Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation 9780755603725

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List of Figures Chapter 1: The King in the City: The Iconology of George IV in Edinburgh, 1822 1.1

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John Ewbank, The Entry of George IV into Edinburgh from the Calton Hill, 1822, oil on canvas (City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries). William H. Lizars, View of the Grand Procession to the Castle, When his Majesty had Ascended the Half Moon c Edinburgh City Battery (1822), coloured engraving ( Libraries. Licensor http//:www.scran.ac.uk).

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Chapter 2: Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago, 1893 2.1

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Harry Lime and Holly Martins on the Prater Wheel, from The Third Man, Carol Reed (dir.), 1949 (courtesy of STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd). Looking east along the Midway: the Captive Balloon and Ferris Wheel, from The Dream City: a Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition / with an introduction by Halsey C. Ives (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–1894) (courtesy of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago).

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The view toward the White City, through the Ferris Wheel structure (Chicago Historical Society ICHi-17426). The view toward the White City, outward from the Ferris Wheel, from The Dream City: a Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition / with an introduction by Halsey C. Ives (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–1894) (courtesy of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago). Apparatus for catching and suspending hogs, 1882, from S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, a Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), fig. 117, p. 231 (courtesy of Oxford University Press, New York). Cincinnati, hog-slaughtering and packing: panoramic painting, 1873, from S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, a Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), fig. 109, p. 217 (courtesy of Oxford University Press, New York).

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Chapter 3: Falling Upon Warsaw: The Shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Culture 3.1 3.2

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Karolina Breguła, from All I Can See is the Palace (2005) (courtesy of the artist). Leonard Sempoli´nski, Palace of Culture and Science (1956) (Instytut Sztuki PAN; courtesy of Jacek Sempoli´nski). The Palace of Soviets as it appeared in the September 1939 issue of the US magazine Mechanix Illustrated (collection of the author). Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83), oil on canvas, 72 × 48 inches. Photo: D. James Dee (courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York). ‘Stalin’s shadow over Warsaw’ (http//:www.socland.pl [Accessed 4 December 2009]).

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Ground level of museum with headless statue/shadow (http//:www.socland.pl [Accessed 4 December 2009]).

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LIST OF FIGURES

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Chapter 4: Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten 4.1

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W. Heath, A woman dropping her tea-cup in horror upon discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water; revealing the impurity of London drinking water (1828), coloured etching (courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London). ‘Texture of the skin, in a man 130 years old, in Minnesota’, from L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy, The New c Hattula Vision (1932), fig. 17, p. 35 ( Moholy-Nagy/DACS 2014). The parachutist featured in Le Corbusier’s Aircraft c FLC/ (1935), fig. 124 (last image of the book) ( ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2014). The picnic from Powers of Ten (1977). Image from the book version by Philip and Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (1982) (courtesy of the Eames Office).

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Chapter 5: ‘The Way the World Sees London’: Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle 5.1

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Cover of Iain Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus (1999) (courtesy c Marc Atkins / of Profile Books / photograph  http://www.marcatkins.com). London Eye website home page (http://www.londoneye.com [Accessed 2 March 2005]) (courtesy of British Airways London Eye [2007]). Publicity image for the London Olympic bid: beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade (courtesy London 2012 [2007]).

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Signage on the Thames walkway beside the London Eye (photograph by the author). The Unilever Series: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 16 October 2003 – 21 March 2004, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 29/01/2009 (Installation) c Tate, London (courtesy of Studio Eliasson and  2014).

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Chapter 6: The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturisation 6.1 6.2

Foster + Partners, City Hall in London (photograph by the author). The aerial photomap in the basement of City Hall (photograph by the author).

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Chapter 7: Clouds of Architecture 7.1

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Photograph of Pruitt-Igoe demolition, 1972, from Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977/8), fig. 3, p. 9. Coop Himmelb(l)au, Villa Rosa (1968), c Michael Pilz and Coop VP 6801 M1 MiP ( Himmelb(l)au). Diller + Scofidio, Blur, Lake Neuchˆatel, Swiss Expo 2002 (courtesy of the architects).

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Chapter 8: Utopia on Ice: The Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome as an Allegory of the Future 8.1

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Interior visualisation of the Dubai Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome (http://www.skidubai.com/dubai/ mountain-ski-dome/ [Accessed 15 August 2011]). Promotional image for Dubailand. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Cloud Nine project (ca. 1960) (courtesy of The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller).

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Franc¸ois Dallegret, ‘The Environment-Bubble: Transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output’ (1965), from Reyner Banham, ‘A Home Is Not a House’, Art in America 53, April (1965) (courtesy of the artist).

LIST OF FIGURES

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Chapter 9: On Google Earth 9.1

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Internet map, 23 November 2003. The Opte Project (http://www.opte.org/maps [Accessed 23 March 2010]). The ‘Blue Marble’, 7 December 1972 (NASA image AS17–148–22727). Descending over North America in Google Earth, 2 February 2007. Nakheel announces ‘The Universe’ (http://www. nakheel.com/en/news/2008 new era [Accessed 30 March 2010]).

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Chapter 10: Transcoded Indexicality 10.1 US Department of State, ‘Mobile Production Facilities For Biological Agents’, from Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/ 02/20030205-1.html# [Accessed 15 November 2006]). 10.2 US Department of State, ‘Bulldozed and freshly Graded Earth, Al-Musayyib Chemical Complex’ with graphic overlay, from Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/ 02/20030205-1.html# [Accessed 15 November 2006]).

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Chapter 11: Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work 11.1 Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (2002), PVC and steel. Installation view: Tate, 2002–2003. Photo: John Riddy (courtesy Tate, London).

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11.2 Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) (1875), oil on canvas, 96 × 78 inches (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3,600 donors, 2007). 11.3 Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570–1576), oil on canvas, 220 × 204 cm. Photo: Zdenˇek Sodoma (Muzeum umˇen´ı Olomouc, courtesy of the Olomouc archbishopric).

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Chapter 12: Architecture and A-Disciplinarity? 12.1 Rosalind Krauss’s semiotic square, after her essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, p. 284.

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Afterword: ‘Postscript as Pretext’ A1

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Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, Latitude and Longitude Resolved, from Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002), pp. 14–17. Photograph by David Seymour (Chim), Poland 1948 (courtesy of Magnum Photos). Texts by Mark Dorrian. Mark Dorrian, ‘The Resilience of Ruins’, in Pamphlet Architecture 32: Resilience (2012), pp. 4–5 (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press).

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Acknowledgements It was Graham Livesey who first suggested that I collect my essays into a book, and Ella Chmielewska’s enthusiasm that convinced me to do so. Ella has been a great intellectual companion for many years, and this is reflected in the thoughtful afterword she contributes to this volume, for which I am deeply indebted. The response of my friend Manuela Antoniu to the texts has equally meant much to me, and I am grateful for her detailed and nuanced reading of them. Almost all the ideas in this book grew out of discussions with Adrian Hawker, my close friend and collaborator. As teachers of architecture, Adrian and I grew up together, and our conversations reverberate through the writings in this collection. Many of these texts also developed in dialogue with Victoria Clare Bernie, and her voice – and I hope something of her wit – is also in them. I am fortunate to have had the support and encouragement of very many friends and colleagues – in particular Kate Soper and Marina Warner, who have been unfailingly generous readers and interlocutors, as has Paul Carter, to whom I am grateful for his typically insightful foreword. Material in the essays was discussed in detail with Stephen Bann, John Beck, Iain Boal, David Cunningham, William Firebrace, Stephen Graham, Jonathan Hill, Amy Kulper, John Lowrey, John Macarthur, Fr´ed´eric Pousin, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tamara Trodd, Anthony Vidler and Iain Boyd Whyte. Many others commented or gave invaluable help in various ways, times and places, including Dawn Ades, Monika Bakke, Andrew Benjamin, Katy Bentall, JeanMarc Besse, Mats Bigert, Michael Bury, Fabienne Collignon, Steven xiii

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Connor, Ben Cope, Anne Curthoys, Bruce Currey, John Docker, Jerzy Elzanowski, Paul Emmons, Hal Foster, Murray Fraser, John Frow, Katja Grillner, Martin Hammer, Jane Harrison, K. Michael Hays, Hugo Hinsley, Catherine Ingraham, H´el`ene Janni`ere, Mark Jarzombek, Perry Kulper, Phyllis Lambert, Jayne Lewis, Christoph Lindner, Christina Lodder, Helen Mallinson, Susan Manning, Laura Marcus, Duncan McCorquodale, Indra Kagis McEwen, Robert Morris, Valerie Mulvin, Jason O’Shaughnessy, Alberto P´erez-G´omez, Peg Rawes, Gillian Rose, Peter Salter, Ursula Seibold-Bultmann, Teresa Stoppani, Peter Tagiuri, Maria Theodorou, Gilles Tiberghien, David Turnbull, Pieter Uyttenhove, Stephen Walker, Peter Wilson, Iain Woodhouse and Yue Zhuang. Opportunities to present the essays in seminars, symposia or broadcasts were given by, among others, Jamie Allen, Ken Arnold, Stacy Boldrick, David Cottington, Davide Deriu, Andrew Leach, Julia Ng, James Peto, Paul Quinn, Charles Rice, Sebastian Schmidt, and Gabriella Switek. Many of the texts in the book were polished and refined by editors at different journals, such as the editorial collective at Radical Philosophy, Cynthia Davidson and Gavin Keeney at Log, Peter Gibbs-Kennet at the Journal of Architecture, El Hadi Jazairy at New Geographies, Eve Kalyva at Parallax, Michael Tawa and David Kelly at Architectural Theory Review, and – especially – Sina Najafi and Jeffrey Kastner at Cabinet. All but one of the essays in the collection was produced while I was teaching in the architecture department of the University of Edinburgh, and I benefitted from discussions with friends and colleagues there, including Alex Bremner, Richard Coyne, Suzanne Ewing, Chris Pierce, Dagmar Weston and Dorian Wiszniewski. Latterly at Newcastle University, I had helpful conversations with Andrew Ballantyne, Martyn Dade-Robertson and Adam Sharr, among others. My thanks go, as well, to the many under- and post-graduate students, at both institutions, with whom it has been my privilege to work. Every text was, I think, written in the reading rooms of the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and I am grateful to that institution and its staff for their generosity over the years. Liza Thompson commissioned the book for I.B.Tauris, after which Anna Coatman and Lisa Goodrum took it on, capably guiding the project through to publication. Jane Yeoman has been a copy-editor

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

extraordinaire, and Aikaterini Antonopoulou has carried out picture research with determination and impressive detective technique. This book is dedicated both to my family – Elizabeth, Maddy and Anna – and to the memory of our dear friend Elizabeth Lebas, urbanist, film scholar, and translator of Henri Lefebvre, who sadly died shortly before its completion, and who is missed by all who knew her.

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Foreword by Paul Carter Scope

The subject of Mark Dorrian’s brilliant Writing on the Image invites us to question the scope of the book. ‘Scope’ in common parlance refers to the ambition of the project; it alludes to the overall viewpoint or commanding vision that informs the work. However, Dorrian insists on the occasional nature of the essays gathered here. He consciously resists imposing on them a panoptic unity; but, if they comprise so many different views, what holds them together? A book, especially in these days of alternative electronic print circulation, is a sculptural object of a quite distinctive kind. We are used to understanding the telescope and the microscope as techniques for bringing new classes of phenomena into our visual field – and, in Writing on the Image, Dorrian greatly extends the lexicon of scopic equipment, showing how buildings, processions, scenography, and even public art are scopes, or instruments for enhanced seeing. But what about the book? In an environment where the image has largely come to replace the graphic in the language and design of public space, the book that intelligently reflects on these new cultural conditions is a kind of graphoscope. It invites us to look at writing. On this argument Writing on the Image is a triumphant success on at least two counts. First, it deploys an extraordinary range of observational acuity, historical imagination and tightly relevant cultural-theoretical contextualisation to bring into view a previously xvii

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unsuspected dimension of pre- to post-modern urbanism. Second, by writing across and against the images under discussion, it communicates a critical mind that retains its conviction that good writing remains capable of scoring the image, of defacing, refacing and generally reframing its normative claims. All the objects in Dorrian’s book are spectacles in a double sense: they draw attention to themselves in order to bring into focus a new ideological reality. Those prepared for the 1822 royal visit to Edinburgh unfolded before the king’s eye: that is, the king was the instrument of visualisation; the world was a projection of his eye, the mimic of its vision. In a similar vein, Dorrian shows how the panoramic gaze or projection sees battlefields and the Clearances. ‘The scopic drive of hierarchical systems’, as he puts it, is not simply ideological: it is an object of design, of technological manufacture. The Ferris Wheel is an optical device for cinematicising the urban landscape; a kind of image spool. It materialises progress in a prospect. These are not simply observational techniques: they make new observations, much as more of the Moon might be revealed or the interior of the brain. There is no figure/ground in Dorrian’s architectonics: the city is a machine for slicing reality into visions, a system of imaginal reconstruction. A colossus like Stalin’s Palace points to the unseen: its shadow blots out other visions; verticality is a disguise of oppression, which weighs down gloved as the outline of freedom. A clue to the scope of Writing on the Image is contained in Dorrian’s introductory allusion to Theodor Adorno’s famous reflections on the essay. The kind of essay that Adorno recommended took its subject from the external world and, in treating it, avoided outmoded claims of totality and continuity. Similarly, Dorrian asks us to consider the complex process of visualisation doubly inherent in the creation of new urban viewpoints and in the documentation of these, and he expects the interruptions between his occasional pieces to convey a critical position, one that is ultimately resistant to all forms of closure – whose blind, conventional connectedness he would, like Adorno, regard as a form of myth. However, the obvious difference between Writing on the Image and Adorno’s anti-totalising essay (given to montage, almost self-consciously naive), apart from its historical moment, is the fact that Dorrian is collecting his essays. How can this avoid being an act of synthesis and integration, justifying the initial query about the book’s scope? And here precisely is the subtle but radical innovation of the book: to bring together without subjecting the contents to the

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FOREWORD

same scopic drive that Dorrian subtly unpicks in his dazzling analyses. Somehow, a new materiality emerges, where the image becomes available for scoring – where the essay (when multiplied) reclaims a public space that is no longer the projection of powerful interests but that retains a dissident topology of its own. This emancipatory space is not necessarily antithetical to the constructed views Dorrian describes: it dances with their excesses, their ups and downs, their ins and outs. Every manned armature is a new viewing platform: the conquest of verticality through flight finds its counterpart in the descent through the microscope’s lens into the tissue of microcosmic reality. Here the panorama is vertical rather than horizontal, and the perspective slides and Dorrian discovers a vertiginous ‘symmetry’ between interstellar and intercostal space. Dorrian speculates about the acoustic aspect of these topological reformations: what auditorium does the voice-over resonate in? In these meditations the critique of the scopic is supported by the evidence of the other senses, for, inevitably seeing further, or seeing into the mechanism of seeing, risks a kind of nausea, a feedback effect in which the ground dissolves. The conquest of the vertical also produces vertigo: transparency means the immateriality of floors, walls, surfaces in general. It is this movement that City Hall may evoke: the obliquity of a new Keplerian dispensation where the old geometry starts to wobble, like a tottering spinning top. To walk on a photomap is in this sense to maximise the cognitivephysical schizophrenia: what falls away supports us, like walking on glass over excavations. A therapeutic response to this over-exposure would be reinvestment: a determination to blur, veil – and lift (for it is still the transcendent that is imagined), so that the structure appears to levitate or support its own weight. In these ascendant works, what remains out of sight is the infrastructure, rather as if we would value the great eye of Palomar but forget the Piranesian geometry of gantries, wheels and derricks supporting the lens’s celestial scanning. Another expression of this resistance to optimisation is the silent ‘howl’ of Kapoor’s Marsyas – ‘a cry that, because it extends beyond all relation, must necessarily be rendered through silence’. So the totalisation of the gaze merges into a new kind of trompe l’oeil where, once again, seeing is swallowed up in its own myth of transparency. Scaling up and down occur in both time and space: a miniaturised landscape speeds up apprehension and patternforming; greater detail delays interpretation. In a way, as control over

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the production of the visual field approaches a 1:1 relationship with what is promoted as the real, interpretation becomes less and less possible: the critical stance from which the new world imagery can be placed in perspective risks disappearing. In the digital image age, which Dorrian examines in the final chapters, coding complicates the Peircean meaning of indexicality. Evidence and visibility merge (and again the role of the voice-over, this time General Powell’s, is raised, for the rhetorical argument and vocal production aim at a contouring and mapping of the visible that enhances its impression of seamless connectedness across scales). In such a device absences produce images that are as readable as those produced by the evidence. Perhaps comparably, Google produces the world it seeks to inform: ‘the particular genius of Google is that it does not just facilitate the subject’s command of information, but that it assembles and delivers it in such a way as to lead to a radical identification with what is given’, Dorrian writes. Or, in another register (that of Google Earth), the map writes back, organising an image of alien life for the lunar observer. Again, in this visualisation tool the intermediate real is wholly squeezed out to produce an image more powerful than (say) the night. And here, in these last essays, the subtle radicalism of Dorrian’s own vision emerges, as a strategy for recovering our balance, and retaining access to worlds that can be imagined but not brought into focus by the lens of the eye. What, finally, is the discipline or discourse that resists visual engulfment? The architecture of the chora, perhaps sketched in Blur, is one of refusals. It refuses to allow things to come into visual focus. This is a clue: but so is the deliberately spreading and nonconnected writing. If the radical discovery of Dorrian’s book is that the new urbanism will resist the scopic temptation – through the design of buildings (or the chora-like refusal of buildings) that refuse to represent, reproduce or otherwise scale up and scale down the world – then his book of essays is the optimal vehicle for announcing this programme. The a-disciplinary architectural practice of refusals can be narrated as another (further expanded) version of an ‘architecture of the expanded field’, where the field has blurred into the infinitudes of the chora. In the lucid sketches of Writing on the Image, Dorrian not only reaches a conclusion that rehabilitates the human gesture – not least the swerve of design – he finds a way to negotiate the fascination of the megalopolis and its rhetorical devices whilst also seeing through its assault on the

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FOREWORD

visual. A non-spectacular chora is recovered, one available again for exploration: as a vade mecum to this shadowing realm, Dorrian’s new book is exemplary. Paul Carter is Professor of Design (Urban), School of Architecture and Design/Design Research Institute, RMIT University, Australia.

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Introduction This book brings together a series of 12 essays written over as many years. Although occasional, in that most were developed in response to specific requests and invitations and were often shaped in important ways by their time of writing, they are linked together by persistent thematic concerns and interests that intertwine throughout the collection. The chapters span both historical and contemporary material, tending to focus – as the subtitle of the collection indicates – on concerns related to architecture and the city, a focus that in turn takes its place within the larger question of the politics of representation. Each of the essays addresses and reflects upon cultural artefacts of one kind or another (images, texts, buildings, artworks, films, performances, digital interfaces, etc.), seeking to interpret their meanings, implications and effects in a critical but expansive way. The manner in which objects operate in culture – and indeed the kinds of experience to which they give rise – is inevitably complex and rarely conforms to disciplinary expectations or limits, and any thinking about them that wants to meet with this has to be prepared to place itself at risk and be led beyond the artificial comforts of disciplinary convention. This is a vocation that Theodor Adorno, in his remarkable essay on the essay – a text that so powerfully exemplifies its own argument – saw as central to its very concept, which he glossed as ‘the speculative investigation of specific, culturally pre-determined objects’.1 For Adorno, the promise that the essay holds is the possibility of coming ‘so close to the here and now of the object, up to the point where 1

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that object . . . dissociates itself into those elements in which it has its life’.2 Here, thought’s engagement with its material through the essay is something that neither method nor pre-established theoretical frameworks can survive, for they can never fully foresee the encounter or be truly adequate to it, and so instead can only do violence to its open-endedness. Rather, in the specificity of the encounter, a constellation comes into shape that exerts pressure on a priori theoretical formulations, which it cannot be made to fit without collapsing and draining away its complexity. The essay thus attends to the unruliness of things when they escape subordination to an interpretative regime. In this way, Adorno writes again, the essay ‘neither deduces itself rigidly from theory . . . nor is it a down-payment on future syntheses. Disaster threatens intellectual experience the more strenuously it ossifies into theory and acts as if it held the philosopher’s stone in its hand’.3 However limited the collection that follows may prove to be in relation to Adorno’s reflections, the open, provisional, speculative and non-totalising character of the essay form that they describe remains for me something that is immensely appealing and important, not least because this way of thinking about the essay so closely corresponds to my own experience of writing the pieces that are assembled within this book. For time and again it seemed to me that, no matter how carefully and certainly I had arranged my materials, planned what to say, and structured my argument, all such preparations were thrown into disarray when writing began. Consequently, I have throughout remained strongly aware of writing as a dynamic and vital process, an ongoing interaction of thought with its materials that develops in ways that are frequently unexpected. It is not as if what was prepared or conceptualised beforehand is simply set aside, but rather that it becomes reorientated and reconfigured, gaining momentum in unforeseen directions under the demands that emerge from the ongoing work, demands that are never totally anticipated or clearly discerned in advance. Given this, it may then seem contradictory to assemble the essays within a single volume. In doing so, my aim has not been to elide the tensions and differences that exist between the writings in order to present them as a unified and coherent whole. On the contrary, I have sought, through the specific arrangement of the chapters, to intensify their essayistic character and bring to the surface the mobilities of thought and perspective that emerge out of the way each piece engages with the phenomena it addresses.

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INTRODUCTION

As noted, all the essays collected here – with the exception of perhaps one – are in some way concerned with issues related to the politics of representation. Through the various materials studied, they consider ways in which our relations with things and with one another are mediated through representational forms and the conditions under which such mediation works. This in turn inevitably entails questions of what specific kinds of media do, what ideological effects they produce, and what sorts of investment we come to have in them. Often the essays open up these issues through something that is noticed in the first instance, some kind of artefact or event that, however singular or minor it might at first sight appear, turns out to be eloquent in its ability to problematise a larger set of relations beyond itself – whether it be an eighteenth-century engraving that depicts a magnified drop of tap water as an alien planet swarming with monstrous creatures; an artwork showing a car with the silhouette of a building mounted on its roof; the covering up of a tapestry in the UN before a televised news conference; or a large-scale satellite image that is affixed to the basement floor of a public building, vertiginously dissolving its solidity. The essays were developed alongside other work – critical writing, architectural design teaching, and art and architectural practice – that I was doing throughout the period of their writing, and this is reflected in the material they examine and issues they explore, especially so in their recurring preoccupations with modes of elevated vision, spectacle, atmospheric politics and the limits of aesthetic experience. In the opening chapter of the book, ‘The King in the City’, I analyse the politically freighted spectacle of George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822, as it was stage-managed by the celebrated novelist Sir Walter Scott. This essay begins the sequence of four historically orientated chapters that together form the first section of the book. By examining the routes charted by Scott for the king’s entry after his arrival at the Port of Leith, the chapter shows how Edinburgh was transformed into a sequence of tableaux vivants, calculated to construct an emblematic narrative of Hanoverian supremacy that was then unfolded before the eye of the king as he moved through the city. In Scott’s directions to the citizenry, published anonymously prior to the visit, the specular interplay between, on one hand, the king’s vision and, on the other, the vision of the king as he appeared to the populace, was constantly and insistently emphasised, an oscillating relation between viewer and viewed clearly intended to produce politically integrative effects. The

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chapter explores how these effects were conceptualised by contemporaries by focusing on the fascinating series of letters written by the advocate James Simpson to Scott in the wake of the event. In Simpson’s anti-Jacobin exegesis the consequence of the royal visit is interpreted in terms of the visual model expounded in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which the splendour of the spectacle of the king – whose eye renews what it alights upon – sets in play a dynamic of sympathy, the result of which is to stimulate, through a purportedly ‘natural’ process of identification, a deep rapprochement between the king and his subjects. The following chapter takes us to the end of the nineteenth century and to the massive observation wheel that the engineer George Ferris constructed for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Although built as an explicit rival to Eiffel’s tower in Paris, it was a unique achievement, a multivalent and complex phenomenon that was simultaneously a vantage point, a kinaesthetic device, and a visual entertainment installed within mass society. This chapter, which uses contemporary reports to examine the visual possibilities that the wheel offered and the optical effects it produced, proceeds by situating it within two key contexts – that of the aerial view and its ideological role within modernity, and that of the array of popular optical entertainments and toys that developed during the course of the nineteenth century. Comparing descriptions by the wheel’s first passengers with early accounts of, in particular, the diorama, I argue that such ‘hyper-visual spectacles’, as they have been called, prefigured and shaped the visual experience of the wheel in important ways. Ferris was to remark that the idea for his construction had first come to him while he was dining at a Chicago chop-house, and the chapter concludes by reflecting on this origin myth, speculating on the possible relationships between the Ferris Wheel, proto-cinematic forms of photography – such as that of Eadweard Muybridge, in which movement was depicted through sequences of still images – and the ‘production line’ procedures for animal disassembly that were pioneered in Chicago’s Union Stockyards during the years leading up to the exposition. In the aftermath of World War II, Josef Stalin bestowed a gargantuan gift on the shattered city of Warsaw, the vast Soviet-sponsored skyscraper known as the Palace of Culture and Science (PKiN). Chapter 3 considers this difficult inheritance, which – although it endures as the contemporary city’s most obvious landmark – remains,

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at the same time, its most debated and troubling building. Here I focus specifically on the building’s shadow, both literal and metaphoric, considering recent artworks and architectural projects that picture its exorcism, which is to say the detachment or dissolution of the historical memory that is the inevitable double of the material fabric of the building. Through this case study, and in relation to a range of material that includes the art of Komar and Melamid and recent literature on memory and oblivion, the chapter develops larger points about the complications of post-socialist attempts to forget, and concludes by interpreting a recent proposal – put forward by a group that includes the celebrated film director Andrzej Wajda – to found a museum of communism in the labyrinthine cellars of the Palace. Where Komar and Melamid’s painting The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83) slyly reworked the famous origin-of-painting myth recounted in Pliny’s Natural History in order to depict the inscription of the shadow of Stalin as the founding gesture of socialist realism, the museum-ofcommunism proposal comes to replay this scene, but in reverse. For now, instead of the absorption of Stalin’s shadow into the building, it is the shadow of the Palace that is detached and rematerialised in anthropomorphic form as a colossal fallen and beheaded statue, the memory of a planned but never-realised monument to the leader that the promoters of the museum perversely find themselves obliged to construct in order to enact its symbolic execution. Chapter 4 reflects upon the film Powers of Ten (1977), made by the Los Angeles design office founded by Charles and Ray Eames. Famous as an educational film that illustrates the dimensional relationship between things, it begins with a close-up of a sleeping man, from whom the camera then pulls away in an accelerating zoom, travelling into deep space before returning to plunge into his hand through a sequence of collapsing scales that eventually passes into the subatomic. Relating Powers of Ten to the preoccupation with verticality associated with the New Vision of the 1920s and 1930s, I propose a new reading of the film by placing it in its Cold War context and commissioning culture. The film is a late example of a long-running series of commissions from IBM that had seen the Eames shift from being designers of objects to designers of informational media. Against this background, the symbolic structure of Powers of Ten, which was first articulated in a trial film made in 1968, seems expressive of the reorientation of the Cold War space race from outer to the ‘inner space’ of the microscopic.

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If IBM’s electronic and computational machines were predicated upon an ability to intervene within and command this ‘inner space’, the latter was at the same time the focus of new anxieties regarding technological developments (such as miniaturisation) and political subjectivity. Examining this, the chapter considers the relation between Powers of Ten and the 1966 Hollywood science-fiction film The Fantastic Voyage, in which a US submarine-cum-spacecraft is shrunk and injected into the body of a Soviet scientist who has been injured in the process of defecting to the West. In conclusion the chapter reflects, via the work of the film studies scholar Michel Chion, upon the kind of epistemics of disappearance in which the film seems to participate, whereby the possibility of seeing more is linked to a condition in which the body diminishes to become purely a mobile eye in order to produce – in Chion’s phrase – the ‘mastery of space by vision’. Following this, we shift our attention to visual phenomena of the more recent past, mobilising, but also revising, Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle in order to produce a new analysis of the visual logic of the London Eye, the gargantuan observation wheel that was erected alongside the Thames in the lead-up to Britain’s millennium celebrations. In Debord’s celebrated account, the spectacle is put forward as a radically immersive phenomenon, a politico-visual ideology that obscures reality in a totalising way. Here, however, I suggest that the ideological efficacy of the spectacle derives rather from the fact that its limits are all too apparent and that it therefore requires an active will to believe, an act of complicity whose features bear a similarity to those of cinematic spectatorship as theorised by Jean-Louis Comolli. Referring to the work of Giorgio Agamben, among others, the chapter goes on to examine the relation between the London Eye and its troubled twin, the Millennium Dome. If the Dome tended to founder under the representational dilemmas of how to stage a great exhibition in a post-imperial context, the London Eye side-stepped this by taking the city itself as its object. It did this, however, in a very particular way, fully exploiting the purifying effects of the aerial view. It was as if – post-9/11 – the strategy of the wheel’s commercial sponsor, British Airways, was to use it to seek to uphold something of the romance of flight and its deeply rooted promise of transcendence, a sense driven home by the myriad advertising images of solitary figures within the wheel’s capsules. Developing through close attention to the various visual discourses promoted around the London Eye, the chapter

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concludes with a reflection on the kind of performative vision it solicits, one emblematised in the crystalline view of a city – visually purified because arrested – that William Wordsworth celebrated in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802, a poem whose words were reproduced at large scale at the base of the wheel, past which, on its opening, visitors filed as they queued to enter its capsules. Chapter 6 goes on to examine the affective and epistemic relations between the aerial view and the miniature, beginning with a consideration of a recent building, erected close to the London Eye. City Hall, by the architects Foster + Partners, is in many ways a reiteration of their famous remodelling of the Reichstag in Berlin. Certainly, the emphasis on visual transparency remains, but the London building is markedly less serene than its German counterpart. If the Reichstag project, looking back to the Glasarchitektur of the early twentieth century, seemed to locate the democratic process under the twin signs of transparency and light, City Hall, with its strangely overbalancing ramps and eccentric profile, seems rather to situate it under the signs of transparency and vertigo. What then connects these, and how might we think about their relationship to one another? One response might be that vertigo is disenchanted transparency: in other words, it is what happens once we dispense with the naive idea that transparency allows us to directly see things-in-themselves, and recognise that, to the contrary, as a ideal it demands a logically unending relay in which transparency must open onto transparency in an infinite series, thus dissolving any possibility of a stable grounding condition. This question is pursued with reference to Nabokov’s novella Transparent Things; to Kant’s analysis of the sublime, (vertigo being that which is induced when the transcendentalising and serenely elevating effects of ‘ideas of reason’ fail or become untenable); and to Hitchcock’s film Vertigo (1958), which in many ways is itself an essay on the loss of ground, both physical and ontological. At the close of the chapter we return to City Hall, linking the question of the loss of ground to that of the collapse of distance by reflecting upon the curious experience of walking on the large-scale aerial photomap of London that is affixed to its basement floor. When Frank Gehry’s design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation in Paris – located in the Bois de Boulogne and due to be completed in 2014 – was first made public, the architect described it as ‘a cloud of glass – magical, ephemeral, all transparent’, thereby

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rhetorically differentiating it from everything weighty, lumpen and earthbound. Not only do clouds seem the phenomena most liberated from all material loading, but equally – as things that signify both nothing and potentially everything – they appear to refuse the restraints of signification itself. Over the past 25 years there has been a gradual accumulation of architectural cloud projects, of which Gehry’s is a late example, and in Chapter 7 I consider these. The essay suggests that the cloud motif has played a double role, allowing architects to maintain a foothold in two very different locations at the same time: on one hand clouds appear as deontologised, anti-metaphysical matter, formless and obscurant diffusions of the anorganic, while on the other they can act, paradoxically, as vehicles through which a claim to the transcendental can be maintained, and consequently an aroma of freedom and purity – even an ideological weightlessness – issues from them. These tensions are dramatised in Diller + Scofidio’s Blur project (2002), which the chapter discusses at length, examining the relation between the architects’ discursive emphasis on the cloud – which they described as the ‘building of nothing’ – as a formless, anti-spectacular phenomenon and the technical (and hyperhylomorphic) preconditions for its achievement. The text analyses the gradual drift in descriptions of the project, as early statements that posed the cloud medium as a zone of cancelled vision and threatening electronic surveillance became increasingly superseded by a euphoric tone. The philosopher Hubert Damisch, for example, characterised Blur as presenting a ‘pneumatological beauty’, somewhere that was ‘good to breathe’, suggesting that it occupied an anomalous position in the history of exhibitionary structures insofar as it showed nothing and presented nothing for sale. However, the essay wonders if this most intriguing of recent architectural projects, in the merging of architecture and atmosphere that it manifested, did not in fact pioneer a new kind of environmental commodification. This is a question I pursue further in Chapter 8, which examines the Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome that was proposed for Dubai, a project that eventually fell victim to the post-2007 global financial crisis. This glass-domed ski-resort in the desert, which was marketed as the interiorisation of a climatic zone that promised ‘arctic experiences’, presents us with an image of air-conditioning in its most spectacularised and developed commodity form, the latest manifestation of a long history of weather control projects within which military futurism and

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technoscientific utopian speculation are intertwined. Weather control thus appears, for example, in one of the earliest works of sciencefiction, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, in which the airborne island of Laputa dominates its subject kingdom by the threat of hovering above it, so depriving the region of light and rain and reducing it to drought and famine. In the tradition of utopian thinking, however, weather control tends to take on a markedly remedial and emancipatory character: it almost as if weather is alienation, or at least a potent manifestation of it, and that to come together again, to break the ice with one another or with the world, will crucially involve getting the climate right. Against this background, the allegorical value of the Dubai ski-dome comes into focus inasmuch as the project gives us a depiction of the icing-over of the ideals of such utopian climatology and the kind of erotics it envisions. The Dubai project shows us how the transformation of the technoscientific utopian imaginary, in the present era of atmospheric anxiety and privatised air, involves a shift from collective spaces of climatic dedifferentiation to an urbanism of heightened and exclusive atmospheric relations that increasingly take on the character of a commodity-form in their own right. In Chapter 9 I return to the aerial view in order to consider the rise of Google Earth, analysing it in the context of the company’s holistic ideology and its stated mission to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. The essay reflects on the agency of image-capture devices and of the programme’s interface in the construction of a world picture that, while underpinned by a recognisable cultural image, at the same time presents us with something radically new. It is a picture that seems to offer us a different kind of political map, one that is no longer primarily structured by boundary lines and coloured territories, but rather by a politics of image resolution, which in turn is linked to – among other factors – national legislation governing the release of data in the specific countries where satellite imaging companies are registered and from which they operate. It is argued that the unprecedented mass availability of satellite imagery has led to a newly intensive mediation of the terrestrial surface by aerial images, according to the logic of commercial branding. Today hybrid ‘mashups’ of text, diagram and photographic imagery – phenomena previously entirely virtual – are realised as physical constructions on a terrestrial surface that has itself become a media screen, this testifying to the mass migration of the eyes of consumers into space. Under these

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conditions the elevated eye can no longer be thought of in terms of coolness, objectivity and detachment, but has to be reconceptualised as something that, by its very presence, produces concrete material effects. The following chapter extends the investigation of the agency and effects of remotely captured imagery, but now through the optic of the question of trust and images in the era of digitisation. The case study that I consider is Colin Powell’s use of aerial satellite imagery in his presentation of evidence to the UN Security Council in February 2003, prior to the invasion of Iraq. The chapter pays close attention to the staging of the event, examining the way that a conflict of images was played out, which echoed the confrontation between the US administration and the weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix. In this confrontation, the ‘coolness’ and apparent objectivity of the aerial images was posed against the agonistic on-the-ground depiction of bombing contained in the tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica that hangs outside the UN Security Council chamber but, prior to Powell’s presentation, was covered over with a cloth. Notably, the reconnaissance images that Powell showed, although presented as evidence, were markedly not – to use a term from the semiotics of C.S. Peirce – indexical. Indeed, the images had been drawn over by the US intelligence specialists, to the extent that a diagrammatic graphic layer now obscured the photographic image below. Ostensibly this was done to ‘make clear’ what the image pictured, but it indicates the increasing tendency, which is part of the computational revolution, for evidence to be always already delivered up as interpretation (DNA analysis, etc). The matching of a photograph with a face is today less to do with ‘likeness’, in the traditional iconic sense, than with the fineness of the information that can be extracted from the image and correlated between electronic files. In the digital age, indexicality is inevitably a ‘transcoded indexicality’. It is no longer a case of the direct transmission of light-rays between the subject of the photograph and the sensitised surface on which its image will be fixed. Instead the image is immediately translated into code, from which it must be reconstructed if it is to become visually legible once more. As code, however, it is from the beginning a kind of analysis, one that facilitates processes of filing, comparison, etc. Digital technologies of identification, such as the iris scan, are then less, as Giorgio Agamben has suggested, ‘bio-political tattooing’ – which is the stamping of an

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externally determined code onto the body – than the encoding of the body itself in its very formation. In Chapter 11 I return to ground and also to London to consider the installation Marsyas, produced by the artist Anish Kapoor in 2002 for the vast Turbine Hall exhibition space at the Tate Modern gallery. The name of the artwork refers to the satyr who, having found the pipes that had been invented by the goddess Athena – but which were cast aside by her in disgust after she saw how playing them deformed her face – challenged the god Apollo to a musical contest. The chapter examines the relation between visual and acoustic monstrosity as it is articulated in the myth, drawing upon Jean-Pierre Vernant’s writing on the gorgon to show how Marsyas’s playing of the instrument is positioned within a mimetics of monstrosity that leads back to Medusa. If the gorgon is an emblem of visual experience intensified to the point of its own cancellation, then this is re-enacted through the horrific punishment of flaying that Apollo visits upon the vanquished body of the satyr, a punishment that – as the chapter shows – has stood as a kind of limit condition of what sight can bear. Citing Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, Apollo and Marsyas (1961), in which the petrifying visual effect of the gorgon becomes transferred onto Marsyas’s howl, I develop a new reading of Kapoor’s installation that interprets it, in its overwhelming visual phonicity, as a silent sound work. In the various debates about inter-, trans-, cross- and multidisciplinarity that have taken place within the humanities in recent years, the questions of what a-disciplinarity would be and how it might be conceptualised have not been opened. Yet it is an obvious possibility, one that seems logically closer to the implications of poststructuralism than the more familiar terms that are often assumed to have been – at least in part – derived from it. The closing chapter of the book explores the question of architecture and a-disciplinarity by revisiting the art theorist and historian Rosalind Krauss’s celebrated use of A.J. Greimas’s semiotic square in her seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. This is read in relation to a text that is perhaps lesser known, Fredric Jameson’s ‘Of Islands and Trenches’, a commentary on Louis Marin’s book Utopics: Spatial Play published a year prior to the Krauss article. The prefix ‘a-’ places us in the zone of what semiologists describe as the neutral (neither/nor), and this – in its role as the anticipator of a futurity that points beyond the closure of the present – is the focus of Marin’s and Jameson’s interest, and

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indeed is that which Marin claims to be the properly utopic. And this returns us, in conclusion, to the discursive role played by the cloud in recent architectural thinking, insofar as it takes shape, or rather remains shapeless, through a process of constant refusal of any identifying gestures. With the exception of Chapters 4 and 12, the texts that appear in this book are reproduced in the form in which they were originally published, with minor amendments that include changes to illustrative material. Readers will notice that some contextualising details in a number of the essays, while correct at the time of writing, are now out of date. Rather than changing these, it has seemed preferable to me to maintain the texts, as far as possible, in the form in which they were produced, but to add a date in brackets at the end of each chapter for clarity. This reflects the year in which the text was written – or written and revised, when two dates appear – and not the year of first publication.

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1 The King in the City: The Iconology of George IV in Edinburgh, 1822 Spectacle and Spectatorship The story of George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822 is well known. Scholars have often stressed its pantomimic aspects, and their writing has capitalised upon the improbable costumery and paraphernalia of the event and its larger-than-life cast of characters all acting under the direction of the stage manager, Sir Walter Scott. And in terms of the critique of ideology, the king’s visit has come to stand as one of the classic historical sites of the ‘invention of tradition’,1 even if – as the scepticism of many contemporary responses shows – its ideological efficacy was always rather questionable. It may be difficult to avoid incredulity when dealing with the visit, but, at least for the length of a chapter, we will try to put aside the usual pleasures of writing of this event. My initial intention was that the focus of this essay would be upon the figure of the king in the city, and that it would analyse, by reference to the political context of his visit, the ways in which his body was staged within the urban fabric in the various paintings, drawings and prints that were produced on the occasion of the royal visit. But on reading more closely – particularly the various ‘eye-witness’ accounts of the king’s entry into the city from the Port of Leith – it became 13

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clear that what was equally and perhaps more significant was the highly calculated way in which the city was itself made to unfold before the king’s eye. This was orchestrated in various ways: by the control of the route taken by the royal procession through the city; by the marshalling and costuming of the citizenry; and by various temporary erections, which included a series of ‘triumphal arches’ through which the king passed, together with an encampment of ‘military tents’ upon Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. It seems to me important to stress the king’s visit as an optical event, a kind of spectacular in which both the king and the city were mutually staged in relation to one another. Furthermore, this entailed a very specific structure of spectatorship: the king observed the city, and the city watched the king, watching it. As I will point out, this involved, at particular points, an emblematisation of the body of the king and the citizenry. This hierarchical structure of display and observation would in fact become the lodestone of the argument put forward by the Scottish advocate and author James Simpson, expressed in a series of letters to Scott after the visit, regarding its moral consequences. More generally, the optical presentation of the city to the king is intriguing because it is situated at the intersection of multiple visual modalities: the urban fabric, which is made to appear as a sequence of theatrical and symbolically loaded tableaux, also becomes the object of a peculiarly touristic appreciation; at moments, too, the visual form of the panorama is invoked.

A Sequence of Tableaux When George IV stepped onto the quayside at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, on 15 August 1822, he was the first Hanoverian monarch to alight on Scottish soil. The royal squadron had dropped anchor the previous day, when Walter Scott had sailed to the royal yacht to present the king with a brooch with the motto Long Life to the King of Scotland, and a silver knife, fork and spoon that had belonged to Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Thus began a set of symbolic displacements and identifications intended to stress the unification of the Hanoverian and Stuart lineages in the figure of the king. As Scott had insisted in his anonymously published and widely circulated stage-directions for the event, Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh and Others, in Prospect of His Majesty’s Visit, ‘King George IV comes hither as the descendant of a long line of Scottish kings. The blood of the heroic 14

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THE KING IN THE CITY: THE ICONOLOGY OF GEORGE IV IN EDINBURGH, 1822

Bruce is in his veins . . . In short, we are THE CLAN, and our king is THE CHIEF’.2 Following the ceremonies on the quayside, the royal procession moved along St Bernard Street in Leith, where it passed below a triumphal arch inscribed with the motto ‘Scotland Hails With Joy The Presence Of Her King’. From there it moved along Constitution Street where it met another, this time proclaiming, in English and Latin, ‘O Happy Day’. Continuing, the procession turned and began the slow climb toward Edinburgh along Leith Walk. ‘No city in Europe can boast a nobler avenue’, boasted Scott in his Hints.3 At Union Street another arch was encountered, this sited at the boundary of the royalty and representing the city-gate. Here the Usher of the White Rod advanced and, knocking on the door, demanded entry for the king. When the royal carriage had passed through, the Lord Provost presented the monarch with the keys to the city. At this point we can turn to an extended passage from an anonymous account that was published in the same year as the visit. I quote this because it powerfully conveys the serial tableaux-like quality of the unfolding city: even the attribution of the book – By an Eye-Witness of Most of the Scenes which were then Exhibited – gives us the impression of a sequence of pictures. So, after passing through the arch at Union Street, a new scene opened upon the view of the august Stranger at every step of his progress towards the palace of his ancestors. A number of streets diverge from the head of the magnificent avenue by which he had entered the city; the route through it on which he had now entered is of a spacious breadth, and lined with noble buildings; the long ranges of palaces to the north, and in front . . . were succeeded in diversified panorama by the romantic accumulation of buildings on the south side of a picturesque valley; on the one hand was the castle, towering in majestic grandeur, fitted to recall the recollection of many a past event, on the other hand was the Caltonhill, crowned with Nelson’s monument. . . . These objects, as they passed in succession under his Majesty’s review, evidently excited his admiration: and at last, when he came in full view of the buildings of WaterlooPlace, he fairly stood up in his carriage and exclaimed, ‘How superb!’ His Majesty was also deeply struck with the bold scenery of Arthur’s seat and Salisbury Craggs. . . . When the turrets of Holyrood came into view, the anthem of ‘God save the King’ was sung, which had a fine effect; and as the

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procession moved forward, and arrived in front of the Palace, the shouts of the multitudes which covered the eastern and southern slopes of the Calton and Abbey hills were heard like the noise of so many waters.4

As I noted, this description comes from the anonymous ‘eye-witness’, but extracts could easily have been drawn from the accounts by, for example, Robert Mudie or James Simpson to make the same point. The structure of the descriptions is remarkably similar, with a constant insistence on the viewpoint of the king. One of the engravings by W.H. Lizars that accompany Mudie’s text illustrates the arch erected at Union Street. Figuratively, when viewed within the tradition of triumphal arches, it seems strangely impoverished and underplayed; but the optical structure of the narratives of the royal entry suggest that the arches were less iconographic figures in the cityscape than markers of points at which, as it were, the curtain came down and the scene was changed.

Association The sense of the visit of the king as manifested through a series of frames that locate him in varying relationships to the city and its citizenry is central to the various paintings and graphic representations produced. J.M.W. Turner’s proposal for a cycle of paintings recording the main events, from the king’s arrival on 14 August to his departure on 29 August, stands out.5 But equally striking is the way apparently singular images were consciously located within a notional pictorial series. This is well illustrated by a commercial pamphlet that was issued to advertise a copper-plate print, taken after a painting that was on public display at an address in Princes Street in 1822, illustrating George’s arrival at Holyrood Palace. The pamphlet pointedly locates the subject of the print, the entry to Holyrood, within a sequence of scenes that it textually reconstructs, beginning with the disembarkation at Leith.6 The descriptions of the tableaux presented to the king during his entry smack strongly of associationist aesthetics. Certainly by 1822, associationist approaches to art were commonplace. They had been given a powerful formulation 30 years earlier in Archibald Alison’s Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), which went through another four editions between 1811 and 1817. Its influence was widespread, and Constable, for one, counted himself an admirer. The 16

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popularity of Alison’s work was encouraged by a lengthy review of the second edition by Francis Jeffrey, published in the Edinburgh Review in 1811. Scott knew Jeffrey well; the critic had reviewed Marmion, if intemperately, and in August 1810 penitentially sent him proofs of his article on Lady of the Lake prior to publication. Scott and Alison were certainly acquainted: in fact, in the letter which accompanied the proofs Jeffrey had invited Scott to a dinner at his house with guests who included Alison, also an Edinburgh resident.7 It is difficult to be precise about the influence of Alison’s thought on Scott, and how it might relate to Scott’s orchestration of the royal visit. But in any event, associationism was in the air. It is clear that observers were highly sensitive to the politicohistorical associations of the scenes that were presented to the king and with which he interacted. James Simpson found the landing at Leith ‘suitable to our naval character, associated with thoughts of victory’, yet at the same time tinged with melancholy, for this too was the pier upon which Mary Stuart knelt in ‘youthful loveliness and early widowhood’;8 when the castle appeared it was described rather inelegantly by the anonymous ‘eye-witness’ as ‘fitted to recall the recollection of many a past event’;9 the prisons which the king

THE KING IN THE CITY: THE ICONOLOGY OF GEORGE IV IN EDINBURGH, 1822

Figure 1.1. John Ewbank, The Entry of George IV into Edinburgh from the Calton Hill, 1822, oil on canvas (City Art Centre, Edinburgh Museums and Galleries).

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passed on rounding Calton Hill signified the rule of law in the Hanoverian state whose justice was obviously accepted even by the inmates who, ‘in spite of their unhappy conditions, manifested their union of feeling with the passing scene without, by the display of banners of welcome’;10 the monument to Nelson upon Calton Hill instantly evoked ‘triumphs attained over insolent fire’11 and ‘the hero whose nautical thunders had restored the courses of the political world’;12 and the scene of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Crags, which had been encamped with tents for the occasion, and whose likeness to a Highland landscape was much remarked upon, may have suggested the military subduing of the Highlands after the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Here the documents’ insistence on the ‘panoramic’ viewpoint of the king is itself significant. The historical emergence of the panorama as a representational form is closely linked to Thomas and Paul Sandby and to Hanoverian military activities in the Highlands in the second half of the eighteenth century. Certainly, recent scholarship has emphasised the commanding, instrumental character of the elevated panoramic view, one recent essay concluding: ‘The panoramic visual field . . . is an important coloniser’s tool, first brought to perfection against [the Highland Scots] before being exported across the globe in the service of Hanoverian geopolitical ambition’.13 Of all the scenes, however, the most ‘picturesque and most national’ was adjudged by Mudie to be the king’s descent to the palace at Holyrood. He looked, Mudie writes, ‘with emotions which may well be conceived, upon the gilded spires of his ancestors’.14 Andrew Hemingway’s studies have underlined the character of associationist aesthetics as a ‘proto-semiology’, and have pointed out their proximity to early nineteenth-century preoccupations with antiquities, local topography, and national landscape, and the ideologies within which those preoccupations were embedded.15 Here we are in the midst of a series of ideas and forces central to the rise of Romanticism, at least in the Scottish context. Association, through the vehicle of the imagination, which is accorded a new centrality, transports us away from the immediacy of the object and the empirical content of perception. This is entirely in accord with the reimagining of the city that Scott’s literature invites: that is to say, a new consideration of the fabric of the city as a complex of signs that convey historical events and the national past. Indeed, the treatment of the city in its presentation

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The Dynamics of Sympathy The particular mode of spectatorship enjoined by the visit is most clearly evident in the events of 22 August, when the king proceeded from the Palace to the Castle. Along the route, on either side, the citizenry were arrayed – according to estate, profession, and incorporation – in what amounted to a symbolic display of the body politic. Scott spelled out the arrangements in his Hints, which had been contrived so ‘that his Majesty will, on this occasion, have a full view of the various classes of his subjects, while, at the same moment, they will have the most full and gratifying sight of their PRINCE’.16 ‘Scotland and Scotchmen’, he reminded his readers, ‘are altogether a new subject for his observation’.17 The emblematic quality of the event is clear: the gardeners stood with elaborate constructions of flowers and fruit; the glass-blowers with their rods;18 the incorporated crafts all with their banners ‘as in ancient times’.19 This emblematism, however, paled alongside that of the figure of the king who, on arriving at the castle, ascended to the Half-Moon Battery before turning and waving to the crowds below. Simpson’s description in his letters to Scott drives home the point:

THE KING IN THE CITY: THE ICONOLOGY OF GEORGE IV IN EDINBURGH, 1822

to the king as a sequence of tableaux seems in some ways anticipated in the dramatic renderings of Scott’s own works, such as the stage sets devised by Alexander Nasmyth in 1820 for The Heart of Midlothian.

