective action. Collective resistance, as an instance of a fused group, is made possible for Sartre by the particular manner in which events unfold as enmeshed in the field of the practico-inert, where the possible itself becomes possible as the result of the complexities introduced by individual comportment, individual projections, as they are pursued in the field of praxis.

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There are thus no predictable outcomes here, and in fact the revolt could have faded, the opportunities of critical mass and engagement could have passed without being realized. A thousand-fold of factors can frustrate or quicken the coming together of any fused action. In other words, we should not confuse the path of history, reflectively articulated by the historian, with the historical character of the path embraced by action. In July 1789, the path was embraced in which the shape assumed by the threat of the forces of the King was experienced no longer individually, but “collectively” in the form of a fused grouping where each reacted as the “individual incarnation of the common person.” The result of this third and final phase is that the people now stand in opposition to the King. The manner in which this third and final phase unfolds is of the most interest to us. Already in the first and second phases, according to Sartre’s analysis, the built world is a significant, but relatively passive factor in the unfolding of the revolt; at most, it plays a role in the concrete expression of its potential. The city of Paris is a “container,” thus a spatial focus of conflict; likewise the collected arms carried through the streets by the mass of random citizens take on the concrete, if also ambiguous significance of potential revolt. In the wake, however, of the escalation of opposition between people and the King in the form of the threat of his troops outside the city, the Bastille itself takes on what can be described as a distinctively expressive role. This has its basis in the topography of the city, but it is also grounded in the formative influence of recent history. Combined with the symbolic potency of the collected arms, this topography and presence of the recent past combine in order to provide an active determination of the actual direction of the revolt, thus forming an organic part of the emergence of the fused group that will act, and with that of the culminating event of the storming of the Bastille itself. Let us look more closely at what is entailed by these two new elements being emphasized. First consider the relevant urban topography. The Bastille bordered the district of Saint-Antoine, where the poorer citizens of the city were concentrated. The structure rested on the site of what was originally the Saint-Antoine gate that had been extended during the Hundred Years’ War into a bastion to defend the eastern approach to Paris; this was later developed into a fortress before it was finally converted into a prison. During the economic crisis that had come to a head in 1789, the district of Saint-Antoine was also, given the growing discontent over the chronic lack of food, a natural flashpoint for any conflict with the King; it was also one of the primary sources of the disorder at which the King had taken aim through his use of military pressure on the city. This pressure, in turn, already found symbolic resonance in the military character of the Bastille, as Sartre emphasizes:

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The Saint-Antoine district had always lived in the shadow of the Bastille: that black fortress was a threat, not so much because it was a prison as because of its canons. It was the symbol of repressive power, as the boundary of a poverty-stricken and unsettled district.10 The relevant recent history was the brutal suppression of the Réveillon Riot that had taken place in the same district the previous April. Workers at a wallpaper factory, after a hard winter of suffering under the burden of food shortages, had rioted in reaction to rumors that their wages were to be reduced. The memory of the military suppression of the April riot resulted in a sense of particular vulnerability to state violence in the district Saint-Antoine; more, if an open revolt and struggle against the crown were to take the form of violence (a violence already prefigured in the arms of the citizens), then in an important sense the history of this past massacre was written into the logic of the potential future massacre threatened by the troops around Paris and, as inextricably bound to the district, symbolically focused in the Bastille itself. The revolt that was emerging as a concrete possibility in July, and which became the project of a fused group, took shape in accordance with the directions offered to it by the memory of recent events that animated the topography of the Bastille de Saint-Antoine; the July revolt unfolded as the counter-violence to this past violence that was already concretely manifest in the public consciousness of the historico-material topography of urban Paris. The violence of suppression, or the concrete actuality of the threat represented by the royal troops, already had so to speak a distinct foothold in this topography, in the form of what Sartre calls an “exis,” or habituality. This exis, in other words, provided a sense of directedness or hodological form to the very streets of the city: The important point as far as the genesis of an active group is concerned, is that this exis actually structured a route; it was primarily a hodological determination of the lived space of the district. And this route was negative: it was the opportunity for troops to enter the district by coming from the west and the north-west in order to massacre people there (as in April).11 The significance of this recent history was in turn given a renewed presence, and with that urgency, by the development of the meaning of the power 10 Sartre, CDR, p. 358. 11 Ibid., p. 358.

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represented by the arming of the people. This latter development found in turn an obvious magnet in the Bastille, not only as a potential point of vulnerability, but also as a potential source of strength. For the Bastille was not only a prison but a fortress, thus the weapons and gunpowder still stored there must be seized, both to prevent their being used against the citizens who are beginning to express their future as a group, and to potentially employ against the forces of the King: Armed men would be needed to defend the district against royal troops, and others to defend it against the Bastille. And the Bastille, in turn, in the context of scarcity, revealed the primary exigency of common freedom: if the district was to be defended against the soldiers, they would have to get some arms; there were not enough in the district, but there were plenty in the Bastille. The Bastille became the common interest in so far as it both could be and had to be not only disarmed but also made a source of supply of arms, and, perhaps, be turned against the enemies from the west—all in a single action. The urgency then was due to scarcity of time: the enemy was not there but he might arrive at any minute. The task defined itself for everyone as the pressing revelation of a frightening common freedom.12



Expressivity, Event and Presence

The Bastille, I would argue, comes across in this analysis of Sartre’s as fundamentally expressive, but not as a text to be read. To be sure, it was also a symbol—Georges Bataille, for example, also emphasizes the symbolism of the Bastille as representative of oppression, and interprets its destruction as evidence of the need of the people of Paris to seek vengeance for their suffering on the oppressive monuments of royal power.13 This is certainly true, but there is more: the expression at issue here needs to be understood also in terms of a gathering of manifestation that composes the threshold of an event; this takes place along the conduit of the concrete development of possibility in which the situation of the people of Paris takes shape dynamically during the events of July 1789. Thus if the Bastille represents an instance of built space as an expression, it is more of a hodological than a textual expression, one that is at 12 13

Ibid., p. 361. Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” in Le Dictionnaire Critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

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once etched in the historico-material topography of Paris, but only fully manifest within the horizon of the opening events of the Revolution. What comes alive and with that expressed in these events is the dawning sense of the possible future destruction of the city: the King’s forces will come through the Bastille and from the Bastille; the only way to meet this threat is at the Bastille. The Bastille, in other words, is that fusion of structured, built space and complexes of the practico-inert that give concrete expression to the political situation of struggle and conflict as that situation unfolds, as the habitual/ hodological conditions for the event itself. What Sartre has in view here is thus the expression of an emerging, chronically indeterminate possibility; it is not a report or a communication of this struggle as an already formed event, but the capacity of the built environment to provide the expressive materiality for the upsurge of a fused group that makes itself progressively manifest as a possibility for formation beyond the limits of seriality. The Bastille today no longer exists. Its site has become a symbol: the Place de la Bastille is a public space that plays a role in a set of national rituals that depends on a more or less determinant “reading” of the meaning of the events of 1789. It thus represents a figure of the built that lends itself to being read in all the senses explored by Silvetti, and open to being critiqued in light of its relation to the vernacular of French national identity. But when we reflect on the unfolding of those events as such, I would argue that we need to situate description within another, perhaps more primordial sense of expressivity, one that is distinctive not only as a more or less complex integration of different strategies of self-referentiality, of the expression of the expressiveness of the built, but above all through its organic integration into the event-character of action as such. The expressivity of the Bastille, of the Paris organized around its presence, was not limited to a means or instrument for pursuing a revolt against the King. It was an essential element of the place of the event, of the Bastille as where the French Revolution found traction for one of its most dramatic beginnings.14 We thus need more tools to think about the full expressive character of built space, of how it not only provides an external visibility for sense, but how it shapes sense, or better: how it shapes our access to our possibilities. Hodological expression characterizes the concrete unfolding of an event, as something present, given within the experience of that kind of being that finds 14

The problem of the event is complex, and we have only managed here to scratch the surface. For an interesting approach to the question, utilizing very different analytical tools, see Robin Wagner-Pacifici, “Theorizing the Restlessness of Events,” American Journal of Sociology 115/5 (March 2010): pp. 1351–1386.

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its direction in the world through an engagement with its possibilities; we see here again how the questions of interest, concern, and selfhood are essential to understanding the nature of access fundamental to built space. But what kind of “presence” do we have in view here? In what sense is a possibility for something “present,” or given—not only as this or that direction, but also in the flow of its very being constituted, opened up, in short in its “truth”? The problem of expression signals in this way the problem of presence, of the sense in which we speak of built space as something “given.” The task for the next chapter will be to understand, on a more basic level, the sense in which the expressiveness of built space and its phenomenality require the description of not only a complex notion of expression, but with that a distinctive modality of presence.

chapter 8

Expression and Presence

Spent Light

In his lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel draws an interesting contrast between architecture and sculpture.1 Both, as forms of art, represent for Hegel the symbolic expression of freedom in the mute density of matter. Itself symbolic of unfreedom, the heaviness and immobility of stone is nevertheless the most appropriate material for sculpture, but also for architecture, considered from the point of view of its specifically aesthetic potential. Hegel here expresses a sentiment that goes back at least to Vitruvius, with his praise of Augustus for transforming Rome from a city of wood into a city of marble. Yet sculpture, Hegel argues, exceeds architecture in the expression of freedom, and reaches its highest point when it succeeds in making manifest the form of the human body in stone: that is, when it succeeds in expressing the organic, the free, in the inorganic and un-free solidity and immobility of stone. Architectural forms, Hegel argues, never transcend the inorganic in this way; freedom as a living organization never finds direct expression here, the tenacity of material immobility is never transcended, weight is never consumed by lightness. To be sure, there are examples of what might be called “architectural sculpture,” but architecture considered on its own, as an art, is for Hegel not genuinely achieved until it specifically assumes a subsidiary role to sculpture. This we have in the function of the temple as a structure that houses the sculpture of the god, so for example Phidias’ statue of Zeus at the temple at Olympia. Here architecture does not itself achieve an expression of freedom, in the sense of making manifest the organic in the inorganic, but instead orients the space enveloped around the sculpture of the god in accordance with inorganic but properly rational forms (such as symmetry, balance, and harmony). The symbolic force of the figure of the god, the presence of spirit that finds its expression there, is not directly expressed, but it is heightened or intensified by the architecture of the temple. My intent here is neither to directly endorse nor condemn this view of architecture, but instead to explore a different way of thinking about the problem of the expressivity of architecture, or the built world generally, one that is more grounded in the kind of “thing” the built represents. 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst, ed. A. Gethmann-Siefert (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003), p. 221f. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340015_010

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In particular I have in mind what we might call the double-sided quality of all things made, including architectural things. On the one hand, there is an indifference or inertia that belongs to such things, not due so much to their material basis, as to something that is a consequence of their being finished. Built things are integrated in the landscape of our lives as completed and finished gestures, or what in the last chapter we followed Sartre in describing as the realm of the practico-inert. On the other hand, there is an incompleteness of meaning, a movement of ongoing, unfinished sense that equally characterizes anything made. So the assemblage of the statue of Zeus and the temple that surrounds it stands as a mute, completed basis for an ongoing encounter with the god, or any other activity that follows the conduits of unfolding sense. Accordingly, we might initially situate the question of expression in architecture in this space of tension between the finished character of the built and the movement of the experience of its sense that follows in the wake of its having been made. Whatever manner of presence we want to ascribe to it, the very sense of the built is something that entails this having been established. Likewise, when we consider the built as an expression or in terms of its potential expressivity, whether textual or hodological, this already having been put into place remains a salient feature. To reflect on something made is always to trace the figure of a termination of movement, or of a spent or completed movement. The indifference, or silence of the built as something complete, is not dissolved in the event of its being taken up by an understanding, but remains as something irremovable. Whenever action, thought, or the movement of events illuminates the potential expressivity of spaces, as when the arming of the people of Paris finds its traction and organized possibility in the hodological order of the built topography of the city, the built world always retains its already-havingbeen established of itself in the very figuration of those selfsame possibilities. The Bastille remains, one could say, that same spent monolithic presence throughout all the transmutations of its significance in the growing storm of the Revolution; its indifference in this way serves as a kind of ballast, both to the dark, material presence haunting the district of Saint-Antoine, as well as to the gathering ground of urgency that led to the formation of a people embracing open revolt. There is in this sense a formative nature coupled with the muteness of anything made. This is a muteness into which things can simply disappear or, in some cases, remain manifest as the underlying tonality of a space. The spent materiality of the Bastille, the tonality gathered in its ideal muteness, remains characteristic of the Place de la Bastille today, providing the architectural ballast for another, quite different set of significations.

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My argument here is that in order to capture the essential aspects of the built world as precisely something built, requires that we consider the place of such spent or completed movements in our experience of the built. We can once again turn to the reflections of the architect Louis Kahn for a way to think about the status of this completed character of the made. In one of his essays, “Silence and Light,” struggling to express what he considers to be a fundamental interweaving of light and materiality, Kahn hits upon a succinct expression of this basic aspect of the presence of the built world: “I sense light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent light.”2 Part of the thought here is that any fashioned physical thing is the result of a process, of a movement of coming into existence that makes it precisely what it is. The challenge of Kahn’s statement is to consider this presence in terms of the being spent of what enables this presence to come into position, to be placed, not as a pane of glass fitted to a frame or a wall of stone stretched along a line of access, but specifically as a presence. It is difficult to grasp what Kahn is trying to say in such a statement. Being spent suggests a terminus of a movement in which or towards which something is used up. Perhaps we can say that light spends itself by aiming at presence, bringing something other than itself into visibility, and in this process it is used up. Or perhaps it becomes fused with the presence it reveals, even on the level of its materiality, as a new kind of mass. Peter Zumthor describes something akin to this in his idea “to plan the building as a pure mass of shadow then, afterwards, to put in light as if you were hollowing out the darkness, as if the light were a new mass seeping in.” This is however, as Zumthor himself concedes, at best a metaphor for something that is in the end incomprehensible: “I don’t understand light. It gives me the feeling there’s something beyond me, something beyond all understanding.”3 It is also something different than what Kahn is driving at. Above all what is perplexing in Kahn’s description is the emphasis on light’s being spent. Why the suggestion that materiality is exhausted light, the consumption of its diaphanous being, and not an extension of its mass, as in Zumthor’s evocative description? How is it that matter is a terminus that belongs to the movement of light, but where light no longer has any of itself left, and thus remains only as the used up remains of its giving? And when we then think of the play of light on material, as a constant condition for the complex ways that the presence of light participates in the being of the built world, what would it mean to 2 Louis Kahn, “Silence and Light,” (1968), Essential Texts, p. 229. 3 Zumthor, Atmospheres, pp. 59, 61.

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understand this dynamic in terms of the play of light on spent light, of a giver of presence with a presence that seems to amount to its own wasteland? In what sense is light a giver of presence, and in what sense is material the spent presence of this gift? Where are these metaphors going? Kahn’s statement, however opaque, can begin to make sense for us, I would argue, once we have grappled with developing an appropriate conception of the presence of built space. Such a conception promises to enable us to formulate a more precise phenomenological conception of the specific sense of how the built world exhibits the double-sided character of something established, finished, but at the same time open to meaning. And this in turn will allow us to re-open the problem of the expressivity of the built, and if not reject Hegel’s account, then at least to deepen it. My argument will be that just such a conception of the presence of built space can be formulated as a modification of Husserl’s phenomenological description of the presence of images4 that we find in a series of lectures from 1904/1905 under the title “Phantasy and Image-consciousness.” (Hua XXIII, Text Nr. 1)5

Image-Consciousness (Bildbewusstsein)

In his lectures from 1904/1905, Husserl gives us an account of properly physical images, that is, images that we see in things like photographs or drawings, 4 The problem of the image is of course ancient, and contemporary research on the topic in philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, cultural theory, psychology, anthropology, and sociology is so vast, and confronts the reader with such an array of contrasting and often contradictory approaches, that I will make no effort here to provide an overview of what is available. For a modest suggestion about where to begin, I will only cite Gottfried Boehm, ed., Was ist ein Bild? (Münich: Fink, 1994), and Klaus Sachs-Hombach, Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005). Among Anglo-American philosophers in particular one finds a vibrant debate influenced by the work of Nelson Goodman, so for example John Kulvicki, On Images: Their Structure and Content (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006); cf. the excellent review of Kulvicki by Zed Adams in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 67/3 (2009): 336–339. 5 Husserl, Phantasie, Bildbewusstsein, Erinnerung. Zur Phänomenologie der anschaulichen Vergegenwärtigungen. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1898–1925). Husserliana XXIII, ed. Eduard Marbach (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980) (hereafter cited as Hua XXIII); Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898–1925). Collected Works XI, trans. John Brough (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) (hereafter cited as Phantasy). Our focus here will be on Text Nr. 1, which reproduces the lectures given in 1904/5 under the title “Phantasy and Image Consciousness” (third principal part of the lectures from the Winter Semester 1904/5 on “Principal Parts of the Phenomenology and Theory of Knowledge”).

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which he takes great pains to distinguish from imagination or fantasy6 as something freely unfolded in the absence of any given perceptual basis. In one sense an image is a thing, like any thing found in the physical world: it presents itself as itself, as a something given qua bearer of properties. The order of physical being is its primary mode of presence, and one that forms the basis or ground for the appearance of what marks the image off as “more” or “other” than a thing. Another way to express this is to say that a physical image as a unity of meaning is founded on a substrate, “physical thing.” Take for example a photograph of Marilyn Monroe: as a photograph, it is determined in accordance with a certain set of given physical properties, having to do with its size, shape, color, as well as the materials of which it is composed and their properties in turn (those of paper, of ink, chemical agents that fix ink to paper, and so on). The image of Marilyn Monroe itself, however, is not a property of the thing, it is not something counted among the set of properties that make up its specifically physical profile. The image that we find “in” the photograph, Husserl argues, is a distinct object, though one the manifestation of which is founded on what is achieved in the coming together of the physical profile of the image-thing. Yet the image is also to be distinguished from what it depicts. The image in the photograph is the image of Marilyn Monroe; she herself however is not an image, but a woman, one who has been dead for some time now. The woman Marilyn Monroe, depicted in the photograph, is what Husserl calls the subject of the image, or that which is imaged “in” the image, and which is something (or in this case someone) whose non-presence belongs to the phenomenological character of the image as something given, present. Thus in the case of the photograph, or any comparable physical image, “we have three objects”:

6 In these lectures Husserl uses the expression Phantasie or Phantasievorstellung, which does not necessarily carry with it the sense of a faculty of images, as in the case of the Latin imaginatio, which is the source of the English “imagination.” The association is, however, common, and Husserl’s strategy in the lectures is to try to pursue this association as far as it will go: “We intend to try to pursue as far as possible the point of view of imagination and the notion that phantasy presentation can be interpreted as image presentation—although there is no dearth of objections to this attempt, objections that subsequently turn out to be justified.” Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 16, fn1; Phantasy, p. 18, fn2. The word Phantasie, as does the English fantasy (by way of Old French), has its ultimate roots in the Greek phantasia, which has a long history of reinterpretation from its original broad sense of “appearance” or “appearing” to different senses of representation, including images. For a more detailed philosophical history see the article “Phantasie” in Ritter, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie.

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(1) the physical image, the physical thing made from canvas, marble, and so on; (2) the representing or depicting object; and (3) the represented or depicted object. For the latter, we prefer to say simply “image subject”; for the first object, we prefer “physical image”; for the second, “representing image” or “image object.” Now naturally the latter, the representing image, is obviously not a part or aspect of the physical image thing. To be sure, the colored pigments spread on the surface of the canvas and the lines of the drawing laid on the paper are parts of the physical image thing. But these colors, lines, and so on, are not the representing image, the true image of the imagination, the semblance thing, which makes its appearance to us on the basis of color sensations, form sensations, and so forth.7 The image as that which depicts is, in Husserl’s language, founded on the physical image-thing, but in an important sense it in turn founds an apprehension of the subject depicted: it is image (in this case) as a depiction or imaging of its subject. However, we need to be careful with what is meant by “founded” in the case of images. The image differs from a categorial object, such as a state of affairs, the intuition of which is also described by Husserl as something founded, in this case on a perception. Though founded on a perception, a state of affairs has no specifically sensuous aspect; it belongs to intuitivity only to the extent that ideal objects are given in an intellectual intuition.8 The consciousness of an image, on the other hand, tracks instead a complexity in the perceptual presentation of the thing itself, thus in the intuitivity that characterizes perceptual presence itself. To be founded here means: the image is only given thanks to a complication of the immanent structure of the perceptual presence of the thing through which it is accessible as an image. Yet at the same time it is the image, and not its thingly basis, that stands in the forefront: we see it up close, so to speak, at the expense of an apprehension of the physical properties of the thing in which we see the image, and thus which provides us access to it by allowing us to effectively see past it. So for example if the photograph is in black and white, we “see in” the contrasting grey tones the surface features of Marilyn’s skin; but this can only occur against the grain of the intentional direction of our gaze towards patterns that belong to the coloration of the paper on which these other patterns are displayed. The two are intimately interwoven: when Andy Warhol manipulates 7 Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 19; Phantasy, p. 21. 8 Husserl, Hua XIX(2)/LU VI, §§40–52.

