Postmortem Architecture_The Taste of Derrida by Mark Wigley

Yale School of Architecture

Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of DerridaAuthor(s): Mark WigleyReviewed work(s):Source: Perspecta, Vol. 23 (1987), pp. 156-172Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of Perspecta.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1567115 .Accessed: 05/11/2011 15:15

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Postmortem Architecture: The Taste of Derrida

Mark Wigley

It is the violation of the living voice of expression by the dead body of representation

156

CORPORIS

that makes expression possible. Consequently, architecture cannot simply be detached

from building. The ornament is embedded in the structure just as much as the founda-

tions are embedded in the ground.

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Postmortem Architecture

Any house is a far too complicated, clumsy, fussy, mechanical counterfeit of the human body. . . . The whole interior is a kind of stomach that attempts to digest objects. ... The whole life of the average house, it seems, is a sort of indigestion. A body in ill repair, suffering indisposition-constant tinkering and doctoring to keep it alive. It is a marvel, we its infesters, do not go insane in it and with it. Perhaps it is a

form of insanity we have to put in it. Frank Lloyd Wright'

POSTMODERNISM S LACK OF TASTE

During the modern period architecture was treated as a subservient and somewhat

suspect discipline among the arts, and early postmodern theory continued this practice. Later postmodern theory, however, raised the status of architectural discourse, to

canonize it as the paradigm of the postmodern condition: "it is evidently architecture

which is the privileged terrain of the struggle of post-modernism and the most strate-

gic field in which this concept has been debated and its consequences explored."2 But

this apparent revision unwittingly sustains the convoluted interdisciplinary politics of the very tradition postmodernism attempts to displace, a tradition carried down

from the antique and explicitly expounded by Kant in the Critique of Judgement, the

canon of the modern aesthetic tradition. Here, in the third critique, Kant described

fine art as a form of expression in which the dead body of an object is given life by an

artist, animated in a way that presents the artist's soul:

"the soul of the artist furnishes a bodily expression for the substance and character of

his thought, and makes the thing itself speak, as it were, in mimic language ... at-

tributes to lifeless things a soul suitable to their form, and ... uses them as its

mouthpiece."3

Fine art speaks. It is listened to rather than read. Aesthetic judgment depends on the

belief that the internal "voice" attended to when confronted by a beautiful object is

common to all mankind and is, therefore, the voice of nature rather than culture.

Whereas cultural conventions organize signs that remain in the bodily realm detached

from what they represent, aesthetic taste requires complete disinterest in the bodily existence of the object, its utility, function, or purpose. Taste is that encounter with an

object where the object is not consumed, not mastered through appropriation, not

used as a means to some independent end. Aesthetic "pleasure" is attained through the suspension of all bodily desire and its "gratification" in the "mere enjoyment of

sense found in eating and drinking."4 To taste is to spit out the object before it is con-

sumed; it is to detach oneself from the object. In the third critique Kant specifically opposes aesthetic detachment to the con-

sumption of an object in an economy. Fine art transcends the economic realm organized by exchange contracts by being "free" precisely "in a sense opposed to contract

work." 5 This exclusion of the economic from aesthetics is the exclusion of the contrac-

tually organized substitution of signs for things, the exclusion of representation. The

third critique is organized by the need to privilege expression over representation by

preventing the contamination of fine art by the bodily economy from which it detaches itself but on which it nevertheless depends. Kant established a hierarchy of the arts with poetry at the top because it most resembles speech, and architecture at the bottom because it remains in the contractual economy of consumption, representing

I.

Frank Lloyd Wright, "The Cardboard House," pp. I29-47 of

The Future of Architecture, (New York: Horizon, I953), quote from p. I30.

2.

Fredric Jameson, "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in

the Postmodernism Debate," New German Critique no. 33: 53-65, I984, P. 54.

3. Immanuel Kant, trans., James Creed Meridith, Critique of Judgement, (London: Oxford University Press, I952), p. I88.

4- Ibid., p. I62.

5- Ibid., p. I85.

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Mark Wigley

bodily function rather than presenting the soul: "the determining ground of whose [architecture's] form is not nature but an arbitrary end. ... In architecture the chief point is a certain use of the artistic object to which, as the condition, the aesthetic ideas are limited. . . . adaption of the product to a par- ticular use is the essential element in a work of architecture."6 6.

Ibid., p. I86.

Postmodern theory effectively abandons the aesthetic by arguing that it cannot be de-

tached from the economic, that taste cannot be detached from consumption. This re-

jection of aesthetic autonomy promotes architectural discourse for precisely the same reason that it is demoted in the third critique. As Frederic Jameson writes: "It is in the realm of architecture, however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most cen-

trally raised and articulated. . . . What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally. . . . Architecture

is, however, of all the arts that closest constitutionally to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship."7

In contrast with most postmodern theory, the deconstruction of Jacques Derrida

produces a different kind of revision of the status of architecture, exploiting a subversive possibility within the aesthetic rather than simply abandoning it. Derrida's read-

ing of the third critique argues that fine art detaches itself from the representational economy of material objects only in order to participate in a "divine economy" where the fine artist imitates God by transcending the world of products for that of pure productivity. The human artist's non-exchangeable productivity becomes exchangeable with that of God. This exchange takes place on the basis of what Kant describes as a "regular agreement," an "accordance," a "compact" sealed by the "trace" in-

scribed in nature that authorizes nature as a work of art. In the moment of transcend-

ing the realm of contracts, this divine economy constitutes itself on the basis of a contract sealed by the signature of the divine artist. The hidden contract provides the rules for fine art by organizing the expressive language, the "cypher in which nature

speaks to us figuratively in its beautiful forms."8 The human artist is able to imitate the divine artist by speaking this language.