While he looked round on the noble picture of the city and country, land and sea, hill and valley spread out before him, and saw at one glance the assembled myriads of his subjects by whom he had just been hailed, he was himself visible to every eye; and alone, on the battlements, the royal standard waving over his head, the artillery flashing under his feet, while every tongue shouted and every eye glistened, stood the commanding figure of the British Monarch, the father of the people, blessing and blessed by his exulting children.20

In his reflections on the royal entry into Edinburgh on 15 August, Simpson had argued that a ‘moral power’ flowed from the sight of the king in the city. His presence ‘enhanced’ what was around it – city, trophy, and mountain scenery, as the author put it – and these 19

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Figure 1.2. William H. Lizars, View of the Grand Procession to the Castle, When his Majesty had Ascended the Half Moon Battery (1822), coloured enc Edinburgh City Libraries. Licensor http//:www.scran.ac.uk). graving (

his regard revitalised for the citizenry. As Simpson wrote: ‘The King’s eye was on these, and, at the same moment, they were new in their interest to the oldest inhabitant.’ This anticipated the argument he would build in his final two letters, which at the same time would turn out to be a critique not of Jacobitism but of Jacobinism. These letters underscore the primary importance of the king’s visit as an optical event, whose moral and political consequences derive, Simpson suggests, from its character as a spectacle. Drawing on Adam Smith’s argument in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, Simpson posits that we have a natural tendency to sympathise with the successes of others, rather than with their disappointments, and this in turn leads us to strive for what we call ‘distinction’, which derives from the sympathy of others with one’s success and joy. Simpson quotes Smith: The man of rank is observed by all the world. Every body is eager to look at him, and to conceive, by sympathy, the joy and exaltation with which his circumstances naturally inspire him. His notions are the objects of the public care. Scarce a word, scarce a gesture can fall from him that is altogether neglected. In a great assembly he is the person upon whom all direct their eyes; it is upon him that the passions seem all to wait with expectation, in order to receive that movement and distinction that he shall impress upon them.21

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THE KING IN THE CITY: THE ICONOLOGY OF GEORGE IV IN EDINBURGH, 1822

This scopic drive that hierarchical social systems satisfy is what, Simpson says, republicanism fails to reckon with, and this in turn can only be a failure to reckon with the human constitution itself. In place of the king, republicanism substitutes the grim spectacle of the guillotine, only in time to reinvent him as an Emperor-Dictator. Smith’s philosophy of sympathy thus allows Simpson to ascribe a particular moral consequence to the emblematic spectacle of the king in the city, whereby its very splendour is the occasion, he argues, for a deep class rapprochement founded upon a supposedly ‘natural’ dynamics of sympathy, in which the body politic unites before the spectacle of the king and is confirmed within it. (2002)

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2 Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago, 1893 A View from Above Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spend – free of income tax, old man, free of income tax?1

That is Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man, giving his old friend Holly Martins a lesson in moral relativism from the apex of Vienna’s huge ferris wheel in the Prater fairground. It is a familiar theme, this thinning of the ethical relationship through distance, its best-known expression perhaps contained in Diderot’s Letter on the Blind when he supposes: Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind? . . . I feel quite sure that were it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in pain though we crush an ant without a second thought, are these actions not governed by the selfsame principle?2

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CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893 Figure 2.1. Harry Lime and Holly Martins on the Prater Wheel, from The Third Man, Carol Reed (dir.), 1949 (courtesy of STUDIOCANAL Films Ltd).

In Reed’s film, Lime is a charismatic black-marketeer dealing in diluted penicillin in postwar Vienna; a cynical but charming vagabond who knows how to exploit the new unmapped topography of the shattered city – a shifting world of shadows, ruins and debris, where only fragile and apparently ‘occasional’ structures, such as the fairground wheel, or those underground, such as the sewers, seem to be fully intact. The oppressive atmosphere of alienation and disorientation that permeates The Third Man has often been remarked upon: the film portrays an urban world in which the possibility of commanding a ‘cityscape’ – both visually and operatively – is constantly cancelled. And so, although early in the film the laterally spreading rhizomatic underground city formed by the sewers seems to be within Harry’s dominion, by the end it has turned into his trap. Disallowing any overview, the film constantly places its audience and protagonists in shadowed and visually limited spaces whose connection to one another is obscure or even – like the ubiquitous and unstable piles of rubble – in motion. If the film gives us cityscapes, they are more akin to Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s 23

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‘scapelands’ of sensory disorientation, where interpretation misses its mark or is silenced, than they are to any conventional understanding of the term.3 This barring of the overview is perhaps most evident – because the opportunity to gain one reaches, literally, its height – in the scene in the carriage of the ferris wheel that vaults Holly and Harry high up into the dusty Vienna sky, whence the latter delivers his monologue and displays his truly Apollonian dispassion. There is a long understanding of the ferris wheel, which it shares with other fairground rides, as an entertainment for lovers, and the scene reads as a parody of this, the intimacy of the upholstered carriage shifting into claustrophobia as the room with a view becomes a room with a drop. Despite the back-projection that flickers upon the windows as the wheel turns, the city remains flat, its expanse ignored by the protagonists. Rather than the carriage opening onto a cityscape, the image seems paradoxically to press against the glass, shutting the windows down and leaving the extent of the vertical fall from the wheel’s zenith – from which Harry looks down, and with which he threatens Holly – as the only registration of the city’s space from the interior. The Diderot-esque motif within the film continues later, when Holly is brought into close quarters with the consequences of Harry’s racketeering. In a hospital, to which he has been taken by the military police, Holly stands pressed hard against the foot of a bed that holds a dying child. The child is unseen by the audience; instead we focus upon Holly’s eyes. He agrees to help the police trap Harry.

The Ferris Wheel and the Aerial View This chapter is about the ferris wheel and vision. More specifically, it aims to examine the ferris wheel as an episode within the broader cultural history of the elevated or aerial view. It should be said at the outset that this is also a history within which the emergence of the notion of ‘cityscape’ is equally and deeply implicated, dependent as it was upon the prior concept of landscape, with its associations of prospect and expanse. The earliest use of the term given in the Oxford English Dictionary makes this landscape connection clear: the extended citation, from an 1856 letter by William Thackeray, reads: ‘A fairyland of frozen land, river, and city-scape, where all the trees 24

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CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893

were glistening with silver, and all the houses iced with plum-cake snow.’ (He is describing a journey by sleigh in the vicinity of Albany, New York; interestingly, after Thackeray, no further citations are given until 1952).4 It is not by chance that in Thackeray’s description an atmosphere of enchantment arises from the sight of a world that is arrested and ‘frozen’ and which, as such, is presented as pristine and, in important ways, empty. We find the same relationship in that paradigmatic city poem of romanticism, Wordsworth’s Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802, a eulogy to a metropolis that appears as a landscape, stilled in sleep before the start of the commercial day. Likewise, it is not coincidental that, upon the opening of the London Eye – the gargantuan hi-tech ferris wheel that was built on the bank of the Thames as part of the capital’s millennium celebrations, and that is now billed as ‘the way the world sees London’ – visitors queuing for entry to the wheel’s capsules found themselves guided past the text of Wordsworth’s poem, monumentalised in large stainless-steel letters and acting as a kind of ideological prefiguration of the experience that awaited.5 While there are suggestions that pleasure wheels may have originated within the Islamic world, and documentary evidence for them going back to at least 1620, the motorised ferris wheel – as we know it today – is undoubtedly one of the iconic ascensional apparatuses of modernity. Its historical emergence can be located at a very specific moment within modern society, one characterised by the linked developments of mass tourism and the urban spectaculars of the turn-of-thecentury World’s Fairs.6 Consequently the ferris wheel has a history of being a specifically urban form: it has a relationship with cities, and may even be taken to be one of the modes – however minor – via which cityscapes are constituted, presented, disseminated and, potentially, challenged. In particular, it draws my interest because of its highly equivocal status. Simultaneously a vantage point, a kinaesthetic device, and an optical entertainment installed within mass society, its reception was, I will argue, deeply informed by the optical toys and ‘hypervisual spectacles’ of the late nineteenth century.7 This chapter’s hypothesis is that this complexity could historically give rise to less monolithic and more ambiguous forms of visuality – and, by implication, a visual politics – than those normally associated with the aerial view. And while there is no doubt that early experiences of the ferris wheel were

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shaped by, for example, dominant popular discourses on ascension, and could sometimes be resolved into them, at the same time it made other possibilities available too.

Looking Down on the City Harry Lime’s speech at the top of the Prater Wheel is rooted in a key ascensional narrative within Western modernity whereby the departure from the terrestrial surface is conceptually linked to notions of transcendent subjectivity, futurity, and abstraction, which have the potential to license a violence directed back toward the surface from where one has departed. This particular constellation is strikingly illustrated in a brief but loaded passage from Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery’s description of his experiences as a war pilot: All I can see on the vertical are curios from another age, beneath clear, untrembling glass. I lean over crystal frames in a museum; I tower above a great sparkling pane, the great pane of my cockpit. Below are men – protozoa on a microscope slide. . . . I am a scientist, and for me their war is a laboratory experiment.8

It is all here: the Promethean detachment from the ground; the consequent separation from its historicity, so that to look down is to look into the past; the dehumanisation of those below and the emergence of a dispassionate, instrumental relationship toward them. Harry gives us one kind of view from above, but there is another – more auratic, more enchanted, and more characteristically associated with the idea of cityscape. Emerging from the pastoral tradition, but transforming in complex ways within modernity, it is grounded within the history of landscape representation (prospect painting), and appreciation. Its historical development intersects with mythologies of the city within modernism, and is shaped by technical innovations in ascensional devices (observation balloons, viewing towers, etc). The sense of removal or distance from the city – of being in a separate world – becomes the condition of possibility within mass society for the transformation of the visual field of the city into a popular entertainment, a development foreshadowed by the emergence of 180◦ and 360◦ panoramic painting in the late eighteenth century. When he wrote of the ‘Haussmanisation’ of Paris, Walter Benjamin commented that, for the first time, citizens became aware of the city’s inhuman character.9 In 26

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the light of this, the development of techniques of estrangement from the quotidian reality of the city and its transformation into a distanced object of visual consumption assume a compensatory and ideologically recuperative aspect, as the violence of urbanism ‘on-the-ground’ is sublimated into the spectacle of the ‘urban landscape’. Notwithstanding his opposition to Napoleon III and the Second Empire,10 the photographer Nadar’s imprecise but extraordinary aerial photographs powerfully contribute to this process, in their description of a relationship between city, landscape and spectacle. Certainly he recognised the entrancing effects of distantiation. Describing the transfigured landscape seen from a balloon in his memoir Quand j’´etais photographe, he wrote: ‘Everything appears to us with the exquisite impression of a marvellous, ravishing cleanliness! No squalor or blots on the landscape. There is nothing like distance to remove us from all ugliness.’11 The historical trajectory of this particular visual modality leads not to the abject, flattened world that Harry Lime looks down on, but to the fascinating imagery of the commodity-spectacle. In 1889 the Paris International Exposition was held, the event that saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world. The edifice was an engineering marvel, a stupendous observation pylon that rose from the heart of the city that was the acknowledged capital of aviation and the great dreamscape of the late nineteenth-century aerial imagination. The affinity between the tower and flight was evident from the start, and was consummated when Alberto Santos-Dumont rounded it in his dirigible in 1901 to win a 100,000-franc prize.12 The enchantment of the view offered from the tower was clear – that of a city become a purely visual object, unified, cleansed of labour and social conflict, and utopic: a spectacle that dissimulated the conditions of its own constitution and that had the power to pose the city, as Barthes was to point out in his classic and affectionate essay on the tower, as a force of nature.13

The World’s Columbian Exposition The first ferris wheel was developed for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 as an explicit competitor and counterpart to the Parisian tower – a kind of historical after-image of it.14 The project for the establishment of a viewing device went through several iterations before the Pittsburgh bridge-builder and steel man, 27

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the appropriately named George Ferris, proposed his wheel. The earlier suggestions that had been put forward were towers: the first was a kind of enlarged and elaborated version of Eiffel’s; others included a three-tower structure for bird’s-eye photographers; the last was a 400ft-high ziggurat served by an electric railway and described in the Rand McNally Handy Guide to Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition as the ‘Tower of Babel’.15 The loaded epithet had much to do with the location of the proposed tower – and indeed the future Ferris Wheel – and it is important to appreciate this, since it is crucial to the way the Wheel was understood at the time. Recent scholarship on the Chicago Fair has insisted on the importance of its local, as well as its international, context in the early 1890s. Chicago was a city hardly 60 years old, and in some ways an unlikely location for the celebration of the quadricentennial of Columbus’s landfall. But it was precisely this newness that established its claim in the eyes of many to be the most characteristic American city – the most freed from history, and therefore future orientated and universal. Certainly the Fair was underpinned by an ideology and ethics of universalism and incorporation, but these were asserted on specific terms and through a very particular vision of the city and its future: the famous White City, constructed under the directorship of the architect Daniel Burnham – ‘a pedagogy, a model, and a lesson not only of what the future might look like but, just as important, how it might be brought about’, as Alan Trachtenberg has written.16 This was, the argument goes, intended to present a high-cultural and a-commercial vision of the city palatable to the contemporary Chicagoan elites, asserted in the face of the dynamism, diversity and cultural confusion of the contemporary immigrant city. While the exhibition of manufactured products was one of the major functions of the Fair, their commodity-character was suppressed in the White City. In only one area did an explicitly commercial condition prevail – the peripheral Midway Plaisance, described by Burnham in his notes on the exposition for visitors in the Rand McNally Handbook as ‘a most unusual collection of almost every type of architecture known to man – oriental villages, Chinese bazaars, tropical settlements, ice railways, the ponderous Ferris wheel, and reproductions of ancient cities. All these are combined to form the lighter and more fantastic side of the fair.’17

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The Midway Plaisance developed as a sort of Wunderkammer hitched to the side of the fairgrounds. It presented itself as an extraordinary commercial heterotopia of concessions against the serene Beaux Arts uniformity of the White City. On the published plans, its divisions appear as diagrammatic lot-lines – suggesting lettable areas – as opposed to the descriptive lines that outlined each structure in the highly composed sequence that comprised the White City itself. The Midway had been originally conceived as an anthropological ‘Street of All Nations’ where a sequence of ‘living villages’ would be placed on display. Traces of this conception remain in Burnham’s description. It was placed under the direction of the Harvard anthropologist F.W. Puttnam, although it was perhaps Sol Bloom, a San Franciscan theatre impresario hired by Burnham to supervise the organisation of the Midway exhibits, who was more responsible for the final result. There have been attempts to read the structure of the Midway in terms of a sequence of racial development, rising as one moved toward the White City – and certainly some contemporary commentators saw in it a ‘sliding scale of humanity’18 – but this was complicated by Bloom’s commercial acumen, his understanding of popular culture, and his appreciation of how to provoke and titillate his audience. In his hands the Midway developed as an avenue of simulacra where exotic and Orientalist fantasies overlapped with theatrical presentations and ethnographic tableaux vivants. This was the world over which the Ferris Wheel presided. The various tower proposals that had been put forward had been intended for the junction at which the Midway met the larger fairgrounds; but the site for the Wheel became the mid-point of the Plaisance, where it sat surrounded by orientalist attractions such as the Moorish Palace and the Street in Cairo. Although at least one published plan of the Midway suggests that the Wheel was orientated toward the city – that is, at right angles to the Midway itself 19 – contemporary photographs show it aligned with the street, as if the Plaisance was a mill-race and the structure a prodigious water-wheel. To many it seemed distinctly American: on one hand an expansive and even vaguely cosmic emblem of unity – on 22 June 1893, the day after the Ferris wheel opened to the public, the Chicago Daily Tribune ran an article entitled ‘In An Endless Circle, The Ferris Wheel Commences Its Journey Through Space’; and on the other,

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Figure 2.2. Looking east along the Midway: the Captive Balloon and Ferris Wheel, from The Dream City: a Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition / with an introduction by Halsey C. Ives (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–1894) (courtesy of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago).

an expression of the progressive machinic force of industry, at night a ‘rainbow of revolving light’, wrote Hubert Howe Bancroft, ‘like the bow of scientific promise set athwart the blackness of the night.’20 Compared with this, Eiffel’s Tower appeared an inert stump, nothing but an historical souvenir, a ‘thing dead and lifeless’ in the words of an essayist for The Alleghenian.21 A 1:50 model of the Tower was placed in a concession alongside the Wheel. As John A. Kouwenhoven has pointed out, viewed from the ground the Wheel had a visual dynamism, its form shifting as one passed by it, in a way the Tower did not.22 Viewed end-on along the Midway, it displayed the strikingly abstract profile of an impossibly thin, linear skyscraper. But as one moved around, it gradually opened out into an expanding ellipse and developed an ocular quality, which was in turn emphasised in popular stereoscopic photographs.23 This, together with its animation, conferred a certain anthropomorphism. Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel, called it a ‘Brobdingnag’,24 while Ferris himself, emphasising its great size, had described it as a ‘monster’.25 And, like all monsters, 30

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Optical Bivalence What was it, then, to look from this device? Some answers can be sketched. First, to some it undoubtedly provided a progressivist vision. James Gilbert has pointed out the importance of the Chicago tourist guidebooks produced in the years leading up to and during the Fair in developing a genre of city literature that shaped responses to, and interpretations of, the city. Important to this genre was an interplay between vignettes of life seen on the ground and the synoptic overview of the city allowed from the tops of Chicago’s burgeoning highrise buildings, the tallest of which was Burnham and Root’s Masonic Temple. The overview played precisely the role of the prospect – a looking-forward that was geographic, temporal, and visionary. Thus Carroll Ryan, writing in his 1893 Chicago the Magnificent:

CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893

it provoked anxieties of loss of control. In the popular literature related to the Fair, this is most bizarrely expressed in the paranoiac episode on the Wheel in Tudor Jenks’s The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls, in which two Arabs, when unable to extort money from the protagonists, superhumanly pull apart the towers supporting the axle, thus releasing the Wheel, which runs amok down the Midway.26

Looking down on Chicago from the dizzy summit of the Masonic Temple, strange thoughts must fill the mind of him who has travelled far, who has seen the ruins of empires, empires in decay, and the new empire of the west rising with a civilization greater, more intense, more free, more universal than all that preceded it.27

The homology between Chicago’s contemporary high-rise buildings and the Wheel – as ‘a skyscraper that moved . . . from the basement to the penthouse and back again’28 – has recently been emphasised and contrasted to the Eiffel Tower, which dwarfed its surroundings: perhaps not coincidentally, the height of the Ferris Wheel at the top of its apex equalled the highest occupied floor in Burnham and Root’s building.29 This interplay of vignette and synopticism developed in surprising ways. When F.W. Puttnam rode the Ferris Wheel, he described the experience in his ethnographic guide to the Midway, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types, an experience clearly 31

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akin to the auratic and enchanting visual modality that we have already discussed. From the Ferris Wheel the anthropologist could see the Midway as a ‘magic gathering’, the Wheel ‘enabling us to view this mimic world as from another planet, and to look upon an enchanted land filled with happy folk’.30 Again, this is an image both neutralising and consoling, one that pictures a world from which social contradiction and conflict has vanished, and which forms a counterpart to the experience of ‘dazzlement’ that some visitors, such as Owen Wister, described on visiting the White City itself: ‘a bewilderment at the gloriousness of everything seized me’, he wrote, ‘until my mind was dazzled to a standstill’.31 Puttman’s vision from the Wheel was also potentially a strongly incorporating vision of diversity as a prelude to unity.32 In June 1893 a reporter from the Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette rode the Wheel on its inaugural rotation: his description carefully sequences ‘this great picture . . . disclosed to men’ by the ‘marvellous mechanism’: It was an impressive, almost weird scene, a memorable experience, this looking down for the first time on this wondrous street teeming with thousands swept by the breath of the effort of the ages into this narrow lane and there living and moving in careless gayety. . . . To the east was the wonderful city of glistening palaces . . . like the dreams of the biblical prophets who saw in their reveries the nations of the earth come together in mighty concourse and to whom the glories of heaven were revealed.33

There are other accounts, however, that suggest alternative visual modes provoked by the mechanism – less official and more elusive, complex, transient and imbricated. Earlier in this chapter I suggested a reading of the Wheel as a kind of hybrid cultural phenomenon that displayed a threefold character of vantage point, kinaesthetic device and optical entertainment. This hybridity made it interpretable in both official, high-cultural, and commercial, low-cultural terms (on one hand, the elevated observation point and the exalted vistas it permitted and, on the other, the carnivalesque fairground ride). Moreover, it made these interpretations – or at least the experiences upon which they drew, and which they at least in part defined – spatially proximate, if not necessarily simultaneous. The terminologies applied to the Wheel, and descriptions of it, register this ambivalence. Officially called an ‘observation wheel’, but popularly a vertical ‘merry-go-round’, it was 32

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not by chance that Ferris himself insisted on the former, thereby positioning his construction both within the lineage of its Parisian predecessor, and within an officially sanctioned and elite, although now popularised, visual modality. Two of the three aspects of the Wheel I suggested are clear enough: but what of the third? My argument here, admittedly conjectural, is that the experience of riding upon it was shaped in important ways by the development and proliferation of public and domestic optical entertainments and toys during the nineteenth century, and that they are discernible in descriptions of the visual effects induced by the Wheel. Certainly some contemporary reports suggest that the view from it could be a kind of proto-cinematic spectacle. When William Gronau – Ferris’s partner and the engineer responsible for much of the Wheel’s structural design – first stepped upon it, it seemed, he wrote, ‘as if everything was dropping away from us, and the car was still. Standing at the side of the car and looking into the network of iron rods multiplied the peculiar sensation mentioned’.34 The sense of being stationary while the city and Fair ‘fell away’ implies an experience in some regards comparable to that of the earlier diorama, an entertainment that was based, as Jonathan Crary writes, ‘on the incorporation of an immobile observer into a mechanical apparatus and a subjection to a pre-designed temporal unfolding of optical experience’.35 In Daguerre’s diorama, which had opened in Paris in 1822, the spectators were seated upon a central rotating platform that shifted by turns to address painted screens whose scenes were ‘animated’ using various lighting techniques. The two scenes that were displayed in the first diorama were The Interior of Trinity Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral and The Valley of Sarnen. A visitor described it thus: While gazing in wrapt admiration at the architectural beauties of the cathedral, the spectator’s attention was disturbed by sounds underground [presumably the mechanical apparatus]. He became conscious that the scene before him was slowly moving away, and he obtained a glimpse of another and very different prospect, which gradually advanced, until it was completely developed, and the cathedral had disappeared. What he saw now was a valley, surrounded by high mountains capped with snow.36

Not only does Gronau’s description of his impression of the city shifting in relation to a static viewing point reiterate the visual sensation of the diorama, but there is a curious resonance between the 33

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way in which Daguerre sequenced the two scenes – with their shift from proximity to distance, from interior (however sublime) to Alpine landscape, the lateral motion of the diorama’s seating mechanism gaining, by implication, an elevational value – and the Ferris Wheel. Compare it, for example, with another description of the Wheel: “It seemed as if the earth were sinking away of sight slowly and quietly. Going up, the passengers had the whole of Chicago and the prairies for miles beyond laid before them unobscured.”37 In his – by now classic – Techniques of the Observer, Crary locates the diorama within a constellation of nineteenth-century visual amusements that bear evidence of a contemporary reconceptualisation and reconstruction of the viewing subject, a ‘modernization of the observer’ as he puts it.38 His account situates the development of optical toys such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope within an historical physiology of vision whose research into after-images had prompted speculation about the persistence of vision when separated from the phenomenal immediacy of its objects. This discourse on the retinal after-image was, Crary argues, the crucial context for the optical entertainments that developed from the 1820s on (whose animation effects were dependent upon the persistence of vision), some of which were directly prompted by new experiences induced by mechanical movement (train wheels seen through railings, cogs in factory machinery, etc.). Pointing out the immobility of the body presupposed by these devices, the eye being aligned and spatially fixed in relation to a moving mechanical assemblage, Crary insists on their disciplinary character, whereby the body is submitted to the machine and incorporated and regulated as a component within it.39 In this, however, the experience of the Ferris Wheel diverged from that of the diorama, for while it submitted the body to its circular mechanical movement (and its strange pleasures), it at the same time allowed – within the confines of the carriage – something of (and even something more than) the ambulatory and visual movement and autonomy that Crary associates specifically with the panorama form, in opposition to the diorama. In the end, what is perhaps most striking in the descriptions, and what deserves emphasis, is the powerful bivalence in the views offered from the wheel. On one side – looking through the moving structure of the mechanism – was the unsettling vision of space shredded and set into motion around the carriage that so disconcerted Gronlau. But on

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CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893 Figure 2.3. The view toward the White City, through the Ferris Wheel structure (Chicago Historical Society ICHi-17426).

the other, a more serene, transcendent and tranquil vista opened up, and all sense of motion was cancelled. Joining Gronlau again on the inaugural rotation: I advised any timid person riding in the wheel to look straight ahead and not into the wheel when no sensation is at all experienced and the view is simply magnificent . . . I could do nothing but admire the great spectacle. Looking [east] one can see the beautiful buildings, grounds and lake. As I said before it was a fine day, with a brightly shining sun, which threw its golden rays upon the water and the harbor and presented a more magnificent sight than my mind had ever pictured. The harbor was dotted with vessels of every description, which appeared mere specks from our exalted position, and the reflected rays of the beautiful sunset cast a gleam upon the surrounding scenery, making a picture lovely to behold. Looking [north] one can see the city of Chicago with its many tall and grand buildings. The sight is so inspiring that all conversation stopped, and all were lost in admiration of this grand sight. The equal of it I have never seen.40

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Figure 2.4. The view toward the White City, outward from the Ferris Wheel, from The Dream City: a Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition / with an introduction by Halsey C. Ives (St. Louis: N. D. Thompson Co., 1893–1894) (courtesy of the Paul V. Galvin Library, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago).

The descriptions suggest that within the carriages passengers were interposed between two incommensurable visual fields, the tension between which seems to have replicated something of that between the Midway and the White City itself: on one side the Midway, ‘always changin’ like one o’ those kaleidoscopes’, and on the other the ‘great beautiful silence of the White City’, as a character in Clara Louise Burnham’s 1893 novel Sweet Clover described them.41 Perhaps this tension was too much for some. There was a report of a passenger who lost control in one of the Ferris Wheel cars, smashing into its sides with such force as to bend the iron bars that lined them. As the Wheel completed its first revolution he became calmer and, ‘breaking down completely, laughed and sobbed convulsively’. Unfortunately for him, however, the Wheel went through two rotations per trip, and as it rose again he tore loose from the men who were holding him down, before a woman in the carriage undid her skirt and flung it over his head, after which he became docile.42 Is this a simple case of ‘fear of heights’, as reported in the article, or is it something more 36

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akin to the late nineteenth-century ‘bourgeois hysteria’ as discussed by Peter Stallybrass and Alon White in their The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, so closely linked to vision and triggered by the tension between desire and its interdiction?43 The reading of the Chicago Wheel in terms of popular visual entertainments would have been encouraged by the specific context within which visitors encountered it. To the east and west of the Wheel, among the other concessions and diversions on the Midway Plaisance, two panoramas were exhibited: one showed the Volcano of Kilauea, another a view of the Bernese Alps. The contemporary Rand McNally Miniature Guide Map44 to the exposition also indicates a Diorama of the Destruction of Pompeii close to the footings of the Wheel. Was the tableau of a city being destroyed by flame and submerged in ash redolent of Chicago’s own devastating, although subsequently highly allegorised, Great Fire of 1871?45 This may have replaced, on the same site, the small Zoopraxographical Hall where the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, on the invitation of the Fair’s Fine Arts Commission, had projected short action sequences based on his animal locomotion studies using his zoopraxiscope (a phenakistoscopemagic lantern amalgam).46

Disassembly An afterword. The mythical origin of the Wheel was at a chop dinner. According to Ferris, the idea came to him while dining with other engineers during a Saturday afternoon at a chop-house, that most characteristic and emblematic of Chicagoan institutions. Ferris ‘got some paper’ and began to sketch, and before the meal was over had designed the Wheel in ‘almost the entire detail’. ‘The Wheel stands in the Plaisance at this moment’, he told a reporter, ‘as it stood before me then.’47 Ferris’s story conforms to a familiar type – that of the genius who gives birth to his creation fully formed – and its likelihood has been discussed. But what I find most interesting and suggestive in the myth is its context of the mundane chop-house and the way its narrative thus binds the final stages of the ‘disassembly’ of the pig to the birth of the wheel, in a kind of profane, Joycean re-working of the tale of the aerial Pegasus springing from an act of slaughter. Slaughter, butchery and meat-packing were central to the Chicagoan economy 37

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of the later nineteenth century, and they hung in the air, a nauseous reminder of the material basis upon which elite culture was being built. It may have been repulsive, but, as one banker remarked, one soon realised it was the smell of dollars.48 Chicago was the ‘porkopolis’ of America, of the world, having overtaken its rival Cincinnati in the 1860s after the Civil War. The industry was centred on the immense Union Stock Yards (which, by the early 1870s were processing well over one million hogs each year)49 , themselves a widely-visited and troublingly fascinating urban spectacle that, in retrospect, look like a kind of obscene and sanguineous precursor to the ethereal and purged White City. As Louis Sullivan, architect of the Fair’s Transportation Building, noted: ‘all distinguished strangers, upon arrival in the city, at once were taken to the Stock Yards . . . to view with salutary wonder the prodigious goings on’. Characteristically, visitors to Chicago were asked firstly how they liked the city, and then whether they had seen the Stock Yards?50 In 1948, the architectural historian and critic Siegfried Giedion published Mechanization Takes Command. In its ‘Foreword’, Giedion announced this study of ‘anonymous history’ as a development and extension of his book Space, Time and Architecture – that most canonical of histories of architectural modernism – which had been published seven years earlier. Whereas the first book had ‘attempted to show the split that exists in our period between thought and feeling’, the new volume, by studying the processes of mechanisation, would ‘show how this break came about’.51 In Space, Time and Architecture, the Chicago Fair had been briefly mentioned once, and only then to be summarily dismissed as the regressive counterpart of the 1889 Paris Exposition, and a marker of the moment when the tradition of great exhibitions went into decline. Whereas Giedion epitomised the achievements of the Paris Exposition by Eiffel’s Tower and the Galerie des Machines, Ferris’s Wheel went unmentioned.52 In Mechanization Takes Command, however, Chicago occupies what is very much the centre-piece of the book. Under the heading ‘Mechanization and Death: Meat’, Giedion develops an examination of the Union Stock Yards that both acts as a structural opposition to his reflections on revivification, water and bathing at the end of the book, and also introduces a concern whose treatment is strikingly oblique and evasive for a study of this kind, researched during the war years (there is no consideration at all, for example, of the rise of industrialised warfare).

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CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893 Figure 2.5. Apparatus for catching and suspending hogs, 1882, from S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, a Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), fig. 117, p. 231 (courtesy of Oxford University Press, New York).

Giedion’s comments on the Chicago Stock Yards are framed through a comparison with the huge abattoir of La Villette in Paris, which was developed under Haussmann at about the same time as the Chicago Yards. At La Villette, cattle were slaughtered in individual booths in a ‘survival of handicraft practices’;53 but in Chicago, 39

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Figure 2.6. Cincinnati, hog-slaughtering and packing: panoramic painting, 1873, from S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, a Contribution to Anonymous History (1948), fig. 109, p. 217 (courtesy of Oxford University Press, New York).

slaughtering at an unprecedented rate was achieved through a staged and increasingly mechanised ‘disassembly line’ process into which the live pig was input at one end and from which it was output as a variety of animal products (meat, lard, bristles, etc.), in a hitherto unprecedented rationalisation of production that eventually attained, as one critic has written, ‘a level of “geometric” perfection’.54 Not only did the modern mechanical assembly line synonymous with Fordist production develop out of a spatial organisation of labour and mechanisms dedicated to the disassembly or breaking-down of material – with its rails and endless chains upon which the pigs were conveyed during the stages of their dismemberment – but, Giedion argues, its development was ‘implicitly related’ to the vast spatial expanses of the American Great Plains whose livestock was funnelled into Chicago.55 On page 217 of Mechanization Takes Command, Giedion published what he called a panoramic painting illustrating the hog-slaughteringand-packing line at Cincinatti, Chicago’s forerunner. Looking at it, one is immediately struck by the fact that it is not so much a panorama – at 40

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CITYSCAPE WITH FERRIS WHEEL: CHICAGO, 1893

least as conventionally understood, in that it has none of the implied circularity of visual field – as a stadial description of an inherently linear process. In the essential seriality of the disassembly line, the painted vignettes that illustrate the various procedural stages – each one separated by a spatial interval from the others – are reminiscent of the sequential images arrayed around the wheel of the phenakistoscope. But they even more closely resemble Edweard Muybridge’s serial and linear photographic studies of animal motion, which were taken by cameras set at intervals and triggered in turn in something like an image production line. These were the images, of course, that Muybridge animated using the zoopraxiscope, and of which he – it seems rather unsuccessfully – tried to sell engravings mounted on phenakistoscopic disks, in his hall at the base of the Ferris Wheel.56 Where Muybridge’s process decomposed the continuum of movement by sequentially freezing the transient body, thus capturing its temporal development in space, its counterpart in the Stock Yards beyond the fairgrounds – the disassembly line – worked on the material of the body itself, effecting its staged, temporal dismemberment through an analogous stadial and spatial distribution of transformations. The chops that lay on Ferris’s plate as he sketched his design might at first glance seem unlikely emblems of modernity. But in fact, they – and the processes they signify – have greater resonance and kinship with the Wheel than do the more synthetic, ‘constructive’ industrial analogies usually made in relation to it (the tower, the bridge, etc.) – not least because of the Wheel’s own dismembering and unhinging optical powers. (2004)

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3 Falling Upon Warsaw: The Shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Culture Shadowplay In the shops of Warsaw art galleries, drinking mugs and T-shirts are sold upon which a striking image is printed. Aimed at tourists visiting the city, the products show a car in profile, pointing to the left, as if it is about to drive off. Resting awkwardly on its roof is a large form, bulky and rectilinear at one end, but tapering through stages to develop into a needle-like point that then projects over the bonnet of the vehicle below. To someone unfamiliar with Warsaw, the ungainly mass on top of the car looks like a kind of retro-styled rocket attachment, something that might have been knocked up from available materials in a local inventor’s kitchen, and then wheeled out strapped to the roof of the ‘Mały Fiat’ – a model manufactured in Poland by Fiat in the 1970s. But for anyone who has even the most passing acquaintance with the city, the shape is instantly recognisable as that of the Palace of Culture and Science (PKiN), the gargantuan structure that was gifted to Warsaw by Stalin and that has, ever since its opening in 1955, remained the contemporary city’s most unrelenting and difficult physical inheritance. The joke here is that the Palace becomes, like the goods on which its image is printed, something carried away as a tourist memento. At the same time, however, the image points toward, and in some respects trades upon, the difficulty of ‘reducing’ the Palace in this way. 42

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FALLING UPON WARSAW: THE SHADOW OF STALIN’S PALACE OF CULTURE Figure 3.1. Karolina Breguła, from All I Can See is the Palace (2005) (courtesy of the artist).

On one hand, the work of this post-modern joke is to laugh away the Palace, to dissipate the malignity of its presence by turning its image into a souvenir. From this point of view, regime change has given the Palace its comeuppance and it has become just another commodity, unhitched from the ground and put into motion – that is to say, economic circulation – as an object of tourist consumption, as just another, albeit impressive, piece of Soviet kitsch. The effect of this transformation of the Palace into a souvenir is to turn it into something like the Eiffel Tower, and thus, even as it pokes fun at the Palace, the image – through its miniaturisation of the edifice – appears an attempt to recode it as something more ‘civic’ and to suggest that it might take up a position in the sequence of venerable and touristically certified European monuments that include the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum 43

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and Big Ben. In this regard, the picturing of the Palace as a souvenir is the same kind of recuperative civilising gesture as was the addition of the Millennium Clock to its upper storey in an effort to transform this implacable figure of subjugation into a civic clock-tower. And yet, on the other hand, if this is miniaturisation, it is – the image implies – a difficult and unsuccessful one. This is not an Eiffel Tower scaled for the mantelpiece. The car might helpfully be pointing downhill, but at the same time we feel that, if it is going to move at all, it will be with difficulty with this weighing down on it. If this is the Palace of Culture transposed into commodity form, it looks as if it is going to be, as retailers might say, ‘hard to shift’. The image thus pictures what the joke itself aims to do, while simultaneously foregrounding its own inefficacy – and indeed the inefficacy of all attempts – to, once and for all, drive away (wywiezc) the shadow of the Palace of Culture. If the joke aims at relieving the sinister portentousness of the Palace by ironising it, it directs a second, and this time more emphatic, laugh toward itself for imagining that this might be so easy – the difficulty being expressed in the mass of the colossal miniature that bears down on the vehicle and renders it, we suspect, immobile. It is not by chance that I use the phrase ‘drive away the shadow’ when commenting on this artwork, for we need to note that it is precisely the silhouette, or shadow, of the Palace that the image targets, this being emphasised in the graphic difference between the undifferentiated black form and the white car upon which it rests. In the image, the silhouette embodies the historical shadow that the Palace of Culture has cast upon Warsaw, a shadow that is inevitably encountered and that in reality seems so difficult to detach from an edifice that, although characteristically described as ‘an alien body in the heart of the city’, is also Warsaw’s foremost identifier – its troublingly unavoidable and unavoidably troubling symbol.1 As a recent brochure produced to promote the Palace in its new guise as a corporate venue – a document almost entirely devoid of any historical narration of the building (another shadow-detaching gesture) – ambiguously puts it: ‘Wellknown for its controversial presence – now we can hardly imagine the contemporary image of Warsaw without the Palace.’ ‘Everyone knows this address’, it ominously concludes in large lettering.2 To the question posed by the journalist Agata Passent, ‘Is the Palace a symbol of Warsaw, our Eiffel Tower?’, one of her respondents replied, ‘To me it is, against all odds’ – a response completely

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in accord with the implications of the image that we have been discussing.3 The author of the artwork of the shadow on the car is Karolina Breguła, a young Polish artist who produced it for a 2005 exhibition entitled All I Can See is the Palace. Describing her intentions, she writes: ‘The palace has been among us for such a long time, and I would like us to finally accept it and stop accusing it for its inglorious roots . . . I hope that my works present it in new brighter light’.4 But despite, or indeed precisely because of, her willingness to embrace the presence of the Palace, her artwork comes to participate in an historical register of representations that have imagined ungrounding, unhinging, or ripping it away from the soil of Warsaw in the face of its – in the ancient sense – properly colossal obdurateness (kolossi being characterised by their lithic immobility).5 These dreams have taken two principal forms. On one hand there is the total demolition of the Palace, as mooted in post-1989 urban proposals and imagined in films such as the comedy Rozmowy Kontrolowane (1991) in which it collapses – is ‘flushed away’ – when the protagonist pulls down on a lavatory chain in the building. And on the other, the Palace is depicted as flying away, usually as a rocket (something of this motif inheres in Breguła’s image). A cartoon strip by Piotr Młodo˙zeniec, for example, shows a man approaching the building’s silhouette and peeling it up at the corner, before launching it into space into which it recedes, leaving in its place the word ART, while Monika Sosnowska’s Untitled, although unrealised, envisioned a large-scale model of the Palace (a ‘cultural meteorite’) crashing into the roof of the entrance to the 2009 Frieze Art Fair in London.6 Perhaps the historical consummation of this recurrent identification of the Palace with a rocket was the visit of Yuri Gagarin, during which the cosmonaut – the late apotheosis of the exemplary heroes of mobility (and in his case altitude) promoted by Stalinist ideology – stood on the high-level observation platform and asked, ‘How far to the Earth is it from here?’7 Above him as he spoke glittered the sputnik-like globe that was mounted into the mast structure rising from the top of the skyscraper – a globe to which a laudatory verse by Witold Degler was dedicated, declaring it to be a crystal ball, that foretold the fortune and future of Warsaw: On the Palace’s spire, where only wind howls, Warsaw’s fortune tells – a crystal ball.8

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In his introduction to The Art of Forgetting, Adrian Forty makes the astute suggestion that ‘forgetting has . . . been the problem of the twentieth century’, before going on to examine a series of strategies and linked techniques of representation that seem to facilitate it.9 One of these he classifies as ‘separation’, which he exemplifies with late medieval and early renaissance ‘double-decker tombs’. Often termed ‘transi tombs’, these characteristically depict a recumbent figure, doubled and arranged on two levels. On the upper the deceased appears honorifically attired, while on the lower the body is depicted as withered and cadaverous. Forty argues that this split representation is a way of separating off what is to be remembered (above), from what can be cast aside and forgotten (below), and I suppose that all the representations that aim to redeem and purify the Palace by separating off and exorcising its shadow (its ‘bad memory’) would be depictions of a similarly strategic and selective forgetting. However, the complication that immediately arises is that such representations, in their depiction of splitting, monumentalise the act of separation itself, and so – inasmuch as they are to do with forgetting – constantly return to us the thing that is to be set aside in the very process of doing so. If the double structure of the transi tombs can be described as an amnesiac technology, then at the same time we would have to acknowledge that it is a structure whose effects weigh against the possibility of our forgetting that we have forgotten, given that what is to be dispensed with is in fact constantly held in view, and often in a state of degradation that is fascinating. In the case of the Palace of Culture, the sheer accumulated volume of cultural representations dedicated to ‘taming’ it testifies to a desire for forgetfulness rather than to its achievement, each new assault on the shadow serving to reiterate the problem and make it visible once more.

Silhouette Seen in a broader perspective, the assault on the shadow is an assault upon one of the key rhetorical devices that was used in the presentation of socialist-realist architecture, of which the Palace of Culture is a late example, opening two years after the death of its patron – a fact that undoubtedly contributed to its sepulchral quality and identification with Stalin’s shade. ‘I was afraid of the Palace of Culture’, a young theatre director says. ‘As so many of us, I was . . . threatened with it – uncle Stalin’s gift. The fear has remained somewhere under my skin.’10 46

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The emphasis on the shadow is particularly evident in socialist realism’s high-rise forms, such as the seven high buildings in Moscow realised immediately after World War II, which were frequently represented in terms of their silhouettes.11 Warsaw’s Palace of Culture stands in the immediate lineage of these, and we find the same insistence again in the curious episode of the determination of its height, as recounted by the Polish architect J´ozef Sigalin. According to Sigalin, the team of architects – led by the Soviet architect Lev Rudnev – watched as an aeroplane trailing a balloon flew in ascending circles above the site. At 120 metres, Sigalin recalled, the ‘Russian architects (especially Rudnev) [declared] “Enough, this is good for Warsaw’s silhouette!”’ But the Polish contingent, in a classic instance of ideological overidentification, in which fantasies of pre-eminence were bound to subjugation, insisted that the aircraft continued to rise (‘we . . . as Varsovians dreaming of the future greatness of their city, were getting drunk on height’).12 Emerging out of the complex conditions of political clientship and reconstruction in post-Yalta Warsaw, the Palace of Culture was not the first building following the war to be proposed for the location upon which it would be built. An architectural competition for the high-rise development of the site, adjudicated in 1948, awarded prizes to entries that were radically modernist.13 Yet within two years – and in the context of the institutional restructuring attendant on Poland’s ‘six-year plan’ (1950–55) – a different future for the site was being projected, as indicated by the ziggurat-like vision for central Warsaw depicted in an official presentation album of 1950. In this, a Central House of Culture rose in anticipation of the gift that would be assured with the agreement signed between the Soviet and Polish governments on 5 April 1952. This was followed by a letter of gratitude from the Polish president Bolesław Bierut to Stalin, published in the Cominform weekly, which noted that the construction would be a ‘monument to the Stalin epoch’.14 The process of construction of the building was symbolically highly charged. Photographs contemporary with the works show an elevated public viewing gallery erected beside the vast construction site, from which Warsaw’s citizens could gaze at what was taking shape before them. Built with great rapidity using a model Soviet workforce encamped on Warsaw, the realisation of the structure was staged as a prodigious demonstration of Soviet technique, an objective

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Figure 3.2. Leonard Sempoli´nski, Palace of Culture and Science (1956) (Instytut Sztuki PAN; courtesy of Jacek Sempoli´nski).

achievement that seemed, at the same time, miraculous and beyond reality. This in turn underwrote reactions to the Palace as a ‘magical thing’, whether these were phobic or celebratory (such as – in the case of the latter – the ‘fairy-tale Palace’ anticipated in the poem ‘Stone Flower’ by the children’s poet and author Jan Brzechwa).15 If places are shadowed by the schemes that are projected for them, then the initial manifestation of the shadow of the Palace might be seen as the destruction of a rare surviving area of prewar tenement buildings and the displacement of their 3,500 inhabitants, required for the development of the site as demanded by the project.16 Two years after Stalin’s death, the building – whose official name, Pałac Kultury i Nauki Imiena J´ozefa Stalina (Palace of Culture and Science named after Josef Stalin), bound it as a memorial to the recently departed leader – was opened on 22 July 1955, an event co-ordinated with the Fifth World Youth Festival, held in Warsaw. As well as a huge congress hall (complete with a mechanical system for elevating Party officials onto the podium), the complex incorporated a swimming pool and gymnasium, theatres, a cinema, a technical museum, a Palace of Youth, and exhibition areas. An Irish visitor to Warsaw in 1956 characterised the cityscape he found there in this way: ‘Despite ten years of reconstruction there 48

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The Palace of Soviets The Palace was conceived in the few years between the Polish adoption of socialist realism and the withdrawal of official support for the style following the death and denunciation of Stalin, its patron and principal referent. One commentator has written that by 1953 – although many socialist-realist constructions were still underway or imminent – ‘socialist realism was a corpse, an embellished one perhaps, but a corpse nonetheless’.19 In one regard the Palace, which became known as ‘Stalin’s finger’, pointed back very directly to the seven skyscrapers realised in Moscow between 1948 and 1955. The chief architect of the Palace, Lev Rudnev, had led the design of the Moscow University building, the tallest building in Europe when it was constructed, and he was joined by Alexander Khriakov and Vsevolod Nasonov, who had also worked on the project.20 But, more than this, it also pointed, as did the Moscow buildings themselves, to the virtual centre-piece to which the latter were referred, the never-to-be-completed project for the Palace of Soviets, the immense edifice whose design has been described as ‘the prototype for all Stalinist architecture’.21 Staged in the early 1930s, the competition for the Palace of Soviets has been seen as the tipping point at which the cultural radicalism of the Soviet 1920s was submerged under the nascent and still vague programme of what would become known as socialist realism. Initially applied to literature, it was defined in the 1934 Charter of the Writers’ Union as ‘the true and historically authentic depiction of

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were vast areas of ruins everywhere and standing up amongst them, visible from every angle, was the fabulous Palace of Culture and Science’.17 This vision of a skyscraper rising from a field of ruins is powerfully conveyed in a photograph taken the same year by Leonard Sempoli´nski, which shows it as a hallucinatory presence, its singular and pale – or, as was ideologically insisted, ‘radiant’ – form counterposed to the surrounding shattered urban fabric that it transcended. Sempoli´nski’s image, with its parallel tram tracks visually converging at the Palace, makes visible the vanished city, as registered in the ruins, together with the newly instituted organising point to which everything would henceforth be referred. ‘Warsaw has no centre’, one of Passent’s respondents would note 50 years later, ‘but all the distances are measured from the Palace. It’s a convention.’18

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life in its revolutionary development’ and was soon enshrined as the official Soviet aesthetic doctrine.22 In opposition to what it decried as the capitalist cosmopolitanism of the constructivist avant-garde, it demanded an expression that was national in form but socialist in content, an ideology whose tenets have been linked to the formulations of Stalin’s 1913 essay Marxism and the National Question, and whose effects would include the ‘Polish parapet’ that graces the Palace of Culture in Warsaw. Deeply didactic and syncretic, socialist-realist architecture sought to reflect the communist mastery of history in its own absorption and mastery of historical architectural forms and materials. While some scholars have stressed processes of ideological ratification and selection (the ‘left side of history’), Boris Groys has argued that it was rather the drive to absorb all contradictory positions within an enveloping unity – a unity that evaporated the possibility of any legitimate position outside itself – that endowed Stalinist aesthetics and this architecture with its totalitarian character. According to Groys, ‘the critical strategies articulated under Stalinism . . . were all formulated within a comprehensive discourse of dialectical and historical materialism in its Leninist-Stalinist interpretation’, in which dynamic ‘living’ antagonism superseded the moribund and formal bourgeois logic of non-contradiction. He continues: ‘The doctrine of the unity and struggle of opposites constitutes the underlying motif and entire inner mystery of Stalinist totalitarianism.’23 Although the four-stage competition for the Palace of Soviets ran between 1931 and 1933, the idea for the project extended back to Sergei Kirov’s proposal for a House of the USSR to be built in central Moscow, made at the first All-Union Congress of Soviets, and the subsequent Palace of Labour competition held the following year.24 Launched in 1931, during the first five-year plan, the competition was administered by a specially formed body, the Palace Construction Council, chaired by Viacheslav Molotov. Internationally publicised – with special commissions for entries extended to leading foreign architects such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Erich Mendelsohn – the open competition attracted 160 submissions, including ten from American architects.25 Although another site was initially envisioned, a month before the public announcement of the competition the Construction Council identified the vast Tsarist Cathedral of Christ the Saviour – which was subsequently dynamited – as the location of the new structure. Sona Stephan Hoisington has argued that the logic

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of the destruction, substitution and supersession of this building, whose outline had previously dominated Moscow, decisively orientated the project in a new monumental direction, as reflected in the conditions of the new brief issued to competitors in the closed competition.26 The project that emerged as winner – or at least as representing a ‘working basis’ for further development – from the final, closed stage, was by the Italian-trained Boris Iofan, whose entry, by his own account, referred to the Monument to Victor Emmanuel II in Rome and, beyond that, to the Great Altar of Zeus at Pergamon.27 A series of vertically articulated drums, rising from an orthogonal, colonnaded base reached by monumental steps, the project was subsequently developed in collaboration with – or, Hoisington suggests, by – the Leningrad architects Shchuko and Gel’freikh, who had themselves been final-stage competitors. In the approved project, the drums had become incrementally extended to form a kind of columnar pedestal surmounted by a titanic colossus of Lenin – arm extended and pointing forward and upward – whose inclusion was said to have been at the suggestion of Stalin himself. In Vladimir Paperny’s structural analysis of transformations in Soviet architecture from the 1920s to the 1950s, he distinguishes between what he terms Culture One and Culture Two, with the Palace of Soviets standing as the exemplary – and because of this, ‘impossible’ – manifestation of the latter. Although Paperny suggests that an oscillation between these two cultural tendencies can be discerned throughout Russian history, his argument is emphatically focused on the immediate post-revolutionary to the immediate post-war period. In Paperny’s account, the transition to Culture Two – which might be read in the progress of the Palace of Soviets competition itself – involved an increased emphasis on, and valorisation of, the ‘centre’, which opposed the despised cosmopolitanism, ‘foreignness’, and horizontality of the constructivist avant-garde of Culture One.28 To this increasing centralisation corresponded a new assertion of boundaries, emblematised by those characteristic heroes of socialist-realist sculpture, border guards. While Culture One wanted to erase the past and establish itself as a new beginning, for Culture Two, ‘the present turned out not to be the first moment in history, but rather the last’, which required an encompassing, incorporative ideology that demanded that the totality of history be absorbed and displayed; as a 1940 booklet declared of the Palace of Soviets: ‘All of the many centuries of the culture of human art

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Figure 3.3. The Palace of Soviets as it appeared in the September 1939 issue of the US magazine Mechanix Illustrated (collection of the author).