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the colors of the photograph in making his portraits, it is the color of the medium-thing that he directly manipulates; he modifies the founding conditions under which this “seeing in” occurs, and in this way he is also able to manipulate the image founded upon these conditions. The imaging character of the medium is thus uniquely intertwined with its physical character, for the imaging of the image remains in close proximity to the physicality of its presentational basis; it is not, in other words, a separate and contrasting intuitivity, one that would enjoy its own register of appearance, however founded it may be on others. There is another important wrinkle to this. Husserl argues that it is important to recognize that the image-subject, what is depicted “in” the image, has no independent appearance of its own at all that would stand in any supplementary relation to the image-thing or image-object. Thus to see the subject “in” the image is to apprehend it only from within the limits of the appearing image itself: The apprehension that constitutes the image object is at the same time the foundation for the presentation that, by means of the image object, constitutes the other object; and in normal phantasy presentation and image presentation, the act of meaning is aimed at the latter, directed toward it alone. This second object is intended in a quite singular way. No appearance corresponds to it. It does not stand before me separately, in an intuition of its own; it does not appear as a second thing in addition to the image. It appears in and with the image, precisely because the image presentation arises. If we say that an image represents the subject, the subject is not for that reason intuited in a new presentation; rather, it is intuited only in the characteristic that makes the appearance of the object functioning as an image felt by our consciousness, by our perceiving, precisely as an image presentation.9 Thus it is not that the appearance of an image object leads us to an appearance of its subject, it is a presentation of its subject “in” which the subject is perceived, but in an appearance that is not its own. And this seeing-in of an image in turn has a site, a location in the world of perceived things, in that it is founded on the physical thing-appearance that the image also thereby “is.” This leads to the question: How do images appear in the world of perceptual things as images, as depictions of what does not appear, as appearances “in” which something other than what appears is intended? What is the specific 9 Husserl, Hua XXIII, pp. 27–28; Phantasy, p. 29.

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structure, or perhaps dynamic of this foundedness that Husserl expresses with the notion of “seeing-in” (Hineinschauen)? Husserl’s argument is that we can understand the presence of images in terms of the constitution of a phenomenological tension that runs in two fundamental directions. The first follows lines that are familiar from traditional discussions of the image, so for example in Descartes’ conception of representatio: the image is in tension with what it is an image “of,” its subject; the ­depiction presents itself as the depicted by at the same time excluding the possibility of its identity with it. This tension can in turn take various forms: looking at a photograph of Fernando Pessoa wearing his distinctive black fedora and spectacles, the “image” of Pessoa I see is not Pessoa himself, but only the way in which something captures a resemblance to Pessoa. However much of Pessoa I see “in” an image thanks to this resemblance, there is nonetheless a constitutive distance that defines the separation between the image-object (the image proper “in” which I see Pessoa) and the image-subject, that which is depicted in the image. Thus it is not simply that the subject is “not present” in the image thanks to a kind of non-identification; there is also an animated distance in play, one that is brought to consciousness in the form of the association of resemblance. This associatively animated distance constitutes a unique space of encounter thanks to which I “see” Pessoa. The image bears or supports a seeing, a catching sight of Pessoa across the distance that separates the two, and in which resemblance functions as an associative taking of my view or look to Pessoa, as it were. This distance structured by an association is not limited to resemblance alone, but can also take on a more abstract, symbolic character: Pessoa’s iconic hat and spectacles can be presented in a more schematic manner, say in a few, suggestive lines that seem to trace the bare outlines of a figure of hat and glasses. In such a symbolic play of line, I do not see Pessoa “in” the unity of line that I have in view; here the association functions in a more external fashion, in that the line only brings to mind or suggests what there would be to see of Pessoa if this were a genuine depiction or perception of the figure of Pessoa himself. The immanent or internal “seeing-in” the image of the image-subject and the more external symbolization of the symbol-subject represent two fundamental modalities of differentiation within this distance constitutive of associativity. Images are thus characterized according to modalities of associative differentiation, tendencies in our apprehension of image-things that pull us towards the intentional possibilities of seeing-in. Thus images and symbols do not populate the world in the same manner as physical things; they are instead constituted by a consciousness that follows the intentional conduits of associations

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that lends to present perceptions of a thing what Husserl calls a tincture characteristic of image-consciousness, thanks to which we take something to be the “representation” of something else.10 The image, as an object of which I am conscious, is also constituted by way of a second line of tension, and with that another sense of distance that supplements the first. Namely, an image is something that is situated in my perceptual field, but in such a way that it is also excluded from this field, through a conflict (Widerstreit) that belongs precisely to its status as “image.” In other words, the structure of foundedness characteristic of the presence of images in our perceptual field is one of an orchestrated conflict or tension (Widerstreit). Thus on Husserl’s account, the image of Pessoa in a photograph is not the mere effect of the arrangement of color hues on the surface of the paper. This arrangement is something real, perceived, belonging to definite lines of dependency and causality to other perceived realities in my field of vision, for example the effect that changes in light have on what it is of the object that I can see here before me. Husserl argues that the image itself, the look of Pessoa that shines through the physical bearer of its insertion into my field of vision, is something that stands in conflict with the order of real relations, and thus is something that has the status of an un-reality. This means that no matter how much the image may resemble Pessoa, or how perfectly resemblance fills the image-object with depictive content, the density of appearance here can only amount to a peculiar kind of nothing that stands in contrast with the appearance of the physical bearer that remains at peace, so to speak, with its environment: The image-object does triumph, insofar as it comes to appearance. The apprehension contents are permeated by the image-object apprehension; they fuse into the unity of the appearance. But the other apprehension is still there; it has its normal, stable connection with the appearance of the surroundings. Perception gives the characteristic of present reality. The surroundings are real surroundings; the paper, too, is something actually present. The image appears, but it conflicts with what is actually present. It is therefore merely an “image”; however much it appears, it is a nothing [ein Nichts].11 10

11

On signs, see Husserl, Hua XXIII, pp. 24–25; Phantasy, p. 26; on the “tincture” of imageconsciousness, see Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 26, Phantasy, p. 27; on internal and external apprehension, see ibid., §§15–16. Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 46; Phantasy, p. 50; cf. Hua XXIII, pp. 47–48; Phantasy, p. 51: “So we have appearance here, sensuous intuition and objectification, but in conflict with an

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This is an essential point: images are not images merely because they resemble people or things, or because they pretend to be the people or things they resemble. Twins are not images of each other in a non-metaphorical sense; coming across a photograph of a lost relative is not anything like being reunited with the real person. Images are images by constituting a disruption in the fabric of the real. Yet they are disruptions that interact with the thing-world; they are founded on its forms and modes of manifestation, and are thus constitutive of a specific modality of properly thingly presence. Images are examples of how thingly presence can be manifest under its own erasure, through a disruption of its potential to be something real, all the while remaining part of the now contested fabric of perceived reality. Accordingly, the phenomenological non-being of the image does not represent a clean break with perceptual being, but is instead present along the lines of a tension or a conflict that has the positive result of the appearance of the image as object, as something of which I am conscious, as an image.12 This conception of image-consciousness is of crucial importance, I would argue, precisely because of what it tells us about the phenomenological nature of perception. Namely, it points to the insight that perception should not be understood as a closed block of positivity, but as a modality of originary presentation that harbors the potential for the manifestation of presences (such as images) that do not properly belong to perception in a narrow sense. More, such unities remain intuitive, and likewise sensuous: the tension that manifests an image is a specifically intuitive tension that unfolds within the horizon of sensuous perception itself. Images are thus not mental projections onto a screen of external perception that is otherwise populated by given sensuous positivities and their relations; the given positivity of the perceived is porous enough, dynamic enough, to allow for the presence of the un-thingly, the image proper, as a concrete if also contested presence among the world of things in perceptual life. Images are thus genuine perceptual givens which stand in productive conflict with the basis of their manifestation: they are productive

12

experienced present. We have the appearance of a not now in the now. ‘In the now,’ insofar as the image-object appears in the midst of perceptual reality and claims, as it were, to have objective reality in its midst. ‘In the now’ also insofar as the image-apprehending is something temporally now. Yet, on the other hand, a ‘not now’ insofar as the conflict makes the image object into a nullity that does indeed appear but is nothing, and that may serve only to exhibit something existing. But it is evident that this exhibited something can never exhibit the now with which it conflicts; hence it can only exhibit something else, something not present. The latter could at most lie within one’s field of regard, only outside the image field.” Ibid., §§27, 29.

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to the extent to which they are exhibitive, presentive of what is “not now,” but in tension to the extent that such exhibition can never belong to the reality of the presentive “now” in terms other than being in tension with it. When I see an image, I thus both see and do not see what there is to be seen “in” it: Pessoa looks out at me across the distance of a conflict thanks to which his image, his exhibiting depiction, appears as the rejection of the closure of the reality that would otherwise characterize the perceptual presence of the piece of colored paper on top of the table. Husserl: “What functions representatively in the content of the image-object is conspicuous in a specific way: it exhibits, it represents, pictorializes, makes intuitable. The subject looks at us, as it were through these traits.”13 Yet on the other hand, it is important to emphasize that images stand apart, in that they dominate the tension with the perceptual given that forms their basis. They stand, as we have already stressed, in the foreground: the image in the photo is there “right away,” I do not need first to see colored paper, only then to be in a position to judge that what stands before me somehow needs to be interpreted as an image. Thus even if all the appearances in the strict sense belong to the “thing,” the “image” is nevertheless distinct thanks to a characteristic quality of tension or conflict through which it sets itself apart from the thing on which it is founded. The image is something that does not appear on its own, but appears only by standing in an inner tension with the appearance of something other, such that it becomes manifest as a kind of non-thing. Images, in other words, are intrinsically virtual—they are “no-things” in the midst of the appearing of things, enabled by such appearances yet at the same time constituted in terms of their conflict with the same. Many of Husserl’s analyses in his lectures on image-consciousness turn on examples in which resemblance plays a key role, though it is clear that this role can be filled by any kind of association. The most important species of association other than resemblance is that of symbolic presentation, whether of the type of Pessoa’s caricature described above, or more abstract examples. The contrast between symbol and image is understood by Husserl in the following way: in images, we see “in” the image what is depicted, following the associative track of resemblance; in the case of a symbol, the intention is directed “outward,” away from the image towards that with which it stands in associative relation.14 In a symbol, we penetrate its forms only deeply enough to be directed outwards toward whatever idea or memory the symbol was meant to 13 14

Husserl, Hua XXIII, 30; Phantasy, pp. 31–32. Ibid., §16.

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“bring to mind.” There is in an important sense nothing to see in the symbol, only enough to provide the expressive means for the intention of a meaning. This can happen in the manner of a schema, or an abstract image only certain points of which resemble what is depicted, as in the pictographic elements of some written languages such as Chinese; or it can take the form of a completely arbitrary signification which finds its basis in the symbol only thanks to convention, as in the assignment of sign-groups to phonetic elements in alphabetic languages. All of these phenomena are founded originally on presentations and re-presentations, and there are examples that involve varying degrees of all of these forms.15 Husserl’s description of images as perceptual givens in conflict or tension with the perceptual field in which they are embedded is important for our problem of the presence of built space. If the built world is to be conceived as something perceived, then the significance of perception should not be limited to being a kind of baseline individuation that would fix a universal standard of univocal presence. Rather, the individuation of the built needs to be understood as belonging to a complex field of originary givenness that will involve properly “presenting” (gegenwärtigende) phenomena as well as “re-presenting” (vergegenwärtigende) phenomena, both of which should be counted among a multiplicity of primitive forms of givenness.

Presence and Complexity

Husserl’s investigations in the lectures we have been considering amount to an argument against any position (namely that of Brentano and to some extent the empirical psychology of the times, which Husserl critically engages in §§3–6 of the 1905 lectures) that would claim, on the contrary, that presence is not something manifold at all, that what is present is univocally what is given as a basic psychic datum. Thus for Brentano the only thing that distinguishes among presentations (Vorstellungen) of the mind are differences in objective

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Here we touch on the rich and complex problem of a phenomenology of signs, and these texts published in Hua XXIII represent an important development of Husserl’s thinking on the nature of signs and language. For a more mature presentation of the problem, see Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen. Ergänzungsband. Zweiter Teil: Texte für die Neufassung der VI. Untersuchung. Zur Phänomenologie des Ausdrucks und der Erkenntnis (1893/94–1921), Husserliana XX/II, ed. Ullrich Melle (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005).

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content, or differences between what is presented.16 In Brentano, for example, “loving” and “hating” both involve presentations, and in exactly the same sense—whether loved or hated, judged or valued, something is always present in exactly the same sense. There is a Cartesian element to this: the claim is that on the level of our ideas taken for themselves, as ideae or repraesentationes, everything is just a modality of the mind, of the res cogitans that has a uniform essence or being that defines the given in each case as something thought. Husserl’s argument is that on the contrary presentation is manifold, and in this sense his thinking represents a decisive break from Cartesianism.17 The second reason for the importance of these reflections for an account of built space is that not only is what counts as an individuated “something” recognized here in its presentational complexity, but this complexity is recognized as the origin of different ways in which the meaning-unities of objects can take on different complexes of content—in Husserl’s later language, “sedimentations” of meaning. The analyses of the imagination in particular, which we will turn to shortly, are decisive for Husserl’s mature understanding of both the problem of individuation and the nature of sedimentation. Thus in this way the question of how built space as perceived is something the presence of which is ordered in a manner that bears expression, that bears sense, will find essential elements for its explication. Let us turn to the first point, in particular to the idea of image-consciousness as a perceptual experience that unites, thanks to an associative tension, different primitive forms of presentation. This notion will lead us to a second fundamental contrast that Husserl pursues in these lectures along with the contrast between image-consciousness and perception, namely the contrast of both with imagination or fantasy proper. One might be tempted to articulate the synthesis of what in imageconsciousness is presented properly (gegenwärtigt, in Husserl’s idiom) and what is presented in the manner of not-being (vergegenwärtigt) in the language of faculty psychology. Image-consciousness here is taken to be the composite result of two capacities of the subject, the faculties of perception and imagination, one of which constitutes the apprehension of given perceptual presence, and the other the apprehension of the non-given presence of the image, the “imagined.” Husserl himself was not beyond thinking of matters in this way, as can be seen in a number of places scattered throughout Husserliana XXIII. The problem with this approach is that it constantly runs aground on a question 16 17

See Husserl, Hua XXIII/Phantasy, §4, and Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Book II, Chapters 1, 6 (London: Routledge, 1973). See Husserl, Hua XXIII/Phantasy, §§41–42, 48.

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that could be formulated in the following way: is this supposed composite, as an intentional unity which I encounter when I see an image, say a photograph of Pessoa hanging on the wall, itself an image or a perceived object? Is the composite, the unity of the given, something really given, thus should I speak of a real image, or is the image qua image merely the effect of an imagination that layers in my subjective apprehension something unreal (the image) on top of something real (the thing I take to bear the image)? The deeper problem is one of a nuanced enough conception of presence that would allow us to capture the sense of the real presence of what is not real, or present. But to get at this problem we need to clear aside a more superficial difficulty—one unavoidable if we limit ourselves to the language of faculty psychology—that arises from a habit of effectively understanding all accomplishments of consciousness in terms of the production of a presentation (Vorstellung) in the sense of a “mental image.” We have already stressed that for Husserl the intentional object is not a mental image, so for example the intentional unity of the perceiving of a line of text and the perceived text is not the unity of an image formed in consciousness. This is also true of the perception of an image: the intentional object “image” is not, as an intentional object, an image—to perceive an image is not to have an image of an image in mind. Yet Husserl goes further than this, in that he draws a difference between the intentional unity of image consciousness proper and that of fantasy or free imagination. His argument is that the intentional unity of something fantasied is not that of the consciousness of an image. Thus it is not only not the case that in image-consciousness the imagination produces an image that is then somehow superimposed on top of a perceptual object; the imageobject is “a figment [Fiktum], a perceptual object but also a semblance object [Scheinobjekt],” one that is inscribed in the perceptual field in tension with its basis. Rather, the imagination does not produce an “image” at all, not even in the case of free imagination: […] if we look at phantasy, the figment is absent. In this sense, the “phantasy image” is not an image that establishes itself in the midst of the actual reality of the present. It does not appear in the form of a perceptual apprehension; it does not become constituted as something quasi-real among the phenomenal realities belonging to my field of regard; and it does not show itself as a figment through its conflict with the reality of the present, which in itself is uncontested.18 18

Husserl, Hua XXIII, pp. 54–55; Phantasy Ibid., pp. 59–60. See also ibid., Beilagen VII, VIII to Text Nr. 1.

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Let us look closer at what this entails. An act of fantasy, Husserl argues, does not put an image before us, as something perceived in such a manner that we can “see in” the image what is freely imagined. I am not conscious of an image, even implicitly, when I imagine Pessoa sitting at the Café Brasileira in Lisbon, furiously scribbling something on the back of an envelope on a hot summer evening. There is no depiction in my act of imagination that belongs to something towards which I am turned in inner perception; I attend directly to the scene, to Pessoa bent over his pen, without any mediation through a tension or distortion that would be supported in something belonging to my perceptual field. To be sure, I may become expressly aware that I am imagining all of this; I may even be motivated to confirm to myself that what is being imagined is “not real.” If I myself am sitting at the Café Brasileira and imagine in free phantasy Pessoa sweating over his envelope, I can “see” very well that the scene I imagine and what I see around me are different things, that there is a non-coincidence between the two. But this non-presence of the imagined in the present is not that of the image of Pessoa that has taken up residence in my perceptual field, as is the case with the familiar statue of Pessoa sitting at a table in front of the café. Here there is a genuine tension with what is presented as perceived, a tension that is located, placed within my perceptual field in such a way that it stands out precisely as an “image” among perceived things. Yet nor is the imaginary scene somehow superimposed over the perceived café—to imagine here is not to generate a composite image, where one of the composita has the value of “real” and another not; the imaginary instead belongs to its own unique field, its own context that separates itself off from the field of perception altogether. Unlike the image, the imagined is separate in a radical sense: its beingseparate is not an appearing non-being that is inscribed within the horizon of perception, since there is no sensuous perceptual given that bears the tension or conflict of the imagined. Husserl: The apprehension contents of phantasy are obviously not simultaneously bearers of genuine and nongenuine perceptual apprehensions. The phantasy image does not appear in the objective nexus of present reality, of reality that becomes constituted in actual perception, in my actual field of vision.19 Likewise, in imagination there is no “localization” of the imagined in the space of an empirical consciousness, if by that we mean a kind of given space of 19

Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 49; Phantasy, p. 53.

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the mind that would contain a depiction of an experience of seeing Pessoa writing at his table. When I imagine Pessoa scribbling on his envelope, I must also imagine perceiving him—what is being imagined is both the perceiving of Pessoa and Pessoa as perceived, as a full intentional unity of experience. But in imagining this, Husserl argues, I do not thereby depict the act of perceiving; there is no canvas of the soul on which I sketch this scene of my perceiving and Pessoa appearing within the unity of this perceiving. Here the “seeing” is just as imaginary as the “seen,” it is not, as an act of consciousness, present in the manner in which my perceiving of the statue of Pessoa is present—it is not, in other words, a founded presentification. But I am able—and this is essential—to recognize that my imagined seeing is precisely imagined, that it is not something that can enter into those relationships of unity that would define my perceptions of things in my perceptual field proper. The imaginary seeing does not “link up” with the actuality of my perception, or the lived experience of sitting in the café. The act of seeing Pessoa does not belong to my perceptual world, it is alien to it, and this is something of which I am conscious.

Figure 8  Café Brasileira (Lisbon, Portugal). Photo by author.