In his essay Economimesis, Derrida examines the terms of the contract to see if it

actually does sustain an economy of expression rather than of representation, taste rather than consumption. As fine art is a form of speech, the aesthetic turn away from

bodily consumption towards taste does not leave the mouth, which is the site of both

bodily consumption and ideal detachment. For Derrida, the privileging by philosophy of expression disguises an economy of secret consumption, of covert representation governed by desire. Everywhere it carries out its work of consumption behind the dis-

guise of detachment, consuming what it detaches itself from. Detachment is but a dis-

guised entrapment. Aesthetic detachment excludes bodily consumption only in order to master the object by consuming it ideally: "it passes through a certain mouth, . . .

assimilates everything to itself by idealizing it within interiority,. . . refusing to touch it, to digest it naturally, but digests it ideally, consumes what it does not consume and vice versa,"9 The divine economy is an economy of consumption like the material

economy it seeks to transcend.

7- Fredric Jameson,

"Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review I46: 53-92, 1984, p. 54.

8.

Critique of Judgement, p. I60.

9- Jacques Derrida,

"Economimesis," trans., R. Klein,

I59


Diacritics II (z): 3-Z5, I98, p. 2o.

I0.

Jacques Derrida, "The Parergon," trans., Craig Owens, October

9: 3- 40, p. 26.

II.

Critique of Judgement, p. 68.

z2.


I3.


I4. Immanuel Kant, trans., Norman Kemp Smith, Critique of Pure Reason, (London: Macmillan, 19z9), p. 47.

I 5

Ibid., p. 608.

i6. Ibid., p. 14.

i7. Ibid., p. 60.

This representational economy remains hidden within the third critique by the disguise of detachment only as long as a distinction can be made between the "inside" and the "outside" of the artwork, between its internal meaning and its external circumstances. Derrida argues that all philosophical discourse on art (from Plato to

Heidegger) attempts to establish this distinction, but find it disturbed by ornamenta- tion [parergon], that which is neither simply inside nor simply outside the work

[ergon].'"10 For Kant, ornament is "only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constitu-

ent." 11 It is that which can be detached from the work, that which has been added to

it, an external addition, a supplement subservient to the work in the service of the work. The third critique authorizes ornament to enter the work it is attached to only inasmuch as it is "form" or "design." Inasmuch as the ornament is material, bodily,

sensual, it is excluded from the interior, being seductive, an object of desire. In the fine

arts, "the design is what is essential. Here it is not what gratifies in sensation which

constitutes the basis of any disposition for taste, but solely what pleases through its

form." 1 In this way, the third critique employs the same form/matter distinction that

organizes the metaphysical tradition. As the application of metaphysics to art, aes-

thetics is subservient to metaphysics. But what Kant's three examples of ornament (the frame on a painting, drapery on

a statue, and the colonnade on a palace) share is that they cannot be detached without

destroying the work. There is a lack, a gap, in the structure of the work which is filled

by the ornament. The work not only admits the external ornament into its interior, it

is constituted by that entry, made possible by that which appears to be excluded from

it, that which serves it, that which it masters. The ornament is an outsider that "always

already" inhabits the inside as an intrinsic constituent. The third critique attempts to

exclude the sensual as "positively subversive of the judgement of taste.... it is only where taste is still weak and untrained that, like aliens, they are admitted as a favour, and only on terms that they do not violate that beautiful form." 13 Derrida deconstructs

aesthetics by demonstrating that the constitutional possibility of form is precisely its

violation by a subversive alien, a foreign body that already inhabits the interior and

cannot be expelled without destroying its host.

THE CONTRACT

The philosophical tradition inaugurated by Plato describes metaphysics as an "edifice"

erected on secure foundations laid on the most stable ground. Kant's first critique- The Critique of Pure Reason-participates in this tradition by criticizing philosophers for

their tendency to "complete its speculative structures as speedily as may be, and only afterwards to enquire whether these foundations are reliable."14 The edifice of meta-

physics is falling apart, Kant said, because it has been erected on "groundless asser-

tions" unquestioningly inherited from the philosophical tradition. To restore a secure

ground, the first critique starts the "thorough preparation of the ground." 15 with the

"clearing, as it were, and levelling of what has hitherto been wasteground."'16 To

"build upon this foundation," Kant will reassess its load bearing capacity and "lay down the complete architectonic plan" 17 of a new philosophy. The edifice will be re- designed. The third critique introduces itself in terms of this design project: "For if such a system is some day worked out under the general name of Metaphysic

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Mark Wigley

... the critical examination of the ground for this edifice must have been previously carried down to the very depths of the foundations of the faculty of principles inde-

pendent of experience, lest in some quarter it might give way, and, sinking inevitably bring with it the ruin of all."8 tiue dgement Critique ofJudgement,

p. 5-

Aesthetic judgement depends on rules but, unlike metaphysics, it cannot make them. It is only the presumed universality of the voice heard when faced with the art object that establishes the rationality of aesthetic judgements-a presumption that cannot be confirmed without contaminating taste with reason. Aesthetic judgement is recog- nized "a priori as a law for everyone without being able to ground it upon proofs,"1 Ib9 d

without being able to identify its "determining ground." Consequently aesthetics can- P- I59

not be constructed on the ground like metaphysics. To facilitate exchange between their respective theoretical and practical realms, the third critique is constructed as a