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will enter into this people’s building.’29 At the same time, the orientation to the future became a kind of postponement, which took the form of an ecstatic endless striving, this commuting the future into eternity and rendering progress in the present toward it equivalent to immobility. Against the horizontality of Culture One, Culture Two extolled verticalisation, the joyful ascent hymned in the popular song ‘Ever Higher’, made manifest in (Soviet, as opposed to capitalist) highrise construction, and epitomised by the approved project for the Palace of Soviets as the ‘highest building on earth’.30 At the same time, Paperny notes, the delegates’ resolution at the Seventeenth Party Congress that ‘No project shall be fully accepted for construction’ registered the inevitable gap that now opened between the ideal edifice – the perfect construction that was aimed for – and even the most accomplished of designs, which inevitably fell short.31 Thus, he suggests, the failure to realise the Palace of Soviets was a kind of structural necessity: ‘The primary construction of the primary city should possess a level of perfection too high to be embodied in a real building. If ordinary Moscow buildings are built in Culture Two, then the primary building must remain an unrealized ideal, marking the transition to another level.’32 According to Paperny, the iconographic key to the Palace of Soviets was made clear in an analogous construction composed of living human bodies supporting a statue of Lenin that was paraded in Red Square on 24 July 1938 (a similar ‘living edifice’, the ‘Pyramid of Peace’, was performed at the Festival of Youth in Warsaw, which coincided with the opening of the Palace of Culture in 1955). If the architecture of the Palace of Soviets was the image of the masses (the vertical pilasters that formed the ‘fluting’ of the columnar base) and their deity Lenin, then although in the seven Moscow high buildings constructed after the war, ringing the empty site of the Palace of Soviets, figuration was subdued, its after-image remained through the presence of the buildings’ spires – which were apparently insisted on by Stalin.33 The high buildings, as representatives and delegates of the Palace of Soviets, indexically ‘pointed’ to it, while the abstraction of figure into spire endowed the latter with metonymic implication. Furthermore, the sense of Paperny’s formulation is that even though ‘the figure of Lenin [was] symbolically . . . represented with spires’ in these surrogates of the Palace, as apexes they, at the same time, pointed

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to and personified the ultimate apex of Culture Two’s hierarchy, Stalin himself. Although merely the ‘pupil’ of the departed Lenin, Stalin’s presence still represented and maintained the link to the ideal, much as the secondary high buildings related to the ‘invisible’ perfection of the never-to-be-completed Palace of Soviets.34

Figure/Finger Descriptions of the work of the Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid have characterised it as ‘perverted simulation’ and ‘post-Socialist Realism’.35 In the early 1980s they painted a striking variation on the origin-of-painting theme, entitled The Origin of Socialist Realism. In the story, as recounted in his Natural History, Pliny tells of a maiden who inscribes the profile of a young man whom she loves on a wall by tracing the outline of his shadow, cast by a lamp. In Komar and Melamid’s reworking of the scene, a left-handed muse of painting leans across the seated figure of her ‘lover’ Stalin, in order to record his profile on a pedestal base. Now Stalin’s ‘fatherly’/phallic pipe substitutes for the young man’s sword, its implication reinforced by the art-historical/Magrittean understanding of the pipe as a sign of something other than what it appears to be. Komar and Melamid’s image suggests that the presence of the leader – as it is transmitted through the agency of the shadow – is the foundational moment of socialist realism (hence the pedestal or base), but also that it is constantly reiterated in its various manifestations. As the art historian Victor Stoichita writes, ‘They uncover the “primitive” side of the Socialist Realist programme and show that the person who was behind it is the man portrayed, and suggest that the programme only ever generated one “shadow”: that of Stalin himself.’36 When Robin Evans considered Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s rendition of the same theme, he pointed out that the architect chose to depict it in a natural setting: that is, logically prior to architecture, which is dependent on the act of delineation inaugurated in the myth.37 Komar and Melamid’s setting of the event in a socialist-realist interior – which is itself a transposition from the quasi-natural, if not non-architectural, setting of their model (namely Eduard Daege’s The Invention of Painting [1832]) – stresses the reiterative character of socialist realism. For not only is Stalin’s shadow, as the painting insists, the origin of socialist realism; but it is also 54

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FALLING UPON WARSAW: THE SHADOW OF STALIN’S PALACE OF CULTURE Figure 3.4. Komar & Melamid, The Origin of Socialist Realism (1982–83), oil on canvas, 72 × 48 inches. Photo: D. James Dee (courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York).

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constantly re-inscribed within it, as the already-existing architectural setting indicates. And insofar as the left-handedness of the muse refers to coercion, as Stoichita suggests it may, we might even say it is autoinscribed, like a fingerprint. Fingers, like pipes, are small things, but it is through reference to small things that the gargantuan is typically demonstrated. When A.N. Prokof’ev strove to illustrate the scale of the Palace of Soviets in his 1939 English-language booklet, he certainly referred to other great structures, but more pertinent was his description of the huge statue of Lenin: ‘a colossus as high as a house of twenty-five stories, the index finger of the outstretched hand measuring 20 feet’.38 It seems no accident that it is the index finger that is referred to here, for it is this finger that indicates the joyous future, that points upward and forward, its vast size hinting at the extent of the vision to which it directs us. At the same time, the index finger with its print is also an authenticator of identity, a thing that points back to the identity of the leader even as it gestures forward to the vision he discerns. In another work by Komar and Melamid, titled The Minotaur as a Participant at the Yalta Conference (1984–85), we find a meditation on Stalin’s finger, which well conveys the inter-relationship between these themes. A mixedmedia work on a series of square panels, the composition is dominated by the figure of Stalin with his arm raised and index finger pointing upwards (capped with a red, phallic top), the gesture itself reciting and pointing toward that of Lenin in his deified and official form. Above this, and at large scale, the finger’s print – its ‘signature’ and identifying mark – appears as the archaic and labyrinthine domain of the Minotaur. If, following Paperny, we accept that the substitution of the (repeatable) spire for the singular colossus of Lenin in the post-war high buildings involved a kind of occultation of the figure, then it also made possible a new metonymic reading that allowed the postwar architecture to ‘exceed’ – through its very secondariness – the original to which it referred. Strikingly, as we have already noted, the Palace of Culture in Warsaw became known as ‘Stalin’s finger’, no doubt in part because of the similarity between the Polish words for palace and finger (pałac/palec). More generally, we might wonder if the strange sense of immanence that these socialist-realist high buildings continue to convey is not in some way related to the complex indexical character of the finger, which as it points ‘outward’ towards

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some other object (the future, Lenin, Moscow, etc.), simultaneously points ‘inward’ through its metonymic embodiment of the identity, presence and rule of the leader. As David Crowley, writing on ‘Stalin’s finger’ in his book Warsaw, observes: ‘Rather than affectionately reduce the building to a Lilliputian scale, this epithet seemed to suggest Stalin’s oppressive and inescapable influence at the very heart of the cityscape.’39 Something else that Stalin’s finger points us to, albeit less directly, is the particular importance and rhetorical value of the model in socialist-realist representation. Famously, a substantial model had been produced of the Palace of Soviets, and a painting made that showed its exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, surrounded by Party leaders turned toward it. The picturing of the leader beside the model allowed a relationship to be drawn between his body and the architecture, and an approximation made between the two. Exemplary in this regard is a painting by the Romanian artist Stefan Sz¨onyi (1952), which depicts an interior at the Kremlin.40 To the left, on a table, is a model of one of the high buildings beside which, in the centre of the picture, Stalin stands. To the right is a large window through which he gazes toward the building that the model anticipates, already rising from the city outside. Of these three figures, the two of the model and its realisation are, on the picture plane, commensurable in size, the perspectival diminishment of the distant building bringing it into relation with the model on the table, such that the transition between the two is mediated by and through the presence of the leader’s body. Perhaps then, to think back to the image by Karolina Breguła with which we began, the difficulty of ‘civilising’ the Palace of Culture by miniaturising it – a difficulty of which we read that image as a symptom – is because the miniature is already present and active ‘on the side of the shadow’, in the relation between exemplary high-rise buildings and the socialist-realist imaginary. It is there in the story of Rudnev, Sigalin and their associates estimating the height of the Palace of Culture from across the Warsaw cityscape, just as it is reflected in Agata Passent’s allusion to the Palace of Culture as an ‘ugly toy’.41 And although the metonymic/metaphoric relation with the body of the leader gives the coupling of the miniature and the gigantic a very specific value and charge in socialist realism, something of the effect is always available where structures stand free of the city fabric around and can be viewed from a distance – to which

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Figure 3.5. ‘Stalin’s shadow over Warsaw’ (http//:www.socland.pl [Accessed 4 December 2009]).

millions of photographs of the Eiffel Tower held in tourists’ hands attest.

Executing the Shadow On the website of the Socland foundation, established by the film director Andrzej Wajda, the architect Czesław Bielecki, and others, there is a grey photograph taken from the observation level at the top of the Palace of Culture, which shows its shadow falling over the parade-ground (turned car-park) below, and hence pointing east.42 It is in a way a familiar view – one that, for instance, fascinated the German press photographer Hans-Joachim Orth, active in Warsaw in the 1970s, whose sequential images tracked the shadow as it moved over the square below. On the Socland website, however, the full phobic implications of the socialist-realist shadow are clear, and are driven home by the image’s caption, which declares it to be ‘Stalin’s shadow over Warsaw’. Those behind the Socland foundation are of an older generation than Karolina Breguła’s – that of Solidarity: their historical and cultural experience is different, their animus is raw, and they want to come to terms with the Palace in a different way. The particular assault they make on the shadow is no joke, and here there is no attempt to laugh it away. 58

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Socland’s proposal is that a Museum of Communism be established at the Palace of Culture, and their website illustrates an architectural project developed for this. Occupying what is described as ‘the labyrinth of the existing foundations’ of the Palace, it also extends out below the parade-ground into the area covered by the shadow on the photograph I have just discussed. Notably, the project’s plan at street level is drawn without shadows, save for that of a headless figure who lies flat, the upper part of the torso and (again) raised arm passing above an area of glazing that gives light to a pit, into which the head has fallen or been cast. It is as if the shadow of the Palace has been gathered into the form of a figure; or, more specifically, as if the shadow has become concretised into a totemic image of Stalin (the Minotaur and his fingerprint/labyrinth, to gesture back to Komar and Melamid), which is then ‘executed’. If, in their ‘origin’ painting, Komar and Melamid depict the mythic beginnings of socialist realism, then Socland wants – through the architectural proposal it makes – to depict its end, which turns out to be a kind of reversal of the origin scene (in that the shadow of the building becomes the figure). What is more, it is a proposal that again illustrates the kind of perverse complication we have come to expect of attempts to banish the shadow of the Palace, for we find that we are obliged, in order to perform the

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Figure 3.6. Ground level of museum with headless statue/shadow (http//:www.socland.pl [Accessed 4 December 2009]).

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rite of execution/exorcism, to ourselves construct the huge statue of Stalin that was intended to stand in front of the Palace, but which was never realised. (2009)

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4

Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten Micromegas We are no longer so excited as formerly by the account of trips on the surface. . . . The mind is stretched, uncomfortably sometimes, but with a new fascination, to speed and profundity, to the thought of worlds that lie a million light-years away from us, to the worlds that recede in evolutionary time beneath the lens, to the thought even that they merge or that by some extraordinary trick of relativity the smaller may contain the large. There is an affinity between the telescope and the microscope, between the discovery of stellar space and the discovery of the atom.1

Thus wrote the English artist and critic William Gaunt in his introduction to W. Watson-Baker’s World Beneath the Microscope, published in 1935 by The Studio as the second volume in a projected book series entitled ‘The New Vision’.2 Gaunt’s announcement of cultural boredom with the horizontal, and the corresponding reorientation of attention onto the vertical, invoked the notion that the view from above – together with its associated technologies, such as the telescope and the microscope – formed a peculiarly modern visual form. His richly articulated introduction to Watson-Baker’s book of microphotography certainly looked back to earlier arguments regarding 61

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Figure 4.1. W. Heath, A woman dropping her tea-cup in horror upon discovering the monstrous contents of a magnified drop of Thames water; revealing the impurity of London drinking water (1828), coloured etching (courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London).

elevated vision, but at the same time it presciently anticipated future expressions of the new adventure on the vertical, perhaps the most striking of which would be Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten (1977). Gaunt’s text is a useful starting point, however, for it alerts us to the kinds of imagined relation with things that were fostered by technologies of seeing from above. The diminishment of enormity through the elevation of vision (as from, for example, an aircraft) or the magnification of the miniscule through the microscope, permitted things of radically different scales to enter into new kinds of imaginative transaction with one another, reactivating ideas of micro-macro correspondence, albeit now on new terms. Here I want to emphasise one of these, or rather a complex that develops around one: that is, the notion that what is glimpsed through the microscope is another ‘world’, an idea reinforced by the planetary associations of the circular frame of the instrument’s scopic field. This is an allusion that has long attended our experience of the microscope, and it is hinted at in the ambiguous title of Watson-Baker’s book (is it this world, or another, that we see when we look through the eye-piece?). In his Thoughts on 62

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Unprecedented Photography Watson-Baker’s World Beneath the Microscope was the second of the two publications that inaugurated The Studio’s series in 1935, the other being Le Corbusier’s Aircraft. Thus at the outset was the relation between the aerial and the microscopic established. The New Vision, the publishing project implied, was intimately connected with the transformation in looking wrought by these technologies of seeing from above. The graphic design that accompanied and served as a brand-image for the series was eloquent: a circular motif with a meridian line that carried implications both of viewing through an instrument and of looking at a globe – the latter perhaps indicating the different world that the new way of seeing allowed to be discerned. The series title referred, of course, to L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy’s book, Von Material zu Architektur (1929), which was based on his Bauhaus lectures at Weimar and Dessau between 1923 and 1928, and which had first appeared in English in 1930 as The New Vision: From Material to Architecture. To understand the particular charge carried not only by the aerial view itself, but also by its pairing with the microscope, it is helpful to look back not just to this book, but also to the formulations in Moholy-Nagy’s earlier Malerei Fotografie Film (Painting

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Animalcules of 1846, Gideon Mantell had written: ‘the air, the earth, and the waters teem with numberless myriads of creatures, which are as unknown and as unapproachable to the great mass of mankind, as are the inhabitants of another planet’, while William Heath’s famous 1820s satirical engraving, ‘Monster Soup’, playing on the then-popular solar microscope shows, characterised a magnified drop of London tap water as a frightful microcosm populated with bizarre creatures arrayed within the circular planet-like frame, in a manner reminiscent of earlier emblematic depictions of star constellations.3 At the same time, this idea of the microscope as opening onto another world stimulates dreams of travel, exploration, and perhaps even conquest of the strange alien landscape, whether the voyager might be imagined as a submariner plunging into the microscopic depths or a planetary explorer – or perhaps even both simultaneously.4 And this, in turn, provokes fantasies of miniaturisation, to which we shall shortly return.

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Photography Film [1925]), published as the Bauhaus book number 8. In this, Moholy-Nagy, who had himself begun to experiment with high camera positions in 1925, reflected on so-called ‘faulty’ photographs, seemingly accidental and ill-composed affairs characterised by oblique angles, low vantage-points, and – crucially – the view from above.5 These he enthusiastically embraced, because they possessed, he argued, an ability to short-circuit the ameliorating effects of human perception. Steep angles of vision produce visual distortion, but, according to Moholy-Nagy, where human perception remains unmediated by the technical apparatus, pure optical experience is modified by intellectual process, and this results in what he described as a ‘conceptual image’. The virtue of faulty photography is that, against this, it presents a kind of vision-in-the-raw in which the objectivising power of the camera can be recognised, and it is because of this that convention rejects such photographs. The implication of the argument is that it is only when the camera gets high – or low – that it becomes possible to see photography ‘in itself’ for the first time. Thus the location up above – and Moholy-Nagy’s corpus does seem to emphasise the high downward-pointed camera rather than the low upward-pointed one – is not just a position, but is photography’s point of actualisation and visibility, for as the apparatus descends to adopt more traditional points of view, so does it come within the ambit of historical forms of art and thus is its specific agency occluded by and entrapped within webs of habit and association.6 The privilege that Moholy-Nagy extended to the view from above in Painting Photography Film, is equally evident in The New Vision: as he declares toward the end of the volume, ‘the most essential for us is the airplane view, the complete space experience’.7 But what is newly evident in this book, and deserves comment, is the particular pairing of, and interaction between, the two registers of seeing from above that will come to structure The Studio’s publishing project. On one hand we have the ‘microphotograph’ that, Moholy-Nagy writes, ‘disclose[s] a new world’, and, on the other, what he describes as the ‘macrophotograph’, the airplane view that compresses space just as the microphotograph expands it.8 Structurally, these two then act to bracket normative vision in much the same way as the ‘view from above’/‘view from below’ did in the earlier book, the difference being that a new emphasis has fallen upon space or scale rather than upon the positional per se.

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Figure 4.2. ‘Texture of the skin, in a man 130 years old, in Minnesota’, c from L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision (1932), fig. 17, p. 35 ( Hattula Moholy-Nagy/DACS 2014).

We should also note in passing that time, as well as space, enters into Moholy-Nagy’s argument. In a fascinating gesture he at one point appends a caption to a photographic portrait of what we are told is a 130-year-old man, saying that it is in effect ‘an airplane view of time’. Why would he suggest this? Because, Moholy-Nagy responds, the image is ‘time-compressing’, insofar as it collapses a series of historical alterations onto a surface, thereby making them visible.9 This is suggestive, I think, not least because we are reminded of the aerial turn in archaeology that blossomed in the decade following World War I, and that led to such early publications as O.G.S. Crawford’s 1928 Wessex From the Air (coincidentally the same year that MoholyNagy’s celebrated photograph looking down from the Berlin Radio Tower was taken), recently studied by Kitty Hauser.10 The point here is that aviation led to great discoveries of hitherto unrecognised ancient sites, settlements and constructions, whose outlines in dry weather and low angles of light became apparent, developing on the landscape almost like a photographic image – a relation that Hauser herself notes.11 If this is a compression of diachronic depth into surface 65

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synchrony, then it is akin to the way that Moholy-Nagy invites us to see this image, raising the possibility of considering the portrait as a kind of aerial archaeology.

Seeing from Above Aircraft, the first book in The Studio’s series, was written at the invitation of the publisher, and is the only volume by Le Corbusier to have originally appeared in English.12 Part poem to the aeroplane, part manifesto, part visionary tract, and part self-promotional document, the volume was presented under the stern epigram, ‘L’avion accuse . . . ’, the line of punctuation marks – present in the original – ominously gesturing toward the consequences of the indictment pronounced by the aircraft. In his preface, Le Corbusier writes: ‘to-day it is a question of the airplane eye, of the mind with which the Bird’s Eye View has endowed us; of that eye which now looks with alarm at the places where we live, the cities where it is our lot to be. And the spectacle is frightening, overwhelming.’13 In Le Corbusier’s prose the aeroplane’s reorientation of the Albertian visual pyramid onto the vertical is mapped onto its status as world-historical exemplar of technological development: ‘At the apex of the immense pyramid of mechanical progress it opens the NEW AGE.’14 The very dispassion of the view from the aircraft, its cold machinic relentlessness and clarity – its cruelty, even – uniquely and powerfully reveals the cruelty of the city itself: ‘The airplane . . . scrutinizes, acts quickly, sees quickly, does not get tired, and more, it gets to the heart of the cruel reality – with its eagle eye it penetrates the misery of towns.’15 Thus the epistemic vantage point that it offers, that of – in Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery’s phrase – a savant glacial, transforms the urbanist into pathologist.16 As in a view through a microscope, the gaze of the urbanist becomes akin to that of a bacteriologist – newly penetrative and diagnostic: ‘The airplane indicts the city. The city is ruthless to man. Cities are old, decayed, frightening, diseased. They are finished. Pre-machine civilization is finished.’17 Yet at the same time this new epistemic position is one that is chastened and delimited. Established as it is on the dislocation and loss of reference that comes with detachment from the ground, which is also a departure from vision’s anthropomorphic conditioning, the aerial view results in a radical expansion and relativisation of prior frames of reference that in turn reveals the cosmos’s indifference to

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humankind with a new forcefulness. Le Corbusier writes, ‘When the eye is five feet or so above the ground, flowers and trees have dimension: a measure relative to human activity, proportion. In the air, from above? It is a wilderness, indifferent to our thousand year old ideas, a fatality of cosmic elements and events.’18 For Le Corbusier, the aerial view does not arouse pleasure, but instead a ‘mournful meditation’ in which ‘everything escapes me’.19 Yet the experience is necessary and galvanising, and so the book draws to its frankly messianic finale, for the eyes that return to earth, having seen from above, have been transformed. The book’s closing cry is that we need a genius: ‘A man! The flock needs a shepherd.’20 Here Le Corbusier, playing Christ to his own St. John, exchanges baptismal water for the thin air of high altitude. The final image in the book is of a parachutist, surely the emblematic embodiment of a new subjectivity, born out of the aerial and descending to earth to lead the masses, the agent of the New Vision founded in ‘seeing from above’. If the vision of a transformed or other world could be unfolded from the aerial view, so too – as the title of the companion volume to Aircraft implies – could it be discerned by the eye that looked down through the microscope lens. William Gaunt’s introduction to World Beneath the Microscope, with which we began, bemoans the fact that Dante had not benefited from the experience of seeing through the microscope when writing the Inferno, before going on to argue that the microphotograph (he is clear that this book is really a photography book) may revive interest in this crowded, gaudily-patterned universe that lies so close to us but just outside our vision. There are rocks of crystal more forlorn and desolate than the strange landscape background of the Monna Lisa [sic]; twirling hordes of monsters voracious and ferocious; spreading tree-like structures that in actuality are a grain of invisible dust; exquisite plumes, delicate columns; robot creatures with quasi-mechanical joints; organisms, like engines just beginning to live; fanciful streamers and bubbles of beauty. In all this there is something abstract, something of the essential nature of visual things.21

This is the world – these are the worlds – that the microphotographer explores, sending back his images like postcards or mementos of his journeys (unsurprisingly, Gaunt refers to Gulliver, a voyager through transformations of scale). Gaunt is well aware of the Victorian heyday 67

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Figure 4.3. The parachutist featured in Le Corbusier’s Aircraft (1935), c FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, fig. 124 (last image of the book) ( London 2014).

of the microscope’s popularity, but interestingly suggests that now, in 1935, the time is ripe for its reappearance. In The New Vision, MoholyNagy had characterised microscopic imagery as modernity’s substitute for pre-modern modes of visual contemplation, and Gaunt makes a 68

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Powers of Ten One of the most remarkable and significant adventures on the vertical however, would come over 30 years later, with the film Powers of Ten, first made as a trial version in 1968, and then remade and released in 1977 in the familiar form that has been so extensively disseminated in both film and printed formats. Produced by the Eames Office, the Los Angeles-based design firm founded by the husband-and-wife design team, the 1977 version was one of the couple’s final films, and has been described as their most widely viewed.25 In the postwar era of US corporate expansion and ascendancy, the Eameses established relationships with some of the key companies of the time. The development of their practice across the period parallels the larger transformation from a modern economy, based on the production of material objects, to a post-modern or informational economy, based on the production of signs. From their early designs for office and consumer objects – such as their famous chairs – they moved increasingly into exhibition and media productions for clients such as IBM, an early commission being The Information Machine, a film produced for the 1958 Brussels World Fair. While work for corporate clients destined for the international exhibitions of the Cold War period was inevitably situated in an arena of national representation and geopolitical contest, the Eameses were at the same time receiving major commissions explicitly driven by such imperatives. Most notable of these was the film installation Glimpses of the USA, produced the year after the Brussels exposition for the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, co-ordinated by the United States Information Agency (USIA). This event has been described as ‘the first cultural exchange between the two countries

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related argument to account for the fascination of the minute: under the conditions of contemporary technological society, he writes, thought must constantly ‘juggle large and small’, acceleration and contraction, and the urge to elaborate minutiae emerges as a ‘complement of’ (or perhaps even compensation for) this.22 Thus he refers to the work of Marcel Proust, in which – in a phrase reminiscent of Victorian speculation on the materiality of the soul, itself inspired by the microscope23 – ‘the protoplasm of the intellect with its multiform hidden combinations is exposed to view on a mental slide. This is a characteristic adventure of modern times.’24

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since the Bolshevik Revolution’, and was the site of the infamous ‘kitchen debate’ between Richard Nixon (then vice-president) and Nikita Krushchev, itself an object lesson in the highly symbolic role that technological consumer products played in the period.26 The Eameses presentation used simultaneous projection onto seven large screens that hung in the main exhibition pavilion, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. Below these, acting as a kind of proxy for the nation itself, was an IBM computer that answered questions about the USA. The USIA apparently ‘accepted the multiple-screen solution because . . . it was the “one really effective way to establish credibility for a statement that the products on view were widely purchased by the American people”’ – that is, to convince visitors that the items in the exhibition were not produced only for it, but actually circulated through American society.27 The origins of IBM, for whom the 1977 version of Powers of Ten was made, lay in the Computing, Tabulating and Recording Company, an organisation that had itself been formed from the merger of three existing corporations in 1911. Operating after 1924 as International Business Machines, the company rapidly expanded overseas, establishing a world-wide network of agencies whose reach was indicated in the speeches of Thomas Watson Snr., its patriarchal president, by the motto ‘International Business Machines girdles the globe’.28 Closely involved with munitions manufacturing during World War II, the postwar rise of the company was deeply dependent on – as Rex Malik reports – the context of ‘the Cold War and the seeming defence needs of America, particularly in the intelligence, cryptoanalysis, and aviation sectors. By 1949 IBM was receiving visits from within the American defense establishment’.29 Although relatively late entering the computer business, IBM achieved extraordinary dominance: it has been noted that, through the 1960s, the market share over which its rivals competed never rose above a quarter of the total available. Writing in the early 1970s, Malik could claim that ‘IBM is not just a major international company in the area of computing, it is the international environment’ – the emblematic company of what the political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski celebrated as the US-dominated ‘technetronic era’.30 Powers of Ten was originally inspired by a 1957 book by the Dutch educator Kees Boeke, titled Cosmic View. By 1963, the Eameses were experimenting with tracking shots that gave the effect of a camera

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pulling away with accelerating motion from an object, and in 1968, used these in a film called A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Shot in black and white, it was followed by an extended colour version – the one known as Powers of Ten – made in 1977. The basic set-up of the film is well-known. It opens with a picnic scene in a park in Chicago. Beginning with a ground level view, the camera then switches to a vertical, aerial position from which it looks down, the frame centred – as we later find out – on an atom in the man’s hand. At this point the narrator tells us that we are one metre away and looking at a square one metre by one metre. Now the camera pulls away vertically and begins to accelerate, so that every ten seconds our distance from the initial scene is ten times greater. The camera continues its departure until just after 1024 metres (100 million light years), when it gradually slows and begins its descent, collapsing beyond its original position and now decelerating through the ever-smaller dimensions of cells, molecules, the atom, and beyond. While Powers of Ten seems more about magnification and resolution than mobility, commentaries have tended to dwell on the visceral (that word is often used) sense of travel it provokes. This is especially pronounced in the Rough Sketch, in which the left-hand margin of the screen is occupied by twin chronometers – like dials on a dashboard – one counting out the time at origin and the other the ‘traveller’s time’, the latter slowing in relation to the former as the voyager increases velocity. The rocket-like set-up is further emphasised by the fact that in this version we are launched from Florida, the emblematic point of departure for the Apollo missions. Philip Morrison, who consulted on the 1977 version and narrated the script, compared the feeling the film engendered to being like that of ‘a driver in a space ship’, while Paul Schrader wrote of, ‘the time-space traveller’ of the Rough Sketch in his 1970 essay for Film Quarterly, ‘Poetry of Ideas’.31 What is particularly notable is the uncanny feeling of symmetry that the film conveys, with the journey outward into space (and surely it is not by chance that we go in this direction first) then being mirrored as we pass into – and voyage through – the microscopic scales of inner space, which are revealed to be so visually consonant with their counterparts. And this in turn endows the film with a strange circularity, almost as if the vertical line along which we have passed had been bent, so that its poles meet with one another.

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Figure 4.4. The picnic from Powers of Ten (1977). Image from the book version by Philip and Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (1982) (courtesy of the Eames Office).

From Outer to Inner Space The mise-en-sc`ene of the picnic with which Powers of Ten begins is of importance, for it presents us with an image that we might locate in a very specific thematic tradition. Certainly the care with which the picnic tableau was constructed is well attested. When we look down, what do we see? The recumbent figure of the man, his hand – which 72

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we will shortly plunge into – resting across his chest, some plates, some fruit, a book and some magazines. Then we recognise what appears to be an oddly oversized clock (perhaps it is the cover of another book), sliding out from below the volume that sits upon it. Once we notice this, clock-faces begin to proliferate: the wristwatch that now seems intentionally turned toward us, and then the plates, with the knives playing the role of chronometer needles, which seem to embody in surreal form the vanished dials from the Rough Sketch. The reading matter also is suggestive. At the top of the frame, to the left of the man’s head, are positioned issues of Scientific American and Science, which – together with the sleeping figure – indicate that we might connect this image to others in which sleeping men are slumped over documents of the work of reason, most obviously The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, the 43rd plate of Goya’s Los Caprichos. Turning to the book on which the man’s left hand rests, we find that it is not, as we might expect, Kees Boeke’s Cosmic View, but rather The Voices of Time, a 1966 collection of essays edited by the HungarianAmerican physicist and social scientist Julius Thomas Fraser. And here we perhaps detect an echo of a book that was published in the USA four years earlier, namely J.G. Ballard’s The Voices of Time and Other Stories.32 The title story in Ballard’s collection tells of a scientist (curiously named Powers) who is slowly going to sleep, victim of a ‘narcoma syndrome’ to which increasing numbers are succumbing. There is not space to describe the story in detail here, or – in Powers’s words – the ‘monstrous surrealist’ future it envisages, save to say that it concludes with the scientist lying in the centre of a mandala that he has obsessively constructed, perhaps indeed a mandala like the one reproduced on the cover of Fraser’s book, upon which the hand of our sleeping picknicker rests. As Powers falls asleep, his consciousness dissolves into the universe’s great stream of radiation. ‘Above him he could hear the stars, a million cosmic voices . . . Like jostling radio beacons. . . . To Powers the sky seemed an endless babel, the time-song of a thousand galaxies overlaying each other in his mind.’33 Notably, when the story was published in Britain in 1963, it appeared in a collection entitled The 4-Dimensional Nightmare. So what might this mean for the way we read Powers of Ten? Beyond its ostensibly educational function, it seems to me that the film does two somewhat contrasting things. Firstly, insofar as it is

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a dream sequence – a monstrous sleep of reason or perhaps even a ‘4-dimensional nightmare’ – it pictures a kind of vertiginous, abyssal collapse of the everyday reality with which the film begins. Listen, for example, to Alan Lightman’s characterisation of the film: We feel dizzy and overwhelmed. Suddenly the camera begins compressing, shrinking in powers of ten: we fly through galaxies, solar systems, planets, are back in our park, back to the familiar and the comfortable. We want to stop here and recuperate in the warm sun, but the camera won’t let us, it keeps galloping to smaller and smaller scales: to microscopic tissues, molecules, atoms, the interior of atoms, and we see the unknown grinning at us from this side as well. The unknown has surrounded us. The world of the everyday seems now like an illusion.34

On the other hand, when seen in the Cold War corporate and national context in which it was conceived and developed, Powers of Ten – with its visual rhetoric of voyaging through scales, across outer and inner space, aimed ultimately at the core of the atom – might also be read in terms of the domination and control of the domains that it pictures. If – at least at the time of the Rough Sketch – we are in the midst of the ‘space race’, then the films seem to picture its expansion into the inner space of the body and the microscopic. Here we can appreciate why it was important that we should first go outward. Moving away from the earth prepares the analogy and sets up the structural relation between the two domains: for only when we have first been in outer space, with all its connotations, are we then predisposed to understand the microscopic, or the interior of the body, as an inner space. Likewise, through the sequential staging of ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ in the films, we develop the sense of a narrative unfolding, a plot-like effect that emerges from the structural relation that organises them.35 The abilities to represent and to manipulate the microscopic go hand in hand, and the drive to extend sovereignty over small things has a long history. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), for example, is dedicated to the king whose empire extends (and is extended by this book of minutiae) over ‘invisible things’, the best of which are the minds of men.36 It is surely important that the commissioning background for so much of the Eameses’ work involved such a geopolitically symbolic corporation as IBM, whose manufacturing was focused on electronic computational 74

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and informational devices that were predicated upon an ability to intervene in and command the microscopic and even subatomic world that the films expounded. In this regard, it is useful to consider Powers of Ten alongside a Hollywood science-fiction movie that was made in 1966, two years before the Rough Sketch was filmed. This production, Fantastic Voyage, is an extremely explicit example of the collapse of the broader geopolitical antagonisms of the period into the scale of the microscopic, the contest for whose domination is the fulcrum upon which the plot turns.37 The story takes place against the background of research into miniaturisation technologies, with the USA and the ‘other side’ simultaneously developing competing programmes. When a scientist working for the rival programme defects, he is attacked, with the result that a blood clot forms in his brain. In order to operate on it, a nuclear submarine-cum-spacecraft (appropriately called the Proteus) is shrunk, together with its crew, which includes an eminent brain surgeon, the American agent who aided the defector, and – it turns out – a spy, who, unfortunately for him, happens to suffer from claustrophobia. In a kind of premonition of nanotechnology, the submarine and its crew are injected into the bloodstream of the comatose scientist, their mission being to navigate to the brain and destroy the blood clot with a laser.38 On the journey, the crew has to survive many perils, including their vessel’s dwindling oxygen supply, which they refill by connecting to the patient’s lungs. They also have to resist attacks by the body’s immune system, whose antibodies in this context appear as ‘alien beings’, and, of course, the inevitable assault of that other ‘alien’, the spy in their midst. Thus, the interior of the body comes to be a kind of inner space in which a narrative of contest and conquest – and, in a sense, a battle for political subjectivity – is played out (the mission being in effect to ‘liberate’ the defector, to restore his consciousness by dissolving a blockage in his brain). At one point, soon after entering the patient’s bloodstream, the brain surgeon, Dr Peter Duval, declares: ‘The medieval philosophers were right. Man is at the center of the universe. We stand in the middle of infinity between outer and inner space, and there’s no limit to either.’ This statement, however contradictory it might be, is surely as apt a description of the basic visual structure of Powers of Ten, with its analogy between the two ‘spaces’, as it is of Fantastic Voyage.

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The Voice-Image Complex Finally, we need to consider the character and effects of the voice-over for Powers of Ten, which, ever unperturbed, reassuringly accompanies us, explicating what we are seeing and maintaining – even at the film’s limits – a calm authority. In his book The Voice in Cinema, Michel Chion examines the powers of what, after Pierre Schaeffer’s ‘acousmatics’, he calls the acousmˆetre – the voice that is heard, that emanates from the image, but whose source cannot be located within it. As such it forms, Chion writes, ‘a special being, a kind of talking and acting shadow’.39 And while Chion introduces the class of ‘commentatoracousmˆetre’, linking it to the tradition of the narration of images to which historical phenomena such as the magic lantern show belong, at the same time he makes it clear that the voice of the commentator is drained of acousmatic powers if it is removed from, and has no relation of immanence to, what is seen. To be an acousmˆetre, Chion warns us, the commentating voice must, ‘even if only slightly, have one foot in the image, in the space of the film’.40 Can this be claimed to be the case with Powers of Ten? And, if so, what is entailed? In the Rough Sketch, the voice of the commentator is that of a woman, whose affectless monotone Paul Schrader had described as ‘a dispassionate female voice – a robot stewardess’, the latter phrase suggesting that, in the film critic’s understanding at least, the source of the voice is travelling with us, perhaps much in the same way as did the onboard computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released the same year.41 In fact, at one point in his article, Schrader does explicitly compare the Kubrick and Eames films. Here, at least, we have a response to the Rough Sketch commentary that clearly places it with ‘one foot in the image’ – and indeed for Chion, the voice of HAL, which is ‘ubiquitous, all-seeing, all-knowing’, is markedly acousmatic. He describes the disconnection of the circuits of the computer, during which it slides from subject to non-subject, from ‘a living acousmˆetre to an acousmachine’, as the ‘most moving acousmˆetre death in cinema’.42 With the 1977 film, however, the status of the voice has become more complicated and difficult to determine. On one hand, the commentary acquires a new ‘placefulness’, appearing locational in a way not evident in the earlier film. Yet, on the other, its effects continue to depend upon the atopicality of the acousmatic voice, the sense of

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which is intensified by its relation to the constant and extreme motion of the image: as the film goes ‘everywhere’, so too it is accompanied, or even led, by the tutelary voice, which is always epistemologically in advance of our vision. It is from the holding together of these two registers that much of the rhetorical effect of Powers of Ten issues. Unlike the ‘robotic’ female of the Rough Sketch, the recognisably accented male commentator in the 1977 version irresistibly connotes the voice of ‘mission control’, and hence a geographical, national and political place or source, toward which everything that is familiar in the voice points back. Yet this is a placeful voice that has become ubiquitous, an accompaniment that retains its even measure despite the ever-changing visual acceleration. At once both located and seemingly everywhere, this equivocality then permits the voice to exert a powerful domesticating effect over the vast dimensional range of the film, which it acousmatically encompasses. Part and parcel of this are the powers of panopticism and omniscience that, as Chion shows, are conventionally ascribed to the acousmˆetre, whose condition as a being both ‘involved in’ the image and yet magically beyond it gives it a special vantage point. ‘The acousmˆetre is all seeing’, Chion declares, ‘the fantasy of the total mastery of space by vision’.43 And – notwithstanding the horizons of knowledge that are declared at the film’s limits – it is exactly this that, for its Cold War cultural context, the voice-image complex of Powers of Ten seems to depict. William Gaunt’s presentiment of the new cultural centrality of the vertical was entirely correct, but in 1935 – the year that Moholy-Nagy arrived in England – the launch of The Studio’s series represented more of a swansong for the New Vision than any kind of beginning. In The Studio’s books the view from above was mobilised toward a reconstructive end: the way of seeing was part of a reconstitution of subjectivity, one that demanded a corresponding transformation of the physical environment. By the postwar period, however, what was at issue was not the reconfiguration of the quotidian based on the impulses and impetus of what could be discerned in the depths by the microscope, or seen from the heights, but rather the technologically driven adventure on the vertical that was the exploration and mastery of – and expansion into – them. And it is to this that the Eameses’ films seem, in their way, to so eloquently testify. (2010)

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5 ‘The Way the World Sees London’: Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle The Scintillating Image At the start of his book, Sorry Meniscus, the walker and writer Iain Sinclair describes how, early one morning in the summer of 1999, he rounded some shingle on the eastern side of the Isle of Dogs in London to gain a view from across the Thames of the Millennium Dome, the intended centre-piece of Britain’s millennium celebrations under Tony Blair’s New Labour government. This was not the first of Sinclair’s ‘excursions’ to the Dome: rather it was, as his readers find out, the last of a short series that began in 1997, when he was invited by the London Review of Books to visit the construction site and report on the future ‘Millennium Experience’. What Sinclair describes at the outset of the book is thus able to be posed as both a first sighting and a summing-up. He writes: I’ve lost all sense of scale, time itself is on the drift. In my rucksack is the most convincing evidence that this dome is something other than a low octane hallucination: a photographic memento from the early days of the project, from 22 June 1997. London as a millennial landscape, scoured, bone dry, without dust or dirt or atmosphere. The East Greenwich Peninsula as Cape Canaveral; a launch pad for a range of super-celestial blues. Toxic marshlands, the residue of defunct gas works, transformed by the swipe of a

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‘THE WAY THE WORLD SEES LONDON’: THOUGHTS ON A MILLENNIAL URBAN SPECTACLE Figure 5.1. Cover of Iain Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus (1999) (courtesy of Proc Marc Atkins / http://www.marcatkins.com). file Books / photograph 

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mouse into Florida. I hold up the promotional photograph against its pale twin. And I realise how the whole millennium scam should have worked. The ‘computer-generated realisation’, produced by Hayes Davidson for the New Millennium Experience Company, is better, grander, more visionary than anything New Labour will achieve by dumping something close to a billion pounds into the deadlands.1

Having quoted this at length, I am going to stay with it for a while in order to draw out some issues that I think it dramatises very acutely. In fact, my approach will be to treat this episode as a kind of allegory of the relationship between spectacle and architecture today. First of all, I want like to draw attention to the structure of the narrative. When Sinclair spies the Dome from across the river, he literally cannot believe his eyes: it seems like a hallucination; relationships of scale and time become unhitched. However, what convinces him of the reality of what he sees, and reintegrates his senses, is the intervention of an image that – we would have to say – is even more hallucinatory and improbable than what it has replaced. Nonetheless, it has the effect of authenticating and making this reality assimilable even as, at the same time, it exceeds it. Sinclair’s holding up of ‘the promotional photograph against its pale twin’ is certainly suggestive of the normative comparison between a portrait and its subject. But the agency of the promotional image is perhaps more akin to that of a mirror that serves simultaneously to both block the lessthan-appealing reality and to transform it into the ideological imaginary of the commodity-image or spectacle. And although it is true that the image he raises has an evidential status (it registers a project history, a set of intentions, etc.), the consoling, reintegrative effects it produces cannot be assumed to be simply a by-product of this. The episode Sinclair describes may seem like a perfect instance of Guy Debord’s thesis in The Society of the Spectacle that ‘the perceptible world is replaced by a set of images that are superior to that world, yet at the same time impose themselves as eminently perceptible’, the eminently here marking the spectacle’s priority.2 But at the same time, Sinclair’s text is very far from the sense of the spectacle as an enveloping and inescapable screen that Debord develops elsewhere in the same book, and insistently reasserts in his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle under the concept of the ‘integrated spectacle’.3 Indeed, if anything, Sinclair’s response suggests that the limits of the spectacle 80

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are in fact only too apparent, and have to be compensated for by the actions of a willing and complicit viewer: his own raising of the computer rendering is suggestive of a quasi-protective blocking off of the more abject reality by the insertion of the spectacular image that then supersedes it. As Debord would insist, the city-space in front of Sinclair is undoubtedly being reconstructed according to the diktat of the image; but at the same time its inadequacy on these terms is clear. It is not that the viewer is bound by the spectacle within a radically delimiting false consciousness, but, on the contrary, adherence to the spectacle – and a potentially violent defence of it (gated urbanism comes to mind here) – strengthens as its limits and its tenuousness become obvious. The situation is, it seems to me, reminiscent of Jean-Louis Comolli’s account of cinematic spectatorship with its ‘will to believe’ that has to make good the lack in the constructed image: ‘The “yes, I know” calls irresistibly for the “but all the same”, includes it as its value, its intensity. We know, but we want something else: to believe. We want to be fooled, while still knowing a little that we are so being. . . . The more one knows’, he goes on, ‘the more difficult it is to believe, and the more it is worth it to manage to.’4 Secondly, I want to use Sinclair’s description to pursue the question of what, qualitatively, the spectacle that he is looking at actually is. I am interested in doing this because I suspect it represents a kind of optical experience that is one of the important forms that the spectacle takes today – in architectural culture at any rate. How to characterise this? From Sinclair’s account, it clearly has nothing to do with gigantism, a criterion that often seems to be at work in considerations of architecture and spectacle. Neither can it be understood as a post-modern sublime: I am thinking here, for example, of Fredric Jameson’s famous description of the atrium in the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel in terms of ungraspable volumetrics, packed emptiness, and suppression of depth, whose disorientating effects he saw as emblematic of the human subject’s dislocation within the globalised informational and economic networks in which it is immersed and that it can only dimly ‘see’.5 Against this background, the spectacle I see Sinclair seeing appears as a kind of countersublime, in which what is pictured emerges with a scintillating hyperobjecthood. If, in the case of the sublime, the object becomes unbounded – and therefore less and more than an object – with the ideological imaginary of the spectacular countersublime, the object reaches an extreme degree of definition, closure and intensity

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(which is supported by the familiar digital strategy of isolating it upon a black field). This effect is related to an eradication of all environmental noise, pollution or interference, which compromise the transmission of the object and make it appear indeterminate or underachieved. (The negative correspondences I see here are to the shadow, mist or cloud in ‘classic’ representations of the sublime, or to the streamers that hang into the atrium of Jameson’s Bonaventure, but also to the material inflection of the image induced by representational and reproductive technologies – Xerox, fax, forms of printing, etc.). In the spectacular images of which I am thinking, all ‘weather’ – I will come back to this at the end of the chapter – has disappeared and we have instead a luminous and pristine virtuality. Historically, this kind of visual purification is often associated with the aerial view, which is why something like the London Eye, the huge ferris wheel built alongside the Thames in London and counterpart to the Millennium Dome, is a powerful vehicle for the transformation of the urban field into its terms. In the passage from Sinclair already cited, he describes the ‘millennial landscape’ the computer rendering shows as ‘scoured, bone-dry, without dust or dirt or atmosphere’. In the next paragraph he goes on, ‘This is London as seen from a returning space shuttle; a vision of privilege, limitless budgets, a cure for cancer.’6 The difference between that and the city’s air Sinclair actually experienced at the Dome’s site is driven home later in his account. Standing close to the flue that vents the Blackwall Tunnel, a vehicular artery passing below the Thames, he notes that, [while it won’t be seen in the] official portraits, the pristine virtual reality handouts . . . you’ll smell the fumes. An unmannerly belch of black smoke. A brewery pall that hits you as soon as you emerge from the Blackwall Tunnel: oasty, hot, in the throat, disquieting. Griddled bird shit. The world through a sepia filter. Dust-storms of gravy browning. Iron filings in a furious wind scrape the cornea. Noise you can taste.7

In relation to this, the extreme definition of the object in the virtual representation implies something like an ecological imaginary. Certainly the proximity of virtual representations to affirmative and celebratory forms of ecological and nature photography – in which everything is disclosed with a luxuriant vibrancy to the eye – is marked, and this suggests a reassuring and compensatory function in a context of 82

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general urban environmental degradation and decay. Capital’s implicit promise would then be – by alighting upon a portion of the city and transforming it within highly circumscribed boundaries on the terms of these images – to produce a cleansing tantamount to the recovery of an idealised ‘natural’ purity. The optical construction and maintenance of these archipelago-like spaces is the counterpart to the socio-political separations they institute. It seems to me that crucial to the hyperdefinition of the object is the scintillation and emissivity of the image upon the computer screen. (Sinclair is, admittedly, looking at a print rather than a screen, and the image is consequently compromised, yet at the same time contemporary printing technologies strive for and come close to the surface and light effects produced on screen). Although computerrendering processes involve the setting up of a virtual sun or other light sources in order to model the reflectivity or degree of transparency of the surfaces, it is really a ‘black sun’: it does not cast light onto virtual objects, but rather is used to calibrate the way in which the emission of light directly to the eye is modulated across the screen. Light is not cast upon, but emerges out of the virtual object, which it at the same time constitutes. Under these conditions, even when rendered with degrees of transparency, the virtual object seems taut, more than present. The pursuit of the immediacy of the emissive image beyond the screen – an immediacy that seems perversely to come from a kind of intensification of mediation rather than its collapse – leads to architectural strategies that are clear enough, and I think that the specific approach taken to the lighting of the translucent skin of the Millennium Dome is a good example. But it also seems possible to conjecture that there is a homology here with the low-level reflective metal surfaces (titanium, zinc, etc.) that we have seen increasingly used as cladding for buildings. To draw on Jameson’s Bonaventure example again, compare these new surfaces with the hotel’s mirror-cladding. Where the latter tends, in its reflectivity, to visually dissolve the contours of the building – which then becomes a kind of emptiness or hole within the city that throws vision back outward – low-level reflective cladding conversely asserts the building’s form and heightens its readability. While this surface is clearly not emissive in the sense I was trying to develop in relation to the computer screen, it does produce an effect that is in some ways analogous. Directional light – sunlight or otherwise – upon these surfaces does not pool into the reflected image but spreads

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across the surface to produce an effect of general luminescence and heightened formal definition and visual closure. The titanium cladding on the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, for example, seems well-suited to produce a kind of surrogate emissive immediacy in support of a hypervisual display of its formal involutions, none of which – as it were – then escape vision.

Post-Imperial Exhibitionism Two years after the publication of Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Giorgio Agamben wrote a short response to it in the form of marginal notes. In these he quotes from a contemporary catalogue to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, to the effect that the Crystal Palace is ‘perhaps the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is perceivable [from] the west or east extremity of the gallery . . . the most distant parts of the building appear wrapped in a light blue halo.’ To this, Agamben adds: ‘The first great triumph of the commodity thus takes place under the sign of both transparency and phantasmagoria.’8 This suggests that there is a certain history of light – of objects in light, and of the light of objects – to be written in relation to the spectacle, and through the optic of what has been called the ‘exhibitionary complex’.9 In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago saw the first ever large-scale use of electric incandescent lighting, in which buildings were effectively drawn in light by outlining their profiles with bulbs. One visitor, Owen Wister, wrote in his diary that, while at the exposition, his mind was ‘dazzled to a standstill’.10 I think there is an important distinction to be made here, between these nineteenth-century spectacles – which emerge within a magical, enchanting aura, or dazzle with their own brilliance – and those deriving from the paradigm of the kind of virtual object represented on the page that Iain Sinclair held. In the earlier conditions, the very radiance of the object or the auratic halo that surrounded it – both of which are registered as effects within the medium that envelopes the object – lend it a certain obscurity or hiddenness. But with the virtual object there is nothing like a halo, because any medium that could support it has apparently disappeared: the strange, aqueous tangibility of the medium has gone, and in its place there is a cold intensification of the pictured object whose emissivity never dazzles and obscures but instead seems to fold in upon itself. 84

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There is not room here to consider in detail the construction and organisation of the exhibitionary installations within the Millennium Dome, but some points should be made in passing. It has been noted how, within it, Britain was represented as a ‘nation of corporations’,11 but I think equally, and perhaps more pertinently, the exhibition tended toward the representation of a ‘subject of corporations’, a sort of diagrammatic reworking of the body politic as an individual life, now made up of an assemblage of parts, powers, and narratives, each identified – to a greater or lesser degree – with a ‘service provider’, the corporate sponsor of the particular zone. Long gone were the old expositionary distinctions of manufacturing, the arts, transportation, horticulture, and so on. In the Dome everything was refracted through an individual life that was, at the same time, everyone’s: a life which was constructed, even, through the powers and possibilities granted by service providers. The sequence of exhibition zones included Play, Body, Work and Learning, Mind, Faith, Rest, Talk, and Journey – the latter two sponsored by British Telecommunications and the Ford Motor Company respectively. One of the things, however, that is very striking about the story of the Dome is the trenchant and general public scepticism that dogged the project. While the Richard Rogers Partnership’s big tent was settled upon early on, the question of what it would contain was long unresolved, and remained a moot and troublesome point: the public relations disarray was cleverly seized on by a McDonald’s advertisement that ran: ‘What’s in the Dome? McDonald’s!’ And therein lay the problem. To a large extent the story is a salutary tale of the inherent difficulties of this kind of exhibition in a context of post-imperial and post-modern ‘weak citizenship’. What exactly goes into – can go into – an exhibition like this? And while ‘weak citizenship’ has been equated in at least one recent piece of work with contemporary ‘spectacular society’,12 the millennium exhibition, apparently paradoxically, illustrates the profound difficulty of actually constructing a viable spectacle of this kind in this context – that is to say a politically disenchanted (and perhaps disengaged), educated, enervated, consumerist society that expects ‘value for money’ in its entertainments, and is sceptical equally of the claims of government and of corporations. As the title of the journalist Polly Toynbee’s report of a day spent at the Dome ran: ‘I paid up, I queued up, and now I’m thoroughly fed up’.13

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Figure 5.2. London Eye website home page (http://www.londoneye .com [Accessed 2 March 2005]) (courtesy of British Airways London Eye [2007]).

‘Ravishing Cleanliness’ The character of the millennium works in London as a sort of distended, latter-day great exhibition was reinforced by the development of the London Eye further upstream, built close to the actual site of the 1951 Festival of Britain’s Dome of Discovery. The London Eye, like the Millennium Dome, is an exhibitionary installation, but it avoided the representational aporia by making the city itself its object. It was from the start, and has remained, a great popular success: recently voted – according to a report in the Independent newspaper – the ultimate world tourist destination (beating off such likely contenders as the Vatican, and the Sydney Opera House), in 2003 it attracted 3.7 million visitors, almost twice as many as its closest ‘paid for’ rival in the United Kingdom, the Tower of London.14 This huge ‘machine of the visible’ is both a massive image-production device installed in the centre of the city, and an urban spectacular in its own right. Its publicity bills it as ‘The Way the World Sees London’, and this seems to be increasingly the case. Not only has it – very strikingly – become the image, indeed the spectacle, of this particular city, but it is also 86

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the generator of a vast repertoire of circulating images. In advertising related to London the wheel is often pictured in isolation; but it is also the structure to which all other contemporary visual narratives about London increasingly have to refer in order to locate and to authenticate themselves – and indeed, in order to function. The second part of this chapter will consider the London Eye in some detail, both because it is a particularly pertinent, if peculiar, case study through which to think about architecture and the spectacle today – especially in connection with the contemporary tourist economy of cities – and because it is dedicated to the kind of consoling, recuperative, hyperobjectival spectacle I have already discussed in relation to Sinclair, as witnessed by the kind of images posted on its website, its publications, and the kind of performative viewing it solicits from its passengers. A constant visual pressure is felt upon everything that is to do with the London Eye, or is in its vicinity – from its name, to its circularity, to its oculus-like capsules with their insistent transparency, to the merchandising available in the kiosks at the base of the structure, which trades on excruciating puns, such as the ‘eye-opener’ (a branded corkscrew) or the ‘eye-spy’ (card opera-glasses). Photographic books with panoramas of London, or images of London from the air, abound.

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Figure 5.3. Publicity image for the London Olympic bid: beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade (courtesy London 2012 [2007]).

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Figure 5.4. Signage on the Thames walkway beside the London Eye (photograph by the author).