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The question thus becomes: what am I aware of, when I am aware of the distinct character of the imagined in contrast to the perceptual proper, or when I am aware of the “unreality” of the imagined that runs in this peculiar parallel to perceptual life? Husserl, after a long period of struggling with this problem, comes to the conclusion that it is only out of the very non-localizability of imagination in the real that the imagined can become a genuine theme for consciousness. I recognize the imagined Pessoa as imagined only through my consciousness of the indifference of the imagined scene to the world around me. The world, in other words, does not contest the imagined the way it contests the presence of an image. In fact, the world is in no way receptive to the imagined at all—“it is not only that the phantasy thing does not appear in perception’s field of regard but instead appears, so to speak, in an entirely different world, which is completely separated from the world of the actual present.”20 This indifference is not a mere function of the non-presence of the imagined Pessoa, that is, of the imagined set of circumstances being “utterly” absent. For a memory is also a comparable kind of utter absence, but it is one that is nevertheless localizable in the real. This brings us to the third and final contrast of Husserl’s reflections, namely between memory and fantasy.21 Remembering a friend who had brought me to this café, I recall that we sat at that table over there, right next to the statue of Pessoa. My memory of my friend sitting next to the statue and telling jokes about Portuguese literary critics enjoys a connection, a unity of intuition, with the real perception of the table that is “still there” next to the statue. To be sure, “unity of intuition” here does not mean that my friend appears to me, for she remains absent; but this absence does not have the same character as the gulf of indifference that separates the imagined and the perceived. The memory, as the recollection of something originally posited in the course of a (past) perceptual experience, enjoys a lasting connectivity to the unfolding of perceptual life—she is neither imagined, nor depicted, nor perceived, but remembered, and in being remembered takes part in that totality of real relations that constitute the unity of the experienced world as a whole distributed in objective time. What is the significance of this status of the imagined? First let us recall the significance of image-consciousness: the description of the image as a perceptual phenomenon provides an important example of how the intuitive unity of the perceived is not something closed, but has instead a dynamic character that opens up the phenomenon to presentational complexity. When we turn phenomenologically to the question of the possibility of expression and 20 21

Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 58; Phantasy, p. 62. See also ibid., Beilage LVII (1917). See Husserl, Hua XXIII/Phantasy, Texts Nr. 2, 15, and 16; also Hua X, §§14–23.

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articulation, for example, this fluidity of perceptual presence is of great significance. An image is an opportunity for seeing, just as a symbol is an opportunity for the pursuit of a reference, because perception is susceptible to an inner strife in its very unfolding, one that is productive of the complexity of presence: the image, the symbol, the spoken word, all represent instances of this inner decomposition of immediate perception that is able to bear a seeing towards something that is itself not sensuously “given.” Free imagination or fantasy points to something very different: namely, it points to the sense in which the world as a whole is not something closed, or better: the sense in which the closure of the world is not fundamentally nonrelative. For on one level the world is indeed closed to my freely imagined fiction of Pessoa sitting at the café; not only does it not fit into the horizon of intuitivity constitutive of perceptual experience, the world is not even open to giving my fantasies a locality of conflict and tension, as in the case of the image. More, there is an important sense in which the intentional acts of perceiving and even remembering are “closed” within the horizon of the world: there is a fundamental bond between the actuality of my perceiving and the reality of the perceived.22 The individuation or inscription of the perceived in the world-horizon of real determination is inseparably bound with the individuation of consciousness itself. But this is also the case with the imagined scene of Pessoa: the act of perceiving is bound, fixed in the realm of the imaginary, and that means that the act of perceiving that belongs to imagination must also fail to be accepted by the world, so to speak. That act of perceiving essential 22

One might here bring up the problem of mental illness, perhaps as an objection. Is it not characteristic of schizophrenics to confuse the imagined with the real? And further, is it not perhaps misleading for Husserl to assume, as he often does explicitly, a “normally” functioning conscious life? Yet perhaps what we need to understand about the abnormal is in fact being provided here. Husserl’s point is to describe perceptual experience, and by extension our experience of the real, in terms of a topology of tensions, conflicts, and successful indifference. Thus one could think in this context of the abnormal as a refusal, on the part of the subject, to allow for the experience of a “normal” way of resolving these conflicts, or following lines of tension in a way that respects the integrity of experience: thus for example refusing reality the right to exclude from itself the imagined, or refusing the imagined the right to be indifferent to the real, thus to retain its “protean” character, as Husserl might call it (cf. Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 58; Phantasy, p. 63). Thus mental illness is not an instance of breaking apart an otherwise complete system of cognition or judgment, but rather an upsetting of a certain balance of power among the different modes of presentation. And by extension, just how close the healthy are to the sick can also be understood in these terms, for “health” is not free of the conflict between those lines of force that order the presencing of the imagined and the perceived.

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to the fiction of Pessoa scribbling on his envelope is also non-localizable, it belongs to the individuation native to the imagined world and not the real world itself. When I, sitting at the Café Brasileira, imagine Pessoa, I do not look now to the actually perceived table before me and then, firmly planted in my consciousness of the world, look off in some other direction, as if I as the same perceiving subject merely look “elsewhere” to a merely imagined man sitting at a table and writing. The two perceivings—the real and the imagined—are not distinguished by content alone, as if the act of perceiving was constituted as an unmodified substrate capable of bearing contents of different kinds (now present, now imagined, now remembered). Rather, the act of perceiving constitutive of the quasi-real quality of the imagined manifestation of Pessoa at the table is fused with an imaginary world, just as my perceiving subjectivity is bound to the actual world of perception. The conscious subject, in other words, effectively doubles itself, opposing itself as a fantasy-I against its present-I. There still remains only one I, the same I that perceives and that imagines, but the phantasy Ego […] is not the actually present Ego; it is, indeed, identified with the latter, but not in the sense that its phantasy experiences could now be actual experiences. I can phantasy myself “just as I am” in the land of the Moors, but not entirely as I am. Namely, I cannot retain my perceptual surroundings. My present field of vision is incompatible with my phantasied field of vision, and so on. This concerns all parts of the content of consciousness that are accepted exclusively in the manner of phantasy but are not now on hand.23 There are two aspects of this that are important for our purposes. The first is the idea that the contrast between perception and imagination (in all senses) is a potential phenomenological site, as it were, for developing an account of the origin of the idea of a world (thus taking us back to the important theme of Chapters 3 and 4). The theme of the world that emerges in these reflections is not that of a simple abstract universal, or an idea of reason that applies the mathematical concept of an aggregate sum to the concept of a multiplicity of things, but is rather a dimension that belongs to our consciousness of the potential intuitivity of objective presence. In the shift from perceiving to imagining we catch a glimpse of the unity of horizon that belongs to the space of encounter in which things become manifest, as if the world as world was suddenly illuminated in the shift to the imagined. 23

Husserl, Hua XXIII, p. 173; Phantasy, 210. Cf. ibid., Text Nr. 18 (from 1918).

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The second aspect is that the sense of the world that is disclosed in this shift is fundamentally tied to a corresponding modification of consciousness. It is only because it is possible for consciousness to immerse itself in a consciousness that it is not, or—to use Sartre’s language—to see Pessoa in the mode of not seeing Pessoa, that something like the exceptional horizon of the imaginary can be opened at all. This potential of consciousness for modification, which ultimately rests on the complex ways that consciousness temporalizes itself, is the ultimate ground for the complex intuitivity of the world as such. In Husserl’s thought, this way of bringing to view the theme of the horizon of the world is of central importance of what in texts such as Experience and Judgment he calls the “widest possible concept of the unity of intuition.”24 The introduction of this conception in this text from the 1930’s comes at the end of a line of reflection that sums up much of Husserl’s thinking on imagination over the preceding three decades, in which he believes to have overcome a difficulty that had plagued him in many of his earlier analyses. We can illustrate the difficulty by returning to our café and the freely imagined Pessoa scribbling on his envelope. In my fantasy of Pessoa, there is no intuitive connectivity between the fiction and my present perception of the café, and this is what distinguished the imagined scene from the memory I have of my friend laughing while sitting at the table next to the statue of Pessoa, which I now perceive. Intuitions, whether perceived, remembered, or imagined, remain native to a field, a context of connectivity; they are what they are only in the horizon of the presentational possibilities native to the world that supports their accomplishment. This is part of what we are conscious of when we are conscious of a world: the world is that in which an intuition is projected towards a future and related to a past, even in those cases where “future” and “past” are saturated with non-presence and the openness of an expression. Non-presence and openness are intrinsically “worldly.” My perceptions have no future in the world of fantasy, and vice versa; however vivid my imagined fiction of Pessoa, it will always remain in intuitive limbo outside the door of the world of perception. Yet here we should pause. Is it really the case that there is no basis for a unity of intuition, that the café in which I am sitting and the café I imagine do not in some sense reside within a common horizon? They are after all comparable with one another—I of course recognize that the one is not of the some presentational modality, context, or even world of the other, but despite all of that the café, whether perceived or imagined, remains the favorite café of Fernando Pessoa. Husserl, in order to pursue a conception of comparability 24

See Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil/Experience and Judgment, §§33–46.

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in the widest sense, argues in Experience and Judgment that the basis for this comparability across the intuitive alienation of the worlds of imagination and perception can be described as a unique intentional accomplishment of associative consciousness. This move of Husserl’s effectively re-opens the theme of association in order to recognize in it the potential for developing a broader conception of intuition. In Husserl’s mature thinking, this extended conception of association amounts to a unique source of intuitive presentation that is irreducible to either perception or imagination, since it is native to neither, but rather is uniquely native to originary consciousness as such, regardless of its self-modifications. The development of this theme of the unity of intuition, I would argue, represents the culmination of Husserl’s reflection on the different modes of presence. Its importance is attested in the context of an investigation into the primitive forms of logical reason, which is the broader project in which the analyses of these lectures we have been following are inscribed. Our interests, by contrast, lie in the question of the phenomenological constitution of built space, specifically the manner of its presence. What we have here, I would argue, is a set of essential distinctions that will allow us not only to fix the specific sense of presence that is germane to the built world, but will also provide an essential element in our understanding how to best frame a reflection on the interface of the built with the imagined, thought, believed, remembered, and—to begin to reconnect with the reflections that began this book—the known.

The Presence of Built Space as Being-Rendered

With these descriptions of physical images, imagination, and memory in mind, let us return to the thesis of Hegel’s with which we began, or to the idea of architecture as an art of the space for art, or as the aesthetics of the environs of expression. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that, armed with Husserl’s descriptions of image-consciousness, we would be in the position to draw an analogy with built things that would in turn re-open the theme of expression. Specifically, what I have in mind is the possibility drawing on Husserl’s conception of physical image-consciousness in order to frame a reflection on the sense in which cultural artifacts, cultural objectivities, express freedom or spirit as intentional being, or intentional life. The things we make or construct express what it is that we intend to do with them; they also express the understanding that functions in this activity, the understanding that forms the paths we pursue in order to accomplish our

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ends. This understanding is not simply intellectual; the ways we love, for example, saturate the formations and structures of the constructed world: the “care” embodied in a finely balanced pattern in the weave of a scarf, the “devotion” evident in a well-tended garden, all share something in common with the caress. Yet in all of these cases of things made, spaces tended to and cultivated, there is, in a variety of forms, that same tension, so to speak, between a mute indifference of matter and the accomplishments of sense that belong to intentional life, or what was described above as the double-sided character of built things. Things made, spaces built, objects that have been shaped with an aim towards the maintenance of existence or the pursuits of action—all of this should not be taken as a sum total of symbols of life, but instead in the sense of the framing of a material place for symbol, for action, or for expression. Like the temple surrounding Zeus, everything of spirit is prepared in the built without thereby being in itself achieved, as if the materiality of the made never relinquishes a certain reserve of presence that sets it apart from the life that inhabits it. What phenomenologically constitutes this sense of reserve, this being-set apart of the made, can be understood in terms of an intentional structure that is analogous to that of physical imagination. At the heart of the being-sense of the artifact, of the built, is the intentional structure of a being-rendered, in the sense of being-provided and having been put into position for the movements of intentional life. The presence of the built as rendered is analogous to the tension between an image and the perceptual environment in which it appears, for it is an example of a similar problematic openness of perception to what is not fully locked into a set of relations and determinations, whether causal or temporal. Yet the presence of the built qua built is only analogous to the image, in that it renders only; it neither depicts, nor symbolizes, nor refers, but remains on the level of rendering a space for human comportment towards its possibilities. Let us take a step back and reflect again on the argument from Hegel regarding the status of architecture as an art. What does it mean to argue that the architecture of the temple participates in the expression of spirit found in the statue of the god, but at the same time remains in an important sense set apart from this very expressiveness? It should be clear that the expressiveness of the built is not comparable to that of a text, or some symbolic form that would have something to say to us. Yet we should also not take as the other extreme a sense of “expression” as a mere mark or sign, something that expresses by providing us the motivation to posit the presence of intentional life, without “saying” anything meaningful beyond this mere positing. The temple doesn’t just point to its occupant, silently pushing our gaze away from itself towards

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what we are supposed to be admiring; nor does it simply lure us into an inner, sheltered sanctum in order to encounter the secrets of the divine. Likewise ruins, to take another example, are not just tokens or marks on a landscape that are only distantly relatable to the people who built the temples, roads, and cities that are now scattered in fragments. The abandonment of a city, such as the progressive abandonment of the ancient Khmer temple city of Angkor Wat, is not a process of converting its buildings and sites into empty signs that would somehow have to be connected, in an external fashion, to the lives once pursued within their environs. The ruins remain immediately expressive of spirit, of the freedom originally set into motion in and by these lives; the inwardly rendered existence of these built things is fixed precisely as products of a spirit that remains present in them, even when the lives of such places have been wholly forgotten and remain wholly absent. This does not contradict the fact that they are also set apart from this spirit, according to the inertial reserve of matter; intentional life is present in ruins, but in a manner that is defined neither by a presence posited by a sign, nor as a meaning to be read off of a text. So what then is it? Let us linger with the example of ruins, since they represent an extreme case of the structure of the relation of intentional life to the rendering presence of artifacts. The case is extreme, since ruins represent the countermovement against the expression of spirit in matter that Hegel has in mind. In ruins, nature is slowly reclaiming its ultimate independence from the shapes in which intentional life has rendered its world. Ruins are not only uninhabited, but through decay, or the progressive onslaught of nature, the rendering forms of habitation that the ruins continue to bear are slowly being erased. If ruins are not mere signs, they are nevertheless an expression of the fragility characteristic of embodied spirit. Fragility in the case of ruins shows us not only how far away from us others can be and yet still have a presence in the spiritual geography of the world; we also glimpse in the progressive decay of their expressions the figure of the ultimate mortality of life embodied in the built. Though ruins are not empty signs in the sense of external indications, it is still helpful to reflect for a moment on the phenomenology of signs in order to understand their expressivity. A theory of signs is of course the aim of Husserl’s classic discussion of indication (Anzeichen) and expression (Ausdruck) in the first of his Logical Investigations, “Expression and Meaning.”25 Take Husserl’s example of someone who is speaking. Speaking involves a voice, through which something is being said. A voice is an example of an 25

Husserl, “Ausdruck und Bedeutung,” Hua XIX; “Expression and Meaning,” Logical Investigations, vol. 1.

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expression when something is said with meaning: verbal expressions are expressions to the extent to which they are articulations of meanings. Expressions in this way are embodiments of intentional being, in the sense that expression just is the outward manifestation of an intention, a consciousness of sense. Another, related sense of the expressive is that it is specifically communicative: here expression is not simply the sensuous embodiment of a movement of thought, but is also thought expressed in such a way that it is directed to someone else. In communication, an expression addresses something to someone, thus expression here both embodies and gives intentionality, presenting meaning as something to in turn be grasped in an equally comprehending and expressive consciousness. Yet communication, Husserl points out, also involves a third, more narrow sense of expression: namely, the voice is expressive in the sense that it announces (kundgibt) the presence of the one who is speaking. I hear the voice as something that indicates to me that there is something to follow, a thinking to be traced, by attending to the voice. Even if I have no idea what someone is saying (if, for example, someone is speaking in a language I do not understand), I nevertheless grasp that someone is speaking, that something is being articulated, perhaps also in an attempt to be heard. This more narrow, indicative sense of “expression” is however only minimally articulate; it is distinct as a species of expression that merely points to a presence, without amounting to its being understood or grasped in terms of any explicit meaning. In speaking, one’s voice announces a presence; it does not shape a communication in the form of “here stands I, the one who is speaking to you,” but remains wholly mute even as it also announces that something is being said by someone. Based on these distinctions, one might argue that the ruins are perhaps “expressive” in the first sense, so to speak “in themselves”: they were once meaningful to those who understood what they were about. To grasp them as meaningful would amount to knowing what a building was for, what the monument commemorated, or that it was a monument at all. Once the knowledge of their significance fades, ruins are on their way to being a collection of meaningless stone. Likewise something similar is true of ruins regarding the second sense of expression as communication. Ruins represent a communication in the process of breaking down; our being addressed by these things from out of themselves is losing its focus, and the physical body of communication, the concrete message, is slowly reverting to the natural materials out of which it had been composed. A text speaks to us; a group of fragments barely raise themselves to the level of communication. Ruins can in this sense be taken as the detritus of

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broken communication; they are as it were failures to speak, which in the most extreme cases are not even perceptible as failures. The more degraded their capacity to function on the level of communication, the more we cleave closer to the bare essence of their materiality that had been deployed towards the possibility of expression, or the underlying rendering of the reality of nature, its being bent towards the activity of life and its expression. More interesting here is perhaps the third sense of expression as inarticulate indication. It is clear that ruins do in fact point to those who built them, in that they can be taken as signs that people once lived and built on a particular site. Unlike communication, however, mere indication can be wholly indeterminate: what an indicative sign points to, even whether what it points to actually exists or not, can be completely left open, as Husserl’s example of the observation of Martian “canals” demonstrates. “Something” is there, that much we are motivated to believe, but everything else is left in the dark. Indications, unlike meaningful expressions and communicative signs, at best announce the presence of something that may or may not be there, or in the case of ruins, may or may not have been there. Though ruins, and by extension the built as a whole, are certainly indicative in this sense, the presence of the built nevertheless seems to exceed the scope of indication. The built arguably makes present intentional life in its absence in a far more robust sense than indications. In ruins, the absent presence of those who built can be described as a supplementation to the indicative function of the rubble, providing a poignant emptiness that is again characteristic of the silence of built spaces. Silence does not indicate; it itself is a mode of non-originary presence that is characteristic of the built world, one that follows the contours of its being-rendered, and has its roots deep in the worldconstitutive structures of intersubjectivity. The place of this silence among things, its phenomenological characteristics, can in turn be described in ways that draw on insights found in Husserl’s analyses of physical images. To be clear, the thesis that the experience of the being-rendered of the built can be understood as sharing phenomenological features in common with image-consciousness is not to say that built space is either an image, or a symbol. Instead, the idea is that to be conscious of built space is to be conscious of a manifestation that unfolds within a tension or conflict that sets this space apart from, on the one hand, the physical foundation of its manifestation, but also from the intentional life that once found and perhaps still finds its expression and presence within the presence-in-tension of the built. The built, like the image, is an unreality, a non-thing that runs through, renders and bends, opens and works a gesture of human existence into the very being of the material world.

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When I come across the remains of an ancient city in the forest, or even ancient remains of a town or settlement uncovered in the midst of a living contemporary city, the whole space emerges for me, gives itself to me, according to a phenomenal pattern that is distinctively akin to an image: it faces me not as set apart, as in possession of appearances uniquely its own, but in tension or conflict with the more direct apprehension of things, including whatever the space in question potentially expresses or embodies. The rendered phenomenality of the built is there to be “read,” to be questioned and explored, as if “in” it I were in touch with the presence of another, as if it offered me the possibility of pursuing a figment of the imaginary without ceasing to perceive, or without closing my eyes. Still lingering with the case of ruins, this being-rendered as an instance of physical imagination is manifest to me in the form of its own fading, the inevitable dissolution of its phenomenological tension with its own material basis. We here witness a fading, a resurgence of the nothingness of material reserve, one that is very much evocative (metaphorically at least) of a fading image. As a consciousness of the being-rendered of the built, the consciousness of lived space is constituted by way of tensions and conflicts that break the homogeneous character of perceived reality, a homogeneity that nevertheless remains in force: the objectivity of rendered space remains as a contested objectivity, it does not fit snugly into the course of things, but stands within the plenum of the world as a struggle to remain open to what is more or other than presence. Here consciousness, as it were, remains within the bounds of perceptual life while at the same time opening itself up to a more complex, heterogeneous engagement in which the presence of the given can emerge as a complex interplay of imagination, symbol, and perception. Built space as rendered-being, in other words, is an original opening, an openness that forms a uniquely prepared horizon for the plays of symbols, signs, and meanings that further unfold the potential for different morphologies of expression, in the full scope of what we can think under this heading. Accordingly, the built world is the unique home for the expressions of language, of text, of art, of human movement, of the entire universe of the plastic, of everything in which Hegel would recognize the manifestation of Geist. Thus even if we might agree with Hegel that, looking at matters from the point of view of the essence of art, it is only in the sculpted human form that freedom finds its most focused expression in matter, perhaps we should nevertheless count the temple as something more originary. That is, perhaps even if architecture has no true content as an art, it nevertheless remains closer to an original opening of a perspective on what it means for expressions to be at all.