"bridge" over the "abyss" separating the first two critiques. It is from this bridge that the ground at the bottom of the abyss, on which the projected metaphysics will stand, can be surveyed. The third critique is constructed to produce a ground plan, a plan for the foundations of metaphysics. It is only a temporary structure which, like scaffold- ing, precedes the building then becomes an ornament which must be detached. But the convoluted logic of ornament ensures a certain difficulty in detaching art from the interior of philosophy, a difficulty which binds architectural discourse to philosophy. In describing metaphysics as an edifice, Kant organizes philosophy in terms of a certain account of architecture before the architectural object has been examined in aesthetics.

"Kant proposes a metaphor borrowed from art, which has not yet been discussed, from the technique of architecture, from the architectonic: the pure philosopher, the metaphysician, will have to proceed like a good architect, like a good technites of edi- fication he will be a kind of artist. He must first secure the ground, the foundation, the fundamentals. . . . the architect of reason excavates, sounds, prepares the terrain, in search of a solid foundation, the ultimate Grund on which all metaphysics may be erected. . . . Here philosophy, which in this book [the third critique] must conceive art-art in general and fine art-as part of its field or its edifice, represents itself as part of its part, as an art of Architecture. It re-presents itself, detaches itself, dispatches an

emissary, one part of itself outside itself to bind the whole, to fill up or to heal the whole which has suffered detachment. . . . [Metaphysics] represents its own desire . . . the desire of reason as desire for a grounded structure. Edifying desire would be produced as the art of philosophising,"20 <o.

"Parergon," P-. 7.

By representing itself as a work of art, metaphysics is subject to its own analysis of art. Just as it admits ornament into the artwork inasmuch as it is "design," it admits its ornament-aesthetics-into its own interior inasmuch as it is architecture. Architec- ture is admitted into metaphysics to make up for, to cover over, some kind of lack within metaphysics. It enters by virtue of its claim on "design." The "trace" that is the signature of the divine artist is design, and fine art is only able to give life to the dead

I6I


body of an object because it is authorized by that signature: "no one would ascribe

design, in the proper sense of the term, to a lifeless material."21 Fine art imitates the productivity of the divine artist by presenting design rather than imitating his products by representing specific designs. It must have the appearance of design and yet "must have the appearance of being undesigned and a spontaneous occurrence."22 In this way, the third critique produces its famous formulation of the beautiful as the

presentation of purposiveness without the representation of a specific purpose, like "nature which displays itself in its beautiful products as art, not merely by chance, but, as it were, designedly, in accordance with a regular agreement as purposiveness without purpose."23 The third critique depends on the traditional argument that the

appearance of design in the world presupposes the presence of a designer, an architect, a "supreme Architect."24

The status of architecture as a discipline was negotiated by the first texts of architectural theory in the Renaissance, which drew on the canons of the philosophical tradition to identify the proper concern of the newly constituted figure of the architect

as being with the kind of drawing (disegno) that mediates between the idea and the

building, the formal and the material, the soul and the body, the theoretical and the

practical. Architecture, the architectural drawing, is neither simply a mechanical art

bound to the bodily realm of utility nor a liberal art operating in the realm of ideas, it

is their reconciliation, the bridge between them. Architectural theory constructed ar-

chitecture as a bridge between the dominant oppositions of metaphysics. To do so it

exploited a contractual possibility written into the philosophical tradition when it de-

scribes itself as architecture.

The philosophical economy is underwritten by a constitutional complicity, con-

tract, a divine-contract, a design-contract between philosophy and architecture drawn

upon by architectural theory in order to establish itself. By virtue of its claim in this

contract, architectural discourse cannot simply be detached from philosophy. The ar-

chitectural metaphor is not simply a metaphor among others. More than the metaphor of foundation, it is the foundational metaphor. It is not simply one other metaphor.

As this design-contract is hidden and the parties to it are unaware of having signed it, architecture's special status is hidden within modern philosophy. Overtly subordinated by philosophy in the third critique, architecture is covertly admitted into

subordinated by philosophy in the third critique, architecture is covertly admitted into

its very structure in the first critique. This is done by forming the modern distinction

between building as expression of structure or function and architecture as the representation of building. Just as ornament splits into form and matter, architecture, the

design contract, the bridge, the draw-bridge, splits into building and architecture.

The first critique promotes building and the third critique demotes architecture.

Metaphysics constitutes itself by employing building as a privileged metaphor, an

expression of its own condition, while regarding architecture as merely representation. Everywhere metaphysics represents itself in terms of ground-foundation-

superstructure and confirms the necessity of excluding all ornament. As aesthetics is

governed by metaphysics, aesthetics too attempts to exclude ornament, organizing itself in terms of building, the building of a bridge.

These relationships, however, are complicated as in aesthetics architecture is privileged over building. The third critique begins by distinguishing itself from meta-

2II.

Critique ofJudgement, part z, P-33-

22.

Ibid., p. I85?

23- Ibid., p. i60.