The Eye generates a sort of force-field within which everything seems to balloon and become aerial. Locational diagrams on the Thames walkway in the vicinity of the wheel – diagrams that would otherwise have the most abstract, planimetric expression – suddenly take on an aerial character. And within this force field, if viewers start to feel a little that the city they will see upon entering one of the Eye’s capsules is laid 88

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out and composed specifically for them, at the same time the city starts to take on an air of unreality, as if it has become secondary to – and dependant upon – this huge fun-fair ride installed at its heart. Stepping onto the moving capsule, one is struck by the degree of transparency and by an ambiguous sense of exposure, both of which are heightened by the minimal cable-stayed structure and the mounting of the capsules on the exterior of the wheel’s rim. This visibility is as much about seeing into the capsule as it is about seeing out. As the wheel descends, a recorded voice instructs passengers to move to one end of the capsule: at this point a digital camera is triggered from which images are printed in time to be collected by passengers upon disembarkation at the base of the wheel. The national airline carrier British Airways was the London Eye’s sponsor, and remained until recently one of its three equal shareholders.15 Marketed under the brand of the company since its inception (as the British Airways London Eye), no opportunity has been lost in staging the visit to the wheel as a flight. When they buy a ticket, passengers find their ‘flight time’ printed on it; queuing to gain access to a capsule on the Thames path, they find themselves organised by tensile barriers in airport fashion; even the security search of passengers’ bags seems calculated to drive home the airport analogy (this is heightened by the theatricalised presentation of the search procedure that is contrived by placing it close to the top of the ramp that leads to the boarding-platform). So far, so familiar: the tropes are recognisably those of contemporary mass air transportation and its concomitants – simultaneous mass tedium and mass anxiety. Notwithstanding this, however, the London Eye has been used to shore up a mythology and romance of flight – the weightlessness, in all senses of that term, of getting off the ground – against these very conditions. It is notable, for example, how in the wake of the crash of a Concorde in Paris, and the eventual withdrawal of the airliner from service, the London Eye appeared to become British Airways’s flagship carrier, filling the iconographic niche vacated by the retired plane. After Concorde, it was the London Eye in which one took ‘champagne flights’. Likewise, however odd it might seem, the Eye now provided the image of transcendence – of the transcendence of flight – and of the stratospheric, even heliotropic, purity that Concorde had previously supplied so readily. Photographs on the London Eye website frequently showed a solitary individual seated in a capsule (in marked contrast, one has to say, with the

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experience of most visitors). Photographed from behind at a low level, the subject gazed out, more at the sky than at the city. These were images that conveyed something of the mysticism associated with at least one strand of modernism’s technophilic tradition: a reconciliation with the world through a technological attunement of habitat that in turn allowed a certain return to innocence and a recovery of immediacy. The wheel here was coded as a device that did not so much display the city as isolate the individual from it, lifting him or her up out of the congestion and distraction of the city below into a transcendent, contemplative solitude. When images illustrating groups of passengers were shown, they indicated the degree to which the strange intimacy of the old ferris-wheel cars was dissolved within the insistent visuality of the capsules. Still, it remains possible to book a ‘flight’ for two in what is marketed as ‘Cupid’s Capsule’. Throughout, the way in which the London Eye is staged solicits and facilitates a particular kind of optical performance from the visitor. What is offered and expected is well conveyed by the rendering, in large stainless steel letters, of William Wordsworth’s poem Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802 which faces visitors as they queue for entry. The poem’s inclusion within the entry sequence does three things: it serves to mark geographically the position of the wheel (it is actually between Westminster and Hungerford bridges); it installs the wheel within ‘heritage culture’ and frames the ride in it as something that can be simultaneously both an ultra-modern and a heritage ‘experience’ (if Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the Romantic implicit in the ‘pleasure dome’, Wordsworth is the one who is explicit in the Eye); and finally, and most importantly for the argument here, it prefigures a very specific visual experience. For Wordsworth’s poem portrays a city that is frozen, immobile, empty, and even dead (‘all that mighty heart is lying still’). Crossing the bridge early in the morning, before the start of the commercial day, the poet sees a city cleansed and newly innocent – mortified, it appears before him as a luminous landscape transmitted through a crystalline medium: . . . silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

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To conclude, I will shift my attention to a space in London that lies between the London Eye and the Millennium Dome: the Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern at Bankside. In many ways, this space seems highly implicated in the cultural-tourist economy of spectacular events and blockbuster art shows. But against this background, the installation that was the fourth commission for the space, Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project (16 October 2003 to 21 March 2004), takes on special importance. In the context of my argument, I see it as a kind of ‘antispectacular’ spectacular that turns on a reinsertion of medium, precisely the ‘weather’ Eliasson inserted within the space: and while it is tempting, but probably too simplistic – given the mirrored ceiling that was part of the installation – to describe it as entirely about medium and without image, the active, unscripted, improvisatory/participatory forms of interaction it provoked are very striking and very different from the individuated ocularity associated with the spectacle. In the end, it seems important not to adopt some wholesale denigration of images, and even more so, of vision per se, maintaining an appreciation of its interrogative, quizzical powers. In his introduction to the Iconoclash exhibition he co-curated, Bruno Latour writes of the indebtedness of thought to images, and of moving between images as a process of thinking. He argues for ‘a world filled with active images, moving mediators’. From such a standpoint, the ‘damage done to icons,’ he writes, ‘is always a charitable injunction to redirect . . . attention towards other, newer, fresher . . . images: not to do without image’.16 Certainly this begs a number of questions, but it is also useful here. The spectacle is a relation between a viewer and what is viewed, and at the same time a relation between people: but the image that is used to think with, that is traversed in a process of thought, is no longer simply a spectacular one. Latour’s work is also useful in sensitising us to the complex network of agencies and relations within which cultural phenomena are sustained. Rather than seeking to overcome the spectacle with some notion of authentic vision or seeing things-in-themselves – the regulative ideal implied by Debord’s argument – it suggests a strategy of exerting pressure on spectacular installations by attending to their

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Opaque Medium

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Figure 5.5. The Unilever Series: Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project, 16 October 2003 – 21 March 2004, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 29/01/2009 c Tate, London 2014). (Installation) (courtesy of Studio Eliasson and 

‘edges’, where they are complicated by habitually unseen and actively hidden connectivities, making them available to thought in a new way. At one point in his book on the Millennium Dome, Iain Sinclair, summing up the project’s agenda, writes ‘Look and wonder’.17 But as we know, there is more than one way to wonder, and that seems a good place to stop, but also to start. (2005/2007) 92

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6 The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturisation A Baroque Afterimage? Let’s begin with an aerial view of an aerial view. We have just entered City Hall in London, the building designed to house the meeting chamber of the London Assembly and the offices of the Greater London Authority, which opened in 2002. Located on the south side of the river Thames, its eccentrically curved and tilting form rises close to the anchorages of Tower Bridge. Directly beside the building, and continuous with it, is an area intended to function as what architects like to describe as an ‘event space’. This is branded as The Scoop and takes the form of an elliptical excavation, the implication being that the twisting elevational force that gave rise to the building beside also produced this disturbance in, and perhaps even arose out of, the London clay. Presently we are standing on the entry level, having come into the building from the Thames path, and are now looking down through a void toward the large-scale photomap – a satellite image of London – that forms the surface of the basement-level floor. To our left a gently curving ramp drops down to the basement and to the satellite image at which we are looking, across which, if we descend, it is possible then to walk and explore at close quarters. If we turn the other way, however, we find that we slowly rise – again via a curving ramp, notionally continuous with that leading to the 93

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Figure 6.1. Foster author).

+

Partners, City Hall in London (photograph by the

basement – upward toward the assembly chamber, around whose glass walls we spiral. From this point, a curiously excessive ramp system, accessed from within the chamber itself, twists upward and outward towards a public area and observation deck, dubbed in the publicity material as ‘London’s Living Room’, from which one can look out at the city. The name may imply a casual free and easy access, an extended welcome in which the seat of metropolitan government meets with the comfy chair, but, as I for one have found, it turns out not always to be a straightforward matter to get entry to this space. The phrase does however have (what is undoubtedly for the mayor’s office) the virtue of suggesting that London is living, somewhat in the same way Glasgow smiled in the famous rebranding campaign launched by that city in 1983, which announced that ‘Glasgow’s miles better’. The City Hall building is thus presented as being organised around two aerial views of London: the first is the high-level vertical satellite image of the city, which one paradoxically descends to examine, and across which one walks; the second is the low-level oblique prospect of the city as viewed from the distanced vantage-point of the observation area at the top of the ascending ramps. Between these 94

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levels hovers the chamber, somewhere ‘in the air’, although given the representational complexities of the situation, it is not clear – at least conceptually – exactly what that location is. When seen from the basement below, the intermediate position of the chamber is not architecturally expressed: it is not, as one might expect, detached from the surrounding walls and allowed to ‘float’ free. Still, it is posed as a kind of aerial object, the connotations of this being literally driven home by the somewhat kitsch emblematic column that is staked into the photomap image of London and topped with digital display screens. Around this, metal rings of increasing diameter are arranged in a way that suggests early representations of radiophonic broadcasting masts but that also links the spiralling vortex above to the basement, whence it appears to be funnelled into the satellite image. The reflective ceiling above the photomap does much the same job, implying that we might be looking up through the council chamber into perspectivally diminishing ellipses. The whole arrangement suggests a metaphorics of transmission, as if the assembly chamber above was receiving messages from, but also broadcasting to, the miniaturised city laid out in detail below it. Responses to the architecture of City Hall have been varied: one report characterised it as ‘disappointingly dumpy’, while Ken Livingstone, the first incumbent as mayor of London, notoriously described it – rather grumpily – as looking like a giant ‘glass testicle’.1 Perhaps he was gloomily anticipating future headlines punning on budgets spiralling out of control and the like; or perhaps he was enviously looking across the river to the less vertically challenged developments of corporate capital in the City, as exemplified by the Swiss Re headquarters at 30 St Mary Axe – popularly christened the ‘erotic gherkin’ – that Foster + Partners, the architects of his own City Hall, would soon realise. Other comments were, however, more positive: certainly this is a building that very clearly sits in the lineage of – and indeed might even be thought as a kind of afterimage of – a highly celebrated precedent, Foster + Partners’ remodelling of the Reichstag, completed in postunification Berlin in 1999 for the new German parliament. This project figures the democratic process through an architectural rhetoric of light and transparency: on the roof a glass lantern, which houses a faceted conical reflector, bounces sunlight downward into the parliamentary chamber below, while access ramps spiral around, allowing the public a so-called ‘God’s-eye view’ into the parliamentary chamber from

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which they are, at the same time and in no uncertain terms, locked out. Thus, at least symbolically, the public are put above their elected representatives, looking over them from above in their deliberations. As Norman Foster’s book documenting the project optimistically puts it, ‘all the building’s processes are on view – it has no secrets’.2 Built, as it were, literally out of the ruins of the past, the project’s serene symmetry affects a convergence between nineteenth-century German Neo-classicism and the early twentieth-century Glasarchitektur of Bruno Taut. At the same time, the spiralling ramp accomplishes by turns a solar motif; a symbolic/democratic inversion of hierarchy; a visual presentation of the metropolis; and – more generally – carries the implication of spiralling out of the past, as registered by the shell of the historical building below, towards more luminous and heightened prospects. Although a more modest affair, in many ways City Hall looks like a late, baroque, version of this, altogether a more anxious and disturbed construction, with its shifty asymmetry and over-balancing ramps far removed from the classical repose of its Reichstag antecedent. Moreover, the presence of the aerial photomap on the floor at the lowest level of the building, suggests a grafting of the image of the city within itself in a mise-en-abˆıme, a sense reinforced by the fact that the image is affixed directly to the ground and not to any secondary and therefore portable support, such as a table or plinth. Not coincidentally, the figure of the mise-en-abˆıme, which unhinges any grounding effect and ideationally sets up a condition of constant deferral within the image, has been closely linked to the ‘return of the baroque’ in contemporary culture, a return of – in Gregg Lambert’s formulation – ‘the “baroque design” [that] can be associated with the becomingliterary of the principle behind knowledge itself’.3 From one point of view, however, City Hall might be straightforwardly assumed to be an outcome of the contemporary demand for spectacle architecture – and there is no doubt that Foster + Partners’ work has transformed in this direction. Along with his peer and onetime collaborator Richard Rogers, Norman Foster is the leading practitioner of so-called British ‘hi-tech’ architecture. Both Rogers’s and Foster’s work is indebted to the pop technophilia of the radical 1960’s group Archigram, but also to the visionary structural and material experiments of the American ‘anticipatory design scientist’ Buckminster Fuller, whose work the pair encountered as graduate

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students at Yale University. If Rogers’s work subsequently developed on the Archigram side of this relationship, Foster’s – with his functionally related emphases on economy of means, fitness for purpose, and high-performance materials – tended toward Fuller, with whom he at times collaborated. It is not difficult to see how these preoccupations can be framed in terms of ecological imperatives, and efficiency in terms of energy expenditure has become an increasingly important part of the declared rationale of his designs. The official statement by Foster + Partners on City Hall, for example, accounts for the shape of the building in terms of ‘optimum energy performance’, and declares that the project ‘demonstrates the potential for a sustainable, virtually non-polluting public building’, although a recent audit of energy consumption levels of public buildings in the UK rated it poorly.4 In fact the relationship between ‘economy of means’ and expenditure, considered in a general sense, is an extremely slippery one in architecture, a point nowhere better illustrated than in Foster’s own iconic Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in Hong Kong, allegedly the most expensive building ever constructed when it was realised. Today the practice has grown to one of truly global proportions, for whose projects the epithet pharaonic barely suffices. The site preparations for Chek Lap Kok airport in Hong Kong demonstrated that Foster’s is one of the few practices capable of not just building the building but also of constructing the land mass on which it sits, the 100-metrehigh peak rising out of the sea that previously occupied the site being flattened to a datum of seven metres and expanded to four times its original area to receive the project.5 But even this looks tame beside Crystal Island, a project for Moscow unveiled in 2006 that demonstrates well the shifts in Foster’s work in response to the priorities of the new oligarchic commissioners of global architecture. If the Chek Lap Kok project involved flattening a mountain, this involves constructing one. Projected as the world’s largest building, at 27 million square feet, this gargantuan ‘city in microcosm’ – resembling, according to one commentator, a volcano – will have a floor area four times that of the Pentagon in Washington.6

Transparency and Elevation Yet there are ways other than the spectacle in which one might think about City Hall. I assume that the representational burden borne by 97

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the design is to figure both the metropolis and the democratic process, and possibly the relations between the two, and there are obvious connections – clearly declared by the architect – with the approach taken at the Reichstag: as a BBC report on the opening of the building noted, ‘supporters of City Hall say it is a bold statement on transparent government’.7 What is interesting for us here, however, is that the building in London, with its twisting and over-balancing ramps and its mise-en-abˆıme photomap, appears to place democracy not under the benign sign of light and transparency – as at the Reichstag – but under the less comforting sign of vertigo and transparency, and so I am consequently interested in how the relations between these three terms (democracy, vertigo, transparency) might be thought in the context of this project. It is tempting to imagine, for instance, that the vertiginous character of City Hall registers a more complex appreciation of the difficulties and pitfalls attendant on any attempt to architecturally stage or picture democratic transparency. While there is no doubt that the parliamentary chamber in Berlin was conceived of by the architect as a transparent thing, founded on a dream of immediacy and radical disclosure and of a ‘building without secrets’, the task of representing democracy involves the immediate complication of being the representation of representation, which, in terms of the metaphorics and idealisation of the glass screen, would then imply a constant redoubling of it – which is to say, of transparency opening onto transparency in a constantly and vertiginously expanding series. Such an incessant relay of signification (incessant because ‘transparent’ and therefore also always beyond command), and the vertigo it induces, is wryly and humorously demonstrated in Vladimir Nabokov’s novella, Transparent Things. The vertigo here arises from a breaking of the ‘surface’ of things, and the consequent loss of the ground that the ‘tension film’ of the present provides. At the outset of the book we are warned: When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines! Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over

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the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon revelling in childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wants to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracleworker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment.8

Hugh Person, the protagonist in Nabokov’s book, is, not by chance, an acrophobic copy-editor who is returning to Switzerland to hamfistedly retread his disconcerting past. Early in the book, Nabokov gives an extended narration of a ‘transparent thing’, a pencil in a sticking hotel drawer that pops out when Person wrenches it open. Like explanation under the child’s repeated question of ‘Why?’, the significations of the object ramify – of the lead, for example, ‘See it baked, see it boiled in fat (here a shot of the fleecy fat-giver being butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd, a shot of the shepherd’s father, a Mexican).’9 Still, Nabokov writes, ‘Alas, the solid pencil itself as fingered briefly by Hugh Person still somehow eludes us!’10 And therein lies the problem – transparency here is a looking beyond the surface that results not in getting at what we seek, but instead in opening the vertigo of things that attention, now pathologised, compels us to follow, and hence, as we were warned at the start of Transparent Things, to sink with the fishes. The aerial view is frequently associated with a serene transcendent and magisterial subjectivity, one lifted above the immersion in things while still holding them in purview. Indeed the very idea of transcendence is an elevational concept; transcend – which shares its root with ascend – means to climb over, or to go beyond, or to surmount. To go up is to see more, insofar as more things are brought into view, but it is also to see them in a newly transformed way, one that foregrounds the limits of individual objects and their relationships with one another while at the same time opening vision onto immensity. And descriptions of immensity, an immensity of things, even in what is close to hand, frequently in turn take on an aerial character as evident in, for example, William Blake’s ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand’. It is this interplay of detachment, discernment, immensity,

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which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through

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and even infinity that is embedded in the idea of the aerial view as a ‘God’s-eye view’. If going up presents us with immensity, which is at the same time a crushing and decentring diminishment of ourselves, then this immensity in turn must be surmounted. This, at least, is the sequential structure of the sublime in the classic Kantian account, in which the supervention of an idea of reason (the idea of a totality in the mathematically sublime, the idea of our moral agency in the dynamically sublime) raises the subject out of the threat, establishing its transcendence.11 This might be described as the ‘sublime effect’, but I am here more concerned with what happens when it fails, and, instead of the grounding, recentring operation of these ideas of reason, we are left with a radical groundlessness in which immensity does not open onto transcendence, but instead plunges us into a swarming, swirling mass of things, and we end up with something much less dignified than the sublime. A recent paper by Simon Grimble begins by quoting from a seventeenth-century English ‘prospect poem’, Cooper’s Hill (‘But my fixed thoughts my wandering eye betrays’), to signal the danger to the coherence of all pictures posed by wandering eyes compulsively pulled toward unruly details.12 The kind of disarray that I have in mind here has to be distinguished from other unserene episodes in the history of the aerial view – the view of immensity as temptation, for example, or the ecstatic Futurist violence of annihilation. In the vertiginous experience of which I am thinking, the multiplicity of things cuts each adrift, and denies any resolution or grounding. We may be above things, but at the same time we are among them in a new, disconcerting way. It is not that we are looking simply into a void, a radical annulment in which nothing counts anymore. The problem is the opposite: that everything, all these swarming things (potentially) count, have to be attended to and cannot be let go, for what has disappeared are any criteria for assigning more value to some than to others – that is, any criteria of subordination. Paranoia has been characterised as a condition of over-interpretation: for the paranoiac everything also counts, everything is significant, which is to say that everything points to the content of the paranoiac fantasy. In the case of the sufferer of vertigo, however, of the ‘vertigo of facts’ as Barbara Goodwin calls it, the signifying chain no longer produces any grounding effect whatsoever (as provided for the paranoiac by the fantasy). As she writes in relation to Nabokov’s Transparent Things,

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Ungroundedness This dissolution of ground and loss of priority that induces vertigo is well illustrated in the opening section of W.G. Sebald’s book of the same name, first published in German in 1990. This recounts the experiences of Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as the novelist Stendhal. A key episode in this concerns Beyle’s memory of a prospect of the town of Ivrea which, when he first saw it, left an ‘indelible impression’ upon him. So, Sebald tells us: It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through some old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d’Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle’s advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one’s travels, since before very long they will displace our memories

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‘vertigo is mixed with despair of ever reaching the heart of the signification’.13

completely, indeed one might say destroy them.14

The prospect of Ivrea may have been a view taken from an elevated position, but what makes it truly vertiginous is the realisation that the later-seen engraving has substituted itself for the original memoryimage – if it ever, indeed, existed. And thus the ‘ground’ – that is, the presumed originary experience to which the memory points – is dissolved. As James Chandler has rightly written, ‘It is seldom an easy matter in a Sebald narrative to tell whether one is moving in the direction of remembering or of forgetting; one is often doing both, or neither, all at once’, and he has linked this to a ‘Romantic art of memory’ deriving from the eighteenth-century theory of ideas developed by David Hume and others.15 It is worth noting here that the German title of Sebald’s book is Schwindel. Gef¨uhle – schwindel meaning dizziness and giddiness, but also lie, swindle, or fraud. In this vein, the photographs that entwine with Sebald’s writing might be thought of as vertiginous agents, resolutely unanchored as they are by caption or credit, and therefore wholly and in a very precise way unauthorised. 101

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Vertigo is dizziness, and not at first sight connected to heights at all: it is etymologically linked to the Latin vertex – whirl, whirlpool, vortex – and to vertere, to turn. But the Latin vertex also signifies the crown of the head – the point of growth outward from which the hair spirals – and by extension the top, summit, or highest point of something. And hence vertical, as naming that which passes through the vertex, and also – I suppose – the implication of the vertical as an axis around which things turn. This etymological entwining of vortex and hair finds a reflection in Hitchcock’s celebrated 1958 film, Vertigo, a movie that abounds in spirals and whorls. Adapted from a French thriller titled D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, the idea for a plot based around encountering someone thought to be dead apparently came to Narcejac while watching a newsreel in a cinema, in which he recognised a figure that he believed to be an acquaintance with whom he had lost touch during the war.16 The film’s plot is familiar: a police detective, Scottie (played by James Stewart), retired due to acrophobia, is hired by an old school-friend to trail his wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who is acting strangely. She is obsessed with her great-grandmother, Carlotta Valdes, who committed suicide at the age that Madeleine has reached, after being separated from her only child and cast out to become a ‘wanderer’. Madeleine suffers from hysterical seizures in which she seems possessed by the spirit of her grandmother. During one of these, brought on by a visit to sequoia woodland that she uncannily feels she has been to before (she touches a ‘time spiral’ formed by the growth rings on a tree-trunk), she has a vision of a place which Scottie, now hopelessly in love with this fathomless woman, recognises as a mission outside San Francisco. He drives her there and, tearing herself from his grasp, she races up the tower and throws herself from its heights, while Scottie, cowering and acrophobically frozen, helplessly watches her fall. When Scottie first follows Madeleine into the gallery where Carlotta’s portrait hangs, and watches her homage to her grandmother, he observes her from behind. Madeleine sits alone with her back to him, yet at the same time addresses him – indeed looks back – with the empty-centred whorl of hair that identifies her with Carlotta in the portrait. Right at the start, in the film’s famous title sequence, the vortex is associated with the eye, and with a subject ‘without ground’, the eye fading away in the title sequence to an empty spiral. In the gallery scene, Scottie’s own voyeuristic gaze is captured by, and

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even drains into, the strange spiral of hair in a conjunction of themes reminiscent of the eye/plug-hole montage that would close the shower scene in Psycho two years later. Scottie’s dizziness in high places is really only a minor motif: the real vertigo felt by him in the film is that emanating from the erasure of death as the ultimate surety of existence. This erasure is effected through the series of three women that share one identity – Carlotta, Madeleine, and Judy Barton – two of whom, at least, return from death (Carlotta in her possession of Madeleine, and Madeleine as Judy Barton, the woman paid by Scottie’s employer to impersonate his wife). The most interesting expression of this vertiginous ontological ungrounding comes in the ‘nightmare’ sequence shortly after Madeleine’s death, in which it is associated very literally and very physically with opened ground, that in question being the gaping grave of Madeleine’s greatgrandmother, Carlotta Valdes, toward which Scottie compulsively walks. The openness of the grave, the grave as a portal, figures not just the reanimation of the dead – the place out of which something has come – but also its consequence: a rift in the ground of ‘reality’, through which the acrophobic Scottie falls.

Walking on the Image Now, I am certainly not going to suggest that we fall through the aerial photomap in City Hall in the way that Scottie falls into Carlotta’s grave, but it does seem to me that there is at least something here to be thought about, and the fact that the image adheres to the ground, that our weight is borne upon it, appears not inconsequential. One way that we could contextualise the photomap is by placing it within the lineage of those representations in which an institution’s sphere of influence or interest is articulated through a miniature that is placed symbolically on display, often in the institution’s headquarters. Examples of this would include the globe in the lobby of Raymond Hood and John Mead Howells’s Daily News building in New York (1930), or the massive model of New York produced by Robert Moses for the New York City Pavilion at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair and now held in the Queens Museum of Art. All such miniatures produce aerial views. In his celebrated introduction to The Savage Mind, ‘The Science of the Concrete’, Claude L´evi-Strauss argued that ‘all miniatures seem to have intrinsic aesthetic quality’. The reduction in scale ‘extends and 103

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diversifies our power over a homologue of the thing, and by means of it the latter can be grasped, assessed and apprehended at a glance’.17 The miniature thus allows the whole to be comprehended in a kind of reversal of the understanding’s analytic process. Rather than working from an object’s parts, the miniature enables the understanding to immediately encompass the thing, extending and diversifying – as L´eviStrauss wrote – its power over it. The intelligence is consequently gratified, and a feeling of pleasure arises. This is certainly not the sublime but it shares certain features with it: an aesthetic pleasure derived from encompassing or ‘getting above’ something previously unfathomable. Miniatures may give an epistemological vantage-point on things, but at the same time they are – as L´evi-Strauss noted – always predicated on omissions. The understandings that miniatures give us are related to what they leave out. Thus, to take a relevant example, urban planning models always have a comforting aspect, which promotes confidence. What is projected may be enormous but the model, by flattering us, makes it seem graspable through its ability to hold back the vertigo of things. Urban planning models, which are typically white, have their own criteria of interpretative subordination built into them in advance, and these are usually, though not always, gratefully received. It is not by chance, nor due only to questions of legibility, that models of this kind are viewed as the most ‘understandable’ – and, by developers, ‘persuasive’ – form of representation for public consumption. Almost always, the model is presented on a table or stand, which separates the ground of the viewer from the ground of the model, and this is another way of encompassing it. Moreover, the act of lifting the model away from the ground promotes oblique, as opposed to vertical, aerial views, and thereby tends to integrate it within a tradition of prospect imagery, with all the implications of pictorial composition and coherence which that entails. Notably, when Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery reflected on oblique and vertical aerial views in his memoir, Pilote de Guerre (translated as Flight to Arras), he distinguished between them in just these terms. From the pilot’s cockpit, Saint-Exup´ery’s vision was always at an angle, giving him a naturalising, highly pictorial and euphoric impression of coherence: ‘I see clouds, sea, rivers, mountains, sun. I see roughly and get . . . a general impression’ (or, an ‘idea of the whole’ [Je me fais une id´ee d’ensemble]). The military observer who accompanied Saint-Exup´ery on his flights, however, always looked on the vertical: ‘He sees lots of things – lorries, barges, tanks, soldiers, cannon, horses,

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Figure 6.2. The aerial photomap in the basement of City Hall (photograph by the author).

railway stations, trains, station masters.’18 It is the difference between seeing ‘one’ and seeing many things, with the many tending toward a vertiginous itemisation of a series of objects shorn of any ‘natural’ coherence. It is hard to imagine what a miniature that did not involve the processes of selection and omission that L´evi-Strauss described might be, other than in terms of a fantasy of total representation. However, it does seem possible to suggest that the aerial photomap in City Hall has qualities that at least provoke and stimulate such ideas of vertiginous multiplicity, no matter how illusory their realisation in the representation actually is. One important aspect of this is the way the satellite image, even while it is proximate to familiar cartographic representations of the city, at the same time dispenses with the hierarchies and differentials that are embedded within their codes. Instead, all things that are retained by the image-capture device are brought into interaction with one another on a single, but consequently unstable, plane of consistency. One can certainly examine the image and recognise things within it, but its muteness – its lack of acknowledgement of the viewer, who is too close when walking upon the 105

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surface to compose it visually as a picture – has a relativising effect that emerges out of the unexpected new equivalency of the pressing, crowding multitude of things within the image that are now accorded new rights. And this in turn is experienced as a certain ungrounding that resonates both with the curious trompe l’oeil experience of actually standing upon the image of the city and with the reflections prompted by the transparent assembly chamber positioned above it. (2008)

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7 Clouds of Architecture ‘A Cloud of Glass’ According to the newspapers, the recent unveiling of Frank Gehry’s design for the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation – to be built in the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne – left observers struggling for a suitable metaphor. However, as the Guardian reported it, the architect himself seemed in no doubt: ‘“It’s a cloud of glass – magical, ephemeral, all transparent,” [Gehry] said. It was, he added, “not stodgy.”’1 Stodginess, certainly, is something that the appeal to clouds might well be hoped to ward off. Of all the flow-motifs available to oppose the heaviness of congealed and earth-bound stodge, the slow and complex three-dimensional circulation, drift and dispersion of the nebular seems the most promising. Moreover, not only does the cloud seem opposed to all material loading, equally it appears to resist being weighted down and tethered by signification. As, symptomatically, the Guardian’s report concluded: ‘Gehry added that one of his main aims was to attract youngsters. He said: “I hope they will look at the building and say, ‘what is that?’”’2 While there is a long association of divine and fantastic architectures with cloud – from the heavenly city, to fairytale giants’ castles reached by beanstalks, to Swift’s flying island of Laputa buoyed upon the magnetic field of the giant lodestone at its core – it is only recently that we have had a situation in which the cloud has shifted from being a fabulous support for the building to a trope for the architectural project itself. Clouds of architecture have been accumulating, and the allusion 107

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Figure 7.1. Photograph of Pruitt-Igoe demolition, 1972, from Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977/8), fig. 3, p. 9.

has become increasingly visible as a sort of post-modern counterpart to the high-modern metaphoric series of organism, crystal, machine, and so on. My intention here is to explore this architectural aspiration for the cloud, to make some suggestions about how we might understand it, and to try to describe the work that the cloud motif might be said to do for architecture and architects. From one point of view it is unsurprising that the cloud might be an area of interest for practices that see themselves as aiming to transgress architecture’s disciplinary constitution, as opening architecture onto what is taken to be excessive to it, or as mounting an assault upon it. At one point in his book, A Theory of /Cloud/, to which I will return, Hubert Damisch characterises cloud as ‘“matter” aspiring to “form”’, thereby registering its infinite provisionality and imminence.3 But equally the cloud might be thought of as ‘matter after form’, the characteristic ‘thing’ that accompanies destruction and demolition, the dispersion and suspension of particles that follows convulsions of matter and that is historically and iconographically fixed in photographs such as those of the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing in St Louis in 1972, or the attack on the World Trade Center. Curiously, it was two buildings by the same architect, Minoru Yamasaki, that supplied the 108

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material for these two most iconic examples of the destructuring of form into cloud. At the same time, the Pruitt-Igoe demolition was famously promoted – by, for example, Charles Jencks – as the deathrattle of modernism itself, thereby staging that particular cloud as the registration of the collapse of not just a specific architectural project but of an entire ideology.4

Lightness and Pneumatology In 1995 Coop Himmelb(l)au, an Austrian-based architectural practice, produced a competition project for a United Nations building in Geneva, under the title Cloud #9. In a breathless text written 15 years earlier, this group – whose affiliation with the sky, and indeed the clouds, is declared in their name (Himmelblau meaning ‘sky blue’ and, with the ‘l’ bracketed off, ‘sky building’) – concluded ‘Architecture must burn’. This text accompanied their Blazing Wing installation in the courtyard of the Technical University in Graz, whose heat, it is reported, smashed the windows in the surrounding historic facades.5 However, the cloud of which they dreamed in 1995 did not consist of the smoke of architecture’s combustion: instead it was, they wrote, ‘a soft, fluctuating enigma – a building that does not want to be a building any more’. Declaring cloud to be ‘an idea without an appropriate concept’, they insisted that ‘at the end of the twentieth century . . . the idea of cloud acquires a new significance’. Cloud is ‘a differentiated system rather than an object’ which, as ‘a product of a complex tissue of influences in which it constantly recreates itself . . . is entirely without identity’.6 Whatever the gap we might feel exists between this and the actual building proposal, what is being rhetorically conjured here is something infinitely responsive and in transformation – something, that is to say, that is always on the point of becoming something else. The following year Coop Himmelb(l)au extended the allusion to the city itself, comparing the digitally networked city to a ‘field of clouds’ in constant flux in patterns of complex interaction. ‘The vocabulary of urban planning’, they wrote, ‘should be placed in an architectural antique shop and replaced with phantasms still to be defined, which fluctuate and flicker like television screens after broadcast.’7 At the end of his essay, ‘Haze: On Nebular Modernism’, Steven Connor extends a discussion on the visual registration of mist in the direction of an account of the atmosphere as a medium traversed and 109

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Figure 7.2. Coop Himmelb(l)au, Villa Rosa (1968), VP 6801 M1 MiP c Michael Pilz and Coop Himmelb(l)au). (

saturated with invisible radiation, communication and interferences.8 And there is something of the sense of this electromagnetic cloud in Coop Himmelb(l)au’s new description of public space as a ‘semiconductor’.9 Yet, at the same time, one is struck by the resplendent luminous, translucent (and auratic) character of these proposals for architectural clouds. Compare Gehry’s statement, ‘I wanted to create something that every time you approach, it shows a different character depending on the light and the time of day. I wanted to emulate everything this word “transparence” means’, with Coop Himmelb(l)au’s description of their Geneva project: ‘The cloud envelope becomes a glass-like net structure that loosely defines a semi-public space. The transparency of this shell makes it possible to look at people moving about through the layers of light and colour.’10 It is almost as if, by some trick of history, the destination of Paul Scheerbart’s Glasarchitektur has turned out in fact to be the cloud. However, we could also draw a very different historical line to architecture’s contemporary clouds, one that would pass through the 1960s’ and 1970s’ preoccupation with pneumatic structures, those structures structured by air. The current prevalence of bouncy castles can obscure the political past of this technology, whose architectural 110

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uptake occurred in a context of radical commitments to the mobile, the temporary, the nomadic, the anti-authoritarian and the event. We can look again at Coop Himmelb(l)au here, who produced a number of pneumatic projects in the wake of the German engineer Frei Otto and, more locally, the Austrian architect Hans Hollein who, for a while, had ‘shifted his mobile one-man-office into a transparent inflatable – a “pneu” – . . . to extraordinary effect in the media’.11 In 1968 Coop Himmelb(l)au produced their pneumatic Villa Rosa, a cocoon-like structure that might be characterised as an expanded essay in atmospherics, the inhabitant being enveloped doubly by the pressurised inflatable and an environment of sensory stimuli released by technical apparatus located in small spherical compartments. This, in turn, led on to their Cloud (Wolke) I and II projects of 1968–72. In their commentary on the Villa Rosa, Coop Himmelb(l)au wrote: ‘Since the erection of the first totem pole the goal has been dematerialization. The dream has always been release from the force of gravity.’12 If the pneumatic structure could be understood as a building made of air, with a minimal material support – a building of ‘almost nothing’ – then by the same token it was minimally borne upon by gravity, which is to say, minimally hitched to the earth, that great sum of material and material history (‘everything we loved and by which we have lived’, as Malevich had said).13 Here we can recognise the proximity of the cloud to a modern thematic of lightness and detachment from the ground. Sources as diverse as Heinrich W¨offlin’s Prologomena to a Psychology of Architecture and Georges Bataille’s entry on ‘Formless’ for the Critical Dictionary suggest an elevational economy in which the movement upwards is associated with the sublimation of base matter into vital form – reprehensibly so for Bataille – in contradistinction to the lateral, descendental and gravity-directed seep of the former. Bataille’s famous argument posits ‘formless’ as a declassifying term that serves to depress the status of things, and his references are to squashed spiders, earthworms, and gobs of spittle.14 Yet at the same time we would have to admit that the cloud presents us with a formless thing that ascends in all senses of the word. In his commentary on the frescoes painted in the earlier sixteenth century by Correggio in the cupolas of San Giovanni Evangelista and the Cathedral in Parma, Hubert Damisch, borrowing a phrase from Gaston Bachelard, describes these images enabled by cloud as ‘operators of elevation’, while at the same time noting that the cloud theme

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‘contradicts the very idea of outline and delineation and through its relative insubstantiality constitutes a negation of the solidity, permanence and identity that define shape’.15 We have the paradigmatic example of this last point by way of Damisch’s classic analysis of the demonstration of perspective reportedly carried out by Filippo Brunelleschi. Onto a small panel, Brunelleschi painted a perspectival rendering of the baptistery in Florence, making a hole in the board at the vanishing point toward which the parallels converged. Holding the back of the painting to his face, and looking through the hole, he used a mirror held in front of him to sight the image, thereby producing an optical structure that articulated the homology between the eye of the observer and the vanishing point. However, on the painting Brunelleschi crucially did not render the sky, but instead provided a silvered surface upon which the real sky was reflected, before being again reflected in the hand-held mirror. Damisch argues that cloud is thus presented as something excessive to the perspectival system, something that escapes the jurisdiction of perspective and forms its constitutive ‘outside’. Of cloud, he writes: this unmastered, unmasterable background element . . . had to be shown but could not be except by the use of a mirror – that is, paradoxically, by resorting to a di-monstratio. Thus the cloud mirror functioned as an index (narrowly construed) of a discontinuity between the order of that susceptible to representation by the means of perspectiva artificialis, and another element which, admitting of no term and no limit, seems to escape capture, demanding to be presented ‘in its natural form’.16

Nebular Atmospherics and Euphorics Now it seems to me that there are legitimate connections to be drawn between this transcendent lightness that cloud offers and certain reflections on architectural drawing, which bring the latter within the ambit of our concerns with contemporary clouds of architecture. I am struck, for example, by the terms in which John Hejduk described his drawings for his Lancaster/Hanover Masque, produced between 1979 and 1982. The community of scripted ‘objects’ and ‘subjects’ that this work describes are organised in relation to a central, voided square across which the Church House and Death House face the Court House and Prison House. Hejduk proposed that the drawings he did for these were, 112

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During the revealing of a thought the pencil in my hand was almost without weight. The lead of the pencil hardly touched the surface of the paper; a thought captured before total concretion. The drawing of the Court House . . . may at first appear to be the vaguest, yet it is most complete.

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‘I believe, the first X-ray drawings. . . . The drawings are apparitions.’ He continued:

It encompasses the whole of a dematerialised thought.17

Here the material ineffability of the drawing, precisely the lightness of the material of the pencil upon the paper – a lightness that, again, makes it almost, but not quite, nothing – is correlated with thought itself, which thereby finds itself transported and registered on the paper before, as Hejduk puts it, ‘total concretion’. Here we are close to the cloud once more, and specifically to its spectral equivocality and resistance to being definitively located or contained within representational forms, insofar as the precondition for its appearance turns out to be its simultaneous (virtual) absence – in this case the lightness of a drawing produced by a pencil that ‘hardly touched the surface of the paper’. Thus too Hejduk’s reference to the X-ray. For if photography has been claimed to be a spectralising technology,18 how much more so is its offspring the X-ray, which works by lightening and absenting matter, dissolving solid fleshiness into cloud or ‘a spectral haze or plasma’.19 It may be happenstance that Hejduk – in his pedagogical role as professor of architecture (and, from 1975, also Dean) at the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York – was a teacher and colleague of three other architects to whom we must refer. The first, Daniel Libeskind, can be passed over quickly in this instance, simply noting his comment: ‘What I tried to do with the problem of architecture . . . was to disengage it from its position on earth . . . to send it to its stellar source’,20 and the ‘cloud prop’ of his competition-winning City Edge project for Berlin in 1987. The other architects, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, who practise together as Diller + Scofidio (and latterly as Diller, Scofidio + Renfro), to require more attention here, as they are the producers of the most literal and celebrated of contemporary architectural clouds. I am referring, of course, to their Blur building, an exhibition pavilion constructed for Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchˆatel, beside the town of Yverdon-les-Bains, in Switzerland. 113

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Figure 7.3. Diller + Scofidio, Blur, Lake Neuchˆatel, Swiss Expo 2002 (courtesy of the architects).

Originating with an invitation to collaboratively participate in a competition project for Swiss Expo 2001, Diller + Scofidio first worked – and were entrusted with what was called ‘immaterial design’ – as part of a team called Extasia, on what was conceived as a new media landscape. The overarching theme of the Expo was to be ‘Swissness’, and Extasia’s ‘assigned theme’ was ‘sensuality and sexuality’.21 At first, it seems, the project was imagined as a void that would be made in the lake itself, and be called the ‘Waterhole Restaurant’. In the event the Expo was deferred for a year, and Diller + Scofidio’s pavilion emerged as a separate project. Variously described as ‘pure atmosphere’ and ‘the making of nothing’ – the title of a book documenting the work22 – the project was specifically envisioned as an anti-spectacle, a refusal of the demand for visual clarity and the scintillating display of commodities normally associated with exhibitionary pavilions. The building would take the form of a cloud hovering over the lake, a ‘fog mass’,23 a piece of architecture made, according to the architects, out of nothing but the ‘site itself: water’.24 One of the project descriptions put it like this: Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical ‘white out’ and ‘white noise’ of pulsing nozzles. Contrary to

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nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself.25

Now it seems possible to claim this as part of a more general equation that links humidity and visual definition. As Paul Carter has pointed out, a precondition of legibility tends to be that things are dried out, so that – to take one example – ink’s temporary flow occurs upon an arid surface that guarantees the future shape of the dried character. To expose a document to humidity is to place in hazard its stability – a stability won through dryness – by exposing it to the warp and wrack of its material substrate. Under the encouragement of the humid, whose very emblem could be the cloud, things lose their linearity, contour and shape: they seep, blot and blur. As Paul Carter puts it:

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immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is

the humid . . . is what causes lines to spread, to get back in touch with the ‘interiorness’ of the world. The humid usefully resists the drive toward ‘legibility’, producing instead a class of marks where writing and drawing discover their common ground. As matter writing back, the humid is the site of movement traces normally overlooked.26

The architects’ own descriptions of the project consistently characterise Blur through claims of what it excludes, rather than what it incorporates, these claims culminating in the statement that it is the ‘making of nothing’. Described as a ‘massless and elastic medium in which time is suspended and orientation is lost’27 (no mass, no time, no direction), and again as ‘spaceless, formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless’,28 one is encouraged to suspect that cloud approximates the propertyless ‘thing’ which Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida sought during their ill-fated collaboration on the design of a garden related to Derrida’s commentary on the Platonic chora (for the Parc de la Villette in Paris)29 – especially when one recalls the momentary flickering and dissolution of aleamorphic forms that have historically been glimpsed in clouds, whose art-historical aspects have been studied by Ernst Gombrich, James Elkins and others.30 It is tempting, then, to see Blur as representing an overcoming of ‘construction’ by a non-hylomorphic ‘atmospherics’. In a richly suggestive essay on the architecture of atmosphere, Mark Wigley has written that atmosphere ‘is precisely that which escapes 115

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analysis. . . . Atmosphere may be the core of architecture but it is a core that cannot simply be addressed or controlled.’31 There is much to this, and yet one of the things that is striking about Blur is the huge technological sophistication and the hyper-hylomorphic control of material upon which the vapour cloud is predicated, and indeed how effectively – as a melding of the meanings of atmosphere as gaseous envelope and atmosphere as experiential ambience – it was orchestrated. ‘We were determined to defy nature’, commented Ricardo Scofidio. Blur ‘was like a magic trick. A great effect that took a lot of artifice.’32 The hidden support of the project was a steel tensegrity structure anchored into the lake bed, which was armed with 31,500 nozzles through which water, pumped from the lake and filtered, was fed at high pressure and vaporised. During the design process, some largescale fog tests were carried out, and considerable sophistication and ingenuity had to be deployed in fine-tuning the technique to produce the desired effect (irregular nozzle concentrations, for example). To maintain the cloud within defined limits – to stop it blowing away, dissolving, etc. – the whole water-delivery apparatus was controlled via a ‘smart weather’ system that monitored the broader environmental condition (temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, etc.) and regulated the rate of feed to the nozzles accordingly. This pumping of stuff into a zone could be described, I suppose, as a technology of ‘inflation’ used – paradoxically – in the absence of any building envelope. And at the same time, this technology of inflation was producing what we could call a sort of ‘air-conditioning’. Such a point, it seems to me, opens Blur onto a different kind of cultural history than that within which it is usually situated, and suggests another, perhaps more critical, way of thinking about the project. At the invitation of the architects, Hubert Damisch himself visited the project, and subsequently wrote a commentary on it. In this he suggested that Blur had ‘something to do with the idea of an inhabitable place, a place where it would be good to breathe, and to breathe differently, by inhaling a different air’. Blur had, he said, a ‘kind of “pneumatic” beauty’ (where pneuma is both breath and spirit).33 There is a euphoric aspect to Damisch’s discourse here, and I want to hold out for comparison an earlier architectural project, which is also euphoric and about an inhabitable place and breathing, which will return us very directly to the experiments with pneumatic structures

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at which we glanced before. The project I have in mind is Reyner Banham and Franc¸ois Dallegret’s Environment Bubble, from their 1965 article, ‘A Home is Not a House’, published in Art in America.34 What is interesting here in terms of the comparison with Blur is that, analogously, the ‘stuff’ of the site – air – is drawn in, filtered, and then pumped out by the internal air-conditioning system, with the resultant internal pressure then inflating the dome. It is as if the project develops an internal environmental cloud that takes the form precisely of airconditioning, and which is consolidated and restrained by virtue of the skin – a skin which, in the Diller + Scofidio project, disappears to leave a visible environmentally conditioned zone that is locationally stabilised not just by the steel structure with its array of nozzles, but by the computerised monitoring system too.

Environmental Commodification Damisch’s euphoric response to Blur was by no means unique, and in this regard it is interesting to note shifts in the architects’ own accounts as the project developed. In 2000, they presented it in terms of an integrated media installation entitled Blur/Babble, in which visitors would be supplied with so-called ‘braincoats’, electronically equipped raincoats, enabling fragments of conversation to be detached, jumbled, resequenced and relayed to visitors, thus, as they put it, supersensitising hearing and ‘producing an architecture of atmosphere in which the spectacular is traded for the oracular’.35 The Babble media installation was in the end shelved due to loss of sponsorship, but the paranoid sense of being tracked by the building – an explicit aim of the project at this point – is very different in flavour to the description we find when the completed project was published in the architectural journal Lotus. Here, the visitor’s ascent to the ‘Angel Deck’ at the summit of the structure is likened to ‘piercing a cloud layer while in flight to the blue sky’.36 The euphoric response might, then, make us suspect that we are indeed rather closer to the spectacle here than previously suggested. As Damisch noted, Blur did not fit into the tradition of expositionary pavilions displaying the objects of mercantile production. Yet it certainly still sold something, for located within it was a ‘water bar’ stocked with bottled waters from around the world. Which is to say – I think without stretching things too far – that what was being sold was an 117

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idea of purity. Damisch seems to say as much when he comments that, at the bar, ‘one could take the waters once more, this time as mineral water, still or sparkling, everything playing on the juncture of the two elements of water and air with nothing earthy muddying the waters’.37 There is no doubt that Blur was a remarkable, and properly architectural, achievement: certainly one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking projects realised in recent times. It provided a witty and critical commentary on expositionary architecture and, more widely, visual desire. Presenting itself as an anti-spectacle, it conformed at the same time to the spectacular demand of the exhibition: to be, in short, show-stopping. And what could be more jaw-droppingly extraordinary than the anchoring of a ‘real, live’ cloud just above the lake, like a mass hallucination or a little piece of heaven brought down to earth. The computer simulations that Diller + Scofidio produced indicate that their nebular vision participated in the same kind of iridescent, diaphanous imaginary as that of Coop Himmelb(l)au and Gehry.38 These are magical, transcendent, and rather untroubling clouds. Despite my comments on dust-clouds at the start, it seems that architects are not so much interested in historicising their clouds, and certainly not clouds that are part of the modern history of desolation – whether Ruskin’s ‘storm-cloud of the nineteenth century’,39 the mushroom-cloud of the atom bomb, or others. As such, it may be that, for some, Blur’s achievement is, in fact, the pioneering of a new kind of environmental commodification – a new development in the socio-political history of air-conditioning – which takes the form of a localised air-conditioning of environmentally manipulated zones, no longer encapsulated within building envelopes, secured against a generally degrading environment. As the planetary environment atrophies, this argument would run, so capital will seek to reconstitute it in localised and socially exclusive zones, and an ideology of purity would be part and parcel of this. In this regard, it might be suggested that Blur has some surprising filiations with, for example, buildings such as those produced for another exhibition: Expo ’92 in Seville. There, localised cooling effects were produced by tower constructions that used micronisers to spray a fine water mist. Similarly, Nicholas Grimshaw’s British pavilion used evaporative techniques, such as a water wall that produced a mist, to cool visitors. This may be – perhaps like bottled water – an admirable technology that addresses

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a problem: but it is a problem in which the social can no longer be intelligibly detached from the natural, and it does it in a localised, restricted and even distorted way. I have in mind the entanglement of commercial interests with the problem itself: for example, the indebtedness of the bottled water industry to the contamination – or belief in the contamination – of public water supplies. Notably, this is an industry that has been diversifying in the direction of atmospherics, with companies producing sprays so that one can surround oneself in a personal cloud of purity and breathe well. So, in the end, what do clouds do for architects? Clouds allow them, it seems, to inhabit two very different places at the same time. On one hand, architects can present their work in ways that connect with the favoured terms of our post-modern era, as shifting, provisional, hybrid and dynamic, while, on the other, they can capitalise upon the euphoric weightlessness of clouds and their aura of transcendental, and even divine, purity. As a designer of clouds, one can, rather magically, be a visionary without the burden – and indeed this is the point – of having to weigh down that vision by specifying a content for it. And this, as Frank Gehry said of his commission to build a cloud of glass in Paris, is ‘heavenly’.40 (2007/2008)

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8 Utopia on Ice: The Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome as an Allegory of the Future The Weather of Utopia In the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, media outlets reported that the Chinese government intended to use weather-modification techniques to ensure favourable conditions for the games. Playing on the story’s science-fiction-like strangeness, Western articles tended to locate it as lying somewhere between an amusing manifestation of cultural eccentricity and a much more worrying deployment of a weird and even alien technology, replete with military implications. Such reports show that weather manipulation remains something that is popularly imagined – like thought control, with which it has an obscure relation – as being located within the phantasmagoric domain of the other. Yet it is an idea that is deeply sedimented within the West’s intertwining utopian, military, technological, and sciencefiction imaginaries. It is striking that, in Thomas More’s fable, Utopia is first established in an act of what we would today call geo-engineering, the radical reconstruction of environment by culture, when the isthmus connecting it to the mainland is severed by the legendary founder Utopus.1 As the island was not already one, and had to be made so, Utopia is from the start presented as a project, a society established within environmental conditions that are at least specified, and might even be ‘designed’. And this in turn poses other questions, not least 120

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ones concerning its weather. It is an issue that would weigh ever more on utopian speculation, to the point where we find Le Corbusier in 1933 declaring, ‘But where is Utopia, where the weather is 64.4◦ ?’2 In general terms, this increasing centrality of atmospheric concerns for utopian thought was closely related to the shifting environmental conditions and contexts to which modernisation gave rise and within which it was pursued; but more specifically, it had much to do with the post-Enlightenment social vision of Charles Fourier. As is well known, the architectural fulcrum of Fourier’s social system was the Phalanstery. Home to his associational community tethered together through the bond of ‘passionate attraction’, it was a people’s palace that assumed the form of – in Walter Benjamin’s characterisation – a ‘city of arcades’.3 Importantly, however, it was also a climatological mechanism that took its place within Fourier’s larger providentialist schema, which envisaged the transformation of the global climate through human cultivation.4 This was, in other words, a vast – but divinely ordained – project of planetary air-conditioning. In his treatise The Theory of the Four Movements (1808), Fourier depicted the aurora borealis as a seminal effusion that could not enter into creative conjunction with its southern counterpart until humankind fulfilled the requisite preparations. These involved increasing the global population to 2 billion, and the subsequent cultivation of land as far as 65◦ north. This achievement, Fourier declared, would trigger the emergence of the Northern Crown, a fluidal ring, ignited through contact with the sun, which would pass light and heat to the earth and melt the northern ice. With new land thus released for cultivation, the destined human population of 3 billion could be fully realised within a newly equalised and temperate global climate.5 (In a ‘Land of Cockaigne’-like touch, Fourier claimed that grapes would be grown in St Petersburg, while the boreal fluid would infuse the sea with citric acid, giving it the pleasant flavour of lemonade).6 All restrictions having been removed, the epoch of the Earth’s harmonic creations could then, at last, begin. Commenting on Fourier’s followers in pre-Civil War America, William B. Meyer notes that they ‘made “earth subduing” one of their goals. . . . They looked forward to the transformation of the planet, to the removal of “those excesses of climate which make a scourge of so large a part of its surface”, to the eradication of “the ices of the poles, and the fatal heats and miasmas of the tropics”.’7 It was a theme that

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would be taken up in science-fiction novels at the turn of the century, such as A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), written by the hotel founder, property tycoon and inventor John Jacob Astor IV. Set in 2088, the book envisages various weather-control technologies, including rain production induced by atmospheric explosions and so-called ‘aeriducts’ – tubes through which moist air is sucked up before being discharged to cool and condense at a great height. Most interesting for us, however, is its idea of eradicating seasonal extremes and stabilising temperature within given latitudes by straightening the global axis, a feat that would be achieved through moving ballast in the form of water between the poles. Too much even for 2088, this had not yet been accomplished, although an association dedicated to the project – the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company – had been formed. Ironically, the ice that Astor’s protagonists battle was to be their author’s nemesis, for he was to become the richest fatality in the Titanic disaster. Clearly, axis realignment was in the air at the time, for Astor’s scenario received a twist five years later in Jules Verne’s The Purchase of the North Pole (1899), in which a group of American investors gains rights to mine the area’s mineral deposits, which would entail melting the ice. Although they present this as a prodigious and benevolent act of climatic engineering, public opinion turns against them when it is revealed that they were artillerymen during the Civil War and that they plan to reorientate the world’s axis through the recoil of the world’s largest cannon, which they propose to construct and fire.