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The Spent Light of the Built

Recall that there were two basic lines of tension highlighted in Husserl’s descriptive analysis of physical images. One is that images stand in a peculiar tension or conflict with the physical world in which they are manifest. This is the dimension that is, mutatis mutandis, analogous in the case of built space. The second aspect was that images for Husserl also stand in a non-identifying, yet associative relation to their subjects. The result is that image-objects stand, as it were, in a double tension with their physical substrate and the subjects they depict. The latter tension, I would argue, also finds an analogy in the case of built things; and its elaboration will allow for the formulation of a suggestion about the place of light in our experience of built space, and with that return to Kahn’s suggestive description of materiality as “spent light.” Kahn’s statement expresses the conviction that all space, but especially built space, is always something more for us in light, and because of light. Kahn’s description of light as the “giver of all presences” can be understood in terms of this rendering of presence as something always more. It is not simply that things and spaces are more or less visible in light, but rather that things built are also shaped and designed by and in light—precisely given the role of light in bringing into play the expressive potential of rendered form.26 Take for example the function of light in the theater. In the theater, light marks the distinction between the stage, and the quasi-obscured surrounding space occupied by the audience. The house lights come down, the stage lights come up—thereby a space of performance is defined, in which nothing is unambiguously what it “is” inside of this space. The stage is thus a space effectively “set apart,” obeying its own modified logic of manifestation, indifferent enough for the purposes of the performance to the everyday signification of things, to which it nevertheless remains subject. Yet here we clearly need to develop the theme of expression and expressivity further, since what the light brings out regarding the place of the stage is not something that we have in view only when we focus on the differentiation 26

Does this exclude the possibility of a conception of architecture accessible through sound, smell, or touch? The important part of this thesis is not so much the focus on light per se, as the function of light as a giver of presence—thus the question would have to be formulated in terms of sound as a giver of presence, likewise touch. There is in fact nothing here that would prevent a comparative study of light and sound, touch and smell with regard to the rendered materiality of the built world. Aristotle, after all, already identified touch as the most basic of the senses, literally what originarily puts us in touch with things; and Husserl’s own analyses of the body explored above puts as much emphasis on the haptic as the visual.

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of the stage from its surroundings. The light does more than just participate in the rendered character of the stage, accenting the sense in which it is present as something that has been built; it preps explicitly the space for a performance. It does this by shaping the space of the stage in accordance with the potentialities of association, again in a manner analogous to images.27 Built space is essentially open, in a uniquely accelerated fashion, to being explicated in terms of associations, and this is a particularly salient aspect of the role of light in the built world. There are a number of aspects of association that need to be kept in mind here. First, we should not overlook the relative urgency or force characteristic of the phenomenality of associations. Take again Husserl’s example of a depictive image: on one level, the associativity of an image, its relative resemblance to the image-subject, falls somewhere on a continuum defined by the two poles of successful resemblance and failure. Yet on another level, association is not only what brings something together with something else, but perhaps more importantly what also holds them apart: the stronger resemblance drives the image towards identification with the appearance of its subject, the stronger the associative distance between the two is affirmed and animated. The force of the ancient myth of daidala lay just in this: daidala were figures and images so lifelike that, Plato tells us, they had to be tied down; they seemed to cross the distance inwardly constitutive of similarity in one bound, and so had to be forcefully kept within their proper limits as simulacra. In the case of perceptual images, the image calls forth the association, insists on it, presenting and manifesting itself within the horizon of this insistence, tracing an arc of manifestation that is nevertheless uniquely negated from within. Let us look at this point more closely. Association, in every context, can be likened to the function of a kind of memory:28 in association, something ­“recalls” something else, pulls it out of an indifferent obscurity. So for example Hamlet does not exist; he can only be summoned by a performance that must bring together enough of what is associated with Hamlet in order to bring him before us, standing there speaking to Horatio, who is equally fictional. Watching the scene is not a mere instance of grasping a signification; I don’t just read the gestures and movements of the actor as so many signs of the wishes and experiences of the literary character of Hamlet. Rather, Hamlet “himself” is here, re-presented though all the while unreal, an appearance that is at the same time always conditioned by a failure to appear that marks his embodiment on the stage as a “fiction.” Likewise the light of the stage is not just a signal for me 27 28

Cf. Elmar Holenstein, Phänomenologie der Assoziation (Hague: Nijhoff, 1972). See Husserl, APS/Hua XI, §§36–39.

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to read the gestures and movements of the performers as so many signs, but rather its illumination sets to the fore, renders the very unreality that is manifest within a reality ready to be open to its own ambiguity. Thus association can be taken to refer to a broad class of phenomena, all having to do with the manner in which something “other” can be present “within.” Similarity or resemblance is just a specific pattern of this broader function of association as an enlivening, a quickening of a movement that dissolves the present into a space that allows for something to become manifest that is not present in quite the same way that a thing is present. There is thus an incomplete, even protean character of association; what is in question here is the nature of something that prepares the ground for an encounter, but which never itself institutes anything more than the force of a possibility, or the experience of its emergence. Built space as something lived through, understood, and shaped by an understanding is associative in this sense: it is a space, a ground prepared along the force lines of an internalization of an otherness that is vivid, quickened, but at the same time opaque, silent, and distant. It is, to return to Kahn’s phrase, an associativity that is spent, that runs aground on its own materiality, at best preparing matter, rendering it for the possibilities of encounter that condition our lives in the world we build. Built space is accordingly reducible neither to a symbol, nor to a mere indication of the presence of subjective existence; it is instead the positive rendering in space of the non-presence of an act of understanding as a concrete human event. I “see in” built space this non-presence, as a silence of the built, its rendered distance, here in the double sense of an associatively charged silence in tension with my perceptual field, but also in tension with another life, another understanding. I see “in” built space the non-present presence of another understanding that, thanks to the built, has rendered itself in a uniquely worldly form of its own absence. Understanding thus gives space, its space in tension with the perceived; and it gives this space as an Unding, a non-thing, in Husserl’s sense. But it has also exhausted itself in giving, thus is silent. But in this silence we encounter the possibilities of existence that it reveals, possibilities that are animated in an associative movement of internalization at the heart of the already-made of the built. And if we take “light” in the extended sense of openness, and materiality as a being that is comparable to the physically imagined, then we can say that the openness of light spends itself in gathering the possibilities of presence in the rendering of space. If so, then perhaps Kahn’s “I sense light as the giver of all presences, and material as spent light” begins to make some sense. If light is the giver of presence,

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it is only because it is the giving of an access into the possible, for the life that inhabits the space of the built; but this space is at the same time spent, it is the material rendering of a rupture of human openness in the world, but where materiality always stands in a negating tension with the open horizon of human existence, contesting its duration, limiting its future. The non-thing of the built remains in tension with the perceptual horizon of the thing, or of the thingly world that is thus open to undoing itself. We build a world that, in effect, is continually un-building itself, continually giving and being spent, and the tension between these two primordial rhythms of being in the world constitutes the movement of a fundamental gesture of human existence.

Conclusion: Towards a PhenomenologicalAnthropological Vocabulary of the Built World

The Idea of a Vocabulary

As indicated in the Preface and Introduction, the aim of the descriptions of the built world presented above, developed through a series of interlocking phenomenological exercises, has been twofold: on the one hand the intention has been to introduce classical phenomenology, its basic concepts and problems, as a way into philosophy; on the other hand, the aim has been to argue for the problem of the built world as a central theme for philosophical anthropology, and to explore phenomenology as a potential source for its basic vocabulary. Despite the fact that this book is not meant to be a contribution to architectural theory proper, it should by now be clear that, in many specific instances, these exercises engage themes, and the vocabularies that articulate them, that are familiar from the history of architectural theory, past and present. So for example there is nothing new in emphasizing the role of the body in the experience of architecture, nor in the attempt to bring into play different theories of expression in order to explain how it is that built forms are meaningful. Architectural theory already has a rich vocabulary for all of these discussions and many others, one that is still very much alive and developing. The attempt to engage these problems on a philosophical-anthropological register is by no means meant to be a critique of anything lacking in the established practical or theoretical fields that one finds in the world of architecture and design. The aim instead has been to reflect on the built world from out of a much more basic motivation. There is an inexhaustible need to speak meaningfully, or just to speak thoughtfully, about the built world, to engage it in all of its protean aspects, paradoxes, difficulties and promise. This is a need that is experienced on many levels and in many forms that comprise the very landscape of human life, ranging far outside the disciplines of architectural discourse, even academic philosophy. Yet this need is, I would argue, ultimately philosophical in spirit, and whatever vocabulary we embrace in order to talk about the built, it will be conditioned in part by how developed of a sense we have for the built world as a philosophical problem. The origin of the need to speak meaningfully about the built world is the basic fact that the question of the possibility of the built, the made, is interwoven with all human experience and its needs, without exception; the built draws its very sense by molding itself to the basic contours of human existence as a © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004340015_011

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collective being in the world. We build from birth and towards birth, likewise from and towards death; we build for and in response to all the meaningful stations of our way; we build for the sake of all our activities and concerns, all our life’s possibilities; and when we don’t build, we inhabit, thereby giving shape to even more dimensions harbored within the scope of the facticity of things made. Whoever wants to understand what a human being is in the most fundamental of senses has to confront the problem of this dynamic relation to the whole of life the concreteness of which realizes itself through the activity and result of making. For it is by making that humans enter into the very space of their existence, and the vestiges of their presence necessarily echo the fundamental role of making and the made in human life. Thus we recognize the earliest and most basic examples of the environmental presence of the human in the shaping of tool-like forms such as the Clovis point; more, our complex and vexed tension with our animality seems to both affirm and disrupt a logic of separation that has ultimately to do with the potentialities of a being able to give shape to matter. Making is of course not all that constitutes human existence; as Arendt has already argued, homo faber cannot ultimately solve the problem of meaning. Yet the built does form the first anchor, as it were, for the proof of human existence, wherever it leads. If the problem of the built world is essential to a philosophical anthropology, then what kind of vocabulary can we take from these exercises that would help in its articulation? First we need to be clear about what is meant by a “vocabulary,” and what it means to conclude an investigation by outlining one. The first point to make is that our results should not be limited to a fixed terminology culled from the chapters above; the open, experimental character of the preceding belies any claim to fixed conclusions. Yet this does not mean that one should neglect the importance of terminology. The use of terms in theoretical reflection is essential. Their meanings, when they are not acting as artificial placeholders for anticipated results, are fixed by analysis and argument; terms accordingly signify what has been essentially established by an investigation. Terms, in other words, are all about the results of what came before, and mark out the territory to which the investigation has allowed us to lay claim. As such, they become relevant in turn to the systematization of results into some kind of rational whole, or at the very least their incorporation into a further, more complex and general line of argumentation and further investigation. Terms, like results in general, can also be preliminary, thus susceptible to shifts in sense or meaning that come from the continuation of investigations that came before, but equally from the mediations implied in any systematization from above. It is this species of preliminary terms that I have in mind

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here for a vocabulary of the built—terms taken up as freely negotiable, with the full expectation of, even demand for their immanent modification. Such a preliminary status is something uniquely positive, even vital for thinking, for to expose terms to the potential for modification in the course of description and reflection is a specifically progressive posture that seeks to get the most out of what can be risked. Such a conception of terminology is a salient feature of any phenomenological vocabulary; it lies at the core of the idea of a descriptive philosophy, as it was presented above in conjunction with the idea of method in Husserl’s phenomenology.1 More, the preliminary character of terms is positive in another sense. It is important to emphasize that descriptive phenomenology embodies an ideal of rigor—for it is ultimately the ideal of rigor, of remaining as close as possible, as true as possible, to what is to be described from out of the extent to which it lends itself genuinely to description, that drives the modification of phenomenological terms. Phenomenological rigor takes the form of a holding-fast to a standard or measure that comes implicit in the experience of manifestation that belongs to the core of human understanding; this is its principle of all principles. The emphasis on this bond between understanding and manifestation represents the opening salvo, as it were, in the phenomenological advance towards apt description that meets the needs of our struggle with the demands—and limits—of the possibilities of meaning as such. To the extent to which this conception of a vocabulary signals a certain style characteristic of our experience of the problem of meaning, we can also identify an analogous phenomenon that belongs to the built world as such, whether from the perspective of building or inhabiting the built. The analogy rests on the simple fact that we never build in the horizon of perfectly determinate meaning, nor do we live in the built world in the mode of perfect clarity and transparency. The essence of our knowledge of the built world, introduced in Chapter 1 through a reflection on the implications of the distinction between architect and engineer, is fundamentally problematic in character. This does not of course mean that we always proceed in building as if we had no idea 1 And it has at least enough of a resemblance to the pragmatism of Richard Rorty to merit mention, even if the terms or vocabulary that we use to orchestrate the exposure of vocabularies to their inevitable modification would ultimately have to differ—above all when we approach the term “truth,” or the ideal of a “final vocabulary.” I will only make the remark that a failure to appreciate the descriptive character of classical phenomenology has led many commentators to miss an opportunity for a more meaningful debate with contemporary pragmatisms, including that of Rorty. For a more thorough meditation on the status of terminology in Husserl’s phenomenology, see Eugen Fink, “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,” in Apriori and World, ed. William McKenna (Hague: Nijhoff, 1981): 56–70.

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about what we want to achieve, or even what we want to say; in a proximate sense, to build is always to have at one’s disposal ample opportunity for controlling a whole host of variables in more and more sophisticated ways. Even the idea of a total work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk that would putatively design human experience itself, does not rest wholly on sand. The point is to instead stress that in architecture whatever we achieve, or attempt to achieve, is in the end not something the meaning of which is hermetically sealed, but stands as a problematic unity within the history that unfolds once the built endures beyond our proximate domination of the possible. Likewise our experience of the built is, to be sure, ordered in accordance with an understanding, but it is an understanding that is shot through with lacunae; it can suddenly leave us confused and disoriented in a world we thought we had fully mastered. So for example a city, itself the product of a multiplicity of acts through time aimed at clearly intended results each of which represents a proximate success, can lead to a complex reality that suddenly confronts us as something for which we do not even have the concepts to think. So it is with terms: we can put enormous effort into defining a finite set of concepts, with the intention that they will be able to serve as a set of fixed meanings that can provide our discourse with well defined parameters; but any such set of concepts, if they take even the smallest step beyond the trivial, will inevitably meet pressures to be expanded beyond their set definitions, as well as give rise to unexpected and often unwelcome confusion. All vocabularies, like anything fashioned by human beings, are inevitably problematic unities of sense that always require more effort than expected, and are final only when they are dead—and even then they are potentially subject to resurrection, beginning the struggle all over again. Vocabularies, like the built world itself, are rooted in an existence that fashions for itself its own horizon (its “first proof of existence”), but which in so doing proves nothing on the order of meaning, since at most it has only made the opening pursuit of meaning first possible. We put something into play the sense of which can only be preliminarily decided in the movement of our life, and only here in a “decision” that is eternally provisionary. There is no other way to build. There is no other way to be. There is thus an inner bond between phenomenological philosophy and the discourse about the built world—any discourse that seeks to be sensitive to the rigor its essence proscribes. For phenomenological philosophy proceeds from the relation, asserted as primordial, between manifestation and understanding; it seeks to explore the structures of human existence as world-opening, world-revealing, an openness to what is. The unfolding of human understanding is a fundamental dimension of this openness, one that gives it shape in

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the explicit form of a multi-dimensional access or encounter with beings. The guiding intuition throughout these reflections has been that to speak about the built world requires that we find a way to speak about the movement of manifestation as this making-accessible of beings in the world; this is the only way in which to fully capture how it is that we build on the basis of, and for the sake of, the development of our understanding. We build, in other words, to know, in pursuit of what is knowable about human things; and the ultimate horizon of this pursuit is rooted in our capacity to bring the phenomenality of the world into play, thus to build from an understanding of what it means to appear. Such knowing cannot be confused with the composition of a “picture” of things; it is not a question here of representation, but of an original, problematic opening of the play of seeing and manifestation. In building, in other words, we engage directly the world-opening movement of human existence, on terms that are fundamentally close, perhaps as close as they can be, to the original rhythms of the clearing of human truth. Thus the anthropological vocabulary that grows out of the preceding is at once philosophical and architectural, theoretical and poetic; it is also phenomenological, to the extent to which phenomenology can succeed in revealing the common ground between architectural thinking and philosophical anthropology. It is not a question of applied concepts, crafted in a workshop of generalities and then introduced as instruments in the space of the particular; it is instead the pursuit of a promise of a descriptive vocabulary, however unstable, and has more to do with a pattern of shifts, of transitions of perspective, thanks to which the common aims of architecture and philosophy gradually come into view. Thus for the Conclusion to these exercises, we will not so much collect together a set of terms or even descriptions, as emphasize a series of potentially fruitful shifts that have emerged in the course of the reflections above. These include the shift from a confrontation between manifestation and understanding to an emphasis on their continuity; from meaning as an instance of definite communication to meaning as the opening of the possible; from the hegemony of interpretation to the primacy of access; from textual to hodological expression; and finally from the world as a closed plenum of being to the world as an open horizon of encounter. These shifts recapitulate most of the main lines of reflection that have been developed in this work, without however summing them up or reducing them to a set of theses or hypotheses. The point of an exercise is to explore, to experiment; thus the task of any conclusion to this kind of investigation should take the form of an indication of how such explorations and experimentations might find a more concise and systematically directed form.

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From Confrontation to Continuity

An important point of departure for these reflections was a notion taken from Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy of what she calls the “space of appearance,” a notion which we attempted to develop, to deepen, through an employment of the resources of classical phenomenology. The Arendtian idea involved more than an emphasis on the public character of political life; it had to do with the notion that political life, that movement of natality and risk towards the promise of acting in concert, makes its appearance in an enveloping context that conditions in fundamental ways the very possibility of engagement. Appearance here is not something univocal, but complex, and often unstable. The role of the open transparency of interior space in the design of the modern German Reichstag, for example, is not a mere symbol of the public character of democratic deliberation, but represents a striking claim to political transparency, one deeply haunted by history, which takes the form of a ­poignant emphasis on the spatial organization of the visible. The power of this structure is not merely symbolic, but is ultimately drawn from the rootedness of political life in manifestation itself. Political life shows itself (or hides itself) in the space of appearance, it offers itself to be seen in terms of what is important and not important, what we face as a community and what is to be de­cided (all of which is in play in Aristotle’s arche and krinein, basic to his definition of the citizen in the Politics2). We sought to expand this idea with the thought that the built, and building, has its fundamental basis in an understanding of what it is for our collective existence to appear, or to be manifest. The idea was that the fashioning and making of such spaces draws its ultimate sense from a basic human comprehension, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, of the power of built space for life. Phenomenology allows for a deeper appreciation of the logic of such an understanding precisely through the pursuit of a robust description of phenomenality, one that runs contrary to approaches that would attempt to marginalize, through various confrontations and dichotomies, the role of appearance in favor of the sources of form and order. Appearances are never simple givens; they are always situated within a horizon, a space in which the conditions of their determinability are always in play. The marginalization of the role of appearances has its origin in the philosophical temptation to focus solely on these conditions of determinability at the expense of the problem of manifestation as such, reducing the latter to the surface phenomenality that is 2 Aristotle, Politics 1275a 22–23.