24. Ibid., part z, p. 67.

i6z

Mark Wigley

physics by forming a distinction between the rustic hut and the palace, between build-

ing and architecture. The modern possibility of a philosophy of art supplementary to

metaphysics is the modern possibility of architecture supplementary to building, of ornament supplementary to structure. So while Kant privileges building in metaphysics, it is architecture that he privileges in aesthetics: "If any one asks me whether I consider that the palace I see before me is beautiful, I

may, perhaps, reply that I do not care for things of that sort that are merely made to be

gaped at. Or I may reply in the same strain as that Iroquois sachem who said that

nothing in Paris pleased him better than the eating-houses. I may even go a step fur- ther and inveigh with the vigor of a Rousseau against the vanity of the great who spend the sweat of the people on such superfluous things. Or, in time, I may quite easily per- suade myself that if I found myself on an uninhabited island without hope of ever

again coming among men, and could conjure such a palace into existence by a mere wish, I should still not trouble to do so, as long as I had a hut there that was comfort- able for me. All this may be admitted and approved; only it is not the point now at issue." 25 15-

Ibid., P-. 43-

So Kant contrasts the utilitarian interest in bodily consumption of the primitive with the aesthetic disinterest of the cultivated, explaining that: "Taste that requires an added element of charm and emotion for its delight . . . has not yet emerged from barba- rism." 26 To become cultivated is to "raise ourselves above the level of the senses,"

27 to move from the bodily to the ideal, from gratification to pleasure, from the utilitarian rustic hut to the house which is superfluous to utility, the house of the aristocracy: the

palace. The desire to transcend the body by adorning it begins with the desire for lan-

guage: "With no one to take into account but himself a man abandoned on a desert island would not adorn either himself or his hut. .. . "28 The degeneration of taste into

consumption is the degeneration from the house detached from consumption (the palace) to the house of consumption (the eating-house). The third critique privileges the

very thing that Rousseau condemns: fine art based on a transcendence of bodily function, and available only to the aristocracy.

For Rousseau, architecture is a corruption of the purity, the innocence of building. The primitive hut occupies the privileged place between nature and its substitution by language, a substitution first made at the weaning of the child, as a substitute for mother's milk, the voice of mother nature. Language, therefore, is a necessary form of expression, and is organized by a "social contract." With the rise of luxury, however, Rousseau argued, came "the easiness of exciting and gratifying our sensual ap- petites, the too exquisite foods of the wealthy which overheat and fill them with indigestion," upsetting the "good constitution of the savages." 29 The excesses that caused this indigestion also produced art through the adornment of the hut and the naked body of the primitive, representations detached from the purity of nature and, therefore, a form of perversion, a "vice." This degeneration from expression to representation, from the living voice of nature to the dead body of a sign, is a degeneration from building to architecture, from the unadorned rustic hut to the ornamented temple: "Then came the height of degeneration, and vice has never been carried so far as it was seen, to speak figuratively, supported by marble columns and engraved on Corinthian capitals." 30

z6. Ibid., p. 65.

27. Ibid., p. 151.

28. Ibid., P- I55-

29.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans., G. D. H. Cole, A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 27-I14, The Social Contract and Discourses, (London: Dent, 1973), p. 50.

30. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,

I63


trans., G. D. H. Cole, A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, p. i-z6, The Social Contract and Discourses, (London: Dent, I973) P. I8.

3I. Joseph Rykwert, On Adam's House in Paradise: The Idea of the Primi- tive Hut in Architectural History. (Cambridge: MIT, i98I.)

32. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans., G. D. H. Cole, "The Social Contract," p. I64-z78, The Social Contract and Discourses, (London: Dent, I973), P. I97.

33. Daniel Cottom,

"Taste and the Civilized Imagination," British Journal of Aesthetics 39(4): 367- 80, I98I.

34. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans., John H. Morgan, Essay on the Origin of Languages, (New York: Frederick Ungar, I966), p. 53.

35. Critique of Judgement, p. 123.

36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans., G. D. H. Cole, "A Discourse on Political Economy," p. II 5 - 54 of The Social Contract and Discourses, (London: Dent, I973), p. II7.

37. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 80.

38. Critique of Pure Reason, P. 573.

Whereas Rousseau provides the foundation of the fundamentalist project of modernism in architecture, the attempt to recover the uncorrupted essence of building by exorcising the perversions of representation and ornament,31 Kant's third critique forms the foundation of the formalist project of modernism in the other arts-his aesthetics attempts to restore the divine contract, cultivating fine art based on excess. Rousseau attempts to remove the excesses of fine art by restoring the social contract, a restoration which, like metaphysics, is a building project: "As, before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the

weight. . ." 32 But Kant's privileging of fine art and Rousseau's condemnation of it veil a complicity between them, a complicity which organizes modernism.