Weather as Weapon Utopian climatology is, of course, only part of a much longer history of weather control. Securing beneficent rainfall is one of the most familiar objectives of archaic magic and ritual practices, in which the weather is grasped through its emblems and homologues. Such was the ‘serpent ritual’ of the Pueblo Indians – subject of a celebrated lecture by the art historian Aby Warburg – in which the lightning of the thunderstorm was induced through the manipulation of its symbolic counterpart, the snake. Perhaps also, weather supplies us with our most fundamental idea of weaponry, or at least that of the weapon in its mythic, godlike form – the weapon that is instantaneous and kills at a distance (which is close to the idea of being able to kill another by willing it) through 122

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some kind of discharge. All those flashing spears of the epics carry implications of lightning, as does, even more explicitly, the rifle’s thunderous report. In Western narratives of contact with ‘primitive peoples’, such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), it is the ability to use a gun – to will death across distances, to instantaneously kill with thunder – that marks its possessor as divine in the eyes of the subalterns.8 It is, however, in Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World . . . by Lemuel Gulliver (1726), a book in which utopian, scientific, satirical, and travel literatures coalesce into something very much like science fiction, that we find the first imaginings of a new kind of meteorological weaponry, one that anticipates the ‘atmoterrorism’ that Peter Sloterdijk has – surely too restrictively – located in the twentieth century.9 The relevant section is the journey to the levitating island of Laputa, an enormous, flying saucer-like landmass that dominates the unfortunate kingdom beneath it by, among other measures, a form of bellicose weather control, whereby the island hovers above the land underneath, modifying its climate by depriving it of sunlight and rainfall, and thus subjecting its inhabitants to drought and famine. While the utilisation of gas in World War I brought a new focus on battlefield climatology, it was in the immediate aftermath of World War II that speculation and research on the weaponisation of weather escalated. At the end of 1945, the Princeton University mathematician and game-theorist John von Neumann convened a meeting of leading scientists, who concluded that, with new climate-modelling techniques, intentional modification of the weather might be possible, and that this could have a major impact in another war – through, for example, forcing the collapse of Soviet food supplies by creating drought.10 The military potential of weather modification would find a powerful advocate in Irving Langmuir, whose assistant at the General Electric Corporation’s research and development laboratory, Vincent Schaefer, had in 1946 discovered the principle of cloud-seeding. Although research projects proliferated in the following decades, public consciousness of the issue remained low until the early 1970s, when the news broke that the USA had used weather-modification techniques in Vietnam. A strong domestic backlash followed, with the events the affair set in motion leading eventually to the framing of the UN Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (known as ENMOD),

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which entered into force on 5 October 1978 (though it did not come into effect for the USA until 17 January 1980).11 But it is clear, not least from the 1996 report, ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’ – one ‘chapter’ of the multivolume study Air Force 2025 that was commissioned by the US Air Force chief of staff to speculate on the future of air war over a 30-year period – that the story does not end there. Significantly, the report is concerned not just to set out what might be technologically possible, but also to project political scenarios in which it could become permissible, thus placing the question of international treaties and public opinion to the fore. What is striking here is that our contemporary environmental crisis is imagined not as a constraint, but rather as a lubricant of acceptability, whereby civil concerns drive cultural and technological developments to the advantage of the military. In the narrative constructed by the authors, the demands of globalised business lead to the ever-greater refinement of weather-observation and prediction mechanisms. Against this background, the world experiences what are increasingly intolerable stresses resulting from population pressures and environmental degradation (shortages of water, food, etc.). As the report puts it: ‘Massive life and property losses associated with natural weather disasters become increasingly unacceptable. These pressures prompt governments and/or other organizations who are able to capitalize on the technological advances of the previous 20 years to pursue a highly accurate and reasonably precise weather-modification capability.’12 With states veritably forced by public opinion in the direction of weather modification, old treaties are revised and less prohibitive new agreements put in their place, opening the door to military opportunity.

Air-Conditioning, Commodity, and Freedom Implicit in the phrase ‘owning the weather’, and explicit in the business-based scenarios presented in the Air Force report, is not just mastery over the weather but also its commodification, a process that we can bring sharply into focus by turning to development strategies over the past decade in Dubai. In his celebrated ‘retroactive manifesto for Manhattan’, Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas characterised the early twentieth-century amusement parks of Coney Island as proleptic testing-grounds for Manhattan and its ‘culture of congestion’, and 124

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it might be supposed that with the Dubai developments we have been witness to the emergence of a similar dreamscape, although one that this time anticipates a new atmospheric urbanism of the future. Interestingly – perhaps bizarrely – pre-credit crunch Dubai seemed to channel aspects of the visual culture of the USA that effloresced in the period before the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which it absorbed and retooled for the era of post-modern global finance. In the Palms developments, the state developer Nakheel took up land art, morphing Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970) into a brand-image visible to satellites. In more specifically atmospheric terms, there was the Dubai Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome, which, although eventually put on hold, was to contain an artificial mountain range and a revolving ski slope together with other – as the official description put it – ‘Arctic experiences’ (which apparently would have included polar bears).13 The ski-dome in particular clearly expressed the development idea of an array of different encapsulated ‘experiences’ as conveyed in the advertising material for the vast Dubailand project, of which it was to be a part, but also that of weather control and escalated climate differential – the conceit of a ski-dome in the desert – as a commodity attraction in its own right. The ski-dome, although structurally dissimilar, is an afterimage of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesics, with all their complex connotations of autonomy, encapsulation, and world imagery – expressed most potently in the floating globes of Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Cloud Nine project (ca. 1960). Now, a recurring notion within the political history of air-conditioning, in which Fuller’s work participates, is that of

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Figure 8.1. Interior visualisation of the Dubai Sunny Mountain SkiDome (http://www.skidubai.com/dubai/mountain-ski-dome/ [Accessed 15 August 2011]).

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weather control as a remedial activity. It is almost as if weather – at least in the imagination of northern white males – is alienation, or at least is a fundamental expression thereof, and that to make reparation, to get back together again, to melt the ice in whatever way we mean (with one another, with nature, with ourselves), we need to get the climate right. From this point of view, air-conditioning in its utopic form might be said to aim at a climatological erotics. Air-conditioning becomes necessary once we are outside paradise (le temps, weather and time, beginning together); but it is also the technological remediation whose promise is either to get us back there again or to deliver it to us for the first time. There is something of this in the ice-cap-melter Fourier’s otherwise unreasonable emphasis on the glasshouse-like street galleries of his Phalansteries, but also in Le Corbusier’s equally obsessive dream of an ideal internal temperature that should be globally observed (which I suppose, in its aim of universal climatic standardisation, is a kind of ice-cap melting by proxy).14 Equally, it is there in Fuller’s famous encapsulation projects, such as the Manhattan dome, which were intended to produce interiors with, in his words, a ‘Garden of Eden’ climate.15 And it comes as no surprise that technologically facilitated returns to Eden are at the same time returns to Mother, as unmistakably expressed in Reyner Banham and Franc¸ois Dallegret’s Environment Bubble of 1965 – an inflatable amniotic sac in which the hum of Mother’s body is replaced by that of the sustaining airconditioning unit whose output keeps the whole pneumatic structure inflated. It is in this last project that we glimpse an important point, which is that climatic remediation inevitably involves ideas of a ‘making free’ of air. On the surface, it seems a counter-intuitive argument to make – that Banham and Dallegret’s project might in some way be invested in a discourse of air and freedom, of air as the epitome and emblem of freedom, given that it is clearly predicated on atmospheric engineering and manipulation. So what am I suggesting? There is a very specific kind of anxiety associated with the subjugation of air, an anxiety especially evident in responses to instances when air is commodified, privatised or militarised. At the core of this lies air’s enduring role as a cipher for radical freedom, such that the poignancy of its incremental but ever-increasing submission to technology arises from the sense of a final historical closing-off of what it has stood for – that is, of an externality beyond instrumental manipulation. As Adorno

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Figure 8.2. Promotional image for Dubailand.

Figure 8.3. Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao’s Cloud Nine project (ca. 1960) (courtesy of The Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller). 127

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Figure 8.4. Franc¸ois Dallegret, ‘The Environment-Bubble: Transparent plastic bubble dome inflated by air-conditioning output’ (1965), from Reyner Banham, ‘A Home Is Not a House’, Art in America 53, April (1965) (courtesy of the artist).

might have put it, in the unease we feel at air’s subjugation, there endures a protest against domination, no matter how mythically grounded our belief in air’s freedom is. Moreover, perhaps what contributes most importantly to this felt significance of air’s enchainment is its status as the pre-condition for terrestrial life: something that, in being free, is also freely given, and, by extension, a commons that through its nature seemed hitherto unencloseable, unable to be stockpiled, and indeed beyond all object-relations. This anterior availability of air is stressed in Luce Irigaray’s well-known reflections on Heidegger’s ‘forgetting of air’. Here Heidegger’s ‘clearing of the opening’ in which thought 128

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When was a deficient supply of air ever known, except through the agency of man himself, in his folly and ignorance? Providence has furnished us with an ocean of it, fifty miles deep, and placed us at the bottom, where its pressure enables us to obtain it in exhaustless profusion, and perfect purity.

He goes on: ‘When a child is hungry, its wailing must be heard by its mother’, but ‘as to the air, without a care or a thought, without labor or sensation, the little animal instinctively expands its chest, and lives.’18 The implication here is clear. Our relationship with the air, in its freegivenness, is the point at which something of the paradisiacal condition of the prenatal seems to endure, even after birth: that is to say, an immediate and freely given plenitude, in which conditions of lack and excess are unknown, and thus the necessity for such ‘external’ forms of communication as the infant’s cry of discomfort has not yet arisen. Banham and Dallegret’s project seems to take up this understanding and rhetorically converge air, air’s meaning – or at least the meaning of air’s freedom – as prenatality, and the fantasy of a technologically enabled return to that state. The paradox of engineered freedom is filtered through the underlying logic of technological remediation. It is the same with Le Corbusier, who could present his fanatically engineered ‘exact air’ as ‘good, true God-given air’, as opposed to the ‘devil’s air’ of cities.19

UTOPIA ON ICE: THE SUNNY MOUNTAIN SKI-DOME AS AN ALLEGORY OF THE FUTURE

begins is characterised not as an emptiness, but as ‘this field, or open space, where air would still give itself’.16 Irigaray writes: ‘No other element is to this extent opening itself – to one who would not have forgotten its nature there is no need for it to open or re-open. No other element is as light, as free, and as much in the “fundamental” mode of a permanent, available, “there is”.’17 It is suggestive to articulate these reflections with those of the American sanitary reformer John H. Griscom, who, in his 1848 book, The Uses and Abuses of Air, asked:

Consuming Climate We are now in a place from which we can circle back to Dubai’s skidome, in order to examine its value as an allegory of the future – a reading that would develop along several interwoven threads. The techno-utopian ideal that I have been discussing is the reconciliation, 129

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within a renovated atmosphere, of individuals with one another and with their environment. The ski-dome, in its reperformance of the symbols associated with this utopian tradition, ironically reverses the practices and metaphorics of thawing, in which it was so heavily invested. In so doing, the dome presents us with a depiction of the freezing over of those aspirations, of ‘utopia on ice’. Part and parcel of this is the ski-dome’s divisive spectacularisation of climate differential, which visibly dramatises the question of who will be cool and who will be hot in the new global dispensation: that is to say, the difference between ‘cool consumption’ (which is, increasingly, the consumption of coldness) and the ever ‘hotter’ labour (or labour in the heat) upon which the former is predicated. In the extreme climatic juxtaposition that it effects, the ski-dome allegorises the interiorisation of ‘nature’ characteristic of the anthropocene, at least if by that we mean ‘pristine nature’ (and for nature to be nature as it is conventionally differentiated from culture, it must always be pristine: that is, nature always appears to be most itself when it is ‘untouched’). Through the paradoxical logic of technological remediation, the ski-dome reproduces nature as an interior condition – more pure, less polluted, and hence more ‘itself’ than in the world beyond, albeit now as commodity. It is revealing that the advertising for the ski-dome promises ‘Arctic experiences’, and not those offered by a resort like St Moritz or Chamonix. Who, after all, skis in the Arctic? The reason for this displacement is that, ideologically, the development is an interiorisation of a climatic zone as much as it is a resort – one that, in a broader sense, becomes emblematic of the future interiorisation of nature itself insofar as the Arctic stands for it in its most pure, untouched, virginal and whitest state. Moreover, it is striking how the figure of a ski-dome in the desert uncannily returns us to the arid landscapes in which the encapsulative climatic utopias of the 1960s and 1970s were characteristically set. At the time, this iconographic motif intersected with both Cold War survivalist anxieties and fantasies of interplanetary colonisation: the desert might be that of a post-nuclear earth or of an alien planet, or even a combination of the two – a post-apocalyptic earth become alien. The project of implanting a piece of the Arctic in the desert reproduces this gesture, but recodes it in terms of contemporary ecological catastrophe and prospective environmental collapse. The cynicism of the project is the direct and instrumental connection between the refrigerated

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interior as the space of consumption and the decay of the exterior environment as the space of labour. Is it too much to claim that in the fundamental conceit of this project – that is, hyperbolic climatic differential as commodity – this destruction is incorporated as a pleasure principle? But perhaps what the ski-dome ultimately points to, is a shift in the ‘human park’ that is the aim of air-conditioning, away from the utopic and singular Garden of Eden (a communal space of dedifferentiation) and toward divergent spaces of climatic simulation and consumption. This, in turn, suggests a genealogy of visual form that might have as much to do with the history of the zoological diorama or ‘habitat group’ as anything else. The tendency has been to see the Dubai developments as radically unresponsive to present environmental realities, and one cannot help but agree with this. However, one must also admit that they represent a commodity form whose logic is absolutely attuned to them, capitalising on the anxieties and desires that attend life on an atrophying planet. As part of Dubai’s development strategy, the ski-dome gives us an intimation of what a new atmosphericallybased statecraft would look like, one calibrated to emergent conditions of scarcity within a planetary environment and economy. (2011)

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9 On Google Earth Giving You the World An acquaintance who works in one of the ministries of the French government tells me of a strategy that he has developed to relieve the tedium of his job. Upon the desk in his office there are two computers to which, when he arrives each morning, he logs on. The first is reserved for ministerial business, but on the second he launches Google Earth, setting its virtual globe spinning far below him. Thus, while one machine presents him with the necessities of the day, glancing at the other offers something of an imaginative release from them, allowing him to fantasise that he is flying through the stratosphere, beyond the preoccupations, irritations and entanglements of close-to-the-ground life. If with Google Earth one can ‘swoop in like Superman from outer space’, to quote the authors of Google: The Missing Manual, then my friend’s solution is one that permits him to be simultaneously the superhero and his workaday alter ego, Clark Kent (and this is something that even Superman himself could not achieve), flying over the planet while, rather more prosaically, continuing to fulfil his bureaucratic obligations below.1 One of the curiosities of researching Google Earth is that it can quickly come to seem as if everyone has – like my friend – a Google Earth story to tell. Thus, while it is usually the case that, at the outset of an essay like this, one has to spend some time introducing the material to be discussed and expanding upon its less familiar aspects, it is symptomatic – and indeed is a key point of interest – that with Google one does not. There still may be some people on the planet with digital 132

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ON GOOGLE EARTH Figure 9.1. Internet map, 23 November 2003. The Opte Project (http://www.opte.org/maps [Accessed 23 March 2010]).

access who do not recognise the name, but they are getting fewer every day.2 Google, with its extraordinarily dominant internet search engine, emblematises globalisation. Somewhat like those obscure, singular, yet infinitely complex institutions that lie below the surface of sciencefiction environments – institutions that are, like God, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, and are consequently characterised by the absence of any differentiating noun, so they become known as just ‘The Corporation’ or the like – Google can seem pretty much omnipresent, or at least well on the way to getting there. If totality was one of the dreams of early modernity – Faustian total knowledge, total control, total empowerment – post-modernity has reclaimed it with a vengeance, yet in a new way, the point now being not the reduction of difference through negation and the accumulation of knowledge 133

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within some promethean individual, but, conversely, the ability to navigate (search) difference by managing the interface between things, as enabled by the prosthetic computational power of the processor. So, the pyramidal or perhaps helical structures of earlier imaginaries of escalating knowledge tend to give way to a more lateral, archipelagolike distribution in which slow historical ascent becomes superseded by the instantaneity of the network connection – a formation perhaps best indicated by the network pictures or internet maps with which we have become familiar.3 Thus Google’s stated objective to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’;4 and thus, too, the title of a 2006 review essay on Google by John Lanchester, ‘The Global Id’, which thereby characterised the search engine as a kind of collective planetary unconscious.5 Certainly, what strikes one about Google is the constant insistence on the colossal, the gargantuan and the exorbitant in its agenda, its technology and its statements. It displays that mixture of the absolute with the seeming negotiation of difference that we tend to describe as holism, which I take to signify a benign encompassing of difference, as opposed to totalism, which is difference’s negation. Famously, the company was named after the googol – the massive number of ten to the power of 100 (apparently the even more expansive name googolplex – ten raised to the power of a googol – was first raised as a possibility).6 The misspelling was by accident, at a stroke draining away some of the (Slavic?) strangeness of the original and endowing the word with a more verb-like quality and a suggestion of the visual; thus ‘ogle’ – www.ogleearth.com becoming the address of one of the major Google Earth blogs – and ‘boggle’. And certainly, wideeyed and slack-jawed astonishment seem the order of the day for this institution that has been ranked as the fastest-growing company in the history of the world. Interestingly, when you make a search on Google, you are not in fact searching the internet itself: the technology is much more Borgesian. Instead, Google makes a copy that is constantly being updated of all the pages on the internet, which are downloaded onto a massive computer cluster that apparently comprises more than 1 million PCs, assembled, networked and optimised by the company itself. The complex is described by the president of Stanford University, himself a Google board member, as ‘the largest computer system in the world . . . I don’t think there is even anything close.’7 Already by 2006, a report estimated that Google had more than 450,000 servers

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distributed across at least 25 global locations and interconnected by a high-capacity fibre-optic network: as it concluded, it is the speed of light that ends up being the fundamental constraint.8 As Google downloads what is in effect the entirety of the internet, it – to quote from John Lanchester’s essay – makes an index of every word on a web page, where it stands in relation to other words, whether or not a word is listed in a title, whether it is listed in a special typeface, how frequently it is listed on the page and so on. . . . There are more than a hundred of these criteria, and Google gives a numeric weight to every one of them, for every searchable term on every one of eight billion web pages. When a query arrives – which it does at the rate of many times every second – Google searches the index for the relevant terms, measures the relevance of the results using all its various metrics . . . , crunches out a single number for each page, and lists them, with the highest score at the top, usually within half a second or so. Even if you didn’t know a thing about computers, you could tell that this involved a truly scary amount of computational power.9

The figures continue to expand and amaze. In his Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, Ken Auletta reports that Google’s index contained 1 trillion web pages in 2008, and that in four hours it could index the equivalent of the complete holdings of the Library of Congress.10 If, as I have already hinted, Google almost uniquely seems capable of simultaneously encompassing the poles of the universal/singular opposition, then one way in which this seems to be manifested is in the extraordinarily intense subjective identification the company and its services inspire. In October 2006 The New York Times ran an article entitled ‘Planet Google Wants You’, which profiled Dan Firger, a law student at New York University and in many ways a typical inhabitant of Planet Google. Six to eight times a day, we are told, his mobile phone rings with text messages from Google reminding him of appointments logged into Google Calendar. He searches the web with Google, talks via Google Talk, emails using Gmail, and so on. ‘I find myself getting sucked down Google’s wormhole’, he remarks. ‘It’s all part of Google’s benign dictatorship of your life.’11 The responses suggest, however, that this ‘benign dictatorship’ is experienced more as an extension, or even a delivery, of the self than as a transaction with another entity. If the 135

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latter is more the mode of experience of Microsoft, computing’s socalled ‘Evil Empire’ and the butt of Google’s ‘Don’t be evil’ slogan (always ‘forcing you to do things their way’, as one complainant puts it), Google – to quote another commentator – ‘literally augments your brain. I don’t have to remember quite a few things now because Google can remember them for me. Google is an additional memory chip.’12 Ultimately, however, the particular genius of Google is that it does not just facilitate the subject’s command of information, but that it assembles and delivers it in such a way as to lead to a radical identification with what is given. Thus, to take one example, The New York Times article closes with a comment by Toni Carreiro, a web designer in California, who enthuses: ‘That’s what Google gives you – “me”.’13 And so we find that, at the same time as Google gives you the world, it also gives you ‘yourself’, an effect not unconnected with the company’s infamous user-profiling techniques and storage of search histories, rationalised as being necessary for increased search efficiency, but also, of course, sophistication in targeted advertising. When Google invested in the human genetics firm 23andMe in 2007, it was interpreted as a logical step in the quest to expand online userprofiling.14 As the British newspaper the Guardian has noted, Google knows more about the United Kingdom’s citizens than does MI5, the state security agency.15 The dream of total knowledge, which is also a kind of total seeing, is an old theme, but care has to be taken here in distinguishing the particular kind of project that Google represents. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Fred Turner has examined how the anti-hierarchical and anti-corporate credos of radical 1960s thought fed into the digital discourses of the 1980s and 1990s. And certainly, the holistic ideology of Google’s founding partners, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, owes more to the pan-earth ethic of California hippiedom of the 1960s and 1970s and the hippie-infused West Coast technoculture in which Page and Brin studied, at PhD level at least, than it does to any Enlightenment project.16 I am thinking here of manifestations such as the Whole Earth Catalog (launched in 1968 in Menlo Park, California, where Google’s founding partners would set up in a garage 30 years later), with its cover picture of the earth from space, which tried to make the ‘wisdom’ of others (other cultures, peoples, races, places, technologies, etc.) available. In this publication we can see a deeply liberal

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counter-culture, whose watchwords were freedom and individual choice, and which – if not exactly consumerist – sought an open access to and participation in the products, techniques and modalities of life of others that was at least a counterpart to that demanded by market capitalism. In the quest for personal development, it seems there was almost nothing that one could not have, as long as it was not seen to compromise the equivalent pursuits of others. ‘We are as gods and might as well get used to it’, the Whole Earth Catalog’s purpose statement declared. In response to the institutional and bureaucratic conditions of formal power structures, the publication aimed, it said, to support the developing ‘realm of intimate, personal power . . . – power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested’.17 So where is Google Earth in all this? We have taken this lengthy excursion before coming back to Google Earth because it allows us to discern the symbolic dimensions of the programme more clearly. Google Earth was released in 2005, and quickly became one of the most remarked upon and – in this era of generalised war and militarisation – contentious, internet developments. But even in advance of the launch of the programme, the name Google Earth seemed highly loaded and symbolically invested. The planet, this earth, when qualified by Google, appears to transform into an informational utopia – or even, in Kevin Kelly’s eschatological phrase, a new ‘Eden of everything’18 – that then exists as the final point on an expanding scale in whose lower reaches those earlier utopias of entertainment and science that were first branded as ‘lands’, and subsequently as ‘worlds’, find their place. The virtual globe that Google Earth presents is surely the symbolic counterpart of the corporation’s mission to make everything available to you: Google gives you the world, and indeed, after the launch of Google Sky, the cosmos as well.19

Google’s World View If, as has been claimed, we are living in the age of the aerial image, then Google Earth is one of the principal phenomena that make it so. Today the aerial view – the image of everywhere – seems to be everywhere, and it seems plausible to claim Google Earth as perhaps the most 137

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prominent manifestation and stimulant of this voracious contemporary appetite for views from above. Relations of all kinds on the ground are increasingly mediated in complex ways from the sky – a situation that Google Earth, through the massive availability of images that it facilitates, has played a key role in bringing about. Much valued for its spectacular and entrancing effects, the aerial view is firmly established as a recurrent feature of popular visual culture, media forms, and touristic installations. When a representative for the London 2012 Olympic Games was interviewed on BBC Radio 4 on 6 November 2007, he was asked by the interviewer about the then still-to-be-unveiled design for the major stadium: his symptomatic response was that at least one thing was certain: ‘It’s a media event, so it will look great from the air.’ Likewise, tourist concentration in the city is now focused on the London Eye, the massive aerial viewing device marketed as ‘The Way the World Sees London’, which in 2005 was voted to be the ultimate world tourist destination.20 At the same time, popular volumes of planetary images proliferate. Often tied to ecological rhetoric – such as Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s The Earth from the Air – in these books scintillating images of the beauty and diversity of the earth’s surface, in extraordinary definition and reproduced with highly saturated colours, achieve a kind of hyper-reality that appears simultaneously abstracted yet highly palpable, and that sublimates both pristine and devastated landscapes alike.21 Against this background, the principal question I want to ask of Google Earth is simply, what does it show us? What, and how, do we see when we engage the programme? Something that seems to me to be of great interest is its graphic interface, how we operate it, and what happens when we do. In particular I am concerned to think about the ways in which we are solicited by the images on the screen, and the kind of imaginative engagement with them – and by extension with the earth itself – that they might be said to prompt. Google’s mass elevation of the eye of the consumer into space carries with it consequences that demand a reconceptualisation of the view from above, one that effectively reverses some of the familiar historical understandings and connotations of aerial vision. Moreover, I am struck by the drift of various developments and trials, in which Google has experimented with ways of more effectively monetising the programme. In an article on the computer game Spore, Stephen Johnson has written of what he calls ‘the long zoom’, which he argues to be the characteristic

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visual paradigm of our time.22 Exemplifying it by, among other things, Charles and Ray Eames’s film Powers of Ten (1977) – a connection that is frequently drawn with respect to the Google Earth interface23 – he stresses its epistemological aspects. The commercial possibilities and evident uses of the ‘long zoom’ in Google Earth, however, suggest another agency, one that is very precisely to do with the establishment of the commodity as the target of the zoom’s spatial collapse. The promise here – at least from the point of view of revenue generation – is of a kind of virtuous circle of mutual targeting whereby Google Earth permits the commodity to target, through advertising, the cybertourist cum satellite-consumer, and then in turn to be geospatially targeted by her. A 2006 advertising campaign for Saturn cars, in which Google worked with a San Francisco-based advertising consultancy, can stand as an example of this. The campaign bundled together various Google products and services ‘like clickable video clips, Google Earth and the geographic finding of computer users’. In an article for The New York Times, Stuart Elliott described how the advertisement worked: Visitors to a variety of web sites in six cities around the country that are home to 22 Saturn dealerships will see what looks like typical banner ads for Aura, a new Saturn midsize sedan. Clicking on an ad. will produce a view of the earth that zooms in on the dealership nearest to the computer user. The doors to the virtual dealership fly open, revealing the general manager who introduces a brief commercial about [the] Aura. After the spot ends, the general manager returns, standing next to an Aura and offering choices that include spinning the car 360 degrees, inspecting its engine, printing a map with directions to the dealership and visiting the websites of Saturn or the dealer.24

What happens, then, when we first launch Google Earth? When the programme opens and the screen image appears, we find ourselves somewhere in space, not exactly deep space – but far enough away to see the entirety of the globe. In earlier versions of the programme the world appeared with the Americas facing us – not an insignificant fact and consistent with the US-centric upload of information that some technical commentators remarked upon in early studies (Google Earth Study: Impacts and Uses for Defence and Security, for example, produced in 2005 by the French Fleximage, a subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company). In his 2007 Google.pedia: The Ultimate 139

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Google Resource, Michael Miller – in what is an instance of ideological misrecognition in its classic sense – makes a bizarre but unironic point regarding this: ‘Anytime you start Google Earth, the view defaults to the extended zoom of planet Earth, focused on the continent of North America. This is a great place to start because you can get just about anyplace you want from here.’25 The interface works through a principle of grasping, which intensifies the sense of the manipulability of the virtual object: through the hand icon that appears one can ‘take hold’ of the earth and spin it, or even invert it, which at first is a strangely disconcerting experience. Note that, at this elevation anyway, we are not moving around the earth; rather we appear to spin the globe in relation to a fixed position that we occupy. The hand cursor is a familiar one, recognisable from other graphics programmes (Acrobat, Photoshop, etc.), but here it gains an extra dimension. We are reminded of the cartographic tradition of miniature globes that we place our hands upon and revolve. The Google Earth interface seems to offer us a digital simulacrum of these, although with a now strikingly literalised planetary image. So where exactly are we located when we open Google Earth? The implication is that we are in fact upon the moon, or at least on the way there. Certainly there is never the registration of any other body, except a generic star pattern, on the graphic interface. More specifically, I think that it might be argued that the Google Earth interface inherits and deploys, as a kind of ‘underlay’, one of the most famous, and popularly recognisable, images of the earth: the so-called ‘Blue Marble’ photograph taken by the Apollo 17 expedition en route to the moon in 1972.26 In his brilliant commentary on images taken during the Apollo missions, Denis Cosgrove has pointed out the motivating and iconic role they played in emerging ecological discourses.27 A key point here is the way in which the image of the planet from space produced a new kind of aerial view, one in which the terrestrial surface no longer filled the photographic frame. The world in the image gained a new sense of fragility when the contours of the planet became visible within its frame. The photographs of a bright earth engirdled by clouds suggested a pristine, jewel-like planetary oasis isolated in the vast barrenness of space, a feeling evoked particularly by the famous ‘Earthrise’ image that was taken from Apollo 8 (1968), with its view of the distant earth rising above the foreground of the inert lunar desert.28 As Stewart

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ON GOOGLE EARTH Figure 9.2. The ‘Blue Marble’, 7 December 1972 (NASA image AS17– 148–22727).

Brand would comment: ‘Nowhere in the solar system is the contrast between a living and a dead planet so conspicuous as on the Moon at Earthrise.’29 Moreover, in their liberation of the globe from all cultural signifiers – borderlines, grids, and cartographic codes – the Apollo photographs seemed to show a unified and perhaps even redeemed world purged of conflict, a planet that could be thought of as a single organism.30 If we accept that the Google Earth interface inherits and in some regard re-performs this image, then in what ways does it differ from it? The Apollo pictures are embedded in a very specific history – that of the Cold War space race and manned, and therefore heroic (as articulated through the iconography of the astronaut), lunar exploration. The pristine singularity of the planet as conveyed by the images was 141

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Figure 9.3. Descending over North America in Google Earth, 2 February 2007.

predicated upon the singularity of the photographic image-capture event itself, the instantaneous and complete recording of the scene. Conversely, Google Earth presents us with a non-auratic image in which the whole ‘radiant jewel’ of the Apollo images is fragmented – both spatially and temporally – into a panoply of geospatial data sets produced by orbiting satellites and lower-level image-capture devices, which are then digitally sutured together to form the global image. Even with the programme’s informational layers switched off we can be under no illusion that this is any kind of ‘natural’ image. With its evidently constructed patchwork, the visual rhetoric of the globe no longer enunciates the ‘wholeness of the object’ but rather the ‘wholeness of its searchability’, for everything that retards vision tends to be drained away. Not only do clouds – ‘magical’ in the Apollo 17 image but obscurantist for Google Earth (although they do remain in the programme’s screen icon, which is a kind of ‘blue marble’ logo) – disperse, but also the world ceases to have a dark side and instead we have an entirely illuminated globe. On Google Earth the darkness of night never falls.31 This is not a matter of stopping the sun in the sky, but rather of distributing and refracting its agency through the multiple 142

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orbiting devices that supply the image data from which the virtual globe is pieced together. This image of a mechanically encircled earth carries none of the sense of specular oscillation provoked by the Apollo images. For crucial to their cultural reception was the spectator’s knowledge of what lay outside their frame – and, indeed behind the camera. The sense of the fragility of the planet was echoed and reinforced by the precariousness and exposure of the body of its representative, the astronaut who took the photograph. Knowledge of the provisional and contingent sustenance of this little piece of the earth, adrift from the biosphere and looking back at it, deeply intensified the spatial vertigo of these images and its implications. One powerful effect of the Apollo images was to prompt reflection on the interrelationship between, and interconnectedness of, the planet’s inhabitants. The pictorial registration of the earth isolated in the vastness of space suddenly made it seem small, and relations on it necessarily close. A similar insistence on a new sense of proximity is evident in many commentaries on not just Google Earth, but the Google phenomenon more generally. Randall Stross, for example, writes that ‘Google has made the earth seem like a single cozy place, and titles the chapter of his book that discusses Google Earth, ‘Small Planet, After All’.32 Inasmuch as we accept this, then Google Earth – in its construction of a world of always-available proximity, a global totality that is always to hand – appears to be an intensification of the ‘one-world effect’ of the earlier images of the earth from space. It would be wrong to discount this, and I have heard aid workers, earthobservation scientists and geographers speak optimistically, inevitably in connection with disaster situations, of the possibilities of the kind of global immediacy, the overcoming of distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, that Google Earth seems to facilitate. Yet at the same time this raises all kinds of questions, not least those that issue from the gap that opens between the apparent omnipresence available to the Google Earth user and the specific limits of her vicarious experience as constructed by the programme: at the very least, it alerts us to the idea that the sense of ‘global cosiness’ is likely to be less an effect of the programme per se than a relationship with it – one highly dependent on the user’s social, political, economic and geographic situation outside the digital construction. Equally, the presumption that Google Earth constructs closeness and cosiness disregards its more uncanny aspects – the degree to which

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the sutured virtual globe transforms the world into a ‘strange planet’ rather than a ‘small planet’. Certainly one has the impression that, postGoogle Earth, the proper realm of the alien is no longer outer space but rather the digital surface of the planet, or else its newly hollow interior, the entrance to which many internet images captured from Google Earth and posted online claim to have found. On the digital surfaces of Google’s planet, strange and uncanny phenomena take shape that are eagerly reported and tracked in various blogs. Peculiar formations are seen to emerge, which beckon alien craft or physiognomically stare back into space, and therefore also at the viewer. At the same time the apparatus of more earthly plots, plans and conspiracies show up in various ways, such as the notorious ‘black helicopters’ (for whose detection on Google Earth The Register ran a tongue-in-cheek competition33 ) or the so-called ‘Area 51’ military base in Nevada, on which so much speculation has alighted.34 Even as it builds on what the images show, conspiracy theory profits from the idea of the constitutive manipulability of the digital image, from the consequent uncertainty over its status, and from what might be described as the question of the ‘politics of resolution’ that Google Earth brings to the fore.

The Politics of Resolution Since its release, much has been made of the national security issues that attend Google Earth, and the company’s response has always been that its global image is constructed of data sets that are already available within the public domain. The responses have certainly been interesting: among others, complaints have been registered from, for example, South Korea, India, Taiwan (mis-named as a ‘province’ of China) and the city of Liverpool in England (because images of the city were not being updated quickly enough to show the results of its ongoing regeneration programme – too much still looked like a building-site, or had still to begin).35 In January 2007, the Daily Telegraph, reported that Bahrain had blocked all access to Google Earth after opposition groups had used it to scrutinise royal palaces and their grounds, and had consequently calculated that ‘the ruling AlKhalifa family owns about 80 per cent of the entire country’.36 The United Kingdom also registered complaints, and as a consequence, again according to the Daily Telegraph, British military bases in Iraq were ‘blotted out’. So too were the Trident nuclear submarine pens in 144

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Faslane and the intelligence centre, GCHQ, in Cheltenham. According to its research, the paper continued, ‘the entire aerial footage of Hereford, home to the SAS, has been fuzzed out’.37 This inevitably suggests that Google Earth might present us with a new kind of political map, one structured according to a different logic to those coloured political cartographies, organised by the vectors of national boundaries, with which we are all familiar. Instead, with Google Earth, the implication is that we have a politics of resolution, or definition, of the image – a new popular political map structured through image resolutions and the upload periodicity of data sets. US government legislation from the 1990s, for example, prohibits satelliteimaging companies licensed in the USA from releasing imagery of Israeli territory above a certain (low) resolution, unless it is already commercially available elsewhere. However, given the rapid international spread of imaging companies and technological developments, this is a restriction that has become increasingly ineffective.38 The more general point to be made here is that censorship, concealment, camouflage – whatever one wants to call it – is not immediately or necessarily legible, and so tends to be rather different from the large white spaces of earlier maps, which clearly signal that something is missing or has been excised. With the digital image, the effect is more of a stirring up or a fluctuation in the digital field – not a tear or a rent within it, or a blot or crossing-out on top of it. Yet another, but related, way of understanding the resolution differentials on Google Earth is as a map of (predominantly Western) economic and political interests – which is to say, those of the customers of the commercial imaging companies from which Google derives its data sets. Areas that appear in great detail with a fast refresh rate are typically those with high real-estate value. Disaster areas, conflict zones or places where state intelligence has been directed can also abruptly emerge with startling detail. Of an area on the PakistanAfghanistan border that ‘suddenly became as detailed as the images of Manhattan’ in March 2007, Wired magazine reported: Turns out, Google gets its images from many of the same satellite companies – DigitalGlobe, TerraMetrics, and others – that provide reconnaissance to US intelligence agencies. And when the CIA requests close-ups of the area around Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Google Earth reaps the benefits (although usually six to 18 months later). This is

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also why remote parts of Asia went hi-res after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 and the Kashmir earthquake in 2005.39

At the same time, given that high image resolution has tended to intersect with the key locations of the ‘digital first world’, it comes as no surprise that a certain bravado can come to be attached to image definition in relation to national territories: more than once I have come across the phrase ‘third world lo-res’, which implies that being first world may come to mean not just having air-conditioned offices and a motorway network, but also having hyper-clear territorial images on Google Earth.

Terrestrial Mediatisation And finally, one of the consequences of the popularisation, coherence and availability of geospatial data that Google Earth facilitates is that the surface of the earth begins to address the sky in a new, intentional way: the terrestrial surface itself becomes manipulated as a media surface, not just virtually on the Google Earth interface, but literally. As the audience of geospatial data is no longer made up of only cartographers, scientists, military strategists and state operatives, but rather – and overwhelmingly – of consumers, how commodities look from the sky, and how they address it, is a new concern. A newspaper reports that tourists, sceptical of the claims and photographs in holiday brochures, now use Google Earth to see the ‘reality’ of the situation (finding out that the hotel is next to a waste dump, or is still under construction, etc.).40 Moreover, the earth’s skin becomes a site for gargantuan advertising landworks addressed to satellites that take up the logic of the ‘mashup’ – the hybridisation of text, diagram and photograph that was pioneered for Google Maps – and transfer it to the terrestrial surface. If the standard narrations of the world-historical effects of digitisation tell of the wearing-away of the real by the virtual, these developments give a reverse instance in which – seemingly perversely – the virtual becomes subject to material realisation. Navigational technologies that display aerial images consequently register these landworks not as an additional informational layer that can be switched off, but as part of the image layer itself. Thus a massive logo of Colonel Sanders appeared beside a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Tenessee, a locator and brand-icon scaled for the era of ‘satnav’.41 In a similar vein, Anders 146

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Albrechtslund reports on a magazine that advertised its hundredth issue by constructing a vast reproduction of its cover in the desert near Las Vegas, declaring that it ‘can be seen from outer space using Google Earth’ and calling it ‘a UFO’s-eye view’.42 The aerial view in its contemporary form becomes less, as it has often been thought of in the past, a detached, dispassionate and privileged way of interpreting the world’s surface than a phenomenon which, by its very presence and new mass availability, produces specific, concrete effects upon it. The most extreme examples of these tendencies, though, are undoubtedly the recent developments in Dubai, which are calculated to address the global real-estate market through the sky. In the vast pictographic constructions of the so-called ‘Palm trilogy’ (the Palm Jumeirah, Palm Jebel Ali, and Palm Deira developments), land art precedents from the late 1960s and early 1970s, which always had a conceptual relationship with the aerial view, are unravelled and recalibrated for the conditions of the globalised post-modern economy. Clearly related to these are publications such as The Middle East from Space (2006), which then naturally takes the form of advertising, displaying the emirate’s planetary-scale branding. The volume is published by Motivate Publishing, in which the UAE Minister of State for Finance is a partner, and under whose imprint the book by the ruler of Dubai – Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rasheed Al Maktoum – titled My Vision: Challenges in the Race for Excellence, appeared the following year.43 From the point of view of Google Earth, though, it is perhaps the development known as The World, which lies adjacent to the Palms, that appears the most suggestively articulated in relation to the new conditions and technologies of global aerial vision. The construction, as is well known, consists of an array of man-made islands, fashioned, in Mike Davis’s words, ‘in the shape of an almost finished puzzle of the world’.44 The rhetorical gesture of its government-owned developer, Nakheel, is a little like that of Google itself: namely to give its – in this case – investors, the world. And perhaps not surprisingly, the next step, as with Google’s launch of Google Sky, turns out to be the cosmos. Or at least that is what was intended before the current financial crisis, when plans for a development around The World, to be called The Universe, were unveiled. In 2008, Nakheel announced the development under the banner, ‘Masterplanners of the Universe’, but the following year it was placed on hold.45 As it stands, the curiosity

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Figure 9.4. Nakheel announces ‘The Universe’ (http://www.nakheel .com/en/news/2008 new era [Accessed 30 March 2010]).

of navigating to The World via the Google Earth interface is of course the reiteration of the global image, the sense of the arrival at a picture of the world that looks back at itself and that is articulated both as a mise en abˆıme and, in its commercial strategy, as a trompe l’oeil for investors in the sky. Furthermore, the puzzle-like arrangement of The World to which Davis refers itself gains a reiterative character, given that it is initially encountered in the data-set patchwork of the virtual globe that serves as the gateway to the other world toward which we zoom, and to which we will descend to find the patches reinstantiated at another scale, although this time resolved into real-estate parcels. (2007/2010)

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10 Transcoded Indexicality Trusting How might we think about the relationship between image and trust today? It is a question that immediately puts us in a very different place to where we would be if we were dealing with image and truth. Whereas the latter would situate us squarely in metaphysics, with image and trust we are involved with something that looks more like a sociology or anthropology of images; that is, we are involved with thinking about structures of belief and forms of cultural investment in images. Image and trust is what image and truth turns into once it has been relativised. Consequently, the question of trust brings the issue of representational modes or forms to the fore and, more specifically, that of how and why we invest more trust in some types of pictures than others. When, in her classic 1977 collection On Photography, Susan Sontag suggested that we would happily forgo even the most fully achieved painted portrait of Shakespeare for a single faded photograph, she was highlighting not just the belief in the verisimilitude of the photograph, but also the commitment to its uncanny consubstantiality with what it pictures.1 As is well known, the specific qualities that the photograph has presented us with (historically, at least), and to some extent the uses to which it has consequently been put, have been theorised in relation to C.S. Peirce’s account of indexical signification. Here the photograph appears as the imprint of the referent – something ‘directly stencilled off the real’, Sontag says, ‘like a footprint or a death mask’ – whose existence and presence at the moment of image-capture it then enduringly witnesses.2 149

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And yet, it is likely that to some my opening question will seem unviable, and even oxymoronic. The question appears to presuppose that some conjunction of image and trust is at least possible today, but is this the case? Is it not more likely that the possibility of trusting images has become entirely dissolved by the rise of digital imaging technologies and the manipulations they enable, as well as the widespread contemporary recognition of the necessarily partial and constructed character of any image? Indeed, some have seen these two developments as inevitably interconnected. William J. Mitchell, for example, writing in relation to photography, has characterised ‘the emergence of digital imaging as a welcome opportunity to expose the aporias in photography’s construction of the visual world, to deconstruct the very ideas of photographic objectivity and closure, and to resist what has become an increasingly sclerotic pictorial tradition.’3 In the 30 years that have passed since the publication of Sontag’s book, then, has not her ‘image world’ been revolutionised by digitisation, resulting in – as Hal Foster puts it – a ‘loosening of old referential ties’? ‘Perhaps’, Foster not entirely unironically goes on to suggest, ‘the development of Photoshop will one day be seen as a worldhistorical event.’4 Certainly there is much to this argument, but it is also important to recognise that its familiar correlate – the presumption that no one trusts images anymore – belies the complexity of the contemporary situation. Today, a generalised scepticism toward images coexists with a deep and intensifying commitment to them that is itself, in part, a reaction to new powerful imaging technologies. What I find especially striking is that digitisation, which seems in one regard to erode trust in the image, is at the same time the precondition for a new intensity of trust that is extended to it, the balance of responses shifting in relation to differing institutional and discursive contexts and the understanding of interests embedded in them. So, images used in commercial situations elicit routine suspicion, while juries convict on ‘visually enhanced’ video evidence, loss-adjustors record car wrecks using digital photography, and patients submit to surgery on the basis of CAT scans. This essay began as a contribution to a seminar series entitled Image and Trust?, and in its first iteration was called ‘The Failure of the Rhetoric of the Image: A Case Study in Trust’. The subject of the ‘case study’ was the presentation given to the United Nations Security Council on 5 February 2003, by former US Secretary of State Colin

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Powell. The background to Powell’s address to the UN is well known: this was to be the denouement of the pre-invasion case for war on Iraq – the moment when it was anticipated the US would unveil evidence of Iraqi duplicity regarding weapons of mass destruction. Powell’s presentation was largely, though not completely, image-based. Images were presented as evidence, and observers were asked to trust them. It is difficult to think of a recent episode in the relations between images and trust when the stakes were, or at least seemed to be, so high.5 We know how events unfolded after this meeting, but my purpose here is not to indict Powell, or the administration he served of misrepresentation. Rather, I want to consider the strategies of presentation whereby images were staged to elicit trust and the complications that ensued. The other part of the title – the failure of the rhetoric of the image – is of course a nod to Roland Barthes’s classic essay in which he characterised the photograph as a ‘message without a code’. Its status as such, as a seemingly ‘innocent’ denotative image, allows the photograph, he argued, to play a persuasive naturalising role in support of ideologically governed connotative meanings that thereby find themselves purified and substantiated (for his purposes, Barthes defined rhetoric as ‘the signifying aspect of ideology’).6 The use of the term failure, then, was intended to register not just Powell’s failure to convince the Security Council of the veracity of his argument, but more particularly the persuasive shortcomings of the images themselves, and the difficulty they found in attaining evidential status. Symptomatically, the aerial surveillance photographs Powell showed, very different in kind from the particular replete and immediate photographic image around which Barthes structured his discussion, were in his presentation often almost literally hidden under annotation – the ‘evidence’, as it were, being covered up by a graphic screen. The key photographs Powell showed were aerial images taken from satellites, and it is upon these that I want to reflect. Recently I visited an exhibition by Ron Mueck – the UK-based Australian sculptor whose hyperreal renderings of human bodies of expanded or diminished size have become well-known – with a philosopher friend who talked about scale in relation to the artworks. One of the things he pointed out was the relationship between scale (specifically large scale) and epistemology: it is difficult to imagine, he suggested, making things smaller in order to get to know them better. In a way, though, this is exactly what aerial imagery does: it is the very epitome of distanced

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vision, limited, perhaps, by ascensional technologies but no longer by the vagaries of topography. The synoptic image conveys relationships between objects, and as such has always represented strategic vision. Today this is mediated through the strange interplay of extreme, extra-terrestrial distance with the relative closeness that contemporary imaging technologies allow.

A Contest of Images One of the curiosities surrounding Powell’s presentation, and in particular his presentation of images, was the hiding of another kind of image in the days leading up to the event. Since 1985, a large tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller, has hung outside the UN Security Council chamber. The tapestry provides a backdrop for the press conferences that normally take place there. It appeared thus on 27 January 2003, when Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, delivered his interim report. Later the same day, it was covered over with a blue curtain and the flags of the Council’s member countries. UN officials suggested that this was to provide a more effective backdrop for TV cameras, but almost everyone else seemed suspicious. Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times, commented that ‘Mr Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children, bulls and horses’, and suggested, ‘Maybe the UN was inspired by John Ashcroft’s throwing a blue cover over the “Spirit of Justice” statue last year, after her naked marble breast hovered over his head during a televised terrorism briefing.’7 But if the latter was a moment of pure deflationary burlesque, the ‘Guernica affair’ presented something more challenging – a dispute over what might be described as the complications of proximity, which seemed structurally to reproduce the disagreement ongoing at the time between the US administration and the weapons inspectors. Powell’s presentation against the ‘background’ (associatively, if not literally) of the covered Guernica emerged as a kind of contest of images in which the detached, dispassionate and cool aerial register of satellite images was intended to displace the famous historical ‘on-the-ground’ depiction of aerial bombardment and the cultural memory, and indeed call to conscience, it evoked. At issue was the anticipated performance of the different images in the specific context of Powell’s presentation, 152

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and the various ways it would be reported. Guernica, an object of suspicion for the advocates of the invasion, was a ‘background’ image that could not be relied upon to remain so, without advancing forward to compromise the televisual message. Mirroring this anxiety over a background image that was too strong, and that consequently had to be effaced, were apparent concerns regarding the performative weakness of the images that would be promoted in the Security Council Chamber, and specifically their persuasive ability to elicit trust. In the days leading up to the presentation, the US administration downplayed expectations that, in their words, a ‘smoking gun’ would be produced, but still there was speculation that there would be what was described as an ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’, after the US ambassador to the UN who dramatically unveiled aerial photographs of Soviet rockets before a live television audience during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. The covering-over of the Guernica tapestry may have hidden the image to those in the interior of the UN building, but it notably had the effect of multiplying it outside, in the form of the reproductions that protestors could be seen waving during Powell’s presentation. Powell begins his talk by referring to the much-discussed UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which had been passed the previous November. He cites the ‘serious consequences’ threatened in the resolution if there was non-compliance with its terms, and argues that ‘no council member present in voting on that day had any allusions [sic] about the nature and intent of the resolution or what serious consequences meant if Iraq did not comply’.8 He then goes on to gloss the material that he will present, describing it as ‘an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior’ that demonstrates that ‘Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort – no effort – to disarm’. The first documentation presented is the recording of an intercepted conversation between, Powell says, an Iraqi colonel and a brigadier general. As it is played, edited and translated passages are projected on a screen. After the tape stops, there follows an extended section in which Powell reprises the material, not so much analysing it as using it to elaborate a series of speculations. This is the pattern throughout the presentation. Sequences of questions hang in the air: ‘Who took the hard drives? Where did they go? What’s being hidden? Why?’ Sometimes material put forward as evidence is interspersed with hypothetical imagery intended to picture what things might look like, which then plays a consolidating role. The speculative drawings, for

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Active Material Tanks

Spray Dryers Filling Machine

Fermentation Control Panel

Figure 10.1. US Department of State, ‘Mobile Production Facilities For Biological Agents’, from Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN, 2003 (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/ 02/20030205-1.html# [Accessed 15 November 2006]).

example, that Powell shows of mobile chemical weapons factories in rail carriages and trucks – ‘diagrammed’, as he puts it, from verbal reports by sources – significantly adopt a low-level aerial point of view. This permits them to be read as a continuation (at a higher resolution) of the satellite photographs that preceded them in the presentation. Something of the photographs’ implications of factual ‘hardness’ and authority thereby comes to be bestowed upon the drawings, which can then in turn, by virtue of the detail they offer, reciprocally act back upon the high-level image register in order to substantiate it. At the start of the presentation, when Powell first introduces aerial photographs – the material that might be expected to provide the firmest evidence – there seem to be anxieties regarding their ability to convince the audience he was addressing. Consequently, he begins with a formulation that implies that persuasive agency is to be located less in the photographic documents themselves (the artefacts that were, after all, being submitted as evidence) than in the way they have been interpreted by experts: 154

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person to interpret, hard for me. The painstaking work of photo analysis takes experts with years and years of experience, poring for hours and hours over light tables. But as I show you these images, I will try to capture and explain what they mean, what they indicate to our imagery specialists.

