Introduction: Act Two

Kipnis, Jeffrey

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Introduction: Act Two

Jeffrey Kipnis

Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004

It is odd to introduce this second volume of writings by Peter Eisenman, since I suspect that most who have come to it are forewarned and forearmed. If, on the other hand, you have picked it as a first introduction to Eisenman’s thought, I fear no preamble can prepare you for what you are about to...

Author

Jeffrey Kipnis

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.vii-xxx

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31865

Chapter subject tags:Eisenman, Peter, 1932-Architectural theory--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th centuryArchitecture, Modern--20th century--Philosophy

Introduction: Act Two

—Jeffrey Kipnis

It is odd to introduce this second volume of writings by Peter Eisenman, since I suspect that most who have come to it are forewarned and forearmed. If, on the other hand, you have picked it as a first introduction to Eisenman’s thought, I fear no preamble can prepare you for what you are about to encounter. To wade through Eisenman’s writing is at best a struggle, and these essays include some of his most viscous. Thus, to those at this juncture who do not already know where they are about to go, my advice is to set this volume aside for the moment. Start with Inside Out, the first volume of writings, which contains the architect’s more influential texts. Those, too, have their difficulties, but, written with prodigious confidence, their arguments are crisper, the propositions more vivid.

The essays in this book constitute Eisenman’s second act, in which the protagonist takes a step that will surely seal his fate, which in his case means his place in history. We must wait for a later act to learn whether Eisenman’s choice ends in comedy or tragedy, but this act surely reveals his turning point. In synopsis, this drama concerns an architect whose philosophical disposition borders on compulsion like Raskalnikov, Pangloss, and other characters who think too much. In the first act, a young, arrogant architect proposes to transform architecture from an artistic into an intellectual discipline. Though he muses on larger cultural questions, he focuses his philosophical urge outward, onto his effort to discover how to design a critical architecture. His thought deepens from reflections on solid, void, shift, and shear to deep structure, to absence and presence, to de-centering, to such exotic notions as trace and catachresis, yet at each step he produces an immediate demonstration of his latest thinking in a design. And no matter how difficult the design concept he wrestles with, by the time he has finished, he always declares his undertaking accomplished.

In act two, for reasons that are not clear, other than the dark doubts that stain too much time in thought, his mood changes, he turns inward and begins to think less about how to do a critical architecture than why. The change is marked in his language, where obscure, existential concepts such as presentness, interiority, and a third aura replace the proliferating conceptual design instruments that plot the first act.

One thing is clear: no outside agent, no colleague, critic, or client forces this change. Though he had convinced few, by the beginning of the second act, his scholarly command of the history and literature of the discipline combined with the originality of his early work to earn him broad respect. No one asked of him a deeper validation of his project than he had already offered. The change was of his own volition even if he really had no choice in the matter. But then, such is the case for most protagonists of modern drama.

These essays brood; a certain stridence unseats the confidence of the earlier writings. Under cover of measured reflection, he plunges again and again into ever more mystifying ruminations beset with inconsistency, self-contradiction, recondite jargon, and dubious reasoning that occasionally ventures to the perilous brink of nonsense. A careful reader cannot help but come to wonder not just “of what” Eisenman speaks, but “to whom?”

Of course, there are approachable writings in this volume, and as always with Eisenman stunning aperçus punctuate challenging passages of expert testimony to harass mainstream architectural thought, particularly when it claims a natural or self-evident legitimacy. Nor do these essays merely reprise the memorable themes of the early writing, but continue to advance these into new territory, even after forty years:

In essence, then, the idea of critical in this text attempts to open up the question of the language of the formal, to reformulate it through the linguistic analogy of the “text,” as a tissue of ever changing traces and interpretations . . .

—“Terragni and the Idea of a Critical Text” (2001)

Written four decades after rumors of Eisenman’s strange analysis of Terragni’s architecture first began to reverberate through the halls of architectural academia, this statement reiterates the two speculations which together distinguish Eisenman’s architectural thinking: (1) that architecture is a language, and (2) that when architecture becomes an intellectually and historically self-conscious discipline, it is no longer just a language, but a mode of writing. The architect’s first act, the early essays, fanfares those two ideas and commences his dogged pursuit of their consequences. To follow that story, we, like the author himself, must ponder these propositions again and again.

However, like the terminology of semiology itself—which, among other limitations, leaves out the phenomenal, the physical, and the affective dimensions of signs—my use of the term text also has both positive and negative implications.

If the affirmation of architecture’s textuality that begins the passage proclaims his opera’s idée fixe, then the self-criticism whispered in this counter-theme sets the mood for the second act, as it introduces the three passions that in this set of essays begin to prick the architect—the phenomenal, the physical, and the affective.

To glimpse how his early thought might stand the test of those passions, Eisenman brings the passage to a close with a refrain of the haunting insight that ever burns his Terragni analysis into the psyche of audiences: the aria of the window, the story of the single pane of glass in the Casa del Fascio different from all others. The 300+ pages of the architect’s Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques stand as one of the most incisive formal analyses in all of modern architecture, but the essence of its idea is perfectly distilled in its brief account of one window.