The third critique remains bound to Rousseau's account of the primitive. It em-

ploys the metaphor of taste for its links with the mother's breast-it is the mother's

voice that is listened to when appreciating fine art.33 Equally, Rousseau's account

maintains the same aesthetic as Kant-the subordination of color to design as "purely a pleasure of the sense."34 Both modernisms argue that expression has been "violated and rendered impure"35 by the sensuality of representation, and attempt to restore its

purity, its innocence, its primacy. In so doing they sustain the tradition on which aes-

thetics is governed by metaphysics, a tradition which represses the threat aesthetics

poses to metaphysics-the danger that lurks within it-by excluding it, like ornament, as "other." But the very gesture of excluding ornament as its other, its own other, consumes it. This repression through disguised consumption practiced by modernism

is the very mechanism of metaphysics. The account of architecture (as building) that is

implicated in metaphysics is necessarily implicated in this repression. Rousseau notes

that "The word Economy, or Oeconomy, is derived from oikos, house, and nomos, law, and meant originally only the wise and legitimate government of the house for the

common good of the whole family."36 The philosophical economy of disguised con-

sumption is a domestic economy, the economy of the domestic, the family house. To

deconstruct that economy is to locate a certain domestic violence within it. Rousseau's rejection of slavery is based on a horror of the domestication of man.

Implicitly this establishes the necessity of the domestication of man's other, woman, as

slave. The house is the mechanism of this mastery. With the origin of the primitive hut, man and woman ceased to be equal: "The sexes, whose manner of life had hitherto

been the same, began to adopt different ways of living. The women became more sed-

entary, and accustomed themselves to mind the hut and their children, while the men

went abroad in search of their common subsistence." 37

The mastery of philosophy is that of the master of the house, the patriarchal authority which makes his other a slave within the house, a domestic servant. The phal- locentrism of metaphysics is not that of the construction of a tower which excludes, but that of a house which includes: "although we had contemplated building a tower

which should reach the heavens, the supply of materials suffices only for a dwelling house ... building a secure home for ourselves.. . "38 The edifice of metaphysics is a

house. Within every appeal by philosophy for the necessity of stable construction, is

an appeal for the necessity of a secure house. Architecture is bound to metaphysics because of its capacity to domesticate. It is not simply a question of the solidity of its foundations. Rather, it is the solidity of its walls, the security of its enclosure, its defi- nition of space, its production of place. Deconstruction threatens the tradition of

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Mark Wigley

metaphysics by disturbing the ability of its construction to put things in their place. It

produces this displacement by identifying the series of double figures, which like that of woman and ornament, are repressed through their covert domestication.

But architecture too has a double condition, and is domesticated, or repressed, by the very mechanism it makes possible. This can be seen in the demotion of architecture by the third critique after being used as the privileged metaphor to define aesthetics. Architecture is subordinated because it is bound to the bodily realm of function. Kant prohibits it from transcending that realm. Its body, like that of the primitive, can

only be adorned with representations of its function. Representations of the non- functional are excluded and any non-representational ornaments a building may be adorned with ("the sole function of which is to be looked at"39) are assigned to the

privileged art of painting in order to maintain between expression and representation the clear gap that constitutes metaphysics.

"Much might be added to a building that would immediately please the eye, were it not intended for a church. A figure might be beautified with all manner of flourishes and

light but regular lines, as is done by the New Zealanders with their tattooing, were we

dealing with anything but the figure of a human being. And here is one whose rugged features might be softened and given a more pleasing aspect, only he has got to be a

man, or is, perhaps, a warrior that has to have a warlike appearance."40

Metaphysics is sustained by subordinating architecture (as building) and prohibiting other accounts of architecture. This prohibition marks a repression. Deconstruction is of interest to architectural discourse because it can identify the threat that architecture poses to the metaphysical tradition it is contracted to, the threat which causes that tradition to repress architecture. Such an appropriation of deconstruction makes available accounts of architecture that are prohibited under the terms of an ancient contract.

DECONSTRUCTION: THE INDIGESTION OF PHILOSOPHY

The house of metaphysics is deconstructed by locating that which resists domestication by resisting the economy of consumption, the mastery of the mouth. Derrida in-

terrogates the limits of both the overt bodily economy and the covert ideal economy by looking closely into the mouth they share for that which resists consumption since it is neither bodily nor ideal: that which "cannot be eaten either sensibly or ideally and which ... by never letting itself be swallowed must therefore cause itself to be vomited."41 The third critique identifies this inconsumable other which removes the distinction between representation and presentation as the "disgusting:" "One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust. For, as in this strange sensation, which depends purely on the

imagination, the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we still set our face against it, the artificial representation of the object is no

longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful."42

39- Critique ofJudgement, p. 188.

40. Ibid., P. 73-

41? "Economimesis," p. 21.

42.


i65


Aesthetics is defined by its exclusion of the disgusting ("Nothing is so much set

against the beautiful as disgust"43), its disgust for the sensuality which imposes en-

joyment, enslaving the subject by seducing it, reversing the mastery of the ideal over the bodily dictated by metaphysics, violating metaphysics: "Disgust is the paradoxical experience of enjoyment extorted by violence, an enjoyment which arouses horror." 44

In naming the disgusting as that which cannot be consumed, that which belongs "out-

side," the economy appropriates it, consumes it as its "other." As the other of this

economy which consumes whatever it represents is that which cannot be represented, words like disgusting do not name it: "The word vomit... is then for philosophy still, an elixer, even in the very quintessence of its bad taste." 45 The expulsion of any threat to the "outside" represses the horror of that which violates, but cannot detach itself

from, the philosophical economy, the subversive alien which inhabits the very mouth that represses it, the "unassimiliable, obscene other which forces enjoyment and whose irrepressible violence would undo the hierarchizing authority"46 of metaphysics. The enslaving violence of the visceral is not outside the economy, it inhabits taste, making taste possible.