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Let me say a word about satellite images before I show you a couple. The photos that I am about to show you are sometimes hard for the average

The Evidential Image It is of course entirely expected that photographs should be presented as evidential. In semiotic terms, they are – as I have already noted – commonly considered indexical signs, and there is a long history of their use as evidence in court, as indeed there is of other signs of this type (fingerprints, blood-stains on clothes, the shoe of the accused found in the flower-bed, etc.). Indeed, there is an argument that our very idea of evidence is closely tied to, even grounded upon, indexical signification as the epitome of trustworthy signification. By index, I mean the condition that Peirce describes as being characterised by the linkage of the signifying material to its referent through contiguity, whereby the former is, as Peirce puts it, ‘really affected’ or modified by the latter (as, say, in the case of something receiving the impression of something else by physical contact).9 A good example is the one that Carlo Ginzburg cites in his celebrated essay, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’: the animal hoof-print on the soil at which the hunter, kneeling on the ground, stares.10 The imprint sits in an indexical relationship to the animal and, through his ability to read it, the hunter can tell what kind of animal it is, the direction it travelled, how fast it was going, how long ago it passed, and so on. Perhaps the importance for the question of trust is the index’s binding to – or grounding of the signifier upon – its referent. In their redescription of Peircian semiotics, Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari describe indexes as ‘territorial signs’, which nicely captures this grounding effect.11 The index is Thomas putting his fingers in Christ’s wound (trust overcoming doubt in the process); it is the footprint that Robinson Crusoe sees on the sand; it is the fingerprint, the signature, and the knock on the door. Peirce states that everything that startles us within signification is indexical and I take this to be linked to the strangely strident presence of the absent object within the signifying material of the index.12 The indexicality of the photograph is most literally seen in the photogram, in which an object 155

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sits upon a sensitised surface, leaving its imprint. But this idea has been generalised and seen as fundamental to the photographic process as a whole, notwithstanding the complex transformations of the image that photographic techniques can produce. The key point is the status of the photograph as the imprint of the emanation of the object, and its consequent presumption (and constant ‘return’) of that object. Hence Roland Barthes’s famous characterisation that, ‘[it] is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself ’.13 The degree of cultural investment in indexical representation leads to the stakes in it being unusually high, higher perhaps than any manifestation of the other sign types – the icon, and the symbol – identified by Peirce. It is no surprise that, until recently at least, the two authenticating signs in a passport were the signature and photograph (the latter being subject to specific rules intended to limit ‘procedural distortions’). At the same time, it is the very commitment to the trustworthiness of the index that leads to its being a particular object of suspicion due to the extent of the rights accorded to it and to its referent or carrier through its agency as an identity authenticator. In his book A Theory of Semiotics, Umberto Eco describes semiotics as ‘in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used to lie . . . I think’, he goes on, ‘a “theory of the lie” should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics.’14 As far as I know, Eco did not go on to speculate which sign type is the most powerful to lie with, but I think it is clear that it is the index. Back to Powell. What is striking about the use of aerial photographs as evidence in Powell’s presentation is the question of the degree to which they actually have evidential status. Yes, something is there, but what is it exactly? What are we seeing through, or within, the photographic medium? There is a problem of legibility, and without this, without being readable by their audience, the images must remain resolutely non-evidential, at least in any useful way. The anxiety over this problem and the effort to transmute the images into evidence, making them legible and trustworthy, result in a strategy whereby a complex graphic overlay is applied to the images; in a kind of overwriting, the interpretation of the imagery specialists to whom Powell had referred spills over the image surface. The intention may be to clarify, to extract conditions immanent within the image, but I would suggest that the effect is more one of burying the evidential

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Jul 2002

Bulldozer

Freshly Graded Earth

Figure 10.2. US Department of State, ‘Bulldozed and freshly Graded Earth, Al-Musayyib Chemical Complex’ with graphic overlay, from Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN, 2003 (http://www.white house.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205–1.html# [Accessed 15 November 2006]).

object (the photographic document), covering it over, and almost effacing it with a supplementary graphic and textual discourse. In an ideal sense, discourse is supposed to stop at evidence, evidence being the point where description is overtaken by demonstration or showing. Etymologically linked to videre, the concept of evidence is in important ways framed in relation to vision: defining ‘evident,’ for example, the Oxford English Dictionary lists ‘distinctly visible, conspicuous . . . indubitable, certain, conclusive’. Evidence is expected to display an evident-ness: that is, ideally, evidence should be self-evident. If it is not, but instead requires some textual or discursive supplement to compensate for what it lacks and hence activate it as evidence, then it seems compromised. This is because the textual description or interpretation of an object presented as evidence can never have the ‘evidential’ status of the primary object. Powell’s images dramatise this dilemma in a particularly clear way: under the imperative of making the 157

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reticent image trustworthy, it is made less so by covering it over with a surface of interpretation that cannot itself be evidential, and which is notably non-indexical. What were the responses to Powell’s presentation? Did it convince? Was there an Adlai Stevenson moment? Not exactly. Predictably, it made little difference to positions that had by then hardened. Unsurprisingly, immediately after the presentation, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called it a most ‘powerful and authoritative’ case.15 It is salutary to recall the responses from the international press. The Washington Post wrote that ‘Mr Powell’s evidence, including satellite photographs, audio recordings, and reports from detainees and other informants, was overwhelming’, while in France Le Figaro commented that ‘for 80 minutes Colin Powell talked, using scary words, pointing the finger at the loutish regime in Baghdad, showing illegible slides, playing inaudible recordings, and trying to demonstrate that war was inevitable.’16

The Mutations of Indexicality I have argued that there is an etymological and conceptual link between evidence and visibility, and have made the suggestion that, ideally, evidence is the point where discourse stops. What this formulation inevitably represses, however, is the degree to which evidence is in fact always borne upon discursive support and, indeed, a structure of trust. When a jury looks at evidence in a court room, for example, it has to be told what it is. Evidential objects are collected, curated, presented, and discursively drawn into a network of relations with each other. Only through this process do they become evidential. For the jury to see a gun with the finger-prints of the accused upon it as evidence in a criminal case, they have to accept the way the object has been narrated within the case (‘it was found under his bed the day after the murder’), as well as the accuracy of forensic procedures, and this entails a structure of trust. This structure is the condition of possibility for the recognition of the object as evidence. Significantly, contemporary forms of ‘hard’ evidence – DNA analysis being the hardest we have got – require that the structure of trust be more absolute and dense, because the evidential object (the DNA material itself ) is more removed from the senses of the individual, and its analysis placed more firmly in the domain of experts and computational technologies. 158

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I have already registered my scepticism regarding the claim that digitisation and associated image-manipulation software and technologies such as Photoshop have resulted in, or at least accelerated, a wholesale culture of mistrust of images. What does seem crucial, however, is the broader background against which the development of programmes like Photoshop is situated: that of the technological transformations or mutations of indexicality. I am thinking of things like fax machines, digital video devices, and DNA analysis. How does Peircean contiguity survive when images are dissolved into digital codes and then reconstructed through playback apparatuses (computers, video machines, etc.)? In an important way, the image on a video screen has a different relation to its object than does the image on cinematic celluloid. It is true that we have what appears to be an indexical image, but its contractual congruity with the referent has been broken, and instead we have something like a transcoded indexicality. What does this mean for trust? One of the consequences of the processes of this transcoded indexicality is that images come apart and break down in more complex ways than they ever have before. Today what seems to be trusted, especially when it comes to security, is complexity, and transcoded indexicality is one of the agents of this. Trust is placed in things that are hard to reproduce. This has always been the case (banknotes, etc.), but under contemporary technological conditions the ‘difficulty’ has to be constantly accelerated, and that requires increasingly complex technological mediation and installations. I am thinking of the new kinds of indexical identity authenticators that have taken over signatures and photographs – iris scans, biometric information, DNA analysis, and so on. This seems to shift the trustand-image question in a decisive way: what is trusted is no longer so much the image as the complexity or fineness of the informational content that can be extracted from it, for it is upon this that both the difficulty of its reproduction and its effectiveness as an identity indicator are based. More particularly, what is crucial here is that the digital underpinning of transcoded indexicality makes images immediately and always already analyses: that is, ‘identity analysis’ has already occurred by virtue of – and in the very moment of – image capture. Through its technological conditions the transcoded indexical image has an a priori relationship to the computational assemblage of the state security apparatus (it is intrinsically and immediately searchable, comparable, transferable, etc.). As you go through the immigration channels of the

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twenty-first century, officials will not scrutinise your face but will check the informational breakdown of your iris scan against their records. They might not even look at you. In 2004, after Giorgio Agamben refused to subject himself to the USA’s new border security measures, and thus to enter the country, he wrote a short commentary for Le Monde in which he said, ‘What is at stake here is nothing less than the new “normal” bio-political relationship between citizens and state . . . [which] concerns the enrolment and filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of subjectivity: I mean the body’s biological life.’17 Agamben wrote under the title ‘No to Bio-Political Tattooing’, and compared the new security practices to the tattooing of internees at Auschwitz. Yet I feel that there is a distinction to be made here, against which the biopolitical dimensions of transcoded indexicality stand out in full relief. Where the tattoo of the internee in Auschwitz was a symbolic and instrumental supplement applied to the body by an external agency, an application that conferred identity through its mark, in the case of transcoded indexicality the body, as it were, produces the mark out of itself, thereby giving itself up from within. Rather than being a substratum to which a code is added, the body – through, as Agamben says, its very ‘biological life’ – becomes newly voluble and compliant. But in the end, perhaps what links the iris scan to the aerial images in Powell’s presentation is not so much a specific technique of analysis as the way in which they bear witness to the contemporary tendency of the evidential object to disappear from view, to subside beneath its interpretation, a tendency that is part and parcel of the increasing location of evidence in what is – contrary to the visual implications of the term – beyond, or excessive to, sight. The fineness of analysis enabled by computational technologies is, in a sense, won through the disappearance of the object to non-specialist scrutiny, and this represents a specific political problematic. Consequently, interpretation, rather than the object itself, is delivered up as evidence: but this is an interpretation increasingly claimed (and trusted) to be purged of all but minimal contingency. In effect, transcoded indexicality produces a kind of acceleration of the identity relation that has historically characterised the index: informationally, the analysis assumes a near identicality with the object itself (the DNA sample, the iris image), allowing it to effectively supersede the object while determining its referent (the individual person) with a new forcefulness. In view of

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this, what Powell’s slides dramatise is this condition of interpretation as evidence, although – strikingly – operating in a situation in which, far from being banished, contingency seems to arise everywhere: from uncertainties over the status and interpretation of the objects discerned in the photographs; from the ongoing dispute, current at the time of Powell’s presentation, with the weapons inspectors on the ground; and not least, from the complications that ensue from ‘imaging’ the absence of objects (the alleged concealment of the weapons), rather than the things themselves. (2006)

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11 Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work Rendering In October 2002 Anish Kapoor’s artwork Marsyas was stretched across the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, the third installation to be commissioned for the space. A gargantuan tension structure made in blood-red PVC membrane, it extended between two steel rings, at either end of the Turbine Hall, to which the fabric was lashed. In the centre, above the bridge that crosses the Hall, a third ring was suspended horizontally, hanging free of contact with the building by virtue of the strain distributed throughout the skin of the installation. Describing the work, Kapoor himself spoke in terms of a resolution between the vertical and the horizontal, of a cruciform, and indeed of flaying as ‘a symbol of the transformation that occurs in the crucifixion’.1 Certainly, this is a familiar allusion in relation to the myth of the unfortunate Phrygian satyr, with its drama of Marsyas’s suffering but transcendence through his flayed hide which, having been ripped from his body, was hung in a cave – the source of what became known as the river Marsyas – where it guaranteed fertility. Yet Kapoor’s rendering of Marsyas, if it is that, remains an unusual and distinct addition to the iconography of the myth, and certainly one less able to be assimilated to the kind of interpretation towards which he himself gestures. The 162

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VOICE, MONSTROSITY AND FLAYING: ANISH KAPOOR’S MARSYAS AS A SILENT SOUND WORK Figure 11.1. Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (2002), PVC and steel. Installation view: Tate, 2002–2003. Photo: John Riddy (courtesy Tate, London).

flaring of the skin of the installation as it is stretched toward the rings produces a horn-like contour, which brings varied precedents to mind, including the marvellous baroque phono-architectural contrivances that ramify behind the ‘talking statues’ presented by the seventeenthcentury Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, in his Phonurgia nova.2 One might thus be led to suspect that the work is as much to do with sound and listening, even if – and maybe especially because – silent, as it is to do with 163

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seeing, with the substitution of the rigidity of the horn’s envelope by the quivering skin perhaps marking a subtle subversion of its acoustic force, which dimly echoes Apollo’s more radical and cruel assault upon the envelope of Marsyas’s own body. I have just used the word ‘rendering’, and this is a term that seems to me particularly useful in relation to depictions of Marsyas, insofar as it means to return or to give back, as the body of a combatant might be given back, or the remnants of a victim of torture, or indeed the skin of Marsyas himself. But it also holds in view the verb ‘to rend’, which is to strip or to tear apart or to break into pieces. Renderings of Marsyas – or at least those taken after Apollo begins his grisly work – are always at the same time rendings that continually reopen anew the body of the satyr. Marsyas’s punishment may be beyond endurance, but equally its depiction has sometimes been cited as a limit condition of what sight can endure, of what it is possible to see – a threshold at which relation is lost and at which we encounter the monstrous. In her book on images of agony, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag wrote that ‘I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject.’3 This interestingly re-performs a comment that she had made in her 1977 collection On Photography, in which she contrasts what she experienced as the unbearable effect of a representation of a body under surgery – in which the photographic apparatus insistently concentrated and determined her vision, obligating, perhaps even freezing or petrifying, the eye – with the relative ease of her experience of being present at an actual operation.4 This identification of the body of Marsyas with the anatomised body is far from unexpected or unprecedented: the scene of the commencement of the satyr’s punishment was significantly depicted in the historiated initial ‘V’ that was incorporated into the second edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1555) – thereby suggesting the self-identification of the anatomist with Apollo;5 similarly, there has been detailed investigation of Marsyas’s iconographic relationship with the study of anatomy by artists in the Renaissance and with the e´corch´e, the flayed anatomical figure who proffers his skin.6 Indeed, the anatomical relation seems already immanent in Ovid’s remarkable proto-realist and even ekphrastic description of Marsyas’s punishment in Metamorphoses – a description in which some have seen a cruel fascination and supposed it linked to the culture of the Roman arena:

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throb and quiver with no skin to cover them: you could count the entrails as they palpitate, and the vitals showing clearly in his breast.7

Monstrous Emergence The story of Marsyas tells of a satyr who found Athena’s discarded pipes, and played them. So delighted with his accomplishments did he become that he had the temerity to challenge Apollo himself to a contest, to be adjudicated by the Muses. Inevitably the satyr was defeated – in one telling, when Apollo sang; in another, when the god turned and played his lyre upside down and challenged Marsyas to do the same with his aulos.8 As a punishment, Apollo bound Marsyas to a tree and flayed him alive. In a strong sense, the myth seems to be about two genera of musical instruments, the chordophonic and the aerophonic, and two kinds of music, whose emblems are the lyre and the pipes. These in turn carry racial implications, whereby the Greek lyre, with its associations of civility and polity, is set in opposition to the rustic and bestial pipes from the Asiatic homelands of the cults of Dionysus and Cybele, the mother goddess of whom Marsyas was a follower. Thomas Mathiesen notes that wind instruments ‘were always regarded with some ambivalence in Greek musical culture as not truly “Greek”’, and argues that, while the development of the story of Athena’s invention of the pipes suggests an increasing acceptance of them, their enduring foreignness is registered in the myth by her decision to cast them aside.9 In his commentary on the contest of Apollo and Marsyas in the Politics, Aristotle opposed stringed and wind instruments to one another: if the lyre has to do with instruction (mathesis), the music of the flute aims at the ‘relief of the passions’ (katharsis). When the flautist plays, the instrument stops his mouth, depriving the body of language and hence its address to the mind, a possibility that the lyre, on the other hand, leaves open. Athena rejected the pipes, he goes on to suggest, ‘because the acquirement of flute-playing contributes nothing to the mind, since to Athene we ascribe both knowledge and art’.10 Against this background, Apollo’s rending of Marsyas’s skin seems to emerge as an horrific and obscene exaction by language upon what is wordless, a wordlessness that is in

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As he screams, his skin is stripped off the surface of his body, and he is all one wound: blood flows down on every side, the sinews lie bare, his veins

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turn radicalised by the act of flaying, a punishment that leaves Marsyas as – in Ovid’s phrase – ‘nothing unless a wound’.11 The point of Apollo’s action here, surely, is to render Marsyas’s body such that it can no longer be said to be a wounded body: rather, it has become a body-as-wound, a condition that the detachment of the skin can uniquely realise. The wound is generalised, and this produces a kind of gaping opening, yet one paradoxically without a surface or skin to puncture or upon which to develop, exactly because it is predicated on the tearing away of any such thing. Marsyas’s howl is born, as we will see, from the monstrous lineage of his music, but more immediately it emerges as something that has gone beyond a condition in which any possibility of relation might obtain, and with it adequation or limit. As Jean-Luc Nancy has commented, ‘what is properly monstrous, the monstrosity of the proper, is that there is no end to the finiteness of the figure’.12 Apollo’s flaying of Marsyas is a retribution that is all about the overcoming – or transgression – of limits, such that the hubris of the satyr is revisited upon him in a punishment whose own exorbitance is matched only in its unbounding of its victim’s body. What, then, I want to examine before returning to Kapoor is the interplay of visual and acoustic motifs in the myth and its depictions – the sight of the flayed body of Marsyas and the sound of his howl; the visage of the pipe-player and the noises that the instrument emits; and the question of the relation between all this and the very particular punishment that Apollo inflicts upon the unfortunate satyr. More specifically, I will try to explore the way in which ideas of seeing and hearing at their limit – which is to say, in contact with the monstrous and at their point of cancellation – are articulated through the complex narrative within which the episode of Apollo and Marsyas is embedded. At the end, in returning to Kapoor, I will put forward a view on how this intensity beyond audition might be implicated within his artwork. Something that is striking about Marsyas’s adoption and playing of the flute is that it occurs as part of a chain of mimicry that leads back to the gorgon Medusa. Medusa is normally understood to be a monster of vision – a creature whose monstrosity is such as to transfix vision, and in whose presence it achieves both its highest degree of intensity and is at the same time voided. Only by deflecting Medusa’s mortal reality through image, by the relay of representation, is the sting of her gaze

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lanced, as is shown by Perseus’s use of Athena’s polished shield to sight and slay the creature. The intervention of the shield is a late addition to the myth’s corpus, and Jean-Pierre Vernant has suggested that it responds to new ideas about the nature of the image that were being developed contemporaneously by philosophers and artists.13 Perhaps also, however, the reflection in the shield is a register of the renderingoblique of the Medusa head that thereby undoes the transfixing, glaring frontality with which it is always depicted, and which is in contrast to the conventions of Greek art in the archaic period. The relation with vision is thus more than clear; but equally, Medusa was a monster of sound. In his classic essay on the ‘extreme alterity’ of the gorgon, ‘Death in the Eyes’, Vernant examined the sounds emitted by the creature, quoting Thalia Howe’s comment that, ‘[it] is clear that some terrible noise was the originating force behind the Gorgon: a guttural, animallike howl that issued with a great wind from the throat and required a hugely distended mouth’.14 Among other sources, Vernant examines Pindar’s description of the gorgons’ pursuit of Perseus, and the ‘piercing groan’ that issues from their jaws and serpentine locks as they chase him. Certain musical instruments, he observes, ‘when used orgiastically to produce delirium, play on this scale of infernal sounds’, none more so than the flute, or pipes, which were invented by Athena in order to mimic the sounds that she had heard emitted by the gorgons and their snakes. The effort of playing the pipes, however, hideously distorted and disfigured her face, and when she caught sight of the monstrous visage that confronted her, reflected in the clear waters of a river, she flung them away in disgust. As Vernant puts it, ‘the risk in playing the role of the shrieking gorgon is actually to become one – all the more so as this mimesis is not mere imitation but an authentic “mime,” a way of getting inside the skin of the character one imitates’.15 These discarded pipes are the ones that Marsyas then picks up. He restrains his features with bands to restrict their deformation, but the visual obscenity that accompanies the shrieking pipes is reiterated in the flaying of the satyr, with the removal of his skin and his reduction to a condition of ‘only wound’, as so powerfully and consequentially conveyed in Ovid’s ‘realist’ description of Marsyas’s quivering entrails. This relation with the gorgon is strikingly and notably registered in the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, Apollo and Marsyas (published 1961), in which the petrifying effect of Medusa’s gaze returns in Marsyas’s howl,

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a howl that turns a nightingale to stone, bleaches a tree, and heralds a new ‘concrete’ art:

. . . shaken by a shudder of disgust Apollo is cleaning his instrument only seemingly is the voice of Marsyas monotonous and composed of a single vowel A in reality Marsyas relates the inexhaustible wealth of his body ... this is already beyond the endurance of the god with nerves of artificial fibre along a gravel path hedged with box the victor departs wondering whether out of Marsyas’ howling there will not some day arise a new kind of art – let us say – concrete suddenly at his feet falls a petrified nightingale he looks back and sees that the hair of the tree to which Marsyas was fastened is white completely16

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In his book Realism, Writing, Disfiguration, Michael Fried has – in developing an argument about the conditions of realism – drawn a highly suggestive parallel between representations of the opened body and the iconography of the Medusa head. This is put forward in connection with his reflections on Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875). In this painting of an operation in process, the presiding surgeon stands before observing medical students who are stacked in the dimly lit background, his bright and blood-stained scalpel in hand, while the assistants to his left pull back the skin from the recumbent patient’s thigh and probe the wound. On the other side, a female form, whom we presume to be the patient’s mother, sits convulsed, her hand drawn up to shield her eyes. In this posture she acts as a kind of ‘delegate figure’ – the phrase is Louis Marin’s – for the observer of the painting itself. As such, however, she does not incarnate, within the painting, its significance for the observer: she does not play the role of ‘representing the presentation of the representation, a figure that can . . . be defined as the delegate for a spectator who has understood the meaning of the interpretation of the whole’.17 It would instead be more accurate to say that, rather than prefiguring meaning for the observer, she anticipates only raw intensity of affect. In his considerations around this work, Fried develops a formulation of realism – which he dates back to at least the sixteenth century – that turns on, as he writes, a ‘tactics of shock, violence, perceptual disorientation, and physical outrage . . . mobilized against prevailing conventions of the representation of the human body specifically in order to produce a new and stupefyingly powerful experience of the “real”’. Noting what he calls the ‘peculiar centrality to the realist canon of Caravaggio’s Medusa [ca. 1597?]’, he consequently speculates ‘that the definitive realist painting would be the one that the viewer literally could not bear to look at: as if at its most extreme, or at this extreme, the enterprise of realism required an effacing of seeing in the act of looking’.18

Unbounding The bright and bloodied scalpel blade that punctuates Eakins’s canvas echoes the flaying knives in renderings of Marsyas, such as those in Sontag’s emblematically ‘unbearable image’, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570–76). While in the accounts and documentation of Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas that I have seen, explicit references to the myth are 169

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Figure 11.2. Thomas Eakins, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) (1875), oil on canvas, 96 × 78 inches (Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3,600 donors, 2007).

limited, something that is very much in the foreground is this painting. A photograph of Kapoor’s studio, which appears in the Tate Britain catalogue published to coincide with the installation, shows it taped to the wall alongside the artist’s own drawings.19 170

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VOICE, MONSTROSITY AND FLAYING: ANISH KAPOOR’S MARSYAS AS A SILENT SOUND WORK Figure 11.3. Tiziano Vecellio, known as Titian, Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1570–1576), oil on canvas, 220 × 204 cm. Photo: Zdenˇek Sodoma (Muzeum umˇen´ı Olomouc, courtesy of the Olomouc archbishopric).

‘My sculpture seems to have a downward energy’, Kapoor reflects, and certainly this is consonant with Titian’s painting in which Marsyas is inverted, lashed upside down to a tree, while a crouching Apollo strips the skin from his torso, his blood pooling at the base of the painting where it is lapped up by a small dog.20 Another figure, gazing heavenwards out of the picture, plays a lira de braccio while Marsyas’s pipes are strung, like the satyr himself, from the tree. Above Apollo a figure cuts into Marsyas’s leg, while to the other side of the attenuated body of the satyr that divides the picture, sits the Phrygian king Midas, who was granted asses’ ears by Apollo for his misjudgement in the god’s other musical contest with Pan. Behind Midas, a satyr stands with a 171

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pail, and in the foreground a faun looks out of the painting toward the viewer. Usually the painting is understood as a Neo-platonic allegory of the transcendence of the soul. Here that instrument and emblem of scission, Apollo’s civilising knife, separates and releases. Some, however, have argued that the painting is wracked with ambivalence. Arguing that the myth of Marsyas gained a new currency in the context of the European colonial adventures of the sixteenth century, David Richards – paying particular attention to Apollo’s ‘filthy’ work – suggestively reads the arrangement of figures in the painting in the context of the status and roles of the personnel attendant during a Venetian execution. In relation to this scenography, and following Jaromir Neumann, Richards advances the idea that Titian casts himself in the role of Midas, whose ironic and contemplatively sceptical presence troubles this savage assertion of the victory of Apollonian culture over wildness.21 ‘Why do you tear me from myself?’ Ovid’s Marsyas cries, as Apollo rends the hide from his body, splitting him apart.22 In her book Skin, Claudia Benthien compares the punishment of Marsyas to that of St Bartholomew and of the Persian Sisamnes, a judge indicted for corruption, both of whom were executed by flaying. In each case, she argues, their crime was the transgression of a boundary, an overstepping of a proper limit – in the case of Marsyas of course, his hubris in thinking himself better than a god. ‘The flaying’, Benthien writes, ‘of one man at the hands of others seeks to restore the existing order symbolically through the use of the most extreme means’, namely the stripping away of the skin, the eradication of the body’s boundary through the scission of the fletcher’s knife as a kind of horrific re-enactment and agonising representation of the transgressor’s own presumption.23 The point of this, Benthien goes on, is to symbolically return the punished subject back to his ‘place’, thus restoring the proper order of things. But there is something about this that does not seem quite right, for precisely what flaying does in its detachment of the skin, in its confiscation of this most intensely semiotically coded and invested organ, is to remove, in the most radical and demonstrative way, the possibility of the subject – of what will be no longer a subject – having any place whatsoever. What remains is, as a showing and a warning, truly monstrous in its etymological sense. It may be that skin – as Steven Connor notes – plays the role of background upon which things appear, and thus can be ‘placed’. As he argues:

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the skin means, more than anything else in particular, the necessity for there to be a ground, a setting, a frame, an horizon, a stage, a before, a behind, and underneath.24

But I wonder if it is also, and equally fundamentally, the essential foreground, the foreground that would be required to integrate and cohere, to bring back into relation and to secure within limits, the ‘pure wound’ that Marsyas has become without it – indeed, a foreground that any background would paradoxically require for its own coherence. We sense something of this dependency in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), in which the anamorphic skull that is smeared across the foreground desubstantialises the solidity of the depicted world into which it erupts, and with which it is radically incommensurable. The play of perspectives posits the anamorph as a wound that opens within the pictured reality of painting, and – in a larger sense – by indicating what is excessive to the unified representational schema, allows it to be a kind of wounding of painting itself. As Jacques Lacan wrote of what he described as the ‘exalted obscenity’ of baroque representations of martyrdom: ‘That formulation can be reversed – those representations are themselves martyrs. You know that “martyr” means witness – of a more or less pure suffering.’25 The wound’s counterpart, the flayed skin, is – in its detachment from the body – a shaggy, dishevelled affair, a crumpled and ghostly destructuration of the body’s image. Thus, insofar as it is a species of ‘image-in-collapse’, it too demands to be thought with reference to the anamorphic representations that were more or less coeval with the Marsyas depictions and anatomical e´corch´es of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But there is an important distinction to make here. Anamorphosis, as its prefix suggests – ‘ana’ signifying ‘again’ – is inevitably predicated upon a recovery of form, a ‘back to’ that will make the secret or distended image legible once more, that will make it stand up and become erect. An anamorph is an image placed in abeyance, but only provisionally so. With the crumpled skin of the e´corch´e, however, this reversibility is never available, at least in any comparable way. It has become radically collapsed and withered, never to be recovered as it was, reinflated and made taut with breath again, unless – like St Bartholomew’s – at the end of time. In the

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[Skin’s] fundamental condition is to be that on top of which things occur, develop or are disclosed. The skin is the ground for every figure. Perhaps

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e´corch´e figures, willing participants in their own anatomisation – indeed, auto-dissectors – who disrobe and offer up their hides to permit their interiors to be examined, tautness, uprightness and even an uncanny volition is transferred onto the flayed body expressly in opposition to the flaccid skin. It has been noted how Ovid’s description of Marsyas’s opened body resonates with the language of the lyre, as if Apollo’s refashioning of Marsyas transformed him into the instrument of his destruction, in what has been described as a ‘semantic overlap between the description of viscera throbbing under torture and the language of poetic performance’.26 Thus the use of terms such as nervi, fibras (the strings of the lyre), salientia (the vibration of strings) and numerare (to put into metre).27 Such an understanding seems clearly present in the two paintings (1637) made by Jusepe de Ribera, in both of which a benignly smiling Apollo, his hand plunged into the gaping wound in the satyr’s leg, seems to play him as if an instrument, coaxing and manipulating his screams.28 This breaking-down of the body, from a skin-surface into a quivering assemblage of sinews and organs, is, beyond the immediate object of the assault, a deeply symbolic attack on the condition of the envelope itself, on all the body’s envelopes and sacs – on everything of the kind required for breath to be retained, held under pressure, and issued; that is to say, a rendering-breathless that opens onto the silence that endures within the boundless intensity of Marsyas’s impossible howl, a silence emblematised in the stone nightingale that in 1961 falls to ground at Apollo’s feet.

And Silence Kapoor comments that ‘I work with red because it is the colour of the physical, of the earthly, of the bodily.’29 And thus his installation gives us what is undoubtedly a so-called ‘red Marsyas’, a category that has been used to refer to depictions after the commencement of his torture. Such sculptures were sometimes realised in red porphyry, such as the ancient torso that flanked the portal to the Laurentian garden in Florence, in which the veins in the stone were carved, according to Vasari, with such skill as ‘as to appear to be little nerves, as seen in real bodies when they are flayed’.30 In Kapoor’s installation, focused as it is 174

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VOICE, MONSTROSITY AND FLAYING: ANISH KAPOOR’S MARSYAS AS A SILENT SOUND WORK

on skin, one might imagine that the veins of porphyry find themselves transformed into the sutures that knit the structure together. On returning again to Kapoor’s artwork, it appears to me that the terms on which he has tended to describe and position it are in fact much less compelling and convincing than what he has done in the installation itself. One of the reasons that we might find this work important, I feel, is because of its implicit sensitivity to what is at stake in the aural aspects of the story of Marsyas. Kapoor helps us to see the resonance between the specific form of the Apollonian unmaking of the transgressor’s body and the assault on the instrument with which it merges. Kapoor’s installation is in a sense a literalised reconstruction of what has been destroyed; for while the flayed skin – unlike the collapsed anamorph within which the pristine image remains latent – may never regain its original form, it may still be refashioned or even reanimated in a different way. Kapoor appears to do something like this, although crucially – and despite what he himself says – in a way that does not rely upon any narrative of suffering and transcendence. If we accept this, then, instead of such violently sublimating imperatives, we might rather understand the artwork, with its overwhelming visual phonicity, as motivated by a determination to attend to the emergence, and implication, of Marsyas’s howl. Thought in this way, Kapoor’s refashioning of the flayed and breathless skin of the satyr seems dedicated to honouring and giving space – in the first instance, the giving over of the immense architectural space of the Turbine Hall – to a cry that, because it extends beyond all relation, must be necessarily be rendered through silence. At the close of his short essay, ‘Painting in the Grotto’, Jean-Luc Nancy writes: ‘The Monster sees the invisible, and the vanishing sense of its own presence in the world’ – into which, with Kapoor, we can insert, ‘and hears the unhearable’.31 (2009)

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12 A-Disciplinarity and Architecture? The System of the Arts In 2004, Jonathan Jones, art critic for the Guardian, wrote an effusive commentary on Foster and Partners’ Swiss Re building at 30 St Mary Axe, in the city of London (the so-called ‘gherkin’). Jones describes the building as the most satisfying new work of art I’ve seen in years. It is modern and ancient; it is site-specific; it sculpts the sky. It is a monument and a mirror. It makes you see London in a new way. It does things that artists – people who are officially called that – have given up even trying to do. The new architecture that announced itself to the world with Gehry’s Guggenheim does not bear simply a superficial resemblance to the art of Picasso, or Kirchner, or Michelangelo. It really is doing things we once expected sculpture to do. It has obliterated the difference between architecture and art. More than that, it is filling the space contemporary art has abandoned.

Contrasting the building with the Bruce Nauman sound work then installed in the Turbine Hall of the nearby Tate Modern, Jones goes on: It’s not just that art now does not add new forms to the world, it is specifically praised and valued for not doing so. Which means that the only real sculpture of our time is being made by architects. Architecture is art’s last, best hope.1

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This is the most unabashed and forcefully polemical contemporary declaration of architecture-as-art I know – of architecture-as-art ‘after art’ – and it usefully foregrounds the pertinence of questioning the idea of the ‘system of the arts’ today. Certainly, the contemporary status of this notion is a real issue when the person (most?) frequently referred to as the world’s Greatest Living Artist is an architect.2 In the introduction to their edited volume, Architecture, Disciplinarity, and the Arts (2009), Andrew Leach and John Macarthur ask, ‘What is architecture, now, among the “system of the arts”?’ This is obviously not just a question about architecture’s contemporary institutional or conceptual status, but also about the very possibility of a system of the arts today, and of producing some kind of plausible relational determination of the specific arts themselves that would make such a system possible but would equally be its outcome. In their introduction, Leach and Macarthur also note that, today, ‘we speak with few cautions of buildings as “art works”’, and this suggests that the relatively uncontentious formulation that architecture is an art has tended to slip into the claim that architecture is art. It is striking the degree to which a whole world of contingency and negotiation seems folded into the indefinite article of the former, when compared to the absolutist character of the latter. What critical scholarship should be interested in doing here, it seems to me, is not so much adjudicating this claim based on some putative internal condition proper to each discipline, and identifying the logical relationships that ensue, as examining and articulating the interrelationships between the practical, cultural, social, aesthetic, political, and economic consequences of approaching architecture in this way. What does the proposal that ‘architecture is art’ do for architecture? What new rights accrue to it, or what losses does it endure, and what are the implications of these? What interests intersect with that claim? What hierarchies or exclusions are promoted by it? As a result the key challenge is, I feel, not to attempt a stabilisation of the system of the arts – or at least not to set out to do so as an a priori – but to analyse the reasons for, and effects of, transformations in it, which may extend even to its complete destructuration. The claim, at least in its current guise, that architecture is art, might be seen as a symptom of a new licence available in what Rosalind Krauss has termed the ‘post-medium condition’. In her commentary

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on this, Krauss develops three narratives to account for the historical emergence of post-mediality, and to one of these – namely, the story of post-structuralism’s assault on presumptions of autonomy and selfsufficiency – she relates the rise of the goal of interdisciplinarity.3 Now in their various forms, inter-, trans-, and cross-disciplinarity are familiar terms, and they represent ideas to which I suspect many reading this would describe themselves as being committed, insofar as they register the partial, provisional, and constructed character of any historically situated disciplinary discourse, and consequently the inevitable limitations of its approach to, and construal of, its objects of study and productions. This said, it seems possible that the idea of post-mediality (which admittedly for Krauss emerges as a highly problematic condition)4 could imply a rather different notion, one that would have to be called a-disciplinarity. Consequently, I want to think about what an ‘architectural’ practice that dedicated itself to this – acknowledging all the contradictions and tensions implied – would look like. Certainly, we have recently seen in architecture the emergence of a radical commitment to non-identity that is perhaps best characterised as an aspiration towards a-disciplinarity and a corresponding condition of neutrality: some kind of approach or practice or discourse that would set itself against any form of positive identification, and would thereby be marked by a repetitive assertion of the ‘not’ (not this, not that, etc.). A statement that seems to me to relate to this attitude is Ricardo Scofidio’s comment in 2003 that ‘architecture is nothing other than special effects’, and this I think can be correlated in significant ways with Mark Wigley’s suggestion in his influential text, ‘The Architecture of Atmosphere’, that atmosphere is ‘the core of architecture’.5 Undoubtedly, these both appear to make positive claims about what architecture is, but at the same time they immediately entail problems of determination and capture, atmosphere in Wigley’s argument being that which ‘cannot be simply addressed or controlled’.6 It is not coincidental that Scofidio’s assertion comes in the context of a discussion of Diller + Scofidio’s Blur project, which is itself an example of an ‘architecture of atmosphere’.7 And here we find reference to the ‘cloud’, whose utopic resistance to being placed (in all senses of the term) has allowed it, I will suggest, to act as both an emblem and a privileged vehicle for the drive toward a-disciplinarity.

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To articulate further this idea of a-disciplinarity, and the ‘neutrality’ and refusal of identification with which I am associating it, it will be helpful to look at two well-known examples of the use of the semiotic square associated with A.J. Greimas. For the first we will return to Krauss, this time to her celebrated 1978 essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’; the second we will find in Fredric Jameson’s article ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, an extended commentary (written one year earlier than the Krauss text, in 1977) on Louis Marin’s 1973 book Utopics: Spatial Play. Krauss’s use of the semiotic square occurs in the context of an argument she develops regarding postwar American sculpture. Observing the diversity of practices that had come to be grouped or posited under the heading sculpture, which over the preceding 30 years had represented a constant expansion of the category, she suggested that it was now so semantically elastic as to be virtually evacuated of meaning. Almost anything seemed to be categorisable as sculpture, and yet, she wrote, ‘I would submit that we know very well what sculpture is’.8 It is, she continued, commemorative and definitively located. Or at least, that is its historical meaning. Its development under modernity is the story of its detachment from these parameters exemplified by, on one hand, a tendency towards self-referentiality and autonomy and, on the other, the incorporation of the (previously) locational pedestal into the artwork itself. Departing thus from the logic of the monument, sculpture enters its modernist condition, in which its status, meaning, and function is, Krauss argued, ‘essentially nomadic’.9 According to Krauss, however, by the beginning of the 1950s this had become reduced to a situation in which modernist sculpture was increasingly experienced as ‘pure negativity . . . something that was possible to locate only in terms of what it was not’,10 thus leading to her proposition that sculpture had come to be defined positionally as a combination of not-landscape and not-architecture. (This dyad seems structurally, although this is not made explicit in the text, to figure the endgame of the double exclusion that first founded modernist sculpture – its functional/symbolic inoperativity, significantly illustrated for Krauss by Rodin’s ‘failed’ commission for museum doors, The Gates of Hell, mapping onto the not-architecture, and its placelessness mapping

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The Expanded Field

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Figure 12.1. Rosalind Krauss’s semiotic square, after her essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, p. 284.

onto the not-landscape). From the late 1960s, however, sculptors began to attend to the ‘outer limits of those terms of exclusion’, and in her article Krauss expanded the not-landscape/not-architecture opposition into a semiotic square in order to articulate and analyse – in terms of the diacritical relations and combinatory possibilities structurally displayed in the diagram – the various practices that had arisen. The expansion of the terms of the initial opposition gave rise to the pair landscape/architecture, to whose terms Krauss, perhaps contestably, respectively aligned nature and unbuilt, culture and built. For each of the three ‘empty’ alternative combinatorial positions displayed by the diagram, she then went on to propose a term (in turn, marked sites, siteconstruction, and axiomatic structures), each of which she related to specific examples, none being, she emphasised, ‘assimilable to sculpture’.11 In a locally strategic way, Krauss deployed the semiotic square (or noted that its effect was) to open an ideological closure: this opening occurred insofar as the expansion of the binary into the square admitted ‘into the realm of art two terms that had formerly been prohibited from it: landscape and architecture’ – or at least, terms that had hitherto been effective only as exclusions. Through its relativisation of the position of sculpture, and its demonstration of other logical possibilities, the square gave, Krauss argued, ‘“permission” to think . . . other forms’.12 Yet from another point of view, and in a wider sense, the semiotic 180

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constitutes a virtual map of conceptual closure, or better still, of the closure of ideology itself, that is, as a mechanism, which, while seeming to generate a rich variety of possible concepts and positions, remains in fact locked into

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square has been seen as not so much opening but mapping the closure of ideological formation, insofar as it displays, and is structured through, categories and attendant concepts that are non-essential, but culturally, socially and linguistically relative (the terms landscape and architecture, for example, and their construal in opposition). Thus Fredric Jameson’s suggestion that the square

some initial aporia or double bind that it cannot transform from inside by its own means.13

Seen in this way, the position and particular anticipatory force of the neutral takes on special importance.

The Neutral With regard to the structure of the semiotic square, a distinction is made between the ‘complex’ term at the top of the diagram (that which holds together or synthesises the two poles of the initial opposition, landscape/architecture in Krauss) and the ‘neuter’ term (its counterpart in the lower zone of exclusions). In Krauss’s formulation, the complex term is privileged as a point of ideological rupture, whereas the neuter position becomes a zone of exhaustion or waste (i.e. modernism in relation to the rich intermedial post-modern practices which, released from the categorisation of sculpture, proliferate around the limits of the diagram). Krauss uses the square to produce a semiotic diagramming of an expanded disciplinarity for sculpture, but one specifically mobilised against the category sculpture itself. As she makes clear at the start of her essay, this is an historicising term that has misrecognised new forms of work and produced an ameliorating, familiarising effect. This is one side of her insistence that the terms in her expanded field cannot be assimilated to it. And yet it is not clear why the logic of this argument does not also tell in relation to the kinds of practice that Krauss situates in the neuter position, which – by these lights – it would seem are not, and never were, assimilable to sculpture, either. The category is admitted as conventional usage (which is exactly what the argument seeks to 181

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relieve the alternative combinatorial positions of), and there is no attempt to displace it, giving the impression that the issue has been bracketed off at this point. On the other hand, if approached from the other direction, with the appearance of the category in the diagram being taken at face value, it immediately raises the question of the exact point at which its use becomes unviable or impossible, to which the answer would appear to be at, and only at, the moment of postmodernism. In Krauss’s diagram the neuter thus figures as an exhausted position, blocked under the sign of an obsolete, historicising term. From this foil, the diagram derives much of its polemical force and the alternative positions formulated acquire their future orientated implications. This, then, allows us to pose a question regarding disciplinarity to Krauss’s diagram, and to derive a different answer than the apparently rigid disciplinary designation sculpture, which occupies the neuter position, would imply. If the diagram can be described as a map of (expanded) disciplinarity, where might a-disciplinarity be located, if anywhere, within it? One would expect it to be situated in the diagrammatic zone of exclusions, in what Greimas termed the ‘neuter’ in counterpoint to the ‘complex’ term at the top of the diagram that held together or synthesised the two terms of the initial opposition, a position over which (according to Marin and Jameson) a question mark indelibly hovers. As, for example, Marin warns in his second preface to Utopics, a diagram of possible choices eliminating the force of contradiction of the rational struggle of contradictory elements cannot be sketched out. This throw or move opens up the whole field of possibilities, but the field itself cannot be controlled because it is nothing but indetermination, what the ‘no’ designates in the utopic no-place.14

When Jameson draws on the semiotic square in his exposition of Marin’s Utopics in ‘Of Islands and Trenches’, the complex term at the top of the diagram comes to be described in terms of existing historical social reality, as a synthetic and ultimately affirmative holding together of contradictory terms within an ideological formation. Counterposed to this is the utopic no-place of the neutral, a neutralisation of the complex term that fractures or dissolves it, that gestures towards some 182

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Utopia’s [again, read ‘the neutral’s’] deepest subject, the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that . . . must once again leave us alone with this history.15

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anticipated but presently unthinkable futurity, yet offers no new positive content to replace what it has cancelled. As Marin declares, ‘Utopic representation [the neutral] would only indicate, and not signify’; and, as Jameson concludes,

(We note in passing that if utopic praxis is, as Marin describes it, ‘in Kantian terminology . . . the schematizing activity of political and social imagination not yet having found its concept. . . . The figure that [it] produces is a sort of zero degree for the concept’,16 then it operates according to a reversal of the structure of the sublime, insofar as figuration comes in advance of an ungraspable concept, instead of a concept preceding an impossible figuration of it.) Crucial to this reading is Marin’s articulation of the neuter as ‘sheer discontinuity’, and consequently of Utopia as ‘not an anti-world or a new world, but an Other World’, a no-place declared in Utopia’s name, which is also a kind of cancellation of a name.17 For Marin, the neutral is a kind of space or position of refusal. He writes, ‘Neither yes nor no, true nor false, one nor the other: this is the neutral.’18 Its relation to its double terms is consequently different to that held by the complex synthesis of the two primary terms. If the former encompasses or enfolds the originary opposition, the neutral is more in a situation of exclusion. The complex is both this and that: the neutral is neither this nor that, and thus sits not as synthesis but as a supplement that permits passage between the terms, yet sits outside of the whole that they make. It is a difference, Marin writes, ‘added to the closed system of difference’.19 Thus the neutral term is, he says, ‘not the third term; it is the weakest form of it. . . . It is the degree zero of synthesis. . . . It is the deserted space of contradiction and the proof of its power – death’s trace.’20 This, then, seems helpful in terms of how we might theorise adisciplinarity. If we associate the ideal of interdisciplinarity with the complex term – that is, a synthetic and affirmative enfolding of, or mediation between, disciplines – then a-disciplinarity would sit in a relationship of (utopic) neutralisation to it; it would gesture 183

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towards the beyond of the disciplinary complex, not as further integration (which would be interdisciplinarity), but as its outside. Thus it would gain expression through a characteristic stuttering of ‘nots’ – which indicates the neutral, and the absence of the positive determinations proper to the upper, complex zone of the semiotic square.

Clouding Disciplinarity It is striking how this radical logic of refusal conforms to the way in which a project discussed at length in Chapter 7, Blur – Diller + Scofidio’s exhibition pavilion for Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchˆatel – was discursively articulated by its designers. The fact that it was presented in this way suggests that this is a project that we might, however tentatively, think of as being involved in and arising out of a logic of a-disciplinarity. Earlier I suggested a link between the emergence of the cloud as an architectural preoccupation and the impulse toward a-disciplinarity, whereby the neutral, unlocalisable character of the cloud, which so forcefully endows it with utopic implication and association, allows it at the same time to condense as a thing of desire for those seeking transportation – and specifically a transportation that would not simply place them somewhere else, but would rather put the possibility of placing, itself, in abeyance – beyond architecture’s disciplinary limits. Here Diller + Scofidio’s insistent description of Blur as operating through a logic of constant exclusion, culminating in their declaration that it is the ‘making of nothing’, comes into focus as an impeccably a-disciplinary gesture. If a-disciplinarity mobilises a logic of exclusion, the reiterative series of refusals that we have associated – via Marin – with the neutral and the utopic, then it seems fully at work in this project, which, as we have already seen, was described by its architects as ‘spaceless, formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless’.21 Moreover, if – as I argued in Chapter 7 – the cloud approximates the propertyless ‘thing’ that is the Platonic chora, then it does so inasmuch as the chora is the exemplary or ultimate a-disciplinary object: an object that is not an object, a neutral thing that resists any kind of positive identification and therefore, even while it receives everything, can only be described through its exclusions, and thus presents a condition of, as Marin would say, limitless contradiction. 184

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Understanding Blur in this way gives us a different kind of vantagepoint on the project, and a new way of thinking about features of it, such as, for example, the euphoria that attaches to the cloud and that, as we saw, came increasingly to the fore as the project developed. In this regard, it is notable that the ‘final word’ in Diller + Scofidio’s book about their project turned out to be a reproduction of a newspaper report with a photograph of laughing visitors below the title ‘The Wonder Cloud’.22 Marin’s reflections on the neutral give us a specific way of reading this image: to live utopia means constructing the representation which will speak its impossibility and simultaneously indicate it as that which it excludes. It is the empty space bordering and framing representation. This is the space of blessedness in representation, the permanent instant of happiness, all in one moment loss, limit and the neutral.23

Although it was not a term used by the architects themselves, adisciplinarity seems a goal that was deeply implicated in the way Blur was conceptualised and discursively posited. As one might expect, however, things become less clear – or at least more complex – when the material realisation of such a project is confronted, and a number of issues then arise regarding the relations between discipline and technique, the institutional contexts of production, and suchlike. In Chapter 7 I have discussed some of the tensions that emanate from the gap between the material actuality of the project as it was constructed and its declared intentions. But the argument there takes us in a different direction, toward the question of Blur’s position within a history of environmental commodification. In the context of the present discussion, I prefer to draw out a different point, one more straightforwardly in support of the kind of endeavour Blur represents, inasmuch as that is about thinking the neutral. For what it is surely important to emphasise and focus on here is less the failure to manifest a condition of radical neutrality than the force that emanates from the challenge of thinking it, a force that takes the form of a constant reopening that is future-directed and mobile, and whose effects and manifestations must inevitably remain never simply adequate to what the neutral – and indeed a-disciplinarity – anticipates. (2005/2013) 185

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Afterword

by Ella Chmielewska ‘Postscript as Pretext’1

And now, at the end of this collection, I take this liminal place as a pretext to discuss the form of writing (on the image) that is assembled in it. In doing so I will call upon – and call attention to – an array of textual production by Mark Dorrian, whose range animates his oeuvre of critical writing and forms a complex context for his visual practice. My focus will be on what this writing does, on textual actions and gestures, and on the kinds of movements and openings they engender. We will invite the texts themselves to speak, to voice this afterword, and – paraphrasing Henri Meschonnic – to demonstrate, to make a place for writing: 2 writing as a form of inquiry, the mode of writing with images that informs the thinking of architecture.3 The book Urban Cartographies (2002), from which the material on the following page is drawn, presents the work of Metis, the research orientated atelier for art, architecture and urbanism that Dorrian cofounded with Adrian Hawker.4 The practice of metis, as described by scholars of ancient Greek culture Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, exemplifies a kind of knowing and skill that operates on uncertain and shifting terrain: ‘Its field of application is the world of movement, of multiplicity and ambiguity. It bears on fluid situations which are continually changing and which at every moment combine contrary features and forces that are opposed to each other.’5 Introducing 186

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AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’ Figure A1. Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, Latitude and Longitude Resolved, from Metis: Urban Cartographies (2002), pp. 14–17.