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chronically unsaturated, thus requiring reference to something else (concepts, judgments, interpretation, form). Part of what lies behind this temptation is the legitimate claim that a fundamental problem of any description of appearance is to account for how it can be “something for us” at all, or how to fix that threshold of manifestation thanks to which something becomes significant, meaningful, and not merely present. And there is in fact an important sense in which something really “appears” only when it has become meaningful, thus when it is precisely more than an appearance—but then we are engaged, it seems, more with the space of meanings than appearances. However building—building with an eye to the conditions for meaningfulness that are the purview of the world of homo faber—always brings us back to an original complicity of space, manifestation, and encounter that constitute the morphology of any concrete life of meaning. The built forces us to look to how the rendering of the surfaces of things guarantees, or at the very least promises, an access to sense. Thus it may be true that the meaning of the modern German Reichstag can only be articulated in a discourse of democracy and narratives of German and European history, but the political existence that finds its truth in these meanings and narratives is uniquely lived only in spaces such as the Reichstag, spaces that are built. A democratic people does not gather together in a meaning, nor does it risk its existence in a narrative, for meanings and narratives are only the mature expressions of a more fundamental situating of human existence in the world. To speak meaningfully about the built world as constitutive of human situatedness thus requires a shift away from a confrontation between manifestation and determinability, appearance and concept, phenomenon and meaning, in favor of a description of the continuity of meaning and manifestation, as moments that belong to building understood as a fundamental human comportment. This represents a line of reflection that we have pursued in various ways above, but perhaps the most important has to do with the role of the phenomenology of perception in exploring this continuity between meaning and manifestation. Phenomenologically reduced, perception shows itself to be much more fluid, much more open and self-transcending than it appears to be in the natural attitude, where we take perceptions to be defined psychic facts standing in a nexus of empirical relations. The phenomenological description of perception reveals that its structures form the basis of a subjective comportment and orientation, not by imposing a particular pattern or formal stamp on what is possible, but precisely through this transcending openness to what is other than perception. Perception is the very archetype of intentional life, and provides the fundamental structure of both the experiences of building and inhabiting.

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If perception represents a primordial level on which there is a continuity between manifestation and meaning, it is not because meanings can be reduced or analyzed into perceptions, but precisely because perception just is that space which provides the possibility for something like a meaning to take root as a meaning, thus as other than perception; this in turn marks the space of an opening, a setting into motion, of human comportment as such. Thus building and meaning, the opening of comportment and the transcendence of meaning, have their common root in the being of perceptual manifestation; they represent a co-primordial emergence of a unity of sense in the movement of human comportment.

From the Defined to the Possible

The point of making the argument that building is a basic human comportment is by no means to suggest that there are meanings that can be reduced to things made, or understanding to making. Accordingly, another essential point of departure for these reflections was the consequences of another of Arendt’s arguments, namely, that meaning cannot be understood as something engineered, built, or made. The architect is not the “engineer of human souls,” just as little as is an author. However dependent what we do and say may be on the materially rendered world for its becoming meaningful, above all as a dam against the inevitable oblivion of forgetting in which meaning becomes impossible, the termination of an act of making never delivers us a finished unity of sense. The meaning of what we say and what we do occurs in a horizon secured, however fragile, by the made, but it is not thereby settled. For Arendt, this signaled a need to shift her analysis towards the development of the problem of action, but for us, it pointed the way towards the idea of the made as an open condition, a conditioning of a decision, or the concrete possibility of sense or meaning. Building thus does not determine meaning, but it does make it possible. But here again, the argument is not that possibilities are made; the possible is never an artifact, provided to us as something produced by the world to which we belong. Instead we need to shift from following the causal trajectory that traces an act of making to a product or result, towards the living act of making as a bringing into view of the possible. Take for example the architectural activity of tending a garden.3 If we immediately conceive of this in accordance with a 3 Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ästhetik (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1931), pp. 201f, for another argument (against Kant) that gardens should be considered architecture.

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model of production—the garden as the production of tomatoes, flowers, and so on—we pass over a more primitive, more basic figure of cultivation that is in play in gardening. For cultivation is not simple production, but instead the manipulation of an order of things towards the potential for production (of a crop, a yield). Cultivation is a manipulation that folds the movement of organic processes together into an organized rhythm of realization, or movement of becoming. Gardens are after all an organization of the growth patterns of life, and cultivation is a kind of making, a building of space that makes manifest the movement of life and death from out of what such organization can allow us to see and understand. As such, cultivation cleaves close to the potential of making to make manifest the possibilities of life, in this case the organic life of plants; but this is also true in a deeper sense with regard to the life of cultivation itself. For the act of making itself here enjoys the possibility of manifestation, one in which the care essential to cultivation can take the concentrated, unified shape of engagement that comes with the sense of “tending” the garden. The possibilities of production are only one dimension of a larger engagement with the becoming of possibility that includes the existential possibility for habitation itself, which is also at play here, insofar as tending the garden represents an example of the built organization of human activity as a concrete instance of being-in-the-world. The garden yields not only its crop, but the gardener as well, whose existence takes shape as the result of this cultivation of possibility. It is not an arbitrary turn of phrase when Voltaire, at the end of Candide, in order to contrast the life of self-collection and progressive self-development against the aimless and confused life of hectic adventures and the winds of chance, chooses the metaphor of the garden. In order to understand and to be who we are, to exist towards what is possible for us and thus what belongs properly to our future, Voltaire says, il faut cultiver notre jardin. I would argue that all cultivation is a kind of making, precisely in the sense that all cultivation sets into motion the bringing into view of the possible. Yet not all making is cultivation; for we cultivate only those things that are already by nature on the way to being what they are, such as organic life. To cultivate is to give shape, but also to witness something that is already emerging out of another source or ground of form than making. Building has a broader horizon, one that includes politics and history, or those dimensions of human life that cannot be merely guided, but must be actively pursued as the potential to encounter something new. The site for the emergence of the new is built, not in the manner of something cultivated towards the manifestation of its given natural potentiality, but as an openness or access to the possible as such, in whatever form it takes. We do not build meanings, nor do we cultivate them,

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but the horizon of our engagement with meaning is dependent upon an openness introduced by the comportment of making, as an originary grounding movement of human life.

From Interpretation to Access

Part of what is at play in all of this is of course the central importance we tend to give to the act of interpretation when it comes to our relation to the built environment—the interpretation of artifacts, of forms, but also, and perhaps more important, the interpretation of lives. This is also what lies behind Arendt’s thesis that there is a bond between making and the opening of a world: the accomplishment of homo faber is to break the monotony of natural life by opening for us a world, a context, in which we are able to pursue the meaning of who we are. The opening of the world brings with it both the possibility and the demand of arriving at an understanding of oneself, of the other, of “us,” an understanding that arguably has its ultimate telos in the accomplishment of an interpretation. Artifacts, such as documents and symbolic objects, inevitably become an essential site for any such understanding, but the opposite is also the case: if we seek to understand the meaning of an artifact, what it “is,” this can only occur with reference to the life that gave it its context, and with that the world of homo faber that gave this context its concrete existence. However complicated this relationship may be, things made are always present as worldly, even in those cases where the “world” to which a given artifact, for example an ancient Babylonian seal, has long since vanished. The world of the seal, in which it functioned as a kind of signature or guarantee for transactions long since forgotten in a cultural context long since dissolved in the name of someone long since dead, nevertheless remains, in its very absence, as the fundamental condition of the present sense of the historical being of the seal. The seal thus opens for us, as an artifact inscribed in the present, access to an historical past world that, though itself once opened, is now closed, without thereby ceasing to be.4 Yet interpretation is only a very specific form of meaning, one that presupposes a multiplicity of forms that must first mature in order for an explicit interpretation to be possible. Throughout we have instead tried to show that the question of the meaning of the built—and here again a shift is in play—is not 4 See Heidegger, BT/SuZ, §§72–76. For a more Husserlian approach, see Edward Casey, “Scholar’s Symposium: The Work of David Carr. David Carr on History, Time and Place,” in Human Studies 2006 (29): 445–462.

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limited to the fold of the double interpretation of life through artifact, artifact through life. This is above all because life is ultimately older than interpretation, and the understanding that belongs to life unfolds according to patterns not reducible to the movement of explanation. Lived meaning, or the genesis of a life of form in the wake of human comportment, is a broader, richer, and deeper perspective on meaning than what is found in its articulation in concepts; this represents one of the fundamental gestures of phenomenology as presented above. Thus the problem of the built, precisely as a problem of human understanding, is the problem of how to capture in reflection that multidimensional space of subjective movement or comportment that makes up the concrete life of meaning.5 Several key aspects of this space of comportment have become progressively prominent in the course of these reflections. Comportment proved to have an essentially bodily character, which was described above through a reflection on the kinaesthetic structures of perceptual life. Human comportment also proved to have an inescapably personal or egoic character, that essential component of all genuinely interested life, or life lived among beings (interesse). But perhaps most decisive of all proved to be the complex intersubjective character of comportment, which recalibrated all the descriptions of bodily and personal life towards their integration into a logic of space constituted by the presence of others. These orientations of the being of comportment were developed in order to open a phenomenological perspective on the threefold problem of how the built bears reference, time, and encounter. The threefold dimension of comportment, we saw, amounts to a threefold structure of access that defines how built space can bear the unities of sense manifest as purposive, temporal, and intersubjective. But what does “access” mean in this context? Do we thereby move from an emphasis on interpretation, with its tendency to intellectualize experience, to something like a practical emphasis on control, and with that we have perhaps introduced unwittingly the theme of domination? This question is a complex one. Access in the sense developed above is not equivalent to control, but it does fix a sense of openness that grounds the possibility of control; it is not reducible to right or disposability, but it does articulate the parameters

5 The picture changes considerably if, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, we move beyond an overly restrictive conception of interpretation in favor of a more sophisticated hermeneutics. This does not change our position, since Gadamer develops his hermeneutics precisely on what is a recognizably phenomenological ontology. See Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1985), esp. 242f.

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of an openness to the possibility of the same. Already in the descriptions of subjective comportment as an immersion in things, or of life that projects its possibilities into a landscape of objects, we can perhaps already discern the outlines of a possible approach to the theory of property, one that does not simply posit use-value as an ultimate, irreducibly factical given. All of this needs to be left open; for now the central point remains that access represents an originary seeing—and it is precisely the question of the being of seeing that stands at the center of phenomenological philosophy since Husserl and Heidegger. Access in the sense of a seeing, a seeing that does not limit itself to the horizon of theoretical encounter, represents a meditation on human possibility, and ultimately on the structure of truth as an uncovering of things, their manifestation from within that shifting orchestration of encounters that make up the flow of our pursuit of ourselves. Thus, ultimately, “access” here means access to “ourselves,” or a circumspective orientation in which we catch sight of the unfolding of our time in what the world of the built has to offer us. This is as true of building as it is of encountering the built. When we build, we build for others (even that other self we ourselves will be), and in doing so we intend their intentions—we build along the lines traced by the possible movement of the other through an experience that will be shaped by the built thing we are bringing into realization. The desk intends the intentions that constitute the act of writing, of reading, of organizing materials needed to live in a world ruled through documents and written declarations; the bridge the dynamics of passage, of the negation of distance embodied in the barrier of the river for beings who knit their world together in processes of bringing-near; the library the organic patterns of understanding that flourish only given the spatial and temporal concentration of knowledge, which gives reflection the ballast and impetus it needs to give human understanding the momentum it needs to grow. All of this we see, and in seeing we see what to build, for building is just that circumspection of what around us can potentially lead to an open engagement not so much of what we are, but what we are becoming. This becoming in turn forms the axis around which the seeing of the builder and the seeing of the one who inhabits the built stand in relation. This second seeing is not the same, but it too intends the intentions of others—though now in the manner of inhabiting an understanding that has shaped the world as an offering, a rendering of space that holds out the promise of arriving at the realization of the potentiality inherent in any becoming, any existence that is its possibilities. Human becoming not only sustains both species of insight, of seeing, but also depends upon both as principles definitive of its most basic morphology.

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From Reading to Moving

That access (bodily, personal, and intersubjective) has an inner bond with possibility comes to the fore in perhaps the strongest sense when we turn to the theme of expression. Here the relevant shift begins with the tendency to emphasize a concept of expression articulated solely within a linguistic model that would emphasize the roles of code, grammar, discursivity, message, reading, and text.6 This can be taken as an alternative, or at least a supplement to an architectural discourse that would emphasize notions such as form, function, use, application, and deployment; or aesthetic concepts such as the beautiful, style, or mood. To be sure, all of these concepts, and the vocabularies in which they are embedded, point in powerful ways to how built forms condition and determine understanding, but also to how such forms lend themselves to interpretation. More, the attempts to employ these notions as a vocabulary for architectural discourse are philosophically significant, precisely because of the importance of coming to grips with the interpretability of the built world. Yet they are also at the same time restrictive—thus the shift above, precisely along lines of a reflection on the structures that constitute human access to possibility, from textual to hodological expression. Part of this had to do with the phenomenological gesture of the primacy of experience, for at root the theme of access has to do with the question of the being of experience. But what does “primacy of experience” really mean? The term “experience” is notoriously hazardous; it tends to send us into what seems to be a private, interior world of subjective response, of strictly personal impressions. It is thus vital to keep in view the phenomenological thesis of the intentionality of experience, precisely in order to problematize what is to count as “inside” when we speak of an experience. For intentionality puts the subject outside of itself; the intentions we intend when we build are not private thoughts and motivations that find their expression only in signifying acts of communication or other outwardly directed behavioral signs, but those of a subject making its way about a world. That means that the primacy of 6 Semiotic approaches are of course often remarkably rich and illuminating, and we have by no means put everything needed into place in order to have a real dialogue with these approaches. This is above all the case with respect to the important theme, influenced by Althusser among others, of the production of knowledge and its relation to historical culture. See in particular the work of Mario Gandelsonas, and his discussion of the architecture of Peter Eisenman: Gandelsonas, “From Structure to Subject: The Formation of an Architectural Language,” in: Oppositions 17 (Summer 1979); also: “Linguistics in Architecture,” in: Casabella 364 (February 1973).

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experience cannot be a question of a clean break of interiority from its exterior marks or signs; consciousness is always “in” (its) outside. Consciousness is thus in this basic sense something always materialized, in and among things; its fate is tied to the movement of just this materialization, without being thereby a thing. In fact, as we saw, it is the movement of conscious life that makes a thing manifest as a thing; intentional being is the grounding movement of both the substantiality of the object-world and its own unfolding as a unity of worldly experience. But that also means that the subject that is its possibilities exists these possibilities in the manner of a being that is always “in” (its) outside. It is a being that is always underway, always going down a hodos; and this leads us precisely to a notion of expressivity that is germane to the illumination, to the seeing or manifestation of this “way” towards which a life projects itself. The expressivity of the built world—the guiding example above was, following Sartre, the city of Paris and the Bastille, or the Paris of the Bastille—thus has to do with a double-manifestation that determines a given reality in terms of a possible future, the complex becoming of which takes the form of the access structure (body-I-others) in concreto. Yet the example of the Bastille also showed that expression, when thought hodologically, is not limited to the movement of building and inhabiting the built, so long as we understand both as two modes in which we intend the intentions of others. The example of the Bastille, the expressivity of which represented a constitutive element of the event of group formation projected towards its destruction, showed that expression has a reality that shares an essential bond with the event-character of human existence. This, in turn, leads to a description of intentional life that is not limited to structure alone, but instead brings the dynamic of its being into view. Somewhat less dramatic (but in some ways more complex) than the Bastille, consider another example from Sartre, this time from Being and Nothingness: the perception of Pierre’s absence in the café: I have an appointment with Pierre at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons, and I say, “He is not here.”7 “He is not here”—at first this looks like a judgment, but in a fundamental sense it is first and foremost a perception, one made possible by the potential for the café to offer itself as the ground for the intuition of Pierre’s absence. Sartre accordingly describes the café in terms of the positive organization of an environment that offers itself as the basis for the intuition of a nullity, an intuition 7 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 9.

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that unfolds in the perceptual movement of a sequence of nihilations of everything in the complex as “not Pierre”: When I enter this café to search for Pierre, there is formed a synthetic organization of all the objects in the café, on the ground of which Pierre is given as about to appear. This organization of the café as the ground is an original nihilation. Each element of the setting, a person, a table, a chair, attempts to isolate itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiation of this ground; it melts into the ground.8 Each thing, each face, each object that belongs to the thing-complex “café,” offers itself as the site for the intuitive negation of the expected presence of Pierre, or of the projected possibility of meeting him in the café which now, “as a whole,” is intuited as the ground of his absence. The intuitivity organized through this movement of negation (a kind of double negation, one in which things “not being” Pierre collectively constitute Pierre “not being” in the café) provides the intuitive basis for the judgment “Pierre is not here.” What is important for us is Sartre’s emphasis that, to the extent to which the entire movement of negation is here being set into motion by an expectation brought to the café, this negativity of Pierre is not only something posited (say, in a way comparable to a game in which one lists everyone who and everything that is not currently in the café), but is something real, and with that something that happens: To be sure, Pierre’s absence supposes an original relation between me and this café; there is an infinity of people who are without any relation with this café for want of a real expectation which establishes their absence. But, to be exact, I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this café. It is an objective fact at present that I have discovered this absence, and it presents itself as a synthetic relation between Pierre and the setting in which I am looking for him. Pierre absent haunts this café and is the condition of its self-nihilating organization as ground.9 What does it mean, to claim that “my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen”? The absence of Pierre happens only in the café, understood as a movement of nihilation; set into motion by my expectation, these 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., p. 10.

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negations tell me at every turn that Pierre is not here. But they tell me this only by showing it to me. This showing takes the form of a ground against which individual elements of the synthetic complex are progressively negated. Thus the possibility projected in the expectation finds its negation not in the judgment, but in the unity of intuition of an absence, which itself has the real positivity of a real relation (of Pierre to the café, of my relation to both), and above all the positivity, the reality, of an event. The event of Pierre’s absence is not something that happens in the mind, or in the performance of a negative judgment; it is an event “in the café,” precisely as an event in which the subjective possibility of the collapse of an expectation finds its objective concreteness. Expanding on this example, we can see how the expressivity of the café as a built space is implicit both in the enabling expectation and the subsequent nihilating organization of the café as ground for the intuition of the absence of Pierre. For implicit in the café is a kind of anticipation of the anticipation of meeting Pierre: there is here a pre-formation of the orientation of the expectation, one that greets the expectation with a course of manifestation that articulates it (“understands” it). The café is after all an assemblage of things organized with a view to being a place where one meets, thus where the possibility projected in the expectation of meeting Pierre already finds an explicit affirmation, and with that an expression. Correlatively, the café is just the kind of place where one might not show up. In this way the affirmation in question is complicit in the manner in which the café houses the event of not finding Pierre (in terms of the double intuitive negation); this complicity is signaled in Sartre’s description of the café as a “synthetic organization” of elements that continuously recede into the café as ground for the manifestation, appearance, or intuition of the absent Pierre. In other words, each nihilation in sequence can be said to bear an emphasis, an accent as it were, of the expressivity of the café as a built space. Thus it is not simply that the café, as a synthetic organization of relations, intends the intention of meeting Pierre by expressing, as it were in advance, the general unity of sense “meeting someone at the café.” Its expressivity continues to function dynamically as the specific tincture taken on by the receding background into which each object that offers itself to the gaze is absorbed in a sequential marking of the event of absence, as I look to each corner, each table, each face. Thus it is not that the café expresses or somehow articulates in advance the possibility that Pierre might not be there; expressivity here instead has to do with the manner in which the nullifying ground of the café draws the expectation out of itself, so to speak, into a space in which the event of the absence of Pierre is progressively intuited. This space is in this sense hodologically expressive, in that it gathers, concentrates, and shapes the movement of

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the experience of not finding Pierre “anywhere” in the café, and in way that is not reducible to a sign expressing the absence of Pierre in the sense of the content of a judgment. Expression in this sense correlates more with a sensitivity, constitutive of the being of the built, to the dynamics of events, than with a capacity to store or to retain unities of sense or meaning. The limitation of what we have called a textual approach to expression when it comes to the built amounts to an overemphasis of the preserving function of built forms, of a permanence of made objects serving as a repository of already articulated meanings. The shift to a hodological conception yields a sense of the expressivity of the built as reactive, even responsive; so for example if I were to “finally discover Pierre, my intuition would be filled by a solid element, I should be suddenly arrested by his face and the whole café would organize itself around him as a discrete presence [italics jd].”10 Here, too, the hodological space of the café lends the appearance of Pierre its specific accent through the tenor of a reactive organization of a lived space uniquely sensitive to and expressive of events.

From Closed to Open

This shift to hodological expression does not, however, represent a radical break from the textual and related figures of signification—it simply serves to emphasize the worldly character of all expressivity, and the fundamental bond this worldliness has with lived experience. Nor is the emphasis on lived experience necessarily a radical departure from a more theoretical or even representational interpretation of built form. However—and here again a shift—what the bond between access and expressivity shows is not that the world results from a process of making available that has somehow been put into place by mere subjective comportment. The architect is not a packager of worlds, nor is the inhabitant one who projects the world as idea on the blank, indifferent screen of material being. Making is not a closed arc of formation from raw material to product, nor does access represent the simple completion of a circuit that would allow the world to “appear.” The world or, to evoke the language of Heidegger, worldhood, just “is” the being of access, or how access provides the ground of manifestation, of being, for what is encountered as such, precisely from out of an openness to what is and, as we saw with the example of Pierre in the café, what is not. This openness is itself the being of the world, which can never take the form of a product but only that of a horizon; and the thought 10 Ibid.