Derrida does not identify this distasteful alien in order to escape the pure realm of metaphysics for the corrupt realm of aesthetics. To simply go "outside" metaphysics is to remain inside it: "The step 'outside philosophy' is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cava- lier ease, and who in general are swallowed up in metaphysics in the entire body of that discourse which they claim to have disengaged from it."47 Derrida locates the

corruption within metaphysics itself. In maintaining the traditional economy of con-

sumption, the modernist texts of Rousseau and Kant privilege the scene where "in-

digestion is unknown."48 Rather than attempting to escape from that tradition, deconstruction disturbs its authority by tracing the effects of an indigestible other within it, philosophy's indigestion, the irreducible and irresistible foreignness within

philosophy that disseminates itself cryptically throughout philosophic practice. It does so by demonstrating that each of the binary oppositions which organize meta-

physics (soul/body, inside/outside, etc.) is made possible by a double figure that effaces the opposition. It demonstrates that metaphysics is made possible by that which violates it by resisting consumption and giving it indigestion.

Derrida's reading of Rousseau, for example, demonstrates that "The system of social contract, which founds itself on the existence of a moment anterior to writing and representation, can, however, not avoid allowing itself to be threatened by the

letter."'49 Representation inhabits, and therefore violates, the expressions organized by the contract. But it cannot be expelled. It is the violation of the living voice of expression by the dead body of representation that makes expression possible. Consequently, architecture cannot simply be detached from building. The ornament is embedded in the structure just as much as the foundations are embedded in the ground. Just as

ornament, which is admitted into the artwork only inasmuch as it is design, contaminates the artwork with sensuality, metaphysics' own ornament, which is admitted only inasmuch as it is building, contaminates metaphysics with architecture. Architecture inhabits and organizes the very philosophical tradition it is excluded from as a degen- erate "vice."

The ideal of stable construction that modernism inherited from metaphysics is

43. Immanuel Kant, trans., John T. Goldthwait, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, (Berkeley: University of California Press, I965), p. 80.

44. Pierre Bourdieu, trans., Richard Nice, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), p. 488.

45- "Economimesis," p. z5.

46. Ibid., p. 25.

47. Jacques Derrida, trans., Alan Bass, "Structure, Sign and Play," pp. 278-93, Writing and Difference, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978) p. z84.

48. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, trans., Barbara Foxley, Emile, (New York: Dent, 1911), p. i0o.

49. Jacques Derrida, trans., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Of Grammatology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976), p. z97.

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that of an innocent origin, an original purity, from which we have degenerated. For

Kant, the claim that there is no such origin "refuses to admit as first or as a beginning anything that could serve as a foundation for building, a complete edifice of knowl-

edge is, on such assumptions, altogether impossible."50 Likewise, for Rousseau, an originary violation "could not serve as a foundation on which to build.... [Being] founded on violence ... the political state ... was continually being patched up, when the first task should have been to get the site cleared and all the materials re- moved ... if a stable and lasting edifice was to be erected."s1 Derrida disturbs the tradition by demonstrating that the apparent purity of the origin results from the repression of the violation that made it possible. Far from innocent, the origin is "always already" corrupted; it is not original. Violation is the very possibility of metaphysics rather than a deviation from it. Consequently, metaphysics is always groundless, always fractured by the abyss that passes under aesthetics. Building always harbors the secret of its corruption by architecture.

Deconstruction undermines the foundations of the edifice of metaphysics by lo-

cating inside the house that which is excluded from it, the "sickness of the outside," which is actually the "sickness of the homeland, a homesickness," 52 the hidden source of both the stability and the ruin of the house. In so doing, Derrida follows Freud's investigation of the "uncanny" [unheimlich] which begins by noting that the word "heimlich" is defined as both "belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc." but also the opposite: "concealed, kept from sight, so that others do not get to know of or about it, withheld from others."53 Through this "double" gesture, the familiar becomes uncanny and frightening. Within the security of the house is an impropriety that is horrifying if it is exposed precisely because it does not befall an innocent subject. Indeed, it constitutes the subject, being "in reality nothing new or alien, but, rather, something which is familiar and old-established in

the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." 54 The secret of this constitutional violation haunts the house in the same way as

the "residues" and "traces" of primitive man haunt the civilized man and those of the

child haunt the adult. For Freud, the passage from child to adult is that from primitive to civilized. Rather than a passage from innocence to violation (as in Rousseau's ac-

count), it is a passage from violation to repression. The uncanny horrifies because it

exposes an originary violation that has been repressed. Freud argues that the gesture of the "double" originates as a means of the primi-

tive to resist the fear of death by dividing the world into body and soul. But, he says, this primitive fear returns in civilization when the distinction between imagination

(representation) and reality (presentation), which is based on the original division be-

tween body and soul, is "effaced." The double reverses to become the "uncanny har-

binger of death,"s55 returning the civilized subject to the primitive condition, and the

adult to the childhood scene of violation. This return to the primal scene, this "return

of the repressed," horrifies in a way that activates "the urge towards defence which has

caused the ego to project the material outward as something foreign to itself."56 Else-

where, Freud argues that this defensive mechanism is erected during the "latency" period in which the child/primitive is trained to sublimate its original perversion with

feelings of "disgust, feelings of shame, and the claims of aesthetics and moral ideas." 57

In these terms, aesthetics is a defensive mechanism of repression which excludes that

50.