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metis as a way of architectural knowing, transposing its alert focus and watchfulness to design procedures, projects and pedagogy, Dorrian offers an insight into the poetic (and political) potentials of architectural thinking and writing. As a ‘situational practice’, Metis takes representation to be a critical site of its work, and thus foregrounds the ‘performative possibilities inherent in the “representational archive” . . . through which any . . . project presents itself’.6 Fastidious about details, attached to locational nuance, attentive to form and craft, metis resolutely rejects the certainty of preconceived, ‘imperiously establishe[d] frameworks’.7 Instead, it embodies chance and contradiction, insists on positional contingency and invites a restless mobility of thought: ‘Always immersed in practical operations and without the assumption of the privileged overview . . . its pretexts are only ever postscripts.’8 The ‘continuous concentration of activity that is in progress’9 characteristic of metis, the multivalent, paratactic quality of the carefully assembled ‘representational archive’, and the persistently incisive inquiring movement within the work, underpin and inform the modes and gestures of Dorrian’s thinking in writing. Within the richness of the representational figures, forms and procedures assembled in Urban Cartographies, we find succinct poetic texts tensing in adjacencies to the visual material collected for each project. We see the first of these textual sketches on one of the pages reproduced; it anchors the opening project of the collection, Latitude and Longitude Resolved. Initially nested in, and calibrated for, an Edinburgh town-house, and indexing the historical context of the city’s eighteenth-century New Town, it was subsequently installed in Sir John Soane’s Pitzhanger Manor, in London. Within and between these locations, the installation traced movements, postures and cadences in the kinds of mediations that have shaped architectural knowledge. With its delicately balanced objects and precisely tuned positions, the peripatetic assemblage pivoted on a singular itinerant absence:10 The absent body of the traveller forms a hinge through which the tremulous furniture and

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cartographic world beyond the room communicate.

The arrangement and halting enjambments of this concise text register tensions between the verticality of locational anchoring and the transversal capacities of thought, while at the same time indexing the installation’s programmatic impermanence – its iterant absence that has now come to be figured within the archive of the book. Each work presented in Urban Cartographies – whether it be an installation in a gallery or an architectural design project – is accompanied by a short lyrical text that mediates between the site of the project in a specific city and its sites of representation. Working in the space between drawings and conventional notations (titles, captions, explanations), these texts provide hinge-points in the iterative process of articulating thought in its relation to the material distributed around it. In its compact form and specific position, each text addresses the singularity of the site, simultaneously extending lines of thought beyond the edges of writing and motioning beyond the bounds of the project. Oscillating between the concrete and the abstract, and engaging with objects, surfaces and spaces, the texts act as poetic apertures that attune and orientate our attention. These texts carry the trace of Dorrian’s most itinerant, metis-like writing, the kind that is both most public and (paradoxically) least visible, and one continually ‘immersed in practical operations’: the pedagogic architectural design brief. This is a textual form to which critical scholarship has paid little attention to date.11 Rarely published, usually seen as merely utilitarian and technical, open to ‘casual and unreflective appropriations’12 and institutional pressures, this everyday text of studio teaching functions as a key vehicle for the circulation of images, precedents, concepts and references. Instructing by way of the invitation it presents, the brief is a text-in-action that unfolds spatial imaginaries, instantiates theory and provokes inventive thinking in the making of architecture. Dorrian considers the pedagogical situation in the design studio as an extended exploratory conversation beginning with a question: ‘What if . . . ?’ – an opening gesture restated throughout the project.

AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’

the measured,

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The persistence of questioning, he writes, ‘unsettles even those aspects of architectural knowledge that seem most stable and straightforwardly transmissible – techniques – insofar as they are confronted with unexpected and problematic contexts and solicited for new performative possibilities’.13 Design investigation traverses scales and perspectives, adopting different positions of viewing and reading, sliding across – or grinding against – surfaces, tracing or crossing lines, cutting through structures and probing material. It attentively moves around and across objects and sites. The design process, he stresses, turns upon the reiterative function of the initiating text: ‘When the destination of the project fails or becomes uncertain, its pursuit enters into a condition of inquiry that constantly redirects questions back to its own grounding – the “brief ” or originating text – which is now placed under a radical contingency.’14 This necessary contingency is written into the brief, into the studio context. Insisting on a ‘mobility of transactions’ between architectural theory, practice and teaching, Dorrian’s studio assignments act both as cues for diverse inquiries into architectural knowledge and as openings for thought.15 The text itself is searching in its compact form. It unfolds from a visual situation already suggested by the brief’s title: Architectural Forensics, Afterimage, Shadowcatcher, Dreaming Objects. It begins with a close reading of the site, of the unstable nature of the surveyed ground, a description whose precision and language demand a considered response and attention to various ways in which ‘we read the place architecturally’.16 In Architectural Forensics (2007) – a design opening for a project on the ‘material prehistories’ of the post-socialist city – the studio space itself is taken as a site of exploration and speculation.17 This ‘key site of architectural production’, Dorrian suggests, is never simply empty, but always already ‘full of tracks, marks, traces, scratches, scribings, indentations, dust, debris, and all kinds of remains that collectively form an opaque archive that points toward the obscure prehistory of the contemporary reality of the place’.18 Taking seriously the ‘material assemblage that constitutes the studio in its present condition’, then, would demand a new attentiveness to thought and action: a disposition that excludes nothing in advance and that considers every thing, no matter how small and indeterminate. In the brief, Dorrian’s description proceeds through a series of visually penetrating thoughts, each indicating a different condition of recording the material tracings

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Forensic sites are always fragile, liable to come apart and lose their eloquence. Extreme care has to be taken in investigation of and intervention within them. To assume that the feather on the floor, whose position and orientation might be disturbed by the sudden draught of an opening door, has the same consequence as a column, is to endow the world with an increased sensitivity and responsiveness, and this demands a different kind of architectural response in order to be adequate to it – perhaps it suggests

AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’

of the site. He describes the attitude demanded of the examination by pointing out the site’s vulnerability:

an architecture of registration, one akin to an instrument or a device.19

The image of a quivering feather that registers an architectural condition calls for a ‘delicacy of thought and action’ and licenses a poetic agility within the methodical enquiry.20 This image is not offered as a mere metaphor, but as a figure of movement that solicits the imagination and transports thought. Such a paradoxical figure, itself both unstable and forceful, wanders easily and renders its text animate. Texts of briefs do not circulate through published citations; rather, they travel in reiterated descriptions of design moves and postures, their terms taken up and absorbed by those partaking in projects and exchanges in and around the studio. Resisting paraphrase, their fragments mingle in conversations and tutorials, reviews and lectures; they appear in abstracts and outlines. Their titles have become terms for investigative modes and conceptual frames for urban methodologies. Concepts, phrases and ideas drawn from Dorrian’s design briefs have circulated through studio reviews and presentations. Deployed and transformed in projects, they have travelled further afield in new works and new writing, in postcripts and new pretexts. We find the after-image of his studio texts in Pamphlet Architecture 32: Resilience (2011) by Stasus, whose work, ‘Animate Landscapes’ (2007– 09), was developed under Dorrian’s tutelage. Introducing the book, Dorrian describes the stillness encountered on this project’s site in terms of a condition of recurring absence: Here stillness accumulated in the city in the same way as the intervals between the tick of a clock in an empty room gradually and unbearably intensify before their release. In this place, things – footsteps, breath, the

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thud of the heart – appeared with a strange new clarity because the spacing between them had taken on a new consequence.21

The enigmatic stillness that was found on the site selected for the project was already anticipated in a haunting photograph introduced in the studio brief for Warsaw: Tracking the City (2007). There, the inquiry was situated by the action of a child who, in the ruined city in the aftermath of the war, was asked to draw a picture of home on a blackboard.22 In his lectures and conference presentations on Warsaw’s ‘material prehistories’, Dorrian likened the figure of the child as she appears in the photograph to Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’.23 This doubly potent reference, noted later in his introduction to the co-edited special issue of the Journal of Architecture on Warsaw, folds Benjamin’s ‘thought-image’ of memory as a site of excavation, into the ‘thought-figure’ of history. The chiastic image-thought-image offered by Dorrian for Warsaw’s troubled ground materialises in the ambiguous figure of the child confronting the viewer, with her stilling gaze and halted gesture of drawing. His descriptions of the photograph – reiterated in the studio, and rearticulated in texts and paratexts that the studio projects engendered – are ekphrastic prose poems. Reproduced on the facing page, each one calibrates the architectural thought, guiding and re-directing the attention to the space of contingency within the image, indexing it to the figure of absence, a Benjaminian ‘short shadow’ of stillness.24 This ekphrastic attention to the image, the patient reading of what emerges from its surface, constructs a chiastic situation of inquiry that is the hallmark of Dorrian’s writing. His texts, metis-like, mobilise tensions between the image and words, between an astutely selected visual event and the thought-figure composed in its reading. The thought-image, a ‘philosophical miniature’ associated with the exilic texts of Walter Benjamin and the aesthetic and political positions of members and interlocutors of the Frankfurt School, manifests its enduring potency – if taken, as some literary scholars who probe into the image-text relationship suggest – not only as an historically fixed literary category, but an active mode of writing and thinking.25 Like the essay, this ‘poetic form of condensed . . . writing in textual snapshots’ remains invested in the form through which thought is made visible.26 For Benjamin, thought-images were optical devices that interlaced the poetic and the philosophical. They posited visual events as objects

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AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’ Figure A2. Photograph by David Seymour (Chim), Poland 1948 (courtesy of Magnum Photos). Texts by Mark Dorrian.

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of thought, critical articulations of the striving within writing that included the movement of thinking itself. Thinking-in-images was both ‘the manner of thinking and the manner of writing’, the methodological basis of his theoretical work and ‘the figurations in which his thinking [took] on form’.27 When he wrote about Benjamin’s ‘imagistic thought’, in which ‘ideas crystallized in detail’, Theodor Adorno described this mode of self-consciously compressed writing as purposeful, crafted ‘to strike sparks through a kind of intellectual short-circuiting that casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire’.28 In Dorrian’s writing, the thought-figure is not an aphoristic form, but an open text-in-action, a figure in and of movement. It binds the generative image and its description together in the way that Benjamin enfolded Klee’s drawing into a single paragraph of ‘On the Concept of History’.29 It is an instrument of spacing that operates between image and text, between the site of exploration and the surface of representation – an espacement that creates, and holds open, a place for thought. Operating within a pedagogical brief, it is cast into design investigations, purposefully thrown into the unstable space of the studio, where it imparts momentum by inviting architectural imaginaries and new ‘figurations in which [architectural] thinking takes on form’.30 Deployed in other texts, fixed in print for publication, Dorrian’s thought-figures become places of oscillation between discursive and representational fields. Constructed with a scrupulous precision of description that probes ambiguities of the image, the thought-figure – itself an incisive visual instance – is enfolded into thinking and writing in a way that simultaneously extends the bounds of textual exposition and disturbs the confines of the image. The vibration of thought, in-between description and depiction, performs an action of ‘spacing’ that Jacques Derrida saw as eventuating in architecture.31 It generates and organises pensive espacements in the way that St´ephane Mallarm´e considered ‘architectural and premeditated’ in his ideal volume, a book as an intellectual instrument, where blanks on the page and actions of textual fragments – in folding, recto/verso rotation of the sheet and hinging of the book’s gutter – generate and distribute thought.32 Turning to the texts assembled in Writing on the Image, we see how each essay pivots on a precisely rendered nexus, a thought-figure that operates as a situated optical device. Each describes a visual episode (the

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AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’ Figure A3. Mark Dorrian, ‘The Resilience of Ruins’, in Pamphlet Architecture 32: Resilience (2012), pp. 4–5 (courtesy Princeton Architectural Press).

choreographed figure of the king in the city, a screen image of Google Earth, the shadow of Stalin’s colossal edifice in the centre of Warsaw, an aerial photomap of London upon which the author stands) placed in a contingent enquiry, subject to shifting modes of viewing that move between scales and resolutions. In the last essay in this volume, which looks into the position of architecture within ‘the system of the arts’, we are presented with a thought-figure compressed into a point of oscillation between the presence of the indefinite article and its conspicuous absence. Dorrian’s discussion of architecture’s disciplinary neutrality unfolds from contemplating the implications of the slight shift in articulating certainty, whereby the relatively uncontentious formulation that architecture is an art has tended to slip into the claim that architecture is art. It is striking the degree to which a whole world of contingency and negotiation seems folded into the indefinite article of the former, when compared to the absolutist character of the latter.33

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moves from this grammatical fulcrum into a reconsideration of the semiotic square, opening up a discussion of the ‘place’ of architecture and the politics of categories and representations. A canonical diagram from a celebrated essay is reassessed by way of an architectural reading that induces torsions in the diagram’s vertices and tensions in its straight demarcating lines. The initiating thought-figure acts as a miniature of a torque: it provokes a twisting motion within the semiotic square, a strain of contingency distorting the lines between spaces where architecture holds its ground and where it dissolves into its own negation. In an opening paragraph of the penultimate essay in this collection describing the artist Anish Kapoor’s installation Marsyas in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London, Dorrian articulates the relations between the work of art commissioned for that space and the architecture within which it was stretched: A gargantuan tension structure made in blood-red PVC membrane, it extended between two steel rings, at either end of the Turbine Hall, to which the fabric was lashed. In the centre, above the bridge that crosses the Hall, a third ring was suspended horizontally, hanging free of contact with the building by virtue of the strain distributed throughout the skin of the installation.34

What appears here as a matter-of-fact account of the artwork’s architectural situation is a compressed drawing of forces and actions of pulling and tearing, which in the choice of participles anticipates the pain of the satyr Marsyas’s hanging body and the violence of the punishment meted out. It is a thought-figure, a sketch of the event indexing the adjacencies of the work’s title, which evokes the fate of Marsyas, the scale of the installation, and the artist’s own description of the work, with its references to resolution and religious symbolism. In this ekphrastic opening – prefigured by the heading, Rendering – Dorrian establishes with poetic precision the scene of his reflection on what lies beyond the visible surfaces of the installation’s fabric. Vibrating in the single word ‘lashed’ is an extent of pain and cruelty that is tied to global events concurrent with the installation. The compact paragraph details surface tensions of emergence: the monstrous scale and the blood-red visibility of Kapoor’s artwork, its paradoxical ephemerality and stillness, and its resonant absence of sound. 196

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Rendering Monstrous Emergence Unbounding And Silence The images called upon in the essay operate at the limits of textual registration: the graphically pulsating violence of Ovid’s description of the Apollonian assault upon Marsyas’s body; the visual cry that issues from Titian’s tremulous painting; the petrified sound in Zbigniew Herbert’s haunting poem of the episode. The recent – at the time of writing – visual shock of the tortured and humiliated body in Abu Ghraib is witnessed through the poet’s singular ‘A’ of Marsyas’s scream, the arrested silence of the fallen nightingale, the halting title of the concluding section, ‘And Silence’. Anticipated in the first heading, Rendering, the contemporary visual event is indexed by a single sentence of the essay, then echoed in the reference to Susan Sontag’s iconic text on pain, amplified by the drawn-out violence in Ovid’s description, and stilled by the arrested lines of Herbert’s poem. Dorrian’s critical explication of the essay from his ekphrastic sketch of the installation, is simultaneously an architectural reading of the assembled material and a crafted rendering of its discursive construction. Like a complex drawing, it cuts through layers of terror, outlines a topography of pain, traces details in agony. Herbert’s profoundly political poem, brought into adjacency with Kapoor’s installation and with iconic works of Western art and literature, orientates the drawing/text, positioning art and architecture within the politics of judgment and visuality. With its cadences of voiceless horror, the poem concretely gestures towards the absent referent of the tortured body beyond the text. Throughout the essay, the exactitude of architectural thought draws connections, giving voice to the political aspects of the silent sound art stretched across the immense space of a gallery whose name indexes power. Dorrian’s essay is invested in its object and its process of inquiry in a way that Adorno demanded of the critical form of writing; it is ‘composed of tensions’, it ‘struggles aesthetically’, ‘it gains its unity

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The essay – ‘Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying’ – which unfolds from the opening thought-figure is orientated by the headings. They bind the text like Mallarm´e’s key sentence stretched across his architectural poem ‘Un coup de d´es’:

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only by moving through fissures’ and it ‘insists that a matter be considered . . . in its whole complexity’.35 ‘It labors emphatically on the form of its presentation’, but, unlike literary essayistic writing, its ‘conceptual organisation’ and ‘its form follows the critical [architectural] thought’.36 Adorno recognises the individuated ‘intellectual optics’ that shapes the essay’s form.37 Notably, in his own essay on Siegfried Kracauer, he observes the distinctly architectural ‘gesture of his thought’ and a remarkable pedagogic gift of the ‘Curious Realist’ who had trained as an architect.38 Adorno notes that ‘the primacy of the optical that architecture requires remained with [Kracauer] in sublimated form’, and describes his unique ‘style of thought and presentation that connects one element to another with a gentle carefulness’ as akin to ‘thinking with the pencil in his hand’.39 Dorrian’s essays demonstrate a similar kind of sensitivity and alertness of thought. Each gestures architecturally. Each opening, a carefully set-out thought-figure, acts like a brief for the essay itself, a place from which the writing unfolds and to which it iteratively returns a reframed and rearticulated thought. It is intensely visual, proceeding through sequenced optical events, exploring points of view, moving between concepts and groupings of imagistic details. Its composition, like an animate installation, is tethered to the originating thought-figure. Drawing out tensions from the condensed form, it stretches the lines of thought across the varied discursive surfaces, sketching in details of binding and rendering connections throughout the assembled representational archive. In their oscillations between detail and overview, scales and perspectives, Dorrian’s essays construct and perform complex architectural drawings. Assembled in this volume, in a singular composition of adjacencies, these essays come to form a paratactic configuration, a ‘force field’ of thinking (in writing) on the image.40 Martin Jay, the renowned intellectual historian, in his reflection on the generative energies that arise from the contiguity of texts gathered in his book Essays from the Edge, credits this assemblage of occasional essays with the power to give a unique insight into his entire oeuvre and into broad discourses of visual culture and cultural history.41 Jay, by his own account, takes inspiration for the collection in the form and the attitude of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, a chance gathering of compact forms of writing which articulated the philosopher’s critique of grand systematising gestures and his scorn for comprehensive and monumental frameworks. Seeking ‘truth . . . in the interstices of a

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Few write as an architect builds, drawing up a plan and thinking it out to the smallest details. Most write as they play dominoes: their sentences are linked together as dominoes, one by one, in part deliberately, in part by

AFTERWORD: ‘POSTSCRIPT AS PRETEXT’

well-wrought text’, Schopenhauer’s essays and aphorisms contested the systematically constructed grand edifice of the treatise (the ‘rationalistic architecture’ of the established oeuvre) with their crisp and crafted forms.42 Jay opens his discussion of the borders and frames of texts with Schopenhauer’s aphorism on the process of writing. From this epigraphic position, the aphorism directs Jay’s reflection on essayistic edges, situating the textual assemblage in opposition to architectural thinking and making. Schopenhauer:

chance.43

Following the philosopher’s formulation, Jay affirms a process of writing that eschews the predetermined precision of architectural thinking in favour of the paratactic composition of texts. Here architecture is relegated to the basic execution of pre-ordered thoughts, while writing, conversely, is likened to a game that welcomes chance.44 According to this opposition, architectural thinking must inevitably operate within strict conventions and rules, and is capable only of constructing predictable and preplanned edifices of power. However, the kind of complex edge-to-edge positioning and sequencing that form the conditions of chance to which the rules of dominoes give rise – from the throw of the dice and from the precise geometry and relation of the gaming pieces – suggest a different possibility for architectural thinking and its connection to writing. The throw of the dice, the gesture of casting demonstrated by Mallarm´e in his architectural poem, has been considered by two thinkers that Jay brings into his discussion of textual edges and spacings, both of whom – Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida – have been concerned with writing as a form of inquiry. The game of dominoes can be read as a field of action that opens between rules and chance, between the geometry of elements and the contingency of gestures of casting, a kind of play that hinges on the situational adjacencies and mobilities of positions. This is a territory, or a ‘field of application’, with which the architect is exceptionally familiar. A territory, or a force field, of metis. The figure of a rational builder who proceeds through instructions towards a predetermined edifice (a leaden treatise) bears little resemblance to an architect in a 199

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pedagogic studio context, casting and working through responses to the call of the brief. Before any text or image is formed, an architect begins sketching, tracing uncertain thoughts through the tentative, searching line of a drawing. In the very action of drawing there is a singularity of finding and a reiterated refusal of closure. What if, then, poised here on the edge of Dorrian’s essays, we consider revising or reimagining the philosopher’s assertion: Few write as an architect draws? ‘Drawing is an opening of form’, we read in the opening sentence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Pleasure in Drawing, a text written for an exhibition that the philosopher curated.45 But this is also to say that drawing is a form of opening onto what lies outside its searching line. It is a situated action of making thought visible, an insistent attempt to both trace and arrest an image of thought, to come close to or approximate, to distance or abstract ideas. Nancy tells us that drawing is ‘at the same time a desire for and an anticipation of form’.46 He draws his reflection from the original interchangeability of the terms ‘drawing’ and ‘design’, still present in the French word dessin. In the composition of the text, Nancy performs the reiterative act of tracing, each time in a new ‘sketchbook’ where different lines of thought are gathered in sequenced quotations on drawing. While architectural drawing is tangential to his interest, a key insight into the pleasure in drawing comes from the geometry he finds in actions of prepositions and valences of terms, ‘an asymptotic contact’ between drawing out and showing, and vectorial forces between the gestures in tirer and dessiner.47 He points out a gap between French and English meanings of the term and the directional shift in the actions of the verbal form in the pedagogic situation, between drawing an insight and illustrating, drawing out a lesson and drawing a lesson (or a line). The gerund of the English word drawing fuses the continuity of movement with its captured shape, while the extending and projective motion of design is stilled in a refined verbal gesture. The gap between the philosopher’s construct dess(e)in and its translation, drawing/design, holds a simultaneity and succession of dynamic and static conditions, of transformative and transpositional movements in drawing. Nancy sees the drawing as a form in the process of forming, ‘an assemblage of parts . . . which mutually confer their coming together . . . to form an articulation . . . to con-figure themselves’.48 It is a reflexive form (in)forming itself, forma formans, rather than forma formata

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which conforms to pre-established schema.49 An architectural drawing, however, both in its making and its reading, necessarily oscillates between forma formans and forma formata, between the articulation of new form and the predetermined structures of conventions. It is routinely ‘immersed in practical operations’, obeying norms and measurements, observing rules, codes and procedures. At the same time, it thrives on speculation, tracing and crossing out uncertain lines, inviting revisions and erasures. Architectural drawings work in assemblages, in sets where spaces come together in polymorphic configurations of traces, projections and notations of actions. Operating at various scales and resolutions, they move between varied points of view, between the conditions of inside and outside; they cut through details and oscillate between pictorial and textual modes. They resolutely remain anchored in the contingencies of concrete sites, their lines weighted down by ‘material prehistories’ of surfaces, interrupted by the quotidian of specific places. Tethered to cartographic representations, they are repeatedly animated by local politics, framed by forms of seeing from above and disturbed by forces of ruling from afar.50 In Dorrian’s drawing-like writing we see both the vertical intensity of detail and the horizontal gestures of ‘drawing things together’ – akin, in its investigative scope, to Bruno Latour’s expansive examination of inscriptive and imaging procedures, practices of knowing and craftsmanship of recording the complex ways in which texts and images ‘come together flattened out onto the same surface’.51 Gathered in one volume, Dorrian’s situated enquiries draw new correspondences of thoughts on the politics of representation, performing what Latour refers to as a concern for ‘what it is to see and what there is to see’.52 Writing on the Image is situated in between two positions – the philosophical (dealing in words) and the poetic (holding to images). It demonstrates a form of spatial action of reading, listening and looking – an action of drawing/design in writing. It experiments with making thought visible and considers the image (in its various roles and situations within the representational schema) as an equally eloquent agent in thinking and making. Looking at architecture from the inside, Dorrian writes with images, deploying their discursive and representational capacities in the process of textual construction. His essays mobilise poetic descriptions of loaded visual events, attending to the inscriptive surfaces of the image, addressing its positioning within

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textual and graphic spaces, accounting for its agency in discourses, its movements in the mapping and sequencing of the exposition. They insist on reiterative actions of close reading, of close writing from within the image and from its places of indeterminacy. Just as Metis, as a ‘situational practice’, is effectively a collaborative thinking-inaction, Dorrian’s writing-with-images is a critical practice of inquiry which draws the reader into an exchange that constructs places which anticipate thought. He considers architecture to be ‘a broad performative field within which multiple practices are pursued and interact, including practices of teaching and research’ – and, we must add, writing.53 Writing on the Image continues the ‘many preoccupations and enthusiasms’ of the projects that comprise Urban Cartographies, ‘which extend, proliferate, modify and compellingly implicate architecture’.54 Arranged in a new ‘material assemblage’, the texts collected in Writing on the Image open themselves to new readings, extending their gestures, reiterating patterns of intensities, and activating new movements. Their thought-figures animate chiastic compositions initiated in the first chapter by the specular interplay between the king’s vision and the vision of the king, and re-performed in each essay of the collection in intricate figurations of inversions and repetitions.55 In its agility, Dorrian’s writing is akin to the poetic action that Lyn Hejinian, a poet, critic and theorist writing on the language of inquiry, claims to be constitutive of the openness of texts.56 An open text, she writes, strives towards ‘maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the idea rushes) and maximum horizontal extensivity (ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and weather)’.57 And it is the text’s poetic attention to the language of inquiry that creates ‘a capacity to generate . . . potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation’.58 This echoes Adorno’s demonstration of criticality as intrinsic to essayistic form and its internal ‘tensions between expressiveness and rigor’.59 The singularity of the essay’s ‘glance’,60 its ‘aesthetic autonomy’, is (in)formed by the writer’s unique intellectual experience, the ‘internal composition of his prose’ and his commitment to the ‘form’s groping intention’.61 Recalling Henri Meschonnic, mentioned at the opening of this Afterword, I take Mark Dorrian’s essays to be embodiments of a precise, poetic ‘work of thinking’, a situated action of inquiry that, in its distinctiveness and clarity of voice, constitutes – like the poem Meschonnic calls for in

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his manifesto – ‘A politics of thought’.62 In its ceaseless motion, and its dedication to language and the form of presentation, it remains resistant to closure. For Meschonnic, the poem, in its individuality, is subjectforming, and writing is ‘a continuous listening to the unknown’.63 It is ‘made of what we are going towards, which we do not know, and what we draw back from, which is vital to recognize’.64 Presented in Urban Cartographies, the installation Latitude and Longitude Resolved was held in motion by the absent figure of the Grand Tour traveller. Here, in this volume of Dorrian’s essays, it is the reader who performs the itinerant role of an explorer. Stepping into spaces opened up and held open by the writing, giving way to ‘chance, polysemy and a new interpretive demand’,65 the reader of Writing on the Image becomes a metis-like collector of images, imaginaries and thoughts ‘through which the journey [of reading and searching] may be re-membered but from which other itineraries are sure to be dreamt and drawn’.66 Ella Chmielewska is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

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Notes on the Chapters Chapter 1 ‘The King and the City: On the Iconology of George IV in Edinburgh’ was written for the session ‘Shadows in the Enlightened City: The City-Image and the Rise of Romanticism’, organised by Mark Dorrian and John Lowrey for the Sixth International Conference on Urban History: Power, Knowledge and Society in the City, Edinburgh, 5–7 September 2002. It was published in Edinburgh Architecture Research 30 (2006), pp. 32–36.

Chapter 2 An early version of ‘Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago 1893’ was presented at the conference Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture, held at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and the National Library of Wales, 8–10 July 2004. The chapter was subsequently published in Christoph Lindner (ed.), Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 17– 37.

Chapter 3 ‘Falling Upon Warsaw: The Shadow of Stalin’s “Palace of Culture”’ was published in the Journal of Architecture 15(1) (Special issue: Mark Dorrian and Ella Chmielewska [eds], Warsaw: Tracking the City) (2010), pp. 87–103. It was given as a public lecture at the Tchorek-Bentall Foundation in Warsaw on 8 April 2010.

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Chapter 4 ‘Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten’ was written for the workshop Seeing From Above: Surfaces, Scans, Smears and Subjectivities, held at the Wellcome Collection, London on 6 February 2010. Versions of the paper were given at the conference Covert Cultures: Art and the Secret State, 1911–1989, Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cambridge, 4–5 February 2011; at a Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture research seminar, Kingston University, 22 November 2011; and at a History, Theory and Criticism Forum research seminar, MIT, 24 April 2012. The second half of the chapter has been published as ‘Adventure on the Vertical: Powers of Ten and the Mastery of Space by Vision’ in Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture 44 (2011–12), pp. 17–23.

Chapter 5 ‘The way the World Sees London: Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle’ was written at the invitation of Professor Anthony Vidler for the 2005 Clark Institute Annual Conference, titled Architecture Between Spectacle and Use and held on 29 April 2005, and was subsequently published in the book of that name (Williamstown: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). The paper has been presented in different iterations at The Alice B. Kaplan Humanities Center, Northwestern University, Chicago, 6 May 2005; at the conference Countering Consumption: Religious and Secular Responses, Institute for the Study of European Transformations, London Metropolitan University, 20–22 April 2006; and at the Institute of Art History, University of Warsaw, 30 May 2008.

Chapter 6 ‘The Aerial Image: Transparency, Vertigo and Miniaturisation’ was written for a special issue of Parallax titled ‘Disturbing Spaces, Impossible Strategies’, at the invitation of the editor Eve Kalyva, appearing in 15(4), (2009), pp. 215–225. Earlier versions were given at the conferences The Aerial View, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 13 October 2008, and (as a keynote) Eyes Over London: Reimagining the Metropolis in the Age of Aerial Vision, University of Westminster, 15 November 2008.

Chapter 7 ‘Clouds of Architecture’ was first given as a paper at the Radical Philosophy Biennial Conference: Materials and Materialisms, Birkbeck College, University

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of London, 12 May 2007, and at Architecture in the Space of Flows, Newcastle University, 21–24 June 2007. It was published in Radical Philosophy 144 (2007), pp. 26–32, following which, at the suggestion of Paul Quinn, a sequence of programmes was developed for BBC Radio 3’s series The Essay. This included contributions by Steve Connor, Robert Harbison and Esther Leslie, and was broadcast 23–27 February 2009. The paper was given as a public lecture at Taubman College, University of Michigan on 12 February 2010.

Chapter 8 A first, longer draft of ‘Utopia on Ice’ was presented at the Science Fiction in the Present: Military Technology and Contemporary Culture symposium, organised by Mark Dorrian and Stephen Graham and held at Newcastle University, 26 May 2011. Later versions were given at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and in the ‘City Air’ session – convened by Amy Kulper and Diana Periton – at the 2012 Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference in Detroit. The essay has been published in Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture 47 (2012), pp. 25– 32, and in a slightly-altered form in Etienne Turpin (ed.), Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Deep Time, Design, Science and Philosophy. MPublishing/Open Humanities Press, 2013), pp. 143–152.

Chapter 9 The first version of ‘On Google Earth’ was written for the workshop The Aerial View: Spatial Knowledges and Spatial Practices, held at the University of Edinburgh on 3 February 2007. Variations were subsequently presented at the conferences Media Architecture, Central Saint Martins Innovation, London, 12 September 2007; The Picturesque and Beyond: Landscape and Modernity, SMAK/Universiteit Gent, 30 November 2007; Agency: 2008 Architectural Humanities Association Annual Conference, University of Sheffield, 14–15 November, 2008; and at a research seminar at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union, New York, 23 February 2010. It has previously appeared in New Geographies 4: Scales of the Earth (2011), pp. 164–170, and in Mark Dorrian and Fr´ed´eric Pousin (eds.) Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 290–307.

Chapter 10 ‘Transcoded Indexicality’ was first presented as ‘The Failure of the Rhetoric of the Image: A Case Study in Trust’ on 13 December 2006, as part of the Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh’s 2006–2007 seminar series Image and

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Trust. It was later published as ‘Transcoded Indexicality’ in Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City 12 (2008), pp. 105–115.

Chapter 11 ‘Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work’ was originally prepared for the ‘Skin’ session, convened by Tamara Trodd and Cordelia Warr, at the 35th Association of Art Historians Annual Conference held in Manchester, UK, 2–4 April 2009. It was published in Architectural Theory Review 17(1) (Special issue: Emergence) (2012), pp. 93–104.

Chapter 12 ‘Architecture and A-disciplinarity?’ was first drafted in 2005 and later presented as a keynote at the conference Architecture, Disciplinarity and the Arts, University of Queensland, Australia, 17 August 2007. It was published in the book of that name edited by Andrew Leach and John Macarthur (Gent: A&S), pp. 193– 205.

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Endnotes Introduction 1. T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, New German Critique 32 (1984), pp. 151–171; p. 151. 2. Ibid, p. 162. 3. Ibid, p. 165.

1 The King in the City: The Iconology of George IV in Edinburgh, 1822 1. I am referring of course to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay ‘The Invention of Tradition: the Highland Tradition of Scotland’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 15–41. 2. (Walter Scott), Hints Addressed to the Inhabitants of Edinburgh and Others, in Prospect of His Majesty’s Visit, by an Old Citizen (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, etc., 1822), pp. 6–7. 3. Ibid, p. 11. 4. A Narrative of the Visit of George IV to Scotland, in August 1822: By an Eye Witness of Most of the Scenes which were then Exhibited (Edinburgh: Macredie, Skelly and Co., Princes Street; and T. Nelson, High Street, 1822), pp. 25–26. 5. Gerald Finley, Turner and George the Fourth in Edinburgh, 1822 (Edinburgh: Tate Gallery and Edinburgh University Press, 1981), pp. 25–49. 6. A Picturesque Sketch of the Landing of His Most Gracious Majesty King George IV from the Royal Squadron Lying in Leith Roads on the 16th Day [sic] of August 1822 to His Arrival at the Palace of Holyrood in the City of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Printed for the author at the Observer Office, 1822).

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7. Sir Walter Scott, Familiar letters of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 1, David Douglas (ed.) (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1894), pp. 185–186. 8. James Simpson, Letters to Sir Walter Scott, BART., on the Moral and Political Character and Effects of the Visit to Scotland in August 1822, of his Majesty King George IV (Edinburgh: Waugh and Innes, Hunter Square, etc., 1822), p. 44. 9. A Narrative of the Visit of George IV to Scotland, p. 25. 10. A Picturesque Sketch of the Landing of His Most Gracious Majesty King George IV, p. 6. 11. A Narrative of the Visit of George IV to Scotland, p. 26. 12. A Picturesque Sketch of the Landing of His Most Gracious Majesty King George IV, p. 6. 13. Michael Charlesworth, ‘Thomas Sandby Climbs the Hoober Stand: the Politics of Panoramic Drawing in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Art History 19(2), June (1996): pp. 247–266; p. 263. See also Andrew Kennedy, ‘Representing the Three Kingdoms: Hanoverianism and the Virtuosi’s Museum’, in Mark Dorrian and Gillian Rose (eds), Deterritorialisations: Revisioning Landscapes and Politics (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003), pp. 272–283. 14. Robert Mudie, A Historical Account of His Majesty’s Visit to Scotland (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, High Street, 1822), p. 108. 15. Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 72. 16. Scott, Hints, p. 20. 17. Ibid, p. 21. 18. A Narrative of the Visit of George IV to Scotland, p. 43. 19. Scott, Hints, p. 19. 20. Simpson, Letters to Sir Walter Scott, p. 24. 21. Ibid, p. 115.

2 Cityscape with Ferris Wheel: Chicago, 1893 1. The Third Man, directed and produced by Carol Reed, screenplay by Graham Greene, a London Film production, UK/USA (1949). 2. Denis Diderot, ‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’ [1749], in Lester G. Crocker (ed.), Diderot’s Selected Writings, (New York and London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 14–30; p. 17. See also Carlo Ginzburg, ‘To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: the Moral Implications of Distance’, in Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance (London and New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 157–172.

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3. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, ‘Scapeland’ in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 212–219. 4. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, prepared by J.A. Simpson and E.S.C. Weiner, vol. III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 254. ‘W.M. Thackeray to Mrs Frederick Elliot’, in Hester Ritchie (ed.), Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie, with Forty-Two Additional Letters from Her Father William Makepeace Thackeray (London: John Murray, 1924), pp. 81–83, p. 82. 5. This is discussed further in Chapter 5. 6. Norman D. Anderson surveys the pre-history of the Ferris wheel and suggests an Islamic origin in Chapter 1 of his Ferris Wheels: an Illustrated History, (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992). 7. Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 252. 8. Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery, Pilote de Guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), cited in Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception (London: Verso, 1989), p. 71. 9. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: a Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 174. 10. Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘A Portrait of Nadar’, in Maria Morris Hambourg, Franc¸oise Heilbrun and Philippe N´eagu, Nadar (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), pp. 3–34. 11. Nadar, Quand j’´etais photographe (Paris: Flammarion, 1900), pp. 77–78, cited in Michel Frizot, ‘Another Kind of Photography: New Points of View’, in Michel Frizot (ed.), A New History of Photography (K¨oln: K¨onemann, 1998), pp. 386–397. 12. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908–1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 41. 13. Roland Barthes, ‘The Eiffel Tower’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), pp. 3–17; p. 8. 14. John A. Kouwenhoven, ‘The Eiffel Tower and the Ferris Wheel’, Arts Magazine 54(6) (1980), pp. 170–173; p. 171. 15. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 107–108. 16. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 209. 17. Cited in Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, p. 213. 18. Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 64–65.

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19. For example, that published in John Flinn’s Guide to the Midway, reproduced in Gilbert, Perfect Cities, p. 112. 20. Hubert Howe Bancroft, The Book of the Fair (Chicago and San Francisco: The Bancroft Company, 1893), p. 869. 21. Robert Graves, ‘The Big Ferris Wheel’, World’s Fair, June 28-Special, The Alleghenian, 1 July (1893). Available at http://www.carnegielibrary.org/ exhibit/neighborhoods/northside/nor n105b.html [Accessed 15 June 2004]. 22. Kouwenhoven, ‘The Eiffel Tower and the Ferris Wheel’, p. 173. 23. Anderson prints one of the Chicago wheel, re-erected at St Louis in 1904, in Ferris Wheels, p. 83. 24. Julien Hawthorne, ‘Foreign Folk at the Fair’, Cosmopolitan, 15(5), September (1893), pp. 567–576, cited in Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (London, New York etc: Bantam Books, 2004), p. 290. 25. Carl Snyder, ‘Engineer Ferris and His Wheel’, The American Monthly Review of Reviews, September (1893), pp. 268–276; p. 270, cited in Anderson, Ferris Wheels, p. 43. 26. Tudor Jenks, The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls, Being the Adventures of Harry and Philip with their Tutor, Mr. Douglass at the World’s Columbian Exposition (New York: Century, 1893), pp. 239–241. 27. Carroll Ryan, Chicago the Magnificent (New York: J.P. Williams, 1893), p. 43, cited in Gilbert, Perfect Cities, p. 112. 28. Ross Miller, American Apocalypse: the Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 239. 29. Larson, The Devil in the White City, p. 290. 30. F.W. Puttnam, Oriental and Occidental Northern and Southern Portrait Types of the Midway Plaisance (St Louis: N.D. Thompson, 1894), p. 2, cited in Gilbert, Perfect Cities, p. 110. 31. From Wister’s diary, cited in Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, p. 218. 32. Cf. Gilbert, Perfect Cities, p. 119. 33. ‘266 Feet in the Air: The Ferris Wheel Turns and Mrs Ferris Gives a Toast’, Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, 17 June (1893). Available at http://www.carnegielibrary.org/exhibit/neighborhoods/northside/ nor n105.html [Accessed 15 June 2004]. 34. W.F. Gronau, The Trial Trip of the Ferris Wheel, typed manuscript in the archives of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, cited in Anderson, Ferris Wheels, p. 62: my emphasis. 35. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London, England: MIT Press, 1996), p. 113.

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36. Frederick C. Bakewell, Great Facts: A Popular History and Description of the Most Remarkable Inventions During the Present Century (London: Houlston & Wright, 1859), cited in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, L.J.M. Daguerre: the History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype (London: Secker and Warburg, 1956), pp. 14–15. 37. J. Seymour Currey, Chicago: its History and its Builders, a Century of Marvelous Growth (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912), p. 85, cited in Miller, American Apocalypse, p. 236. 38. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 113. 39. Ibid, p. 112. 40. Gronau, The Trial Trip of the Ferris Wheel, cited in Anderson, Ferris Wheels, p. 62. 41. Clara Louise Burnham, Sweet Clover (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1893), p. 201, cited in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, p. 67. 42. ‘Madman in Mid-Air; Kentuckian Becomes Crazed in the Ferris Wheel’, Inter Ocean, 24 September (1893), cited in Anderson, Ferris Wheels, p. 66. 43. Peter Stallybrass and Alon White, ‘Bourgeois Hysteria and the Carnivalesque’, in The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 171–190. 44. Reproduced as frontispiece to Stanley Appelbaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: a Photographic Record (New York: Dover Publications, 1980), p. 102. 45. Gilbert, Perfect Cities, pp. 63–65. 46. Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), p. 233, where she reports the Pompeii attraction as a ‘panorama’. Appelbaum doubts it was ever built: Appelbaum, The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, p. 102. 47. Snyder, ‘Engineer Ferris and His Wheel’, cited in Anderson, Ferris Wheels, p. 43. 48. Recounted in Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 1. 49. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1991), p. 230. 50. Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), pp. 307–308. 51. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: a Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. v. 52. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition [1941] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press and London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 209–210. 53. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 211.

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54. Marco D’Eramo, The Pig and the Skyscraper – Chicago: a History of Our Future (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 32. 55. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, p. 211. 56. Robert Bartlett Haas, Muybridge: Man in Motion (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1976), p. 176.

3 Falling Upon Warsaw: The Shadow of Stalin’s Palace of Culture ˙ 1. Agata Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy (Long Live the Palace!) (Warszawa: Spis Tresci, 2004), p. 8. 2. Pałac Kultury I Nauki Warszawa (no date or pagination). ˙ 3. Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 161. 4. http://www.karolinabregula.com/ [Accessed 3 November 2009]. 5. ‘The kolossos . . . is a strong, fixed immobility, a monument of impassivity which has been stood upon the earth.’ Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’, in The Truth in Painting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 15–147; p. 121. ˙ 6. Reproduced in Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 156. Adrian Searle, ‘Park Life’, The Guardian: (G2), 15 October (2009), pp. 9–11; http://www .friezeartfair.com/press/print/frieze projects 2009 curatorial programme announced/ [Accessed 2 December 2009]. 7. David Crowley, Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p. 38. On the Soviet ‘bogatyrs’ see Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 36; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times – Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 71–72. 8. Cited in Grzybkowska, Dobrosława, ‘Pałac Kultury i Nauki w Warszawie jako obiekt kultowy w PRL-u’. http://www.dk.uni.wroc.pl/texty/ prl 06.pdf [Accessed 3 November 2009]. Translation Piotr Lesniak. 9. Adrian Forty, ‘Introduction’, in Adrian Forty and Suzanne K¨uchler (eds), The Art of Forgetting (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), pp. 1–18; p. 7. ˙ 10. Łukasz Garlicki, cited in Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 113. 11. Anders Åman, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe During the Stalin Era: an Aspect of Cold War History (New York: The Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 50 and illustration, p. 57. ˙ 12. Cited in Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 30. 13. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, p. 126. 14. Ibid, pp. 128–129.

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15. Cited in Magdelena J. Zaborowska, ‘The Height of (Architectural) Seduction: Reading the “Changes” through Stalin’s Palace in Warsaw, Poland’, Journal of Architectural Education 54(4) (2001), pp. 205–217. 16. According to Passent, today over 100 people ‘claim . . . rights to the lots ˙ occupied by the Palace’: Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 10. ´ 17. Leon O Broin, ‘Eyewitness in Warsaw: August 1956’, Studies: an Irish Quarterly Review 46(181) (1957), pp. 1–7; p. 1. ˙ 18. Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 159. 19. Augustin Ioan, ‘A Postmodern Critic’s Kit for Interpreting Socialist Realism’, in Neil Leach (ed.), Architecture and Revolution: Contemporary Perspectives from Central and Eastern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 62–66; p. 65. 20. Åman, Architecture and Ideology, p. 130. 21. Boris Groys, ‘Uniform Pluralism: On the New Moscow Style’, Harvard Design Magazine 13, Winter/Spring (2001), pp. 13–19; p. 16. 22. Cited in Alexei Tarkhanov and Serge Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture (London: Lawrence King, 1992), p. 44. 23. Groys, ‘Uniform Pluralism’, pp. 17–18. 24. Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, Stalinist Architecture, p. 25. 25. Stephan Sona Hoisington, “‘Ever Higher”: the Evolution of the Project for the Palace of Soviets’, Slavic Review 62(1) (2003), pp. 41–68; p. 44. 26. Ibid, p. 47. 27. Ibid, p. 58. 28. Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, p. xxiv. 29. Ibid, p. 18; N. Atarov, Dvorets Sovetov (Moscow, 1940), cited in Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, p. 19. 30. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism, p. 68; A.N. Proko’fev, The Palace of Soviets (Moscow, 1939), cited in Hoisington, ‘Ever Higher’, p. 65. 31. Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, p. 87. 32. Ibid, p. 89. 33. Ibid, p. 90. 34. Ibid, p. 90 and cf. p. 97. 35. Peter Wollen, ‘Painting History’ in Komar & Melamid, History Painting (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 1985), pp. 37–57; p. 38. 36. Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 135. 37. Robin Evans, ‘Translations from Drawing to Building’, in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), pp. 152–188; pp. 163–165. 38. Prokof’ev, The Palace of Soviets, cited in Hoisington, ‘Ever Higher’, p. 65.

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Crowley, Warsaw, p. 42. Reproduced in Åman, Architecture and Ideology, p. 34. ˙ Passent, Pałac Wiecznie Zywy, p. 8. This and following images and quotations are from http://www. socland.pl/index.php?option=com content&task=view&id=77& Itemid=60 [Accessed 4 December 2009].

4 Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten 1. W. Gaunt, ‘Introduction’, in W. Watson-Baker, World Beneath the Microscope (London and New York: The Studio, 1935), pp. 7–9; p. 9. 2. It seems only to have run to three volumes, the final being Raymond Lowey’s The Locomotive, which appeared in 1937. 3. Gideon Mantell, Thoughts on Animacules: A Glimpse of the Invisible World (London: John Murray, 1846), p. 7. Compare Heath’s engraving with, for example, Andreas Cellarius’ engraving of the southern hemisphere and its heavens in the Atlas Coelestis seu Harmonia Macrocosmica (Amsterdam, 1660). 4. On microscopy and imaginaries of travel see Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 342–349. 5. Rupert Martin, ‘A New Perspective’ in Rupert Martin (ed.), The View From Above: 125 Years of Aerial Photography, 9 December 1983 – 28 January 1984 (London: The Photographers Gallery, 1983), pp. 19–23; p. 21. 6. L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film (London: Lund Humphries, 1969), p. 28. Cf. L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy, ‘Unprecedented Photography’ (1927), in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art / Aperture, 1989), p. 83–85. 7. L´aszl´o Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision: From Material to Architecture (New York: Brewer, Warren & Puttnam, Inc., 1932), p. 178. 8. Ibid, pp. 30–32. 9. Ibid, p. 35, caption to Fig. 17. 10. Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Kitty Hauser, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life (London: Granta, 2008). 11. Hauser, Shadow Sites, p. 172. 12. On its commissioning, see M. Christine Boyer, ‘Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier’s Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s’, Diacritics 33(3/4); Autumn–Winter (2003), pp. 93–116: pp. 93–94.

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17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

Le Corbusier, Aircraft (London and New York: The Studio, 1935), p. 5. Ibid, p. 13. Ibid, p. 12. Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery, Pilote de Guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1942), p. 72. Le Corbusier had flown with Saint-Exup´ery in 1929; see Anthony Vidler, ‘Photourbanism: Planning the City from Above and from Below’, in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (eds.), A Companion to the City (Malden, Oxford, etc.: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 35–45; p. 39. Le Corbusier, Aircraft: no pagination, facing Fig.101. Cf. Saint-Exup´ery’s description of the analysis of aerial reconnaissance images: ‘One brings back photographs that are analyzed by stereoscope like growing organisms under a microscope. Those analyzing your photographic material do the work of a bacteriologist. They seek on the surface of the body (France) the traces of the virus that is destroying it’; Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery, ‘Letter to an American’, in Wartime Writings, 1939–1944 (London: Picador Classics, 1988), pp. 195–199; p. 199. Le Corbusier, Aircraft: no pagination, facing Fig.121. Ibid. Ibid. Gaunt, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision, p. 30. Nicola Bown, ‘What is the stuff that dreams are made of?’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 151– 92; p. 163. Gaunt, ‘Introduction’: p. 8. Philip and Phylis Morrison, ‘A Happy Octopus: Charles and Ray Learn Science and Teach it with Images’, in Donald Albrecht et al., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention (New York: Harry N Abrams, in association with the Library of Congress and the Vitra Design Museum, 2005), pp. 105–117; p. 108. Donald Albrecht, ‘Design is a Method of Action’, in Albrecht et al., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, pp. 19–43; p. 32. H´el`ene Lipstadt citing George Nelson in ‘Natural Overlap: Charles and Ray Eames and the Federal Government’, in Albrecht et al., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, pp. 151–177. Nancy Foy, The IBM World (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 23. Rex Malik, And Tomorrow. . . The World? Inside IBM (London: Millington, 1975), p. 32. Malik, And Tomorrow. . . The World?, p. x; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press,

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32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

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1970); Robert Sobel, IBM: Colossus in Transition (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1984), pp. 187–188. Philip Morrison cited in Pat Kirkham, Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth-Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1995), p. 353. Paul Schrader, ‘Poetry of Ideas: The Films of Charles Eames’, Film Quarterly, Spring (1970), pp. 2–19; p. 11. Available at www.paulschrader.org/writings.html [Accessed 12 October 2010]. J.G. Ballard, The Voices of Time and Other Stories, (New York: Berkley, 1962; reprinted 1966). J.G. Ballard, ‘The Voices of Time’, in The Voices of Time (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1985), pp. 9–41; p. 39. Alan Lightman, ‘A Sense of the Mysterious’, in Albrecht et al., The Work of Charles and Ray Eames, pp. 118–125; pp. 122–123. Interviewed by Paul Schrader, Charles Eames claimed that their films didn’t have a plot, and that ‘. . . in most of them it is structure that takes [its] place.’ But in Powers of Ten, structure seems more to conjure plot than to displace it. Schrader, ‘Poetry of Ideas’, p. 15. Robert Hooke, Micrographia: Or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observation and Inquiries Thereupon [1665], Facsimile Edition (Lincolnwood, Illinois: Science Heritage, 1987), no pagination. In his article Schrader in fact describes Powers of Ten as a ‘fantastic voyage’; Schrader, ‘Poetry of Ideas’, p. 11. Richard Fleischer, (dir.), The Fantastic Voyage (Twentieth Century Fox, 1966). The tenacity of The Fantastic Voyage as a cultural image for nanotechnology, and its status as an imaginary of ‘inner space’, is illustrated by a recent science and technology website which updates the Proteus to look like a space shuttle voyaging through floating red blood cells. Curiously, the craft has windows and, what is more, the lights are on, which suggests a miniaturised crew as well. http://www.impactlab .net/2009/01/17/mini-submarines-to-explore-human-body-nearingreality/ [Accessed 12 October 2010]. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 21. See also Pierre Schaeffer, ‘Acousmatics’, in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), pp. 76–81. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 24. Schrader, ‘Poetry of Ideas’, p. 11. Chion, The Voice in Cinema, p. 45. Ibid, p. 24.

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1. Iain Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus: Excursions to the Millennium Dome (London: Profile Books in association with the London Review of Books, 1999), pp. 7–8. 2. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books: New York, 1994), p. 26, no.36; italics in original. 3. ‘Imprisoned in a flat universe bounded on all sides by the spectacle’s screen, the consciousness of the spectator has only figmentary interlocutors which subject it to a one-way discourse on their commodities and the politics of those commodities’: Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 153, no.218. See also Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London and New York: Verso, 1990). 4. Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980), pp. 121–142; pp. 139–140. 5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 42–44. 6. Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus, p. 8. 7. Ibid, p. 31. 8. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Marginal Notes on Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle’, in Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 73–89; p. 75. 9. Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations 4 (1988), pp. 73–102. 10. Cited in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), p. 218. 11. Jim McGuigan, ‘The Social Construction of a Cultural Disaster: New Labour’s Millennium Experience’, Cultural Studies 17(5) (2003), pp. 669– 690; p. 687. 12. Retort (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts), ‘Afflicted Powers: the State, the Spectacle and September 11’, New Left Review 27, May/June (2004), pp. 5–21; pp. 18–20. 13. Polly Toynbee, ‘I paid up, I queued up, and now I’m thoroughly fed up’, The Guardian, 5 January (2000), p. 20. 14. Arifa Akbar, ‘London Eye on top of the world as it becomes best tourist attraction’, The Independent, 17 March (2005), pp. 18–19. 15. British Airways sold its stake in November 2005, and shortly afterwards the Tussauds Group acquired sole ownership of the London Eye. Tussauds was in turn taken over by Merlin Entertainments Group in 2007.