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we have been exploring is that the basic ordering or structure of this horizon is first and foremost an originary building, understood as that first impetus, that first push towards ourselves. Here of course one might object from a more empirical point of view, arguing that the world of buildings, of settlements or domiciles, is a relatively late development in human evolutionary history. The paleontological evidence clearly indicates a much more nomadic past, which means that it would at best be misleading to suggest that humans first arose out of the activity of building. Is it not more sensible to argue that cooperative activities, such as hunting and mutual defense, the preparation of food, the constant struggle to adapt to the elements, represent a far more primordial accomplishment of human rootedness in the world than building, which arguably only develops along the lines already laid by the development of these more basic patterns of existence? It is important to keep in mind that the reflections above have not been limited to a discourse about buildings, or the built forms of a specifically sedentary existence, but were aimed throughout towards bringing into view a potentially deeper connection between building and inhabiting, making and living. And here it is difficult to even imagine a world that is not in some way already stamped by the presence of homo faber, even before that momentous transformation of human existence that broke, or at least problematized, our bondage to the rhythm of natural existence that Arendt describes under the rubric of labor. Is not the nomadic early human, chipping away at a piece of stone, or gathering together with others in the intimacy of the defensive posture of a camp, just as clearly an instance of homo faber as the builder of temples and cities? And how else can we make sense of the remarkable paintings in the caves of Lascaux, which situate the activity of image-making at the very beginnings of the emergence of modern humans, if not through some conception of the rendering of space as essential to human being in the world? And if the objection then turns into a warning about taking the relative sense of building too broadly, to the point where it is indistinguishable from analogous patterns of making found elsewhere in the animal world— the bee in its hive, or the noble beaver proving its existence by doggedly slapping mud on its dam—thus erasing the difference between animal and human, should we really take this seriously? The suggestion is not that building creates an unbridgeable gulf between humans and animals, but that building grounds the possibility of the human. So why should it surprise us that aspects of this ground are shared with animals, since after all we are ourselves animals? If this is the case, then the structures of access elaborated in a phenomenology of the built world in turn form a potentially important contribution to an

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ontology of the world as such—specifically the human world as a horizon, an opening of possibility that finds its ultimate ground in making and building. Based on the reflections on the worldly character of the built pursued above, it is clear that such an ontology would have to combine the descriptions of access as the being of the open with an account of the manner in which our immersion in things also brings with it a kind of closing, a restrictedness, even a naïveté. Part of what it is to be in the world is to be already ahead of oneself, pulled along by the trajectory of an immersion that does not leave space for a reflection on origins, leaving them essentially unquestioned in favor of what happens in their wake. There is a kind of forgetting that is basic to the manner in which world-experience unfolds, lending what was characterized above as a distinctive silence and anonymity to built spaces. Part of what it means for the built to be an opening of a world is the ontological truth that its sense or meaning must be constantly reaffirmed, rediscovered, in a continuous process of preserving it from its own tendency towards oblivion. The built world thus does not really represent the successful preservation and permanence of human meaning; instead it defines the parameters, the site, in which preservation and permanence can be first pursued as fundamental existential tasks. Phenomenology, by suspending the naïveté of worldly being in order to bring the basic structures of its latent being more sharply into view, represents a meditation on just this double movement of the world as an opening of the horizon of possibility and its exposure to closure, or to the threat of forgetting. The threat of forgetting is not merely a matter of the limited power of memory, but is ontological in character, and points to the manner in which forgetting, oblivion, closure, can determine inwardly the very being of things. This theme thus points to a burning issue for any modern reflection on the built world, or the world as such—namely the question concerning technology, and the growing domination of technological thinking in the modern world. The technological model of resource and consumption, that pattern of ordered destruction of being characteristic of the modern age, has haunted all of these reflections, from the first introduction of the distinction between architect and engineer in Chapter 1. And this too represents a central theme of phenomenological philosophy, one that perhaps finds its most developed articulation in what Heidegger calls Ge-stell, that revealing of being that takes the form of the concentrated reserve of force.11 11

Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Heidegger Gesam­ tausgabe, vol. 7, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm van Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000); “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Rowe, 1977), especially

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A full engagement with the problem of technology would take us too far afield. Nevertheless, these exercises, and the shifts in vocabulary they inaugurate, have perhaps at least put us in a better position to frame the question of whether a phenomenologically oriented philosophical anthropology of the built world is limited to a reflection that reproduces various figures of the resource/consumption circuit characteristic of technological civilization, or whether an ontology of the rendering of being, of the world into the openness of human possibility, can both form the basis for an understanding of the essence of technology and point to a horizon that transcends it. The promise of these exercises, and perhaps the ultimate philosophical challenge that they pose, is the possibility of a conception of building and making that replaces the ideology of the accumulation and intensification of being as power, as will, with a philosophy of building as giving, as an offering to the human and the divine, basic to the originary human rendering of space. To evoke an old battle cry of phenomenological philosophy, such a shift from power to gift would be to once again find a way to claim that possibility is always higher than actuality. Nevertheless, if such a shift were to make sense, it must also account for how the essence of the built also sets into play the possibility for precisely that reduction to accumulation and domination, to concentrations of power, which must be grasped equally as a distinctively human possibility. That same openness of the being of access that makes meaning possible is also the ground for the possible impossibility of meaning, for its ontological forgetting in the form of Ge-stell. In other words, we need to come to terms with the human fact that we are able to build worlds in which we are completely incapable of living, worlds that absorb our being into something other than ourselves, as if disproving our existence through an occupation of a space that can never be our “own.” This also means that what is meant by “ontology” cannot be a set of fixed, determinate categories of a metaphysics; it must instead be the title for a meditation of how and what it means to be, a meditation reflective enough, self-possessed enough, that it can at the same time continuously question the conditions for an openness to the very question of being itself. In other words, as Heidegger once put it, ontology is only possible as phenomenology. The vocabulary that emerges from these exercises, and which gathers together pp. 19f (in the English translation) and pp. 20f (in the German original). For an illuminating discussion of the problem of technology in Husserl and Heidegger see Jan Patočka, “The Dangers of Technization in Science according to E. Husserl and the Essence of Technology as Danger according to M. Heidegger,” in  Jan Patočka. Philosophy and Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Erazim Kohák (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 327–339.

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a multi-dimensional set of descriptions of the built world, points progressively towards this theme of human openness to questioning, to the problematicity of meaning. The built, as it has come to be understood here, is the very embodiment of the problematicity of understanding. More, this problematicity is something basic even to manner of the presence of the built, as became clear in the last exercise on image and imagination. The argument that the experience of built space can be described as analogous to image-consciousness yields an explicitly ontological structure determinative of a specific mode of thingness. That something like a physical imagination is at all possible—an image-consciousness grounded in the given plenum of being, but in tension with it—is of fundamental importance to any philosophical anthropology of human life and experience. The built world, experienced as rendered in so many directions for what we can be, can only be a world of the imagination. The imaginary here is thus not a flight from things, from the world, but the most intimate secret at the heart of all human encounter—it is, to give Sartre the last word, “the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom.”12

12 Sartre, The Imaginary, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 186.

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Volumes Cited from Husserliana: Edmund Husserl Gesammelte Werke

Husserliana II: Die Idee der Phänomenologie. Fünf Vorlesungen. Edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. English translation: The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated by L. Hardy Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2010.

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Husserliana III: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie. Volumes 1 and 2. Edited by Karl Schumann. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976. English translation: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by Daniel Dahlstrom. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014. Husserliana IV: Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Zweites Buch: Phänomenologische Untersuchungen zur Konstitution. Edited by Marly Biemel. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991-reprint. English translation: Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989. Husserliana VI: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Edited by Walter Biemel. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1976. English translation: Crisis of the European Sciences. Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970. Husserliana VIII: Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1959. Husserliana X: Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. Edited by Rudolf Boehm. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969. English translation: On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time. Edmund Husserl Collected Works. Volume IV. Trans­ lated by John Brough. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994. Husserliana XI: Analysen zur passiven Synthesis. Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten (1918–1926). Edited by Margot Fleischer. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966. English translation: Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic. Translated by Anthony Steinbock. Dordrecht: Springer, 2001. Husserliana XVI: Ding und Raum. Vorlesungen 1907. Edited by Ullrich Claesges. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973. English translation: Thing and Space. Lectures of 1907. Edmund Husserl Collected Works. Volume VII. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997. Husserliana XVII: Formale und transzendentale Logik. Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft. Edited by Paul Janssen. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974. English translation: Formal and Transcendental Logic. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977. Husserliana XVIII: Logische Untersuchungen. Erster Band: Prolegomena zur reinen Logik. Edited by Elmar Holenstein. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1975. English translation: “Prolegomena to a Pure Logic.” In Logical Investigations. Volume 1. Translated by J.N. Findlay and edited by Dermot Moran. London: Routledge, 2001. Husserliana XIX: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band: Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. 2 Volumes. Edited by Ursula Panzer. The

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Name Index Achilles 32 Alexander the Great 16 Althusser, Louis 261n6 Anaximander of Miletus 185, 186, 188 Anaximenes of Miletus 185 Archimedes of Syracuse 18 Arendt, Hannah 8, 9, 11, 23, 25–34, 36–39, 60, 69, 71, 81, 116, 121, 123, 191, 193, 250, 254, 256, 258, 266 Ariadne 120 Aristippus of Cyrene 42, 48, 50 Aristotle 32, 52, 53, 126, 155, 162, 188, 245n26, 254 Bach, Johann Sebastian 205 Baird, George 34, 36, 37 Barber, Stephen 200 Bataille, Georges 216 Baudot, Anatole de 13 Beethoven, Ludwig von 163, 205 Benjamin, Walter 209, 210 Bentham, Jeremy 89 Bonaparte, Napoleon 13 Boullée, Étienne-Louis 123 Brentano, Franz 58, 65, 162, 230, 231 Burford, Alison 15–16n10 Butler, Howard Crosby 18, 19 Caesar, Augustus 17, 198, 219 Caesar, Julius 15 Callebat, Louis 28 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi 60, 166 Casey, Edward 4, 118, 119 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 16, 27, 28 Clarke, M.L. 15–16n10, 16n12 Daedalus 15, 73, 120, 188–192 de Muralt, André 113 Descartes, René 96–99, 144, 153, 154, 226, 231 Duchamp, Marcel 91, 137–139 Eisenman, Peter 200, 261n6 Fink, Eugen 251n1

Frampton, Kenneth 8, 13, 23, 26, 30, 31, 33, 38 Frascari, Marco 3 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 259n5 Gandelsonas, Mario 261n6 Giedion, Sigfried 13, 18, 20 Gropius, Walter 14n6, 22, 35, 37 Hadid, Zaha 183 Hegel, G.W.F. 73, 219, 222, 239–241, 244 Heidegger, Martin 2, 9, 10, 26n31, 51, 59, 86, 124, 125, 127–131, 142–149, 153, 154, 158, 160, 161, 172, 177, 178, 260, 265, 267, 268 Hildebrand, Adolf 165n5 Holl, Stephen 3, 124, 140, 141, 198 Hollein, Hans 200 Husserl, Edmund 2, 9–11, 26n31, 51, 57–59, 62, 64, 65, 68, 74–76, 79–82, 85–87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96–99, 101–109, 111–115, 117, 118, 120, 121, 129–139, 150–158, 160, 161, 168, 172, 176, 177, 181, 182, 184, 222–227, 229–235, 236n22, 238, 239, 241–243, 245, 245n26, 246, 247, 251, 251n1, 260 Kahn, Louis 17, 48–50, 62, 63, 100, 110, 122, 128, 165, 199, 221, 222, 245, 247 Kant, Immanuel 40–43, 52, 57, 58, 61, 124, 128, 163, 256n3 Koolhaas, Rem 200 Le Corbusier 1, 2 Lefebvre, Henri 31 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 163 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 36 Levinas, Emmanuel 51 Libeskind, Daniel 3, 47, 184 Louis XVI of France 211–214, 216, 217 Lukács, György 177 Madsen, Michal 32n45 Mahler, Gustav 205, 206 Mann, Thomas 45–47, 53 McCann, Rachel 3

282 McEwen, Indra Kagis 17, 24, 25, 28, 119, 120, 185–192 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 9, 51, 182 Monroe, Marilyn 223, 224 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 205 Neckar, Jacques 211 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 3, 5, 8, 26n31 Onians, John 170, 171n7, 175 Otero-Pailos, Jorge 3 Palladio, Andrea 24, 25, 183 Pallasmaa, Juhani 3 Panofsky, Erwin 20n19 Pappus of Alexandria 18, 19, 21, 22 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 3, 184n16 Pessoa, Fernando 226, 227, 229, 232–238 Pevsner, Nikolaus 19, 20 Phidias 219 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 183, 184n16 Plato 15, 28, 108, 110, 189, 192, 246 Protagoras 129 Rijn, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van 163 Romano, Giulio 204 Rorty, Richard 251n1 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 32, 180 Rush, Fred 140, 143 Sartre, Jean-Paul 9, 31, 51, 158, 172, 208–217, 220, 238, 262–264, 269

Name Index Schama, Simon 179–180n10 Scheler, Max 51 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 256n3 Schmarsow, August 165n5 Schwarzer, Mitchell 165n5 Semper, Gottfried 14n6, 18 Serra, Richard 198 Silvetti, Jorge 199, 203–206, 217 Solon 32 Stern, Lawrence 177 Suger, Abbot 20n19 Thales of Miletus 185 Thiis-Evensen, Thomas 3 Tschumi, Bernard 71–74, 119 Van de Ven, Cornelis 165n5 Vesely, Dalibor 3, 8 Viel de Saint Maux, Jean-Louis 17 Vitruvius, Marcus V. Pollio 15–18, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 34, 42, 198, 204, 219 Voltaire 32, 257 Warhol, Andy 224 Wright, Frank Lloyd 14n6 Yourcenar, Maguerite 184n16 Zumthor, Peter 3, 48, 126, 175n9, 179n10, 221

Subject Index Académie Royale d’Architecture 13 access 6, 44, 64, 94, 99, 106–108, 163, 174, 177, 178, 184n16, 192, 194, 218, 221, 224, 253, 255, 258–261, 265, 267 accessibility 112, 177, 178, 185, 191, 224, 245n26 being of 265, 268 intersubjective 197, 261 and meaning 57, 106 modes of 94, 107, 108, 111 as originary seeing 260 and possibility 217, 248, 257, 261 primacy of 253 problem of 11, 107, 178 and things 89, 99, 115, 117, 195 threefold structure of 259, 262, 266 in valuing 107 and world 79, 184 Angkor Wat 241 anthropology, philosophical 1, 4, 11, 249, 250, 253, 268, 269 appearance 3, 8, 26n31, 33, 36, 39, 47, 48, 50, 62–64, 66, 83, 84, 86, 89–92, 94, 95, 100, 104, 108, 110, 113, 114, 120, 121, 136, 137, 143, 159–162, 166, 182, 185, 187–189, 192, 193, 207, 244, 246, 251, 253–255, 262, 264, 265 appearing of 64, 161–163 and expression 110, 207, 242 field of 106, 143 ground of 64, 265 horizon of (see under horizon) of images 223–225, 227, 229, 246 manifestation of freedom 206 manner of 90, 163, 179, 183 and meaning 8, 10, 11, 29, 30, 114, 255, 256 phantasia 223n6 possibility of 87, 114, 174, 175, 257 prior to expression 207 self-manifestation 63–65, 69 as skin 189–191 space of 8, 11, 29–31, 33, 36–39, 50, 60, 69, 91, 116, 121, 191–194, 254, 255 of subjective life 83 and understanding 251–253

apprehension 62, 63, 69, 93, 100, 108, 110, 133, 134, 154, 188, 224–227, 231, 232 Auffassung 132, 133, 135, 137 contents of (Auffassungsinhalte) 132, 133, 227, 233 perceptual 133, 231–233 arche 254 architecture 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 23–25, 28, 30, 34–36, 48, 73, 122, 126, 165, 179n10, 185, 199, 200, 203, 204, 206, 219, 249, 252, 253, 256n3, 261 architect vs. engineer 7, 8, 12–14, 16–21, 23, 25, 28, 33, 37–39, 53, 54, 68, 69, 72, 185, 192, 198, 251, 256, 267 architectural paradox 71–73 architectus 15, 16 architekton 15, 19 as art 219, 239, 240, 244 as expression 198, 206, 220 expressivity of 200, 219 history of 8, 22, 25, 38 as knowledge 7, 8, 185, 204 meaning of 4, 5, 8, 17, 31, 37, 165, 198–200, 245n26 mechanicos 18, 19 medieval 124 modern 13, 14, 22, 34, 35, 37, 38, 123, 134 and music 205 oikodomos 19 phenomenology of 4, 9 philosophy of 199 postmodern 200 practice of 17, 34 Renaissance 204 and rhetoric 36 and sculpture 219 technites 19 as text 203, 204 art 14, 18, 42, 48, 185, 219, 244 Baukunst 14n6 durability of 30 fusion of art and craft 22 fusion with science 20 Gesamtkunstwerk 22, 252 modern 34

284 art (cont.) painting 138 philosophy of 199, 219 role in architecture 34 spatial 48 temporal 48 work of 5, 34, 159 artifact 8, 25, 26, 39, 40, 47, 48, 50, 68, 71, 75, 122, 170, 171, 182, 187–190, 198, 202, 203, 213, 241, 256, 258, 259 cultural 25, 203, 239 daidalon 187–190, 246 meaning of 240, 258 permanence of 25, 32 of techne 192 association 226, 229, 239, 246 function of 226, 247 and memory 246 movement of 247 phenomenon of 246, 247 protean character of 247 resemblance 226 symbolic presentation 229 Band 198 Bastille 208, 211, 213–217, 220, 262 Place de la Bastille 217, 220 symbolism of 216 Battle of Stalingrad 109, 110, 177 Bauhaus 20, 22, 35, 38 being-rendered 240, 241, 243–247, 255, 260, 266, 268, 269 analogy with image 240 material 248, 256 Bloch Building, Nelson-Atkins Museum 140, 141, 143 body 4, 64, 72, 139, 150, 152–154, 158, 168, 169, 177, 181, 183, 184n16, 195, 196, 245n26, 249, 262 as body-thing (Leibkörper), 151, 152 chros 189 kinaesthetic 139, 150, 197, 198 lived 150, 196 mind-body dualism 73 orientation of 10, 90, 139, 184, 207 as origin of movement 150, 151, 181 perceiving body 194, 198 problem of 9, 138 reification of 151 spatiality of 195

subject Index as stimulus-response circuit 181, 184 in Stoicism 27 as zero-point 150, 151 building 1, 4, 5, 7, 11–18, 20n19, 21–26, 29, 34–37, 43, 48, 69, 71, 85, 116, 120, 122, 123, 167, 168, 173, 175, 179, 185, 188, 189, 191, 197, 203, 206, 248, 250–256, 260–262, 266–268 by animals 266 buildability 173, 196 concept of 35, 123, 268 faber 16 as fundamental human comportment 255, 266 history of western 8, 12, 14, 15 idealization of 18, 22 knowledge of 11, 16, 18, 23, 28, 33, 39, 204 as language 206 and meaning 199, 250, 255–257 practice of 8, 13, 14, 18, 21, 22, 34, 36, 69, 123, 165, 196, 203, 204 process of 16, 73, 203 qua self-critical 203 and self-knowledge 35 of space 3, 17, 39, 122, 164, 165, 167, 168, 180, 257 techne 188 technological conception of 35 tektein 188 tekton 15n10 as writing 203 built space 3, 10, 21, 30, 37, 38, 47, 50, 71, 120, 140, 143, 164, 168, 169, 172–182, 185, 189, 191–194, 196, 197, 199, 207, 217, 218, 220, 231, 240, 245–248, 254, 255, 259, 264, 269 and access 178, 218 analogy with image 243, 245 anonymity of 267 and architectural drawing 182 as being-rendered 244 as embodiment of knowledge 7, 12, 174, 175, 179, 184, 197, 247 as exemplary phenomenon 160, 161, 182, 185 experience of 171, 245 expressivity of 10, 207, 216, 217, 231, 264 fragility of 180 as instrumentum 122