Critique of Pure Reason, P- 429-

51-? A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 9I.

52. Of Grammatology, p. 3I3.

53- Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Standard Edition, vol. I 7: z 17- 56, p. zzz.

54- Ibid., p. 24I.

55- Ibid., p. z35-

56. Ibid., p. z36.

57- Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Standard Edition, vol. 7: Iz5-z43, p. 177.

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which disgusts by forcing the effacement of the distinction between presentation and

representation. As aesthetics operates in the service of metaphysics, which maintains that distinction, it is not surprising that Freud finds: "As good as nothing is to be found upon this subject [the uncanny] in comprehensive treatises on aesthetics, which in general prefer to concern themselves with what is

beautiful, attractive and sublime-that is, with feelings of a positive nature-and with

the circumstances and the objects that call these forth, rather than with the opposite

ncann, feelings of repulsion and distress."58 p. z19.

The aesthetic exclusion of the disgusting resists the primitive fear of death revived by the uncanny. It is a certain coming to terms with death. Aesthetic pleasure is like

mourning, which derives from systematically detaching and taking within oneself

("introjecting") all the parts of oneself contained in what has been lost: "the ego, confronted as it were with the question whether it shall share [the] fate [of the lost ob-

ject], is persuaded by the sum of the narcissistic satisfactions it derives from being alive to sever its attachment to the object that has been abolished."59 As the detachment of all interest, all desire, from the object, mourning is the paradigm of aesthetic

pleasure. That which forces one to desire to vomit is that which prevents mourning: "Let it be understood that in all senses what the word disgusting de-nominates is what one cannot resign onself to mourn."60

A detailed account of the disgusting can be found in Derrida's reading of the

study by the psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok of the refusal to mourn. They argue that its pathological condition is a fantasy of "incorporation"-of taking into the body the lost object itself, of consuming the object but doing so precisely to preserve it, to deny its loss: "it is to avoid "swallowing" the loss, that one

imagines swallowing, or having swallowed, what is lost, in the form of an object."61 The object is appropriated to keep it as other, as foreign, as a foreign body within the

body, taken into the body to stop it from contaminating the body, to keep it in indefi- nite quarantine: "retaining the object within itself but as something excluded, as a foreign body which is impossible to assimilate and must be rejected. .. .62 Unable to

simply expel the object, "the fantasy involves eating the object (through the mouth or otherwise) in order not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside," 63

Such a fantasy is necessary when normal mourning would expose and destroy the

pleasure of a shameful experience with an indispensible object. To preserve this secret

pleasure, the subject preserves and protects the object. The fantasy of incorporation maintains a hidden psychic topography in the face of the reality of a loss that, if ac-

knowledged, would make this topography visible and compel it to change. This "act of vomiting to the inside"64 defines a secret vault within the subject, a

"crypt" constructed by the libidinal forces of the traumatic scene which "through their contradiction, through their very opposition support the internal resistance of the vault like pillars, beams, studs, and retaining walls, leaning the powers of intoler- able pain against an ineffable, forbidden pleasure."65 As both the hiding of a secret and the hiding of that hiding, the crypt cannot simply take its place in the topography it preserves. The demarcations between inside and outside, the closure established by the drawing of a line, the division of a space by a wall, is disturbed by the internal

fracturing of the walls by the crypt. The crypt organizes the space in which it cannot

59- Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, Standard Edition, vol. I4: P. z5 5.

60. "Economimesis," p. z3.

61. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,

"Introjection-Incorporatiorr: Mourning or Melancholia," pp. 3- I6, Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlander (eds.), Psychoanalysis in France, New York, I980, p. 5.

6z.

Jacques Derrida, trans., Samuel Weber, "Limited Inc.," Glyph z, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, I977), p. 218.

63. Jacques Derrida, trans., Barbara Johnson, "Fors," The Georgia Review 31 ():64-116, I977, p. I02.

64. Ibid., p. I03.

65. Ibid., p. 68.

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01~~,6 A~~ ovoa

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simply be placed, and sustains the topography it fractures. These fractures, however, are not new. They have been present in the topography ever since the original traumatic scene, organizing the self and making possible the illusion that the scene never occurred. The fantasy of incorporation maintains a crypt that was already there.

By resisting consumption, this cryptic "architecture" disturbs the operation of

language acquired through mourning-the substitution of signs for the absence of ob-

jects, which "makes up for that absence by representing presence."66 This is a substitution that had begun with the departure of the mother's breast from the mouth: "First the empty mouth, then the absence of objects become words, and finally experi- ences with words themselves are converted into other words."67 The crypt is constructed because of the impossibility of using language in the normal way, by exchang- ing words for a certain object in voicing grief, without revealing a shameful secret: "the impossibility of expressing, of placing words onto the market." 68 Nevertheless, it hides itself within the marketplace as another kind of contract, organizing an-other

operation of language. Even while keeping its secret, the crypt leaks. It does so through convoluted manipulations of the word as object; these displace words that cannot be

spoken without revealing the secret with words that can be safely uttered: "Cryp- tonymy would thus not consist in representing-hiding one word by another, one thing by another, a thing by a word or a word by a thing, but in picking out from the extended series of allosemes, a usage which then (in a second degree distancing) is trans- lated into a synonym."69 Through these displacements, in which "a certain foreign body is here working over our household words,"70 the crypt is secreted inside the house.