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5 ‘The Way the World Sees London’: Thoughts on a Millennial Urban Spectacle

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Throughout these changes, British Airways’s brand association with the London Eye was maintained via a franchising arrangement. 16. Bruno Latour, ‘What is Iconoclash? Or is there a World Beyond the Image Wars?’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Culture (Karlsruhe: ZKM and Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 14–37; pp. 26–27. 17. Sinclair, Sorry Meniscus, p. 21.

6 The Aerial Image: Vertigo, Transparency and Miniaturisation 1. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk news/england/2145305.stm [Accessed 8 April 2009]. Sudjic, Deyan, ‘A Thoroughly Modernising Mayor,’ The Observer, 8 July (2001). http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/ 2001/jul/08/arts.highereducation [Accessed 8 April 2009]. 2. Norman Foster, Rebuilding the Reichstag (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), p. 111. 3. Gregg Lambert, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 4. 4. www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1027/Default.aspx [Accessed 8 April 2009]. Robert Booth, ‘Halls of Shame: Biggest CO2 Offenders Unveiled’, The Guardian, 2 October (2008). www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/2008/oct/02/carbonemissions.greenbuilding [Accessed 8 April 2009]. City Hall was rated E for carbon emissions on a scale of A to G, where A is the least polluting and G is the highest. 5. www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/0639/Default.aspx [Accessed 8 April 2009]. 6. www.inhabitat.com/2007/12/26/tallest-skyscraper-in-the-worldcoming-to-moscow/[Accessed 8 April 2009]. www.fosterandpartners .com/Projects/1496/Default.aspx [Accessed 8 April 2009]. www. fosterandpartners.com/News/324/Default.aspx [Accessed 8 April 2009]. 7. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk news/england/2145305.stm [Accessed 8 April 2009]. 8. Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 7. 9. Ibid, p. 13. 10. Ibid, p. 14. 11. Immanuel Kant, ‘Part 1: The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement’, in The Critique of Judgement, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), p. 109 (§27), p. 111 (§28). 12. Simon Grimble, ‘Somewhere to Stand: Descriptive Writing and Cultural Criticism in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory’, in Mark Dorrian

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

and Gillian Rose (eds), Deterritorialisations . . . Revisioning Landscapes and Politics, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2003), pp. 175–181; p. 175. Barbara Goodwin, ‘The Vertigo of Facts: Literary Accounts of a Philosophical Dilemma’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 18(3) (1978), pp. 261– 276; p. 273. W.G. Sebald, Vertigo (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 8. James Chandler, ‘About Loss: W.G. Sebald’s Romantic Art of Memory’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 102(1), Winter (2003), pp. 235–262; p. 245. Dan Auiler, Vertigo: the Making of a Hitchcock Classic (London: Titan Books, 1999), p. 30. Claude L´evi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), p. 23. Antoine de Saint-Exup´ery, Flight to Arras (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1942), p. 117.

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7 Clouds of Architecture 1. Kim Willsher, ‘Is It a Cloud? Is It a Cocoon? Gehry’s Paris Museum unveiled’, The Guardian, 3 October (2006), p. 15. 2. Ibid, p. 15. 3. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 35. 4. ‘Modern architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32pm (or thereabouts), when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grˆace by dynamite.’ Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1977/78), p. 9. 5. Frank Werner, Covering + Exposing: the Architecture of Coop Himmelb(l)au, (Basel, Berlin and Boston: Birkh¨auser, 2000). 6. Ibid, pp. 67–68. 7. Ibid, p. 21. 8. Steven Connor, ‘Haze: On Nebular Modernism’, a paper presented at Modernism and Beyond: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Art Theory and Literary Theory, Trinity College, Oxford, 12 May, (2006), pp. 12–16. Available at www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/haze/haze.pdf [Accessed 10 February 2007]. 9. Werner, Covering + Exposing, p. 21. 10. Willsher, ‘Is it a cloud?’, p. 15; Werner, Covering + Exposing, p. 68. 11. Werner, Covering + Exposing, p. 27. 12. Ibid, p. 28. 13. Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: the Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola and New York: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 68.

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14. Heinrich W¨offlin, ‘Prologomena to a Psychology of Architecture’, in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds), Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), pp. 149– 190; Georges Bataille, ‘Formless’, in Atlas Arkhive Three: Encyclopaedia Acephalica (London: Atlas Press, 1995). 15. Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, pp. 21, 15. 16. Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1994), p. 94. 17. John Hejduk, The Lancaster/Hanover Masque, Text 8 (London: Architecture Association and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1992), p. 13. 18. ‘I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter’. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 14. See also Jacques Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since MerleauPonty (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 259–296. 19. Connor, ‘Haze’, p. 12. 20. Daniel Libeskind, ‘The Pilgrimage of Absolute Architecture (A Conversational Explanation)’, in Countersign (London: Academy Editions, 1991), p. 42. 21. Charles Renfro, ‘Blur Building’, Architecture + Urbanism 428 (2006), pp. 62–73; p. 67. 22. Diller + Scofidio, Blur: the Making of Nothing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002). 23. Diller + Scofidio, ‘Blur Building, Expo 2002, Yverdon-les-bains, Suisse’, Lotus International 125 (Liquid Architecture) (2005), pp. 76–81; p. 78. 24. Renfro, ‘Blur Building’, p. 67. 25. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78. 26. From the original manuscript of Dark Writing. I am grateful to Paul Carter for his permission to quote. 27. Diller + Scofidio, ‘Blur: Swiss EXPO 2002 Diller + Scofidio, Ear Studio, MIT Media Lab’, Assemblage 41 (2000), p. 25. 28. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78. 29. See Jacques Derrida, and Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). 30. Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, London, 1977); James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). 31. Mark Wigley, ‘The Architecture of Atmosphere’, Daidalos 68 (1998), pp. 18–27; p. 27.

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32. Patricia C. Phillips, ‘A parallax practice: a conversation with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Art Journal, 22 September (2004), pp. 62– 79; p. 74. 33. Hubert Damisch, ‘Blotting Out Architecture? A Fable in Seven Parts’, Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City 1, Fall (2003), pp. 9–26; pp. 19, 26. 34. Reyner Banham, ‘A Home is Not a House’ (illustrated by Franc¸ois Dallegret), Art in America 53, April (1965), pp. 70–79. This project is discussed at greater length in Chapter 8. 35. Diller + Scofidio, Assemblage, p. 25. 36. Diller + Scofidio, Lotus International, p. 78. 37. Damisch, ‘Blotting Out Architecture?’, p. 19. 38. Diller + Scofidio, Blur: the Making of Nothing, pp. 48–49. 39. See Raymond Fitch, The Poison Sky: Myth and Apocalypse in Ruskin (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982). 40. Willsher, ‘Is It a Cloud?’, p. 15.

8 Utopia on Ice: The Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome as an Allegory of the Future 1. Sir Thomas More Utopia [1516] (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1975), pp. 34–35. 2. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), p. 42. 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 14–26; p. 17. 4. Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 224. 5. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements and of the General Destinies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 47–48. 6. Ibid, p. 50. 7. William B. Meyer, ‘Edward Bellamy and the Weather of Utopia’, Geographical Review 94(1) (January 2004), pp. 43–52. 8. See the discussion in Paul Baines, “‘Able Mechanick”: The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins and the Eighteenth-Century Fantastic Voyage’, in David Seed (ed.), Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), pp. 1–25. 9. Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009). 10. Spencer Weart, ‘Climate Modification Schemes’ (June 2011). Available at: http://www.aip. org/history/climate/RainMake.htm [Accessed 15 August 2011].

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11. See Chapter 6 of James Rodger Fleming, Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 12. Colonel Tamzy J. House, et al., ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’ (1996), http://www.fas.org/spp/military/ docops/usaf/2025/v3c15/v3c15-2.htm#v3c15–2 [Accessed 15 August 2011]. 13. See http://www.skidubai.com/dubai/mountain-ski-dome/ [Accessed 15 August 2011]. A much smaller ski resort located in the Mall of the Emirates opened in 2005. 14. ‘The normal temperature of air fit for breathing is 64.4◦ Fahrenheit. . . . But where is Utopia, where the temperature is 64.4◦ . . . ? Let’s manufacture exact air: filters, driers, humidifiers, disinfectors. . . . Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires, the solution is the same’. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, pp. 40–42. 15. See, for instance, Fuller’s comments on his American Pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal, cited in John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977), p. 169. 16. Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (London: The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 5. 17. Ibid, p. 8. 18. John H. Griscom, The Uses and Abuses of Air: Showing Its Influences in Sustaining Life, and Producing Disease; With Remarks on the Ventilation of Houses (New York: J.S. Redfield, 1848), pp. 6–7. 19. Le Corbusier, The Radiant City, pp. 40–41.

9 On Google Earth 1. Sarah Milstein, J.D. Biersdorfer, and Matthew MacDonald, Google: The Missing Manual, 2nd edition (Beijing, Cambridge, etc.: Pogue Press, O’Reilly, 2006), p. 108. 2. David Vise singles out South Korea as being particularly resistant to penetration by Google. David A. Vise, ‘Google’, Foreign Policy 154 (2006), pp. 20–24; p. 20. 3. See, for example, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin, Mapping Cyberspace (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 4. http://www.google.com/corporate/ [Accessed 22 March 2010]. Due to be completed in around 300 years, according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers (USA) in 2005: see Lucy Sherriff, ‘We’ll index the world by 2310, says Google’. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/10/google index/ [Accessed 23 March 2010].

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5. John Lanchester, ‘The Global Id’, London Review of Books 28(2), 26 January (2006). http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n02/john-lanchester/ the-global-id [Accessed 23 March 2010]. 6. David Vise, with Mark Malseed, The Google Story (Basingstoke and Oxford: Pan Macmillan, 2008), p. 39. 7. Cited in Vise, The Google Story, p. 3. 8. John Markoff, ‘Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Seeks More Power’, The New York Times, 14 June (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/ 06/14/technology/14search.html?pagewanted=2& r=1&ei=5070&en= 5f47a9cc1f8a2faf&ex=1189396800 [Accessed 23 March 2010]. 9. Lanchester, ‘The Global Id’. 10. Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It (London: Virgin Books, 2010). 11. Alex Williams, ‘Planet Google Wants You’, The New York Times, 15 October (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/fashion/ 15google.html?ex=1189051200&en=1640e28bbf02e82e&ei=5070 [Accessed 22 March 2010]. 12. Williams, ‘Planet Google Wants You’. At a September 2010 press conference, Sergey Brin announced that he wanted Google to become ‘the third half of your brain’. Nick Bilton, ‘Google Earth Pushes Boundaries Between Real and Virtual’, The New York Times, 29 November (2010). http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/ google-earth-pushes-boundaries-between-real-and-virtual/?scp=1& sq=%22google%20earth%20pushes%20boundaries%20between%20real% 20and%20virtual%22&st=cse [Accessed 1 December 2011]. 13. Williams, ‘Planet Google Wants You’. 14. Robert Verkaik, ‘Google is Watching You’, The Independent, 24 May (2007), pp. 1–2; p. 2. 15. Victor Keegan, ‘That Ringing Sound is Google on the Phone’, The Guardian (Technology), 13 September (2007), p. 4. 16. Stewart Brand, [ed.], Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools, Fall (1968). http://www.wholeearth.com/issue-electronic-edition.php?iss=1010 [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 17. Fred Smith, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 18. Kevin Kelly, ‘Scan this Book!’, The New York Times Magazine, 14 May (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing .html?pagewanted=1& r=1&ei=5070&en=ac7163de40132770&ex= 1189051200&adxnnlx=1188918074-MfeDRLvuvFFoXIiFxqjuUw [Accessed 22 March 2010]

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19. Cf. Roberts’s and Schein’s discussion of images of the globe in advertisements by geographic information providers, in which they note: ‘Views from above underscore the advertiser’s totalizing claims of complete coverage, of being everywhere’. Susan M. Roberts, and Richard H. Schein, ‘Earth Shattering: Global Imagery and GIS’, in John Pickles (ed.), Ground Truth: The Social Implications of Geographic Information Systems (New York and London: The Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 171–195; p. 174. 20. Arifa Akbar, ‘London Eye on top of the world as it becomes best tourist attraction’, The Independent, 17 March (2005), pp. 18–19. See Chapter 5 of the present book. 21. E.g. the ‘picture of one of the worst things on the planet: the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada’ is selected by Bertrand as his best photograph. ‘What you’re looking at is essentially poison and pollution, yet the shot has great beauty.’ ‘Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Best Shot’, The Guardian (G2), 24 September (2009), p. 23. 22. Steven Johnson, ‘The Long Zoom’, The New York Times Magazine, 8 October (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/ magazine/08games.html? r=2&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all [Accessed 25 March 2010]. I am grateful to Amy Kulper for this reference. 23. Vittoria di, Palma, ‘Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy’, in Vittoria di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri (eds), Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 239–270. For an interpretation of Powers of Ten in its Cold War context, see Chapter 4 of this volume. 24. Stuart Elliott, ‘Marketing on Google: It’s Not Just Text Anymore’, The New York Times, 22 September (2006). http://www.nytimes.com/ 2006/09/22/business/media/22adco.html? r=1&ex=1188964800&en= 0e8871e885436af5&ei=5070 [Accessed 27 March 2010]. 25. Michael Miller, Google.pedia: The Ultimate Google Resource (Indianapolis: Que Publishing, 2007), p. 323. 26. Photograph reference: AS17-148-22727. Vittoria Di Palma also discerns a relation between Google Earth and this image. Di Palma, ‘Zoom: Google Earth and Global Intimacy’, p. 264. 27. Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), pp. 257–267. 28. Studied by Robert Poole in Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008). 29. Stewart Brand (ed.), The Next Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Point / Random House, 1981 [4th printing]), p. 1. 30. On the relation between the Apollo images and James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, see Poole, Earthrise, p. 170–189.

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31. In later releases there is an option to switch on a shading effect, although this disappears upon zooming in. 32. Randall Stross, Planet Google: How One Company is Transforming Our Lives (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), p. 131. 33. Lester Haines, ‘Google Earth: The Black Helicopters Have Landed’, The Register, 14 October (2005). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/14/ google earth competition results/ [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 34. To sample a Google Earth UFO sighting in Area 51 see: http://www .youtube.com/watch?v=ucZKCrMvqu4 [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 35. Katie Hafner and Saritha Rai, ‘Governments Tremble at Google’s Bird’s-Eye View’, The New York Times, 20 December (2005). http:// www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/technology/20image.html? r=1&ei= 5070&en=4b89cb0ad323cec6&ex=1189051200&pagewanted=all [Accessed 30 March 2010]; Lester Haines, ‘Taiwan Huffs and Puffs at Google Earth’, The Register, 4 October (2005). http://www .theregister.co.uk/2005/10/04/taiwan google earth/ [Accessed 30 March 2010]; Lester Haines, ‘Liverpool Throws Strop at Google Earth’, The Register, 27 November (2006). http://www.theregister.co.uk/ 2006/11/27/liverpool google earth outrage/ [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 36. ‘Picture is Not Always Clear’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 January (2007). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1539400/Picture-isnot-always-clear.html [Accessed 30 March 2010]. For more on this see: Ian Black, ‘Bahrain Protests Will Go Nowhere While the US Supports its Government’, The Guardian, 16 April (2011). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/16/bahrain-protests-ussupports-government?INTCMP=SRCH [Accessed 2 December 2011]. 37. Thomas Harding, ‘Google Blots Out Iraq Bases on Internet’, The Daily Telegraph, 20 January (2007). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/1540039/Google-blots-out-Iraq-bases-on-internet .html [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 38. For a report on the appearance of high-resolution images of Israel on Google Earth in 2007, see http://www.informationliberation.com/ ?id=23961 [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 39. On the website they helpfully provided a ‘Search for bin Laden at Home!’ link: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/start.html?pg=10 [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 40. Charles Starmer-Smith, ‘Zooming In: The World at Your Fingertip’, The Daily Telegraph, 5 November (2005). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ travel/733938/Zooming-in-the-world-at-your-fingertip.html [Accesssed 27 March 2010].

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41. Lester Haines, ‘Giant Colonel Sanders Visible from Space’, The Register, 17 November (2006). http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/11/17/ colonel sanders mosaic/ [Accessed 27 March 2010]. 42. Anders Albrechtslund, ‘Surveillance in Searching: A Study into Ethical Aspects of an Emergent Search Culture’, unpublished paper, no pagination. I am grateful to the author for providing me with a copy of his essay. 43. http://www.motivatepublishing.com/library/default.asp?categorycode= About mp&ID=About mp [Accessed 30 March 2010]. 44. Mike Davis, ‘Does the Road to the Future End at Dubai?’, Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City, 6 (2005), pp. 61–64; p. 61. 45. http://www.nakheel.com/en/news/2008 new era [Accessed 30 March 2010].

10 Transcoded Indexicality 1. ‘Having a photograph of Shakespeare would be like having a nail from the True Cross.’ Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 154. 2. Ibid, p. 154. 3. William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the PostPhotographic Era (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992), p. 8. 4. Hal Foster, ‘Design and Crime’, in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London and New York: Verso, 2003), pp. 13–26; p. 24. 5. ‘Seemed to be’ because it is clear that the presentation was at best about legitimation, and had little consequence for operational decisions. 6. ‘The discontinuous connotators are connected, actualized, “spoken”, through the syntagm of the denotation, the discontinuous world of the symbols plunges into the story of the denoted scene as though into a lustral bath of innocence’. Roland, Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ in Image Music Text (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977), pp. 32–51, p. 49. 7. Maureen Dowd, ‘Powell without Picasso’, The New York Times, Section A, 5 February (2003), p. 27. 8. This and subsequent quotations are from the transcript which can be found, along with the images shown in the presentation, at http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030205-1.html# [Accessed 15 November 2006]. 9. C.S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols 1 and 2, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds) (Cambridge Mass: Belknap Press, 1965), 2.248 (p. 143).

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10. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Myths, Emblems, Clues, (London, Sydney, Auckland, Johannesburg: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), pp. 96–125. 11. Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1996), p. 65. 12. ‘Anything which focuses the attention is an index. Anything which startles us is an index, in so far as it marks the junction between two portions of experience.’ Hartshorne and Weiss (eds), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 2.285 (p. 161). 13. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (London: Vintage, 1993), p. 5. 14. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 7. 15. Julian Borger, ‘Powell raises the banner for war but the world remains divided’, The Guardian, 6 February (2003). http://www.guardian .co.uk/international/story/0,889809,00.html [Accessed 2 December 2006]. 16. Staff and agencies, ‘What the international papers say’, Guardian Unlimited, 6 February (2003). http://www.guardian.co.uk/ international/ story/0,890477,00.html [Accessed 2 December 2006]. 17. Le Monde, 10 January (2004). Translation available at www.truthout.org/ cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/3249 [Accessed 2 December 2006]. I am grateful to Gavin Keeney for drawing my attention to this.

11 Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work 1. Anish Kapoor, with Donna de, Salvo, ‘A Conversation’, in Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (London: Tate Publishing, 2002), pp. 60–64; p. 61. 2. Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova sive conjugium mechanico-physicum artis & naturae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum (Kempten: Rudolph Dreherr, 1673), p. 162. 3. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), p. 37. 4. ‘the less gory operation in Antonioni’s China documentary Chung Kuo made me flinch at the first cut of the scalpel and avert my eyes several times during the sequence. One is vulnerable to disturbing events in the form of photographic images in a way that one is not to the real thing. . . . Antonioni has already chosen what parts of the operation I can watch; the camera looks for me – and obliges me to look, leaving as my only option not to look.’ Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 168–169.

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5. H.W. Janson, ‘Titian’s Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalian-Galenist Controversy’, The Art Bulletin 28(1), March (1946), pp. 49–53; p. 52. For a general account of the initials see Samuel W. Lambert, ‘The Initial Letters of the Anatomical Treatise, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, of Vesalius’, in Samuel W. Lambert, Willy Wiegand and William M. Ivins, Jr, Three Vesalian Essays to Accompany the Icones Anatomicae of 1934 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), pp. 3–24. 6. Fredrika Jacobs, ‘(Dis)assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno’, The Art Bulletin 84(3) September (2002), pp. 426– 448; Jonathan Sawday, ‘The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), pp. 111–135. 7. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VI, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press and London: Heinemann, 1977), p. 315 (387– 391). 8. Thomas Mathiesen notes that Athena’s instrument contained a reed, and so cannot be properly described as a flute. Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo’s Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 182. 9. Ibid, pp. 176–179. 10. Aristotle, ‘Politics’, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), II, Bollingen Series lxxi-2 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 1986–2129; p. 2127 (1341a, 20–25; 1341b, 2–7). 11. Joanna Nizynska’s translation. ‘The Myth of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert’s “Apollo and Marsyas”’, Comparative Literature 53(2), Spring (2001), pp. 151–169; p. 153. 12. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Painting in the Grotto’, in The Muses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 69–79; p. 71. 13. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘In the Mirror of Medusa’, in Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.), Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 141–150; p. 147. 14. Thalia Howe, ‘The Origin and Function of the Gorgon Head’, cited in Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Death in the Eyes’, in Zeitlin (ed.), Mortals and Immortals, pp. 111–138; p. 117. 15. Vernant, ‘Death in the Eyes’, p. 125. 16. Zbigniew Herbert, ‘Apollo and Marsyas’, in Collected Poems, 1956–1998 (London: Atlantic Books, 2009), pp. 165–166. 17. Louis Marin, ‘Figures of Reception’, in On Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 320–336; p. 334. 18. Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 64–65.

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ENDNOTES TO PAGES 170–177

19. Kapoor, Marsyas, pp. 92–93. 20. Kapoor with de Salvo, ‘A Conversation’, p. 60. 21. ‘Apollo’s intimate involvement in the execution is an outrageous breach not only of divine dignity but of the decorum of the execution scene since the highest authority of the state was conspicuously absent at executions, his place being supplied by his deputy. The actual execution of the legal sanction was considered beneath the dignity of high office.’ David Richards, Masks of Difference: Cultural Representations in Literature, Anthropology and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 9–36; pp. 21–22. For a review of interpretations of Titian’s painting see Jutta Held, ‘Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas: an Analysis of the Analyses’, Oxford Art Journal 31(2) (2008), pp. 179–194. 22. Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 315 (385). 23. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 72. 24. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 38. 25. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan – Book XX: Encore 1972–1973 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 116. For Lacan’s reflections on Holbein’s painting, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), pp. 85–89. 26. Andrew Feldherr, ‘Flaying the Other’, in Andrew Feldherr and Paula James, ‘Making the Most of Marsyas’, Arethusa 37(1) (2004), pp. 75–103; p. 83. 27. Feldherr, ‘Flaying the Other’, pp. 82–83. 28. Cf. Beat Wyss, ‘The Last Judgement as Artistic Process: The Flaying of Marsyas in the Sistine Chapel’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 28 (Autumn 1995), pp. 62–77; p. 63. 29. Donna de Salvo, ‘Making Marsyas’, in Kapoor, Marsyas, pp. 12–17; p. 16. 30. Cited in Jacobs, ‘(Dis)assembling: Marsyas, Michelangelo, and the Accademia del Disegno’, p. 430. 31. Nancy, ‘Painting in the Grotto’, p. 79.

12 A-Disciplinarity and Architecture? 1. Jonathan Jones, ‘A Fine Pickle’, The Guardian, 18 October (2004). http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2004/oct/18/architecture .regeneration [Accessed 12 August 2005]. 2. Hal Foster comments on this in ‘Master Builder’, in Design and Crime and Other Diatribes (London & New York: Verso, 2002), pp. 27–42.

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3. Rosalind Krauss, ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), pp. 32–33. 4. See, for example, ‘Roundtable: The Predicament of Contemporary Art’, in Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster & Rosalind Krauss, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), pp. 670–679; pp. 674–675. 5. Patricia C. Phillips, ‘A Parallax Practice: A Conversation with Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio’, Art Journal, September 22 (2004), pp. 62– 79; p. 76; Mark Wigley, ‘The Architecture of Atmosphere’, Daidalos 68 (1998), pp. 18–27; p. 27. 6. Wigley, ‘The Architecture of Atmosphere’, p. 27. 7. See Chapter 7. 8. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT, 1986), pp. 276–290; p. 279. 9. Ibid, p. 280. 10. Ibid, p. 280. 11. Ibid, p. 284. 12. Ibid, p. 284. 13. Fredric Jameson, ‘Foreword’, in Algirdas Julian Greimas, On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory (London: Frances Pinter, 1987), pp. vi–xxii; p. xv. 14. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play (London: Macmillan, 1984), pp. xv– xxvii; p. xxv. 15. Fredric Jameson, ‘Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse’, in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971– 1986, vol. 2, The Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 75– 101; p. 101; Marin, Utopics, p. xxvi. Robin Wilson discusses both Krauss’s and Jameson’s use of the semiotic square in his doctoral thesis Image, Text, Architecture: Sites of Utopic Critique, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (2006). 16. Marin, Utopics, p. 163. 17. Ibid, p. 47. 18. Ibid, p. 7. 19. Ibid, p. 14. 20. Ibid, pp. 15–16. 21. Diller + Scofidio, ‘Blur Building, Expo 2002, Yverdon-les-bains, Suisse’, Lotus International 125 (Liquid Architecture) (2005), pp. 76–81; p. 78. 22. Diller + Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002). 23. Marin, Utopics, xxvi.

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1. I have taken this title from Mark Dorrian’s ‘Introduction: Postscript as Pretext’, in Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, Metis: Urban Cartographies (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002), pp. 8–11. 2. Henri Meschonnic, ‘The Rhythm Party Manifesto’, trans. David Nowell Smith, Thinking Verse I (2011), pp. 161–173. Meschonnic, a poet, translator, and theorist, insists on ‘a necessity to demonstrate [manifester] the poem’, ‘to make a place for a poem. A place’ (p. 161). For him, ‘a thinking of the poem is necessary to language and society’ (p. 173). I am grateful to Fiona Hanley for bringing ‘The Rhythm Party Manifesto’ to my attention and for the conversations on gestures and forms of writing. 3. The philosopher Andrew Benjamin poses the question, ‘what is the thinking of architecture?’ in Architectural Philosophy: Repetition, Function, Alterity (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), pp. viii, 1. 4. Metis was founded by Dorrian and Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997. In the intervening years they have produced a sequence of installations, architectural and urban proposals that have been internationally exhibited and published. They describe their design philosophy as follows: ‘Metis’s work focuses on the city and the complex ways in which it is imagined, inhabited, and representationally encoded. They aim to produce rich, multi-layered works that resist immediate consumption and that are instead gradually unfurled over time through interaction with them. Their approach is concerned with establishing a poetic but critical approach to the city that is sensitive to its cultural memory but is also articulated in relation to its possible futures’. See http//:www.metisarchitecture.com 5. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, trans. Janet Lloyd, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 20. Cited in Dorrian, ‘Introduction: Postscript as Pretext’, p. 8. Vernant and Detienne describe the mobile knowing of metis with a help of two (animated) figures: the fox (with its reversing positions, retracing paths, swift and precise movements of a compact form, and a burrowed labyrinth for dwelling) and the octopus (reaching out in all directions with its knotted polymorphic body, mimicking its context and extending its corporeal grasp through forces of suction and viscosity). 6. Dorrian, ‘Introduction: Postscript as Pretext’, p. 9. 7. Ibid, p. 8. 8. Ibid, p. 8. 9. Vernant and Detienne, Cunning Intelligence, p. 6. 10. Dorrian and Hawker, Metis: Urban Cartographies, p. 16.

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Afterword by Ella Chmielewska: ‘Postscript as Pretext’

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11. Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, ‘The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse: Partial Notes on Architectural Research/Teaching/Practice’, Journal of Architecture 8(2) (2003), pp. 181–190. Dorrian and Hawker’s article addresses the function of the studio brief. For a detailed discussion of Dorrian’s pedagogical texts see Ella Chmielewska, ‘Writing with the Photograph: Espacement, Description and an Architectural-Text-inAction’, in A. Dahlgren, D. Patersson and N. Lager Vestberg (eds), Representational Machines: Photography and the Production of Space (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2013), pp. 83–105. 12. Dorrian used this phrase in describing the conventional attitude toward the design studio (‘the casual and unreflective appropriation of studio spaces’), whereby this key site of architectural production is ‘typically considered to be kind of neutral space, and certainly . . . rarely considered to have any consequence or affect upon the work that is produced in it.’ Architectural Forensics – Architectural Design Opening A, Master of Architecture Programme, University of Edinburgh (2007), p. 1. 13. Dorrian’s statement on ‘What is it to “teach” architectural design today?’ in his teaching profile and in Metis’s design philosophy: www.metisarchitecture.com See also: Dorrian and Hawker, ‘The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse’, p. 184. 14. Dorrian and Hawker, ‘The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse’, p. 186. 15. Ibid, p. 182. 16. Dorrian, Architectural Forensics, p. 2. 17. Dorrian defines the theme of the Master of Architecture studio programme based upon Warsaw, as ‘post-socialist urbanism and its material prehistories’, Architectural Design Opening B, Master of Architecture programme, University of Edinburgh (2007). 18. Dorrian, Architectural Forensics, p. 2. 19. Ibid, p. 2. 20. Ibid, p. 2. 21. Mark Dorrian, ‘The Resilience of Ruins’, in Stasus (James A. Craig and Matthew Ozga-Lawn), Pamphlet Architecture 32: Resilience (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), pp. 4–7; p. 5. 22. The photograph was taken by David Seymour (Chim) for the 1948 UNESCO report on Children of Post-War Europe. See Mark Dorrian, ‘Introduction, Warsaw: Tracking the City’, Journal of Architecture 15(1) (2010), pp. 1–6; p. 1. For a detailed discussion of the image see Chmielewska, ‘Writing with the Photograph’, pp. 87–88. 23. Dorrian’s discussion of the photograph circulated outside studio reviews in public talks, seminars and presentations during the Master of Architecture programme, Warsaw: the Post-socialist City and its Material Prehistories, 2007–2009, University of Edinburgh School of Architecture:

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26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

Warsaw, October 2007 and June 2008; Vilnius, December 2008; Santiago de Compostela, December 2008; Edinburgh, September 2009; Warsaw, April 2010 and November 2010. See the unpublished studio briefs for Design Openings A and B, September 2007, and Fieldwork: Tracking the City, October 2007, University of Edinburgh. See also a lecture given by Dorrian at The University of Edinburgh School of Architecture on 16 October 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQZDdI6SqIU [Accessed 20 June 2014]. Chmielewska, ‘Writing with the Photograph’, pp. 87–89. Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987); Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines (London and New York: Routledge, 1996); Gerry Moorey, ‘Up Close and Impersonal: Walter Benjamin’s Thought-Images’, Third Text 19(6) (2005), pp. 607–616; Megan Luke, Review of Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life, H-German, H-Net Reviews. (March 2008). http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14335 [Accessed 14 June 2014]; Tania Roy, Review of Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life, in Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature 8(1) (Fall 2009/Spring 2010). http:/www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/BMRCL2010/Thought%20Images .htm [Accessed 20 June 2014]. Richter, Thought-Images, p. 2. Weigel, Body- and Image-Space, p. viii. T.W. Adorno, ‘Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften’, in Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 241, 238, 338. Richter quotes the latter passage from Adorno in an epigraph and in the introduction to Thought-Images, p. ix,13. He refers to Denkbild as a ‘self-conscious mode of writing’, p. 14. Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 389–400; p. 392. Weigel, on Benjamin as theorist, in Body- and Image-Space, p. viii. Jacques Derrida, ‘Point de Folie: Maintenant L’architecture’, AA Files 12 (Summer 1986), pp. 65–75. St´ephane Mallarm´e conceived of a book as ‘architectural and premeditated,’ an assemblage constructed with precision and patience. See Arnar,

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24. 25.

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33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

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Anna Sigridur, The Book as Instrument: St´ephane Mallarm´e, the Artist’s Book and the Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 29. Mark Dorrian, ‘A-Disciplinarity and Architecture?’ Chapter 12 this volume, p. 177. Mark Dorrian, ‘Voice, Monstrosity and Flaying: Anish Kapoor’s Marsyas as a Silent Sound Work’, Chapter 11 this volume, p. 162. T.W. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Fr´ed´eric Will, New German Critique 32, Spring–Summer (1984), pp. 151–171; p. 164. For Adorno, ‘The essay remains . . . the critical form par excellence’, p. 166. Also, see Robert Kaufman, ‘Lyric’s Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege’, Modernist Cultures 1(2) (Winter 2005), pp. 209–235. www.jsmodcult.bham.ac.uk [Accessed 20 June 2014]. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 165. Adorno notes ‘the unique imagistic character of Benjamin’s thought’ in his ‘Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften’, p. 235. T.W. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist: On Siegfried Kracauer’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, pp. 58–75; p. 58. Adorno, ‘The Curious Realist’, p. 61. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, p. 161. For Adorno, ‘under the essay’s glance every intellectual artifact must transform itself into a force field’. See also Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). Martin Jay, ‘Introduction’, in Essays From the Edge: Parerga and Paralimpomena, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), pp. 1–8. Jay, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. Jay quotes Schopenhauer’s ‘On Books and Writing’, published in a selection from Parerga und Paralimpomena (1851) as Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1976). The role assigned to architecture by philosophers is discussed by Mark Jarzombek in ‘The Canning of Architectural Thinking’, FOOTPRINT, (Autumn 2007), pp. 31–46. On philosophy speaking for architecture, or philosophical texts ‘forcing’ architecture to think, see the title essay in Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2001), p. 27. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, trans. Philip Armstrong, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). This book is focused on drawing as and in art practice. See the ‘Translator’s Note’, pp. vii–x; p. vii. Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, p. 3. Nancy, ‘Preface to the English-Language Edition’, in The Pleasure in Drawing, pp. xi–xiii; p. xi. Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, p. 70.

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ENDNOTES TO PAGES 201–202

49. Ibid, p. 70. 50. See Dorrian’s co-edited book on the aerial view: Mark Dorrian and Fr´ed´eric Pousin (eds.), Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (London: I.B.Tauris, 2013). 51. For Latour, in his essay on ‘thinking with eyes and hands’, drawing is ‘a common place for many inscriptions to come together flattened out onto the same surface’. Bruno Latour, ‘Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together’, in Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (eds), Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1986), vol. 6, pp. 1–40; p. 26. 52. Ibid, p. 9. 53. Dorrian and Hawker, ‘The Tortoise, the Scorpion and the Horse’, p. 189. 54. Dorrian and Hawker, Metis: Urban Cartographies, p. 9. 55. Dorrian, ‘Introduction’ to this volume, p. 3. In the condensed paragraphs of the introduction, we can see the complex chiastic movements of each composition. The thought-figure itself is constituted through chiastic motion, it is ‘a conceptual engagement with the aesthetic and . . . an aesthetic engagement with the conceptual.’ See Richter, Thought-Images, p. 2. See also the discussion of chiasmus in Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Iva Jevtic, ‘Between Word and Image: Walter Benjamin’s Images as a Species of Space’. http://interdisciplinary.net/ci/vl/vl2/Jevtic%20paper.pdf [Accessed 20 June 2014]; and the discussion of the chiastic character of thought-images in the writing of Benjamin and Adorno in Anthony Auerbach, ‘Reprise: Aesthetic Theory’, in Structural Constellations: Excursus on the drawings of Josef Albers c.1950–1960, PhD thesis, University of London (2004), pp. 217–220. http://aauerbach.info/research/structural constellations/ ecloga reprise.html#t2. [Accessed 2 June 2014]. 56. Lyn Hejinian, ‘The Rejection of Closure’ (1985), p. 2. http://www .poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237870 [Accessed 2 June 2014]. See also Lyn Hejinian, The Language of Inquiry, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 57. Hejinian,‘The Rejection of Closure’, p. 2. 58. Ibid, p. 3. See also the exposition of Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ in Kaufman, ‘Lyric’s Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege’, pp. 216– 218. 59. Adorno, ‘Curious Realist’, p. 59. 60. The ‘glance’ in Bob Hulott-Kentor and Fr´ed´eric Will’s translation of ‘The Essay as Form’ (p. 161) is rendered a ‘gaze’ in Shierry Weber Nicholson’s translation of the essay (in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, pp. 3–23; p. 13). Here, I take the glance as more productive in the context of the architectural imaginary. See also Edward S. Casey, ‘The Sudden, the Surprising, and

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61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

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the Wondrous: With Walter Benjamin on the Streets of Paris’, in The World at a Glance (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. 208–247. Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form’, pp. 164–165. See also Kaufman’s discussion in ‘Lyric’s Constellation, Poetry’s Radical Privilege’, pp. 213–214. Meschonnic, ‘The Rhythm Party Manifesto’, p. 171. Meschonnic sees the poem as ‘subject-form(er)’, ‘The Rhythm Party Manifesto’, p. 164. Referring to Mallarm´e’s ideal book he speaks of writing as listening: Gabriella Bedetti, ‘Interview: Henri Meschonnic’, Diacritics 18(3), Fall (1988), pp. 93–111; p. 110. Meschonnic, ‘The Rhythm Party Manifesto’, p. 170. Dorrian and Hawker, Metis: Urban Cartographies, p. 9. Ibid, p. 11.

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Index 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick dir.), 76 a-disciplinarity, 178–179, 181–185, see also clouds, neutral Adorno,T.W., xviii, 1–2, 126–127, 194, 197–199, 202 aerial view Arthus-Bertrand, Yann, 138 Le Corbusier, 66–67, 68 and diagrams, 154, 156–158, 154, 157 and ‘faulty’ photographs, 64 and ferris wheels, 24–26, 31–37 Google Earth, 137–148 and microphotography, 61–64 and miniaturisation, 106–106 Nadar (Gaspar-F´elix Tournachon), 27 Powers of Ten (Eames), 71, 72 Saint-Exup´ery, Antoine de, 26, 66, 104–105 satellite imagery, 93–96, 98, 103–106, 151–155, see also Google Earth

and time, 65 and transcendence, 99–100 and vertigo, 100, 103–106 and visual purification, 82 Agamben, Giorgio, 6, 10, 84, 160 air air-conditioning, see clouds, Le Corbusier, Fourier, weather freedom and remediation, 125–129 and prenatality, 129 Albrechtslund, Anders, 146–147 Alison, Archibald, 16 Ambassadors, The, see Holbein anamorphosis anthropocene, 130 Archigram, 96–97 Arthus-Bertrand, Yann, see aerial view Ashcroft, John, 152 associationism, 16–19 Astor, John Jacob IV, 122 Athena, 165 Auletta, Ken, 135

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Bachelard, Gaston, 111 Ballard, J.G., 73 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 30 Banham, Reyner and Franc¸ois Dallegret Environment-Bubble, 116–117, 126–129, 128 Barthes, Roland, 27, 151, 156 baroque, 96, 168, 173 Bataille, Georges, 111 Benjamin, Walter, 26, 121, 192, 194 Benthien, Claudia, 172 Bielecki, Czesław, 58 Bierut, Bolesław, 47 Blake, William, 99 Blix, Hans, 152 Blur (Diller + Scofidio), see clouds Boeke, Kees, 70, 73 Boileau, Pierre and Thomas Narcejac D’Entre les Morts, 102 Breguła, Karolina, 43, 45, 57–58 Brin, Sergey, 136 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 112 Brzechwa, Jan, 48 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 70 Burnham, Clara Louise, 36 Burnham, Daniel, see World’s Columbian Exposition Carter, Paul, 115 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 169 Chandler, James, 101 Chicago, see World’s Columbian Exposition Chion, Michel, 76–77 chora, xx–xxi, 115, 184

260

City Hall (London), see Foster + Partners clouds and a-disciplinarity, 178, 184–185 and air-conditioning, 116–119 and architecture, 107–119 and atmosphere, 115–117 Blur (Diller + Scofidio), 113–119, 114, 178, 184–185 Coop Himmelb(l)au, 109–111, 110 and destruction, 108–109, 108, 118 and glass, 107, 110 and humidity, 115 and perspective, 111–112 and pneumatics, 110–111 and signification, 107 and X-rays, 112–113 see also Gehry, Damisch Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 90 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 81 Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802, see Wordsworth Connor, Steven, 109–110, 172–173 Coop Himmelb(l)au, see clouds ´ Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret) Aircraft, 66–67, 68 exact air, 121, 126, 129 Palace of Soviets competition, 50 see also aerial view Correggio, Antonio Allegri da, 111 countersublime, 81–82 Crary, Jonathan, 33–34 Crawford, O.G.S., 65 Crowley, David, 57 Crystal Palace, 84 Cybele, 165

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Eakins, Thomas The Gross Clinic, 169, 170 Eames, Charles and Ray, 62, 69, 77, 139, see also Powers of Ten Eco, Umberto, 156 Edinburgh, 13–21 Eiffel Tower, 27, 30–31, 38, 43–44 Eisenman, Peter, 115

Eliasson, Olafur The Weather Project, 91–92, 92 Elkins, James, 115 Elliott, Stuart, 139 Evans, Robin, 54 Ewbank, John, 17

INDEX

Daguerre, Louis, 33–34 Damisch, Hubert on Blur, 116–118 A Theory of /Cloud/, 108, 111–112 Dante (Durante degli Alighieri), 67 Davis, Mike, 147–148 Debord, Guy, 80–81 Defoe, Daniel, 123 Degler, Witold, 45 Deleuze, Gilles and F´elix Guattari, 155 Derrida, Jacques, 115, 194, 199 Detienne, Marcel, 186 Diderot, Denis Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, 22 Diller + Scofidio Blur, see clouds Dionysus, 165 diorama, 33–34, 131 Dome of Discovery (Festival of Britain), 86 Dowd, Maureen, 152 Dubai Dubailand, 125, 127 Palm trilogy, 147 Sunny Mountain Ski-Dome, 125, 129–131 The World, 147–148

Fantastic Voyage (Richard Fleischer dir.), 75 Ferris, George, see ferris wheels ferris wheels Ferris, George, 28, 30 London Eye, 25, 82, 86–90, 86, 87, 88, 138 in The Third Man, 22–24, 23 at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 27–41, 30, 35, 36 see also aerial view finger, 56–57 Fleximage, see Google Earth forgetting, 46, 58–60 Forty, Adrian, 46 Foster + Partners 30 St Mary Axe, 95, 176 Chek Lap Kok Airport, 97 City Hall, 93–98, 94, 103–106, 105 Crystal Island, 97 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, 97 Reichstag, 95–96 Foster, Hal, 150 Foster, Norman, 96–97, see also Foster + Partners Fourier, Charles, 121, 126 Fraser, Julius Thomas, 73 Fried, Michael, 169 Fuller, Buckminster, 70, 96–97, 125–126, 127

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Gagarin, Yuri, see Palace of Culture and Science Gaunt, William, see W. Watson-Baker Gehry, Frank Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 84 Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, 107, 110, 119 George IV, King, 13–21 Giedion, Siegfried Mechanization Takes Command, 38–41, 39, 40 Gilbert, James, 31 Ginzburg, Carlo, 155 Glasarchitektur, 96, 110 Gombrich, Ernst, 115 Goodwin, Barbara, 100–101 Google, 133–137, see also Google Earth Google Earth and Apollo photographs, 140–143, 141 and branding, 146–148 Fleximage study of, 139 and the ‘long zoom’, 138–139, 148 as non-auratic, 142–143, 142 and omnipresence, 143 and the politics of resolution, 144–146 and refresh rates, 144–145 symbolic aspects, 137, 139–140 uncanniness of, 143–144 Goya, Francisco de, 73 graphiscope, xvii Greimas, A.J., 179, 182 Grimble, Simon, 100 Grimshaw, Nicholas 118 Griscom, John H., 129

Gronau, William, 33 Gropius, Walter, 50 Gross Clinic, The, see Eakins Groys, Boris, 50 Guernica, see Picasso Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, see Gehry Hauser, Kitty, 65 Heath, William, 62, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 128–129 Hejduk, John, 112–113 Hejinian, Lyn, 202 Hemingway, Andrew, 18 Herbert, Zbigniew Apollo and Marsyas, 167–168, 197 Hitchcock, Alfred Psycho, 103 Vertigo, 102–103 Hoisington, Sona Stephan, 50–51 Holbein, Hans The Ambassadors, 173 Hollein, Hans, 111 Hood, Raymond, 103 Hooke, Robert, 74 Howe, Thalia, 167 Howells, John Mead, 103 Hume, David, 101 indexicality, 149, 155–161 International Business Machines (IBM), 69–70, 74–75, Iofan, Boris, 51 Irigaray, Luce, 128–129 Jameson, Fredric, 81–83, 179, 181–183 Jay, Martin, 198–199 Jeffrey, Francis, 17

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Kant, Immanuel, 100, 183 Kapoor, Anish Marsyas, 162–164, 163, 166, 169–171, 174–175, 175, 196 Kelly, Kevin, 137 Khriakov, Alexander, 49 Kircher, Athanasius, 163 Kirov, Sergei, 50 Klee, Paul, 194 Komar & Melamid The Minotaur as a Participant at the Yalta Conference, 56 The Origin of Socialist Realism, 54–56, 55, 59 Koolhaas, Rem, 124 Kouwenhoven, John A., 30 Kracauer, Siegfried, 198 Krauss, Rosalind post-medium condition 177–178 ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 179–182,180 Krushchev, Nikita, 70 Lacan, Jacques, 173 Lanchester, John, 134–135 Langmuir, Irving, 123 Latour, Bruno, 91–92, 201 Leach, Andrew, 177 Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See, see Diderot L´evi-Strauss, Claude, 103–105 Libeskind, Daniel, 113 Lightman, Alan, 74

Livingstone, Ken, 95 Lizars, William Home, 16, 20 London Eye, see ferris wheels ‘long zoom’, 138–139 Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, see Gehry Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 23–24

INDEX

Jencks, Charles, 109 Jenks, Tudor, 31 Johnson, Stephen, 138–139 Jones, Jonathan, 176

Macarthur, John, 177 Malevich, Kazimir, 111 Malik, Rex, 70 Mallarm´e, St´ephane, 194, 197, 199 Mantell, Gideon, 62–63 Marin, Louis delegate figures, 169 Utopics: Spatial Play, 179, 182–185 Marsyas and anatomical iconography, 164 Apollo and Marsyas, see Herbert Apollo’s flaying of, 162, 164–167, 172–175 Aristotle’s commentary on, 165 and e´corch´es, 164, 173–174 howl of, 166–168, 174–175, 197 Jusepe de Ribera’s depiction of, 174 and monstrosity, 166 musical contest with Apollo, 165 Ovid’s description of, 164–166, 172 Titian’s depiction of, 164, 169–172, 171 see also Kapoor Mathieson, Thomas, 165 Mechanization Takes Command, see Giedion Medusa, 166–169, see also Marsyas Mendelsohn, Erich, 50

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Meschonnic, Henri, 186, 202–203 metis, 186–189, 199 Metis: Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker Urban Cartographies, 186–189, 187, 195, 202–203 Meyer, William B., 121 Microsoft, 136 Millennium Dome, see Richard Rogers Partnership Miller, Michael, 140 minaturisation, 43–44, 57–58, 62–63, 75, 95, see also aerial view Minotaur as a Participant at the Yalta Conference, The, see Komar & Melamid Mitchell, William J., 150 Młodo˙zeniec, Piotr, 45 Moholy-Nagy, L´aszl´o, 63–66, 68, see also aerial view Molotov, Viacheslav, 50 More, Thomas, 120 Morrison, Philip, 71 Moses, Robert, 103 Mudie, Robert, 16, 18 Mueck, Ron, 151 Muybridge, Eadweard, 37, 41 Nabokov, Vladimir Transparent Things, 98–101 Nadar (Gaspar-F´elix Tournachon), see aerial view Nancy, Jean-Luc, 166, 175, 200–201 Nasonov, Vsevolod, 49 Nauman, Bruce, 176 Neumann, Jaromir, 172 Neumann, John von, 123 neutral, the, 181–185

264

Nixon, Richard, 70 Novak, Kim, 102 Opte Project, 133 Origin of Socialist Realism, The, see Komar & Melamid Orth, Hans-Joachim, 58 Otto, Frei, 111 Ovid, see Marsyas Page, Larry, 136 Palace of Culture and Science (Warsaw) ascended by Yuri Gagarin, 45 depiction of, 42–45, 48, 58 identification with Stalin, 46–48, 56–60 shadow of, 43, 44, 47–48, 58–60, 58, 59 and socialist realism, 46–47, 49, 53, 56–60 Palace of Soviets, 49–54, 52 panorama, 18, 40 Paperny, Vladimir, 51, 53–54, 56 Passent, Agata, 44, 49, 57 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 149, 155–156, 159 Perseus, 167 phenakistoscope, 34, 41 Picasso, Pablo Guernica, 152–153 Pliny the Elder, 54 post-medium condition, see Krauss Powell, Colin, former US Secretary of State, 150–158, 160–161, 154, 157 Powers of Ten (Eames), 62, 69–77, 72, 139, see also aerial view Prokof ’ev, A.N., 56

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Reichstag, see Foster + Partners rendering, 164–165 Ribera, Jusepe de, 174 Richard Rogers Partnership Millennium Dome, 78–80, 82–83, 85–86, 79 Richards, David, 172 Rockefeller, Nelson A., 152 Rodin, Auguste, 179 Rogers, Richard, 96–97 Rudnev, Lev, 47, 49, 57 Ryan, Carroll, 31 Saint-Exup´ery, Antoine de, see aerial view Schaefer, Vincent, 123 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 54 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 198–199 Schrader, Paul, 71, 76 Scott, Sir Walter, 13–14, 17, 19 ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, see Krauss Sebald, W.G. Vertigo, 101 Sempoli´nski, Leonard, 48, 49 Seymour, David (Chim), 193, 195 shadow, 54–56 see also Palace of Culture and Science Sigalin, J´ozef, 47, 57 Simpson, James, 14, 16–17, 19–21 Sinclair, Iain, 78–84, 79, 87, 92 Sloterdijk, Peter, 123 Smith, Adam, 20–21 Smithson, Robert, 125

Soane, Sir John, 188 socialist realism, 5, 47, 49–60 see also Palace of Culture and Science Socland, 58–60 Sontag, Susan, 149, 164, 169 Sosnowska, Monika, 45 spectacle, 14, 20–21, 27, 38, 80–92, 96–97, 114, 117–119 Stalin, Joseph, 49–50, 53–60, 55 see also Palace of Culture and Science Stallybrass, Peter, 37 Stasus, 191 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 101 Stevenson, Adlai, 153 Stewart, James, 102 Stoichita, Victor, 54, 56 Straw, Jack, 158 Stross, Randall, 143 Stuart, Prince Charles Edward, 14 sublime, 7, 81, 82, 100, 104, 183 Sullivan, Louis, 38 Swift, Jonathan, 107, 123 sympathy, 20–21 Sz¨onyi, Stefan, 57

INDEX

Pruitt-Igoe, 108, see also clouds Puttnam, F.W., 31–32

Tate Modern, 11, 91, 92, 162, 176, 196 Taut, Bruno, 96 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 24–25 Theory of /Cloud/, A, see Damisch Third Man, The, see ferris wheels thought-figures, 192–196 Titian, see Marsyas Toynbee, Polly, 85 Trachtenberg, Alan, 28 transi tombs, 46

265

WRITING ON THE IMAGE

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transparency see also Nabokov and vertigo, 98–100 Transparent Things, see Nabokov Turner, Fred, 136 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 16 Urban Cartographies, see Metis Utopics: Spatial Play, see Marin Vasari, Giorgio, 174 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 167, 186 Verne, Jules, 122 vertigo, 98–106, see also aerial view, Glasarchitektur, Hitchcock, Sebald, transparency Vesalius, Andreas, 164 Wajda, Andrzej, 58 Warburg, Aby, 122 Watson-Baker, W. World Beneath the Microscope, 61–63, 67–69, 77, see also aerial view weather as alienation, 126 commodification, 124–125, 129–131

266

as interference, 82 modification, 120–131 and time, 126 as weapon, 122–124 ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025’, 124 The Weather Project, see Eliasson White, Alon, 37 Whole Earth Catalog, 136–137 Wigley, Mark, 115, 178 Wister, Owen, 32, 84 W¨offlin, Heinrich, 111 Wordsworth, William Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802, 7, 25, 90 World Beneath the Microscope, see Watson-Baker World’s Columbian Exposition, 27–37 Burnham, Daniel, 28, 31 Midway Plaisance, 28–30, 32 see also ferris wheels Yamasaki, Minoru, 108–109 zoetrope, 34 zoopraxiscope, 37, 41