285

subject Index intersubjectivity of 50, 172–177, 179, 184, 196 as a non-thing (Unding) 247 phenomenality of 165, 168, 176, 179, 181, 218, 239, 243, 244 phenomenology of 10, 191 presence of 218, 222, 230, 231, 239 problem of 10, 108, 109, 123, 149, 158, 164, 166, 167, 184, 196 silence of 175, 243, 247 and sound 175n9 built world 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 17, 26, 27, 29–31, 33, 34, 37–39, 47, 60, 61, 69, 71, 72, 85, 117, 122, 123, 148, 159, 166, 168, 169, 174, 183, 185, 193, 194, 196–198, 214, 219–222, 244, 246–249, 251–253, 260, 266–269 and access 185 aestheticization of 21 constructibility of 203 and expression 10, 194, 197, 199, 207, 208, 220, 222, 262 as embodiment of knowledge 7, 8, 10, 39, 68, 179 experience of 3, 4, 69, 198, 230 and habitation 5, 39, 197, 207 as instrumentum 122 interpretability of 261 materiality of 198, 245 and meaning 2, 3, 9, 30, 39, 207, 220, 222, 240, 255 opacity of 95 phenomenality of 10, 70, 123, 168, 207, 221, 239, 243 phenomenology of 29, 39, 148, 192, 194, 266 problem of 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 28, 68, 122, 249, 250 rationalization of 22 as situation 207 as universe of ciphers 206 vocabulary of 193 Café Hawelka (Vienna, Austria) 87, 88 Candide 257 Carceri d’invenzione 183 choros 15, 120 comportment 136, 213, 240, 255, 256, 259, 260, 265 bodily 3, 158, 182, 259 egoic character of 259

intersubjective character of 259 of making 258 orientations of 259 space of 256, 259 concern. See under interest consciousness 34, 63–65, 78, 79, 82, 89–92, 94, 98, 104–106, 110–112, 114, 115, 135, 140, 154–156, 161, 162, 174, 177, 232, 233, 235, 237–239, 242, 244, 262, 269 as absolute being 96, 105, 116, 120 accomplishment of 104, 105, 232 act of 108, 152, 153, 234 and adumbrations 90 (see also sensation, Abschattung) affectivity of 168 and association 226 becoming of 115 being of 58, 93, 103, 114, 115, 154, 155 class 208 contents of 92, 154, 237 Greek 185, 190 historical 4, 30 horizon of (see under horizon) of images (see image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein)) immanence of 89, 101, 103, 112 individuation of 236 intentional 58, 66, 89, 103, 104, 111, 114, 116, 131, 153–156, 242, 262 materialization of 262 modification of 238, 239 movement of 104, 110, 262 noeses of 104, 113, 114, 154 non-actional modification of 87 openness of 244 perceptual 91, 132 phenomenality of 106 picture theory of 92 pure 122 and reflection 66 self-consciousness 115 and selfhood 153, 154 Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari 166 Dasein 146, 178 attunement of 147 as being-in-the-world 144–147, 149 as care (Sorge) 145, 146 as concern 144, 145, 149, 178 spatiality of 145, 147, 149, 154, 155

286 demiourgos 190 Der Zauberberg 45 design 2, 4, 5, 7, 15, 28, 34, 36, 204, 249, 252, 254 of buildings 33, 35 designer as technician 34 of machina 15 of modern life 35 of the process of design 22 problem of 5, 32n45 standardized 22 Ding and sich 107 doubt 97–99 act of 96–98 attempt to 97–99 methodological 97 possibility of 97–99 and suspension 98, 99 universal 97 drawings, architectural 16n12, 24, 182, 183, 184n16, 185 forma, deformatio 16n12 paradeigma 16n12 École des Beaux-Arts 13 École des Ponts et Chaussées 13 École Polytechnique 13 edge 118–121, 123 horizontality of 119 as marking discontinuity 120 ubiquity of 118, 119 ego 10, 80, 82, 152–155, 157, 158, 168, 181, 195, 237, 262 absolute certainty of 96, 98 being of 153–155 cogito 82, 87, 96 community of 181 doubling of in imagination 237 fantasy-I 237 I move 141 inhabits own being 155, 180 life of 64, 114, 156 as pole (Ichpol) 113, 153 as res cogitans 153, 231 selfhood 64, 152–155, 157, 158, 168, 177, 185, 195, 196, 218, 260 as solus ipse 157 as substrate 153 encounter 9, 39, 49, 50, 56, 60, 64, 69, 82, 100–102, 110, 118, 141, 142, 144, 157, 159,

subject Index 166, 174, 176–178, 195, 198, 220, 247, 253, 255, 257, 260, 265, 269 as borne 10, 69, 83, 95, 122, 259 experience of 39, 247 with others 47, 48, 50, 74, 157, 178, 193 possibility of 142, 172, 196, 247 self-encounter 155 space of 9, 47–50, 55, 63, 69, 143, 172, 184, 185, 191, 193, 194, 196, 206, 211, 226, 237, 260 with things 55, 127, 134, 172, 195 engineering 16, 18–22, 28, 32n45, 38 dominance of 35 engineer as l’homme moderne 13 engineering ideal 21–23, 26, 30, 36, 38, 198 as fabrication of space 34 history of 8, 22 and machina 15 military 15, 25 military, Roman military camp 199 social 28 as technology 22 epoché 9, 86, 99–106, 111 ergon 188 event 29, 60, 74, 75, 84, 110, 177, 180, 208, 210, 213–215, 217, 220, 262–265 of absence 264 as disruptive of meaning 200 event-character 207, 210, 213, 217, 262 historical 208, 213 human 71, 208, 247 manifestation of 213, 216 meaning of 200, 213, 217 movement of 10, 210, 220 theoretical 185 threshold of 216 experience 4–6, 9, 28, 34, 47–49, 55, 57–59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 68, 73, 81, 84, 90, 93–95, 103, 106–108, 110, 115, 116, 118, 123, 138, 140, 141, 143, 145, 156, 157, 161, 164, 165, 174, 181, 186, 192, 197, 213, 217, 236n22, 237, 246, 259, 261, 262 access to past 94 and anxiety 147 archaic experience of the world 186 being of 63, 261

287

subject Index of the built 10, 39, 61, 164, 175, 179, 181, 184, 197, 198, 203, 207, 220, 221, 243, 249, 252, 260, 269 collective 29, 214 concept of 10, 68, 200 as designed 34, 94, 252 of destruction 31 of distance 158, 171 of the divine 192 emergent character of 114, 169 empirical 156 of encounter (see under encounter) of experience 63–65, 68, 162 and experiment 55 human 36, 73, 249, 269 reality of 37 of the imagination 237 immanence of 94, 102 intentional 60, 62, 83, 96, 111, 113, 114, 130, 234, 261 intersubjective 173, 195–198 lived experience (Erlebnis) 37, 57, 58, 61–69, 86, 87, 93, 94, 96, 101–105, 107, 109–113, 121, 130–132, 138, 139, 142, 143, 150, 154, 163, 168, 234, 265 of meaning 55, 58, 60, 85, 113 modern 35 movement of 220, 265 natural 86, 106 object of 68, 106, 107 of others 158, 174 perceptual 11, 59, 60, 93, 104, 108, 131, 133, 134, 136, 142, 145, 150, 152, 160, 162, 181–183, 198, 231, 235, 236 phenomenological 120 primacy of 61, 261 production of 94 re-living of 94 rhetoric of 34 of seeing 54, 56, 192, 234 of space (see under space) subjectivity of 95, 122, 137, 142 of things (see under thing) of touch 152 transcendental 66 of the uncanny 84 unity of 84, 185 vs. world 89 of the world (see under world) world-experience 85, 267

expression 3, 7, 10, 11, 13, 31, 35, 37, 49, 53, 109, 110, 171, 193, 194, 197, 198, 206, 207, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 235, 238–245, 249, 255, 261 architectural 140, 199, 204 communicative 242, 243 expressivity 10, 73, 80, 171, 197, 198, 207, 208, 213, 217–220, 240–242, 245, 262, 264, 265 of freedom 219, 239, 244 as gift to meaning 110 hodological 216, 217, 220, 253, 261, 262, 264, 265 indication (Anzeichen) 169, 241–243, 247 and language 59, 206, 207 mathematical 78 and meaning 59, 109, 110, 200, 204, 206, 241, 243 movement of 62, 206 prior to language 207 problem of 9, 10, 218 production of 206 and signs 37, 240, 265 symbolic 71, 73, 219 textual 57, 199, 203, 205, 206, 216, 220, 261, 265 unproductivity of 109, 110 First Unitarian Church and School (Rochester, New York) 48 fragility 180, 241 origin of 181 phenomenon of 31 French Revolution 13, 208, 211, 213, 216, 217, 220 National Assembly 211 Réveillon Riot 215 Third Estate 211 fused group (groupe en fusion) 208, 210, 211, 213–215, 217 gardens 240, 256n3, 257 as architecture 256 and labyrinths 120 gnomon 180 Haas Haus (Vienna, Austria) 200 habit 35, 145, 155 breaking of 45

288 habit (cont.) condenses time 45 habituality 155, 168, 195, 217 exis 215 habitus, intellectual 17 monotony of 45 sedimentations of 168 habitation 2, 5, 39, 41, 55, 57, 62, 67, 89, 93, 108, 114, 116, 123, 129, 148, 154, 157, 168, 179, 196, 197, 207, 240, 241, 248, 250, 251, 255, 257, 260, 262, 266 habitability 197 history of 197 manner of 130, 155, 156, 166, 178, 260 proto-forms of 175 rendering forms of 241 of self 177, 180 hermeneutics 8, 259n5 history 17, 53, 64, 85, 117, 170, 179–180n10, 200, 214, 215, 254, 257 concept of 200 cultural 12, 200 embodied in landscape 179–180n10 European 255 evolutionary 266 historical existence 30, 171 Holocaust Memorial (Berlin) 200 homo faber 8, 23, 25–28, 71, 81, 85, 116, 121, 250, 258, 266 works of 23, 30 world-making function of 26, 39 horizon 27, 47, 79, 84, 85, 114, 116, 141, 156, 164, 180, 191, 209, 238, 246, 252, 257 of appearance 69, 100, 254 of being 83, 100, 155 concept of 10, 76 of concern 148, 196 of consciousness 114, 153, 156, 161 of determination 129, 143, 164 edge of 119, 120 of encounter 74, 85, 101, 130, 174, 178, 237, 253 of human existence 81, 248 of intentionality 68, 121, 153, 155 of meaning 6, 43, 50, 55–59, 61, 66, 85, 96, 99, 101, 114, 117, 147, 195, 206, 244, 251, 256, 258 of the noema 114 of the non-built 196

subject Index of observation 6 of orientation 164 of perception 53, 76, 108, 228, 233, 236, 248 of possibility 48, 84, 114, 149, 213, 267 practical 43 predelineations of 77 pre-given horizon of things 81, 83, 95, 100 of seeing 55, 87, 188 of the subjectivity of experience 137 of theoretical encounter 260 of understanding 50, 54, 57, 63, 83, 116, 165 of the world 28, 58, 74, 76, 78, 80–82, 84, 85, 87, 88, 100, 117, 146, 149, 236, 238, 253, 265–267 Hundred Years’ War 214 I, the (das Ich). See ego image 11, 29, 64, 93, 135, 202, 223–230, 232, 233, 235, 236, 240, 243, 244, 246, 269 apprehension of 225, 227 associativity of 245, 246 in conflict with perceptual field 227, 228, 230, 232, 233, 245 daidala 246 and depiction 225, 246 as a disruption of the real 228 founded manifestation of 223, 228 image-making 266 image-object 224–227, 229, 232, 245 image-subject 223–226, 246 mental 121, 232 of movement 139 not produced by imagination 232 as a nothing (ein Nichts) 227–229, 231, 243 phantasia 223n6 phantasy-image 232, 233 physical 222–226, 239, 243, 245 physical manipulation of 225 presence of 222, 226, 228, 235 as quasi-real 232 representatio 226 and seeing-in (Hineinschauen) 225, 226, 233 vs. symbol 229

subject Index image-consciousness (Bildbewusstsein) 222, 224, 225, 229, 231, 232, 235, 239, 243, 269 concept of 228, 231 in psychology 231 tincture of 227 imagination 11, 40, 44, 45, 47, 55, 100, 105, 108, 158, 184n16, 223–225, 231–233, 235–239, 244, 269 absence of images 232 apprehension contents of 233 bodily 184 faculty of 223n6, 231 fantasy 223n6 free 232, 236 imaginatio 223n6 independence of 233, 235 non-presence of the imagined 233, 235 phantasia 223n6 Phantasie 223n6 physical 11, 240, 244, 269 protean character of 236n22 vs. perception 237 immanence 91, 94, 96, 102, 105, 106, 111 as anonymous presence 101 of consciousness (see under consciousness) of experience (see under experience) immanent being 94, 96, 101, 105 phenomenological 89, 95, 101, 103, 105, 106 reell content of 105 sensuousness of 91 and time 94 transcendence in immanence 89, 103–105, 112 immortality, sense of 30 intentionality 57, 58, 62, 65, 66, 134, 156, 184, 242, 261. See also consciousness being of 64, 66, 115, 137 horizon of (see under horizon) obscurity of intentional being 65 phenomenality of 62 and sensation 168 theme of 58, 66 thesis of 103 interest 5, 16, 19, 42, 75, 81, 82, 116, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 155, 156, 177–180, 183, 193, 195–198, 218, 250 and access 177

289 aesthetic 22, 35 of animal laborans 38 in beauty 19 concept of 177, 178 concern 53, 142–147, 176–178, 195 cultivation of 180 egoic 155, 174, 207 embodiment of 185 exposed 180 failure of 180 in form 20 and fragility 178, 180 immediate 81, 156 intention of intentions 193 maturity of 176 in means for existence 116 political 16, 19, 165n5, 181 practical 5, 72, 165n5, 196 pursuit of 60, 156, 157, 179 sedimentation of 177 and space 178–180 symbolic 181 International Congress of Architects (1889) 13 intersubjectivity 9, 10, 47, 50, 156–158, 169, 171, 173, 174, 176, 195, 196, 243, 262 distance of 171 intersubjective visibility 179 theme of 47, 170, 171 as total phenomenon 174 Khufu ship 189 kinaesthesis 138, 139, 141, 145, 150, 165n5, 182, 183, 194, 196, 259. See also sensation limits of kinaesthetic sense 184n16 localization of 181 movement of 183 as primordial phenomenon 139 as sensation of the flow of perception 139 knowledge 5–8, 11–13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 33, 36–39, 53, 68, 84, 116, 144, 161, 167, 170, 175, 185, 190, 192, 242 architectural 14n6, 25, 68 of building (see under building) embodied 10, 175, 178, 181 episteme 192 foundation of 97, 112 ideal of 21, 22, 35, 36

290 knowledge (cont.) local 18, 175 logic of 21 meaning of 5–7, 23 possibility of 56, 115 problem of 5–7, 37, 38, 185, 193 problematicity of 7–9, 12, 27, 33, 37, 39 production of 204, 261n6 and science 6, 7, 19 as seeing (eidenai) 192 self-knowledge 35, 36 sophia 191, 192 as source of power 6 techne 192 temporal concentration of 260 kosmos 186–190, 192 of the polis 190 krinein 254 labyrinth 15, 77, 110, 120 ancient image of 119, 120 and edges 119 as metaphor 72–74, 119, 195 of the natural attitude 77, 79, 81 as symbol of architecture 73 landscape 35, 148, 179–180n10, 241, 260 architectural 25 carved by interest 177 cultural 179–180n10 urban 201 language 58–62, 127, 130, 156, 199, 203, 204, 206, 207, 242 as cultivation of visibility 60 and expression 59, 206, 207, 244 as independent origin 61 and meaning 57, 59, 121, 206 and space of appearance 60 as theme in phenomenology 59 written 230 Lascaux Caves 266 light 4, 6, 75, 76, 124, 127, 140, 145, 221, 245–247 changes in 227 as element of architecture 124 as giver of presence 221, 222, 245, 247 materiality of 124, 221 play of 221, 222 spent light 221, 222, 245, 247 in the theater 245, 246

subject Index thingness of 124 Lisbon Café Brasileira 233, 234, 237 1755 earthquake 32, 180 machine 13, 15, 16, 23, 34 ambiguous 34 automaton 15 construction of 15, 39 metaphor of 34 modern fascination with 33 siege machines 15 unity of 41 Manhattan (New York City) 65, 200 manifestation. See appearance Mannerism 203, 204 material 7, 17, 18, 24, 32, 41, 44, 116, 121, 123, 126, 127, 167, 180, 191, 196, 209, 219, 220, 223, 240, 242, 244, 260, 265 material conditions 208, 211, 215 materiality 3, 26, 33, 35, 71–73, 119, 126, 127, 208, 209, 217, 220, 221, 240, 243, 248, 265 metaphorical power of materials 199 as spent light 221, 222, 245, 247 meaning 9, 26n31, 27, 28, 37, 50, 54–58, 60, 63, 64, 68, 69, 75, 83, 85, 86, 93–95, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 109, 111–113, 134, 147, 178, 184, 194, 200, 203, 208, 217, 225, 230, 242, 244, 252, 255–259, 267, 268 as access 255, 268 accomplishment of 53, 59, 62, 63, 66, 67, 83–85, 108, 110, 113, 182, 204, 240 of action 27, 29, 37 anonymity of 59 and appearance 8, 10, 11, 29, 114, 256 articulation of 101, 147, 265 as borne by things 9, 70, 95 clarification of 6, 51, 52, 57, 69 concrete 5, 10, 213, 255, 259 and constitution 108 embodiment of 29, 37 and encounter 49, 50, 220 enrichment of 109, 112, 113 in the epoché 99–102 excess of 52, 54, 56, 58–60 and expression 59, 109, 110, 199, 241, 242, 253 of the good 54

subject Index and homo faber 26 horizon of (see under horizon) incompleteness of 220 intersubjective 193, 195, 196, 259 and language 57, 59, 60, 62, 121, 206 as logos 24 in the natural attitude 83, 85, 86, 100, 101, 120 need for 5, 26 objective 113, 172 of objectivity 57, 58, 95 origin of 57, 61, 67, 69, 86 political question of 28 possibility of 146, 251, 253, 256 and the practico-inert 208 problem of 5, 8, 28, 50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 69, 83, 85, 103, 114, 116, 191, 250, 251 problematicity of 52, 53, 269 production of 36, 37, 204, 205, 256, 257 promise of 27, 31 and reduction 106 and rhetoric 28, 206 sedimentations of 168, 231 and seeing 55, 57, 64 sense of sense 58, 60, 101, 102, 117 shifts of 38, 204, 250 space of 8, 29, 38, 255 subversive 205 terminological 250, 252 textual 241 transcendence of 59, 105, 256 of truth 54 unity of 37, 53, 61, 63, 68, 83, 86, 108, 109, 112, 114, 130, 135, 147, 158, 256, 259, 264, 265 measurement 78, 151, 170 as a kind of building 78 man is the measure 129 memory 25, 71, 87, 94, 116, 239, 267 art of 25, 27 and association 246 and drawing 25 durability of 32 vs. imagination 235, 238 locus of 27 and perception 139, 235 and the practico-inert 208 preserved in commentarius 25

291 public 25 and symbol 229 and writing 25 method 55, 67, 101, 162 in Descartes 97, 99 generality of 159 of mathematical induction 62 in modern science 55 phenomenological (see under phenomenology) scientific 12, 55 flexibility of 55 surveying 167 Mineirinhas (Portugal) 173 modernity 13, 14, 21, 148 modern life 34, 35, 38 modern sensibility 22 modernism 20, 22, 35, 38, 203 as world-phenomenon 148 modification of first person perspective 169 of intuitivity 66 negation 135 non-actional (Inaktualität) 87 of seeing 77, 192 as theme in Husserl 155 movement 15, 165n5, 175n9, 195, 209, 220, 244, 252, 260, 262 of action 188 appearance of 91, 138 of becoming 221, 257 bodily 48, 140, 150, 151, 182, 195 of determination 137, 141 of explanation 56, 259 of human existence 81, 142, 153, 240, 248, 253, 258 landscape of 148 lived 137, 138 manifold senses of 141 of natality 29, 254 of negation 263 perception of 91, 138 in performing 246, 247 revelatory 188 sensation of 138 as spent 220, 221 static image of 91, 137, 138 as theme in phenomenology 142, 158 of traffic 209 of understanding 41, 57, 62, 242