This cryptic language can be decoded in psychoanalysis. But as the crypt (de)con- structs itself in a way that displaces traditional architectural thinking, this analysis can neither simply enter nor violently fracture the crypt to find its secret. Rather, it involves a double play, first to locate the cracks through which the crypt leaks and then to force entry. In this way, the analyst violates that which is already violated, that which is "built by violence."71

"To track down the path to the tomb, then to violate a sepulcher: that is what the

analysis of a cryptic incorporation is like. The idea of violation might imply some kind of transgression of a right, the forced entry of a penetrating, digging, force, but the violated sepulcher itself was never "legal." It is the tombstone of the illicit, and marks the spot of an extreme pleasure, a pleasure entirely real though walled up, buried alive in its own prohibition."72

It is through this double play that deconstruction locates the impropriety hidden within the edifice of metaphysics. The sense that such a gesture is foreign, improper, if not in bad taste, in architectural discourse is the sense that the discourse is a field enclosed by some kind of strategic border outside which such acts belong. But the distasteful logic of deconstruction locates the corpus that is "Derrida" within architectural discourse. Unable to either stomach or expel this foreign body, the discourse confronts the limits of its constitution: its digestive tract and the political contract that authorizes it.

66. "Introjection-Incorporation," p. 6.

67. Ibid., p. 6.

68. Fors," p. Io8.

69. Ibid., p. 107.

70. Ibid., p. 83.

71. Ibid., p. 68.

72. Ibid., P-. 97-

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THE INDIGESTION OF DERRIDA IN ARCHITECTURAL DISCOURSE

The metaphysical tradition that philosophical discourse maintains, and with which architectural discourse has such an intimate relationship, does not reside exclusively in the texts of philosophy. The covert violence of that tradition occupies and organizes all transactions in our culture. To displace this pervasive mastery of metaphysics, the

indigestible alien within metaphysics has to be exhumed from each of the cultural for- mations in which it is buried. Such an analysis is both necessary and difficult in an architectural discourse that maintains its object as a guarantee of metaphysics. Der- rida operates within the discourse of metaphysics and, by virtue of the contract, al-

ready inhabits architectural discourse, appearing to locate the indigestible other within it by way of a displacement from oikos to oikesis, from house to crypt. This dis-

placement locates the crypt hidden within the ground-foundation-superstructure- ornament tradition. To maintain that tradition, Kant argues that the edifice of meta-

physics is "in ruins" because philosophers unwittingly undermine the secure ground they seek, producing the catacombs into which their edifice collapses.

". . . we must meantime occupy ourselves with a less resplendent, but still meritorious

task, namely, to level the ground, and to render it sufficiently secure for moral edifices

of these majestic dimensions. For this ground has been honeycombed by subterranean

workings which reason, in its confident but fruitless search for hidden treasures has carried out in all directions, and which threaten the security of the superstructures." 73

But these cryptic fractures are not flaws in the construction of metaphysics that can be

repaired, they are the very possibility of its authority. The ground on which the foundations for the house are laid is necessarily unsafe, undermined by the crypt: "the terrain is slippery and shifting, mined and undermined. And this ground is, by es-

sence, an underground."74 Metaphysics is erected on the insecurity of an absence rather than the security of a presence, on death rather than life, on the tomb of a viola-

tion rather than an innocent, unmarked ground. Its edifice is always already inhabited

by a crypt that violates it while making it possible: "erected by its very ruin, held up by what never stops eating away at its foundations."75

The crypt is neither building nor architecture but the uncanny effacement of the distinction between them, the distinction that is at once the contractual possibility of architectural discourse and the means of repression of the threat posed by that discourse. The location of the crypt within the house, as the possibility of the house, threatens the terms of the contract which postmodernism observes inasmuch as it

keeps architecture detached from building, and ornament detached from structure. Rather than simply privileging ornament, the crypt locates ornament within the structure itself, not by integrating it in some classical synthetic gesture, but by locating ornament's violation of structure, a violation that cannot be exorcised, a constitutional violation that can only be repressed.

Derrida's analysis of the indigestion of metaphysics is itself an encrypting of a traumatic scene, a violation which is a source of both excruciating pain and forbidden

pleasure. To appropriate deconstruction without consuming it is to indigest it by in-

quiring into architecture's presence in this violent scene. This can only be done by interrogating its texts in a way that locates their cracks in order to identify the repres-

73-

Critique of Pure Reason, p. 3I4?

74. "Limited Inc.," p. I68.

75. "Fors," p. 40.

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sion that makes deconstruction itself possible. This requires an extended analysis that would attempt to establish whether the texts disturb the design-contract or whether

they covertly honor its conditions as another agent of the repression of the constitutional violence of architecture.

Such an interrogation would not simply establish the mastery of architectural discourse as mastery cannot be thought outside the very subservience of that discourse. Instead it would displace mastery itself by displacing the condition of the architectural object that guarantees metaphysics. Rather than authorizing yet another practice purporting to violate traditional architectural theory, the account of architecture

produced by the indigestion of deconstruction sustains an architectural practice that locates and exploits the violation within architecture which allows it to fulfill its most traditional contractual obligations to metaphysics. This is a practice that is other than postmodern.

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Postmortem Architecture_The Taste of Derrida by Mark Wigley

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