292 natural attitude 9, 74, 75, 78–81, 83–86, 94, 95, 99–103, 105, 106, 111, 117, 118, 255 concept of 74 general thesis of (Generalthesis) 80, 99, 101 indifference of 80, 94 as modality of attunement (Einstellung) 99 modification of 86, 96, 117, 118 obscurity of 83 suspension of 9, 96, 99–101, 104, 116 noema 104–108, 110, 111, 113, 114 analysis of 105, 111, 130 esse is percipi 105 full noema 112, 113 immanence of 105 as irreell 105 as mode of access 111 noematic core 111–113 as logical subject 112 noematic enrichment 114 noematic interweaving 108, 111 object simpliciter 111–113 Objekt im Wie 113 parallelism of noesis and noema 111 perceptual 106, 109 as point of orientation 108 Sinn 105, 111, 112 transcendence of 105, 111 noesis 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114, 132, 152, 153 analysis of 105, 130, 131 movement of 104 noetic interweaving 111 parallelism of noesis and noema 111 sedimentations of 152 structures of 106 normality 84, 155–157 exposed character of 156, 158 and mental illness 236n22 modification of 156, 157 object. See thing obscurity 10, 68, 77, 83, 95, 246 natural 83, 85 transcendent 117 observation 6 instrumentally enhanced 6 Okeanos 119

subject Index Onkalo (Finland) 32n45 orientation 9–11, 58, 67, 79, 129, 133, 147, 148, 158, 161, 164, 168, 172, 194, 196, 197, 255, 260, 264 bodily 150–152, 158, 168, 172, 176, 181, 185, 193, 194 dimensions of 10, 168 as disclosive of possibility 146 disorientation 147 ego-orientation 152–154, 158, 168, 176, 185, 193, 195 epistemological 144 event-character of 207 of habituality 168 historical 207 and interest 178 intersubjective 155, 156, 158, 168, 185, 195, 197, 207 natural 79 of theoria 186, 187 transitive 149 Palazzo del Te (Mantua, Italy) 204 Panopticon 89 parallax 140, 141, 198 Paris 13, 202, 211–217, 220, 262 district of Saint-Antoine 214, 215, 220 historico-material topography of 208, 215, 217 Parsons the New School for Design (New York) 4 perception 6, 10, 11, 48, 60, 61, 78, 87, 90, 92, 96, 105, 108–110, 131, 133–135, 140, 141, 143, 162, 165n5, 182–184, 189, 196, 224, 226–228, 230, 231, 236, 239, 244, 255, 256 of absence 262 actuality of 87, 233–235, 238 as archetype of intentional life 255 bodily oriented 139, 181 Darstellung 132 environing 76, 77, 137 as exemplary phenomenon 162, 163 faculties of 231 field of 144, 145, 196, 233–235, 237 flow of 92, 139 horizon of (see under horizon) immanence of 89 immediate 93, 100, 134, 236 in imagination 234

subject Index vs. imagination 237, 238 inner 233 intentionality of 134, 137 kinaesthetic 141 movement of 132, 137–139, 141 openness of 240, 255, 256 Originalbewusstsein 182, 184 originary 182, 183, 228 perceivability of 162 perceived 89, 105, 107–109, 136, 138, 154, 162, 163, 234 perceiving 64, 65, 89, 91–93, 104, 105, 107, 108, 111, 131–133, 135, 138, 140, 163, 172, 182, 225, 232, 234, 236, 237 perception of perception 162 perceptual field 78, 138, 227, 230, 233, 247 perceptual manifestation 137, 163, 256 phenomenologically reduced 255 phenomenology of 10, 142, 159, 181, 255 and physical imagination 244 pretensions of 91 primacy of 182 proprioception 139 sensuous 133, 134, 137, 181, 194 as threshold phenomenon par excellence 182 phantasy. See imagination phenomenology 1–3, 8, 9, 11, 26n31, 38, 51, 52, 54, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66–68, 86, 101, 106–108, 112, 116, 149, 153, 155, 159, 165n5, 249, 251, 253, 254, 259, 267 in architectural theory 9 basic problems of 50, 160 and clarification 51 constitutional analysis 103, 105 in contrast to metaphysics 57 descriptive 251 genetic 115 limits of 95 as logos of phenomenon 66 and ontology 268 phenomenological method 1–4, 9, 51, 52, 57, 58, 67, 85, 86, 98, 104, 106, 118, 159, 251 phenomenological movement 9, 159 phenomenological philosophy 4, 5, 9, 10, 67, 86, 115, 252, 260, 267, 268 phenomenological reduction 68, 101–106, 111, 112, 116

293 phenomenological residuum 102, 106 promise of 38, 95, 102, 107 and reflection 65 static 114, 115 unnatural standpoint of 103 zurück zu den Sachen selbst! 61 phenomenon 3, 8, 11, 56, 59, 63, 66, 67, 102, 145, 152, 159–161, 193, 212, 230, 251, 255 exemplary 159–163, 190, 191 gegenwärtigende 230 of others 156, 158 phenomenality 26n31, 39, 63, 64, 66–68, 78, 106, 120, 143, 159, 161, 162, 164, 177, 179, 189, 191, 192, 254 latent 67 phenomenality of the phenomenon  64–66, 102, 160, 161 political 32 rendered phenomenality of the built 244 social 36, 200 temporal 155 vergegenwärtigende 230 photographs. See image phusis 185, 187, 190 place. See under space pledge (le serment), 211 polis 190, 191 kosmos of 190 possibility 11, 49, 56, 66, 68, 71, 72, 76, 77, 84, 94, 115, 141, 142, 147, 174, 175, 179, 195, 196, 213, 215–218, 220, 226, 244, 247, 254, 257, 259, 260, 264 always higher than actuality 268 articulated in perception 77 conditions of 2, 25, 43, 66, 115, 184 cultivation of 257 of destruction 31 human 11, 37, 192, 260, 261, 266, 268 of nothing 146 open 206 predelineation of 77, 213 projection of 263, 264 of reflection 54, 64–67 of understanding 174, 258 practico-inert 208–210, 217, 220 field of 209, 213 pragmatism 251n1

294 praxis 203, 209 alienation of 209 field of 213 legacies of 208 possibilities of 209 presence 9, 11, 37, 55, 56, 60, 66, 67, 69, 76, 82, 93, 100, 106, 114, 132, 135, 140, 152–154, 157, 218, 221, 228, 230, 232, 236n22, 237, 240, 244, 245, 247, 263, 265 adumbrated 91, 100 of the built 11, 240, 243, 269 and complexity 236 corporeal 152 of the divine 189 and expression 193, 241–243 of history 215 human 25, 27, 250 of the imagined 236n22 intentional 104, 156 of lost time 155 manifestation of 89, 228 manner of 220 material 220 as meaningful 32 modes of 223, 239 non-presence 223, 238, 247 of others 24, 47, 48, 50, 68, 155, 157, 158, 169, 171, 172, 174–176, 195, 197–199, 241, 243, 244, 250, 259 of the past 214 perceptual 224, 229, 231, 236 phenomenological 155, 173, 188 of political existence 191 presence-in-tension 243 rendering of 241, 245 reserve of 240 self-presence 65, 154 spent 220, 222 of spirit 219 unfolding of 100, 135 of the un-thingly 228 vestigium hominis 48 presentation (Vorstellung), 132, 230, 232 movement of 133, 137, 138 Phantasievorstellung 223n6 proprioception. See under perception purpose 5, 12, 17, 40, 42–44, 47, 52, 69, 71, 82, 84, 103, 117, 134, 178, 180, 245 as borne 9, 10, 69, 83, 95, 122

subject Index natural 42 purposiveness 39, 40, 42, 44, 52, 68, 69, 83, 85, 102, 105, 134, 159 intrinsic (innere Zweckmäßigkeit) 40 natural 40 relative (relative Zweckmäßigkeit) 40 technical 22, 43 pursuit of 40, 60 reference to 9, 43 pyramid 134 Egyptian 170 massiveness of 170 as metaphor 72–74, 79, 119, 195 pyramidion 180 as symbol of reason 73 reference 43, 44, 54, 155, 205, 206, 236, 258. See also expression as borne 9, 44, 50, 259 self-reference 65 Reichstag (Berlin) 254, 255 rhetoric 28, 34, 202 and architecture 28, 36 dispositio 28 eurythmia 28 ordinatio 28 Rome 17, 25, 27, 219 Travestere 125 ruins 25, 44, 45, 177, 241–243 and being-rendered 241, 244 and communication 242 and expression 241–243 and fragility 241 and landscape 241 and presence 241, 243 presence of intentional life in 241 science 6, 13, 18, 54, 55, 57 a-philosophical 54, 55 explanatory 56 industrial 20 legitimacy of 57 mathematical 18 mechanics 13, 18 modern 5, 6, 55 neuroscience 171n7 psychology 57 scientific understanding 43, 55, 156 sculpture 198, 219

subject Index and architecture 219 seeing-in (Hineinschauen) 224–226. See also image and built space 247 intentional possibilities of 226 Seele und Form 177 semiotics 36, 199, 261n6 sensation 4, 134–137, 139, 143, 151, 152, 168, 182, 224 Abschattung (adumbration) 90–94, 104, 112, 131–134, 137–139, 142, 150, 151 field of 138 acoustic 150 as animated by apprehension 137 color sensations 224 distance between sensation and what is sensed 134 double movement of sensing and sensed 142, 145 field of 136, 143 functional concept of 133 as ground of passivity 136 hyle 106 kinaesthetic 138, 139, 141–143, 150, 151 as localized in context 139 manifold of 134, 135 movement of 136–139 non-intentionality of 137 pleasurable 205 presentive (darstellende) 135, 136, 139, 181 motivated 142 sense data 133, 136 sensibility as contra-symbolic 72 sense. See meaning seriality (la structure sérielle) 209–212, 217 inertial patterns of 210 of the mass 210 modification of 210, 212 overcoming of 212, 213 Shaker 7, 21, 141 shipbuilding 187 sign 10, 36–38, 48, 57, 63, 117, 123, 169, 173, 191, 198, 230, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 261, 262, 265 communicative 243, 261 empty 241 indicative 57, 243 phenomenology of 241 signified 36, 194, 204

295 signifier 36, 37, 194, 201, 204 silence 59, 85, 221, 243, 247 architectural 176 of the built 175, 176, 220, 243, 247, 267 skin 189–191, 193, 224 epiphaneia 189, 190 expressive 194 second skin 198 smell 245n26 sound 245n26 as giver of presence 245 space 1, 2, 4, 9, 17, 22, 35, 37, 38, 47–50, 71, 75–78, 116, 117, 127–130, 133, 136, 139, 142, 144–146, 148, 154, 156, 158, 163–169, 173, 175–180, 183, 184n16, 191, 193, 194, 197, 208, 220, 240, 245, 264 appearance of 164, 255 of appearance (see under appearance) architectural 200, 204 aroundness (Umhaftes) 143 building of 15, 39, 48, 122, 173, 257 built (see built space) of choros and labyrinth 120 concept of 123, 165–168 of dancing 120 distorted 166 as embodied knowledge 178, 179 engineered 23, 34 of existence 23, 56, 250 experience of 4, 138, 168 expressivity of 220, 244 as exemplary phenomenon 163, 164 extensio 144 field 137, 150, 156, 157 geometric 195 as ground of coordination 164, 166 hodological 215, 217, 265 impossible spaces 183 inhabiting of 2, 3, 89, 129, 168, 175 and interest 145, 179, 180, 197 interior 165, 254 intersubjectivity of 50, 174, 259 as invariant form 166 lived 169, 215, 244, 265 material 72 as metaphor 157 metric 144 nature of 72, 167 occupation of 1, 78, 268

296 space (cont.) ordered 26, 50, 120, 178, 198 oriented 10, 154, 195, 198, 207, 219 overcoming of 148 paradoxical 184n16 partes extra partes 194 of performance 245, 246 place 4, 26n31, 27, 63, 75, 118, 127, 128, 144, 162, 163, 165n5, 171, 208 and possibility of meaning 256 presence of 86, 165 private 35 public 21, 31, 35, 217 real 50, 72, 140, 163 region 144, 145, 148, 150 remotion (Ent-fernung) 149 rendered 240, 244, 247, 260, 266, 268 representation of 167, 184 spatiality 129, 138, 141, 143–145, 149, 150, 152–154, 156, 158, 163–165, 167, 193, 194 symbolic 71 truth of 166 vastness of 148 of words and deeds 25, 29, 71 worldhood of 144, 145 spectacle 181, 185, 186, 188, 189 Statue of Zeus at Olympia 219, 220, 240 Stephansplatz (Vienna, Austria) 200, 201 structuralism 36, 206 post-structuralism 199 symbol 44, 45, 117, 212–217, 219, 226, 229, 230, 236, 240, 243, 244, 247, 254. See also image and association 226 cultural 204 durability of 71 vs. image 229 of intelligence 72 permanent 71 and reference 236 symbol subject 226 symbolic force 219 symbolic form 170, 240 symbolic objects 258 symbolic presentation 229 symbolic resource 213 symbolic value 131 symbolization 226 totality of symbols 71

subject Index technology 15, 21, 22, 32, 268 as Ge-stell 267, 268 modern 4, 13 problem of 267, 268 theory 44, 200 aesthetic 165n5 architectural 2, 3, 14n6, 26, 35, 165n5, 183, 249 of property 260 string theory 169 theoria 185–187, 189, 191, 192 thing and access 89, 99, 112, 115, 117, 195 apprehension of 53, 122, 133, 134, 141, 244 as bearer of meaning 10, 31, 43, 44, 68, 69, 71, 76, 83, 95, 122, 129, 198, 239, 259 being of 44, 100, 123, 129, 131, 132, 250, 267 built 3, 6, 71, 122, 123, 172, 173, 180, 181, 219, 220, 239–241, 245, 251, 256, 258, 260 concept of 10, 107, 123, 151, 237 as conditioned (bedingt) 125, 126 constitution of 141, 168, 174 and craft 188, 189 depth of 95, 193 and description 121, 122, 128, 132 determinations of 40, 77, 106, 108, 112, 123, 127, 128, 130–132, 134, 141, 142, 151–153, 181, 194, 223 Ding 126 and edges 118, 119 eidos 120, 189, 192 and encounter 11, 47, 74, 101, 114, 127, 134, 142, 172, 195, 196 experience of 43, 57, 63, 64, 84, 96, 97, 100, 101, 106, 114, 128, 130, 131, 134, 141, 162, 192 fragility of 31, 181 givenness of 43, 63, 66, 75–78, 82, 89, 91, 92, 95, 96, 100, 104, 121, 122, 129–132, 134, 135, 140, 143, 147, 153, 156, 160, 162–164, 166, 167, 172, 175, 186, 192, 194, 229, 237, 245, 260 human artifice 23, 26, 31, 32 and image 222–226, 229, 232 and imagination 224, 235, 269 immersion in things 260, 267 and interest 31, 75, 81, 82, 145–147, 174, 176, 181, 196

297

subject Index and intersubjectivity 47, 48, 169–172, 174, 197, 198 kosmos of 189, 190 and materiality 72, 126, 127, 141, 171, 175n9 meaning of 43, 58, 59, 65, 75, 83, 85, 99, 101, 106, 112, 115, 117, 122, 127, 130, 131, 133, 142, 158, 170, 172, 196, 231, 245, 249, 258 mere thing 41, 124, 128 in the natural attitude 75, 80, 83, 94 nihilation of 263 non-perceptual 78 obviousness of 123, 127 order of 1, 26, 27, 60, 72, 118, 146, 164, 167, 186, 187, 257, 264 perception of 88, 104, 106, 112, 122, 130–132, 135, 137, 140, 152, 181, 182, 224, 225, 227, 233, 234, 245n26, 248 physical 221, 223, 224, 226 plasticity of 44, 94, 170 presence of 58, 86, 91, 104, 128, 132, 147, 158, 164, 192, 224, 240, 247 problem of 121, 123, 126, 131, 143 rendered 170, 240, 255 and resemblance 228 and silence 220, 243 and space 77, 128, 129, 139, 147, 149, 151, 163, 164, 166 thauma idesthai 187–189 thingness 10, 11, 80, 121, 123, 124, 126–132, 134, 137, 139–142, 149–152, 170, 181, 262, 269 as unconditioned (un-bedingt) 124, 126 emphasis on 124, 126–128, 130, 140, 141 not itself a thing 124 obviousness of 128, 129, 142 as a this 127, 128 and time 45–47, 128, 129, 155, 163 transcendent 100, 122 and understanding 7, 55, 83, 115, 116, 171, 190, 253 and world 26, 71, 76, 83, 94, 95, 121, 146 time 1, 2, 9, 38, 44, 45, 47, 50, 63, 94, 102, 127–129, 143, 145, 146, 154, 163, 164, 167, 240 appearance of 47, 128, 163, 164 as borne 9, 10, 45, 46, 50, 69, 83, 95, 122, 129, 259 concept of 163, 167

condensed 45, 260 of consciousness 163, 238 depth of 44 distorted 166 as exemplary phenomenon 163, 164 as invariant form 166 lingering of 45, 46 natural 75 passage of 32, 47, 69, 128, 155 presence of 45, 47, 53, 128 and selfhood 154, 155 sense of (Zeitsinn) 45, 47, 53 structure of 3, 46, 75, 90, 114, 128, 148, 152, 154, 155, 166, 260 temporality 9, 68, 129, 154, 159, 163, 167 tracking of 41, 45, 180 touch 152, 245n26 as giver of presence 245n26 haptic manifestation 141, 245n26 and movement 142 as most basic sense in Aristotle 245 of one hand with the other 152 of oneself by another 152 Trajan’s Column 200 transcendence 89–94, 96, 102, 107, 108, 112, 158, 176, 187 aura of 187 being of 92–94, 101 of meaning (see under meaning) objective 111 of others 176 parallel to immanence 111 Reales 105 sense of 105, 187 of things (see under thing) transcendence in immanence 89, 103–105, 112 Tristram Shandy 83, 84, 114 Vila Nova de Cerveira (Portugal) 46 vocabulary 3, 11, 58, 141, 249, 250, 251n1, 268 architectural 249, 261 concept of 250, 251 descriptive 44, 50, 102, 253 final 251n1 modification of 251n1 phenomenological 251, 253 as problematic 252

298 world 6, 11, 28, 60, 100, 117, 120, 135, 148, 154, 157, 166, 195, 196, 253, 265, 267 and access 89, 184, 253, 265 animal 266 and artifact 25, 31, 68, 191, 209, 256, 258, 260 as beginning 101 being-in-the-world 3, 58, 69, 70, 74, 81, 83, 89, 101, 148, 185, 193, 248, 250, 257, 266, 267 as borne 39, 69, 71, 76, 83 built (see built world) concept of 9, 10, 71, 72, 74, 116, 121, 122, 141, 144, 151, 237 vs. consciousness 102 consciousness of 65, 237, 238 and edges 118–121 vs. experience 89 experience of 61, 84, 116, 118, 148, 182, 186, 218, 261 of habitation 55, 57, 197 of homo faber 8, 23, 25–27, 31, 71, 73, 81, 116, 117, 121, 255, 258, 266 horizon of (see under horizon) human 1, 3, 4, 10, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 37, 73, 116, 121, 124, 193, 209, 255, 266, 267 and imagination 235, 237–239, 269 immersion in 81–83, 85, 88 and intersubjectivity 158, 172, 174, 193, 195–197 as labyrinth 72, 73, 77, 78, 80–82, 86, 95, 109, 116, 119 material 26, 29, 81, 243, 260 mathematical 78–80 orientation to 79

subject Index and meaning 9, 27, 66, 71, 73, 74, 101, 102, 117, 147–149, 194, 267 Mitwelt 178 of myth 185 natural 74–76, 78–81, 83–89, 94, 96, 100–103, 116, 117, 120 of nature 5, 24, 123 ontology of 267 opening of 27, 28, 38, 69, 147, 236, 248, 252, 253, 258, 265, 267 movement of 267 order of 164, 190, 194 of the past 44, 71, 258 of perception 11, 78, 92, 182–184, 225, 234–239 phenomenality of 55, 66, 115, 121, 161, 238, 253, 265 in the phenomenological attitude 86, 103, 105 physical 167, 223, 245 plasticity of 148 political 28, 191 prejudice of 85, 117 as pyramid 72, 73, 81, 116 as reality 24, 95, 105, 144, 237 rendered 241, 244, 256, 260, 268 skin of 193 and space 141, 144, 148, 149, 155, 168, 195 spiritual 155, 241 symbolic 71, 72, 206 and things 48, 58, 71, 117, 121, 146, 149, 150, 152, 161, 172, 192, 195, 228, 240, 248, 262 Umwelt 6, 27, 143, 146, 162 spatiality of 144 worldhood 10, 11, 70, 121, 123, 144, 145, 147, 148, 265