Such limits are indicated by, for example, the movement of one window, the projecting window on the rear façade of the Casa del Fascio, which can be seen as a microcosm of a critical text. This window, which hinges open in a plane parallel to the vertical face of the building, is functionally and visually obscure. It exists both as a textual notation and as an indication of the elusiveness of such a concept to a purely linguistic interpretation. Its significance is accessible only partially through an analysis of the drawings in the context of a linguistic reading, and only partially through a visual and somatic reading. Without an analysis of the drawings, this window can only be read as a “dumb” compositional device. However, . . . when the reading of the drawings is compared to the visual and somatic experiences—a somatic reading, as it were, of the building—additional readings accrue. In plan, the Casa del Fascio seems to be a square, and the initial casual experience of the building is as a square. However, an examination of the actual drawn dimensions of the plan reveals that the side façades are slightly shorter than the front and rear façades. And when the one window that does not pivot or rotate diagonally—the one window to puncture an exterior façade plane—is opened outward from the rear façade, the building becomes—at least conceptually—a dimensional square. This can be represented—in a lateral sense—only in a drawn plan or section. But the experience of the open window that causes the building to be an actual square cannot be known from its representation on paper or screen. The window’s eccentricity, its positioned view from below, the details of its mechanism, the gap that it leaves when it is activated depend on an experiential view. [emphasis added]

In retrospect, forty years later, the insignificant metal hinge that regulates the opening of that one window now rises to challenge the dematerialized conceptuality of Eisenman’s original argument. In effect, it becomes Terragni’s brushstroke, the inescapable material gesture necessary for the artist to render his idea. With its physicality comes the phenomenal—the rivulet of fresh air that flows around the glass barrier into its unique gap—and the affective—the vague feelings that well for a moment when that one open window is seen half consciously by passersby on the street.1Reading this passage, I recall my initial encounter with a “real” Mondrian, the painter who then stood for me as the purest of conceptual painters. To my dismay, the painting confronting me was incongruously palpable, its canvas set forward from the plane of its frame to assert its physicality, its white fields overpainted with brushstrokes obviously meant to convey impasto, now tattooed with craquelure. Duchamp’s brusque dismissal of “all those miserable frescoes which no one can even see any more” crossed my mind: “We love them for their cracks.”

Semiotics’ insensitivity to the particular physicality of architecture triggers much of the dramatic conflict in these essays, as, for example, in the exchange between Eisenman and Derrida. Yet, the central crisis coalesces in a darker, more exotic space where mind stirs into metaphysics. A secreted portal leads there from almost every essay, and once we find ourselves in it, we encounter a strange menagerie of concepts and formulations. Presumably, the architect conjures these intellectual concoctions to safeguard architecture from some threat or demon, but, then, on the other hand, whence come these demons in the first place? What are they, why do they haunt architecture, specifically?

Of course, in the demystified sobriety of contemporary discourse, demons only refer to one thing: inner demons that plague a mind. That a bit of familiar Freudian psychoanalysis—no more than has already proved instrumental to modern interpretations of Hamlet—might bear on these essays is already suggested by a striking curiosity concerning the essay guiding us thus far. “Terragni and the Idea of a Critical Text” was written as an epilogue for the publication of Eisenman’s landmark study of the Italian modernist, a relentless exercise in formal analysis that all but erases Giuseppe Terragni as the agent of his own architecture, not to mention as a once-living being. As noted, four decades separate the completion of the original analysis and its eventual publication, a delay that would have awed even the hesitant Dane. Until the belated publication of the Terragni study, the content of the work circulated from student to student not as text but as gossip and rumor—an odd fate for an opus implicated in architecture’s accession to the rank of writing. And by the time the architect finally readied the manuscript for publication, he, like Hamlet, could not but join qualms to it.

For the architect who more than any other has foregrounded intellectual agency to have gained foothold through an aggravated assault on agency itself is an intriguing but all too familiar plot. Thus, Eisenman’s calculated assassination of pater Terragni cannot be the central crisis of this second act; that crime merely establishes the character flaw of the protagonist. The crisis arises, rather, from a slow dawning wherein the analyst-architect, looking in a mirror, begins to wonder if he may have unconsciously poisoned his beloved architecture. With writing.

And if there were a contest and he had to compete in measuring the shadows with the prisoners who had never moved out of the cave, while his sight was still weak, and before his eyes had become steady . . . would he not be ridiculous? Men would say of him that up he went and down he came without his eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascending.

—Plato, Republic VII, 517

Eisenman’s pursuit of architecture as writing was part and parcel of the development of the “linguistic” school by Rossi, Venturi, Jencks and Baird, Graves, and others. Concerned with architectural meaning, these theorists drew upon the model of language to elaborate the discipline into a comprehensive scheme of semantic elements, syntactic formal relationships, and rhetorical devices, patterns, and idioms. The basic idea is easily grasped in Eisenman’s oft-repeated assertion that for architecture, a column is not a structural element, but a signifying device. It is a foregone conclusion that a structural system must successfully support a building, whether with classical columns, frames, or pilotis. And to be sure, the architect must grasp the basis of the structural problem to begin to work, much as a composer must grasp the basis of the sound production of any instrument for which he writes music. But solving the structural problem is not the work of the architect, which is rather to explore the other effects that a structural system inevitably produces once the load question is settled. Thus, while from an engineering point of view both piloti and classical column are load-bearing elements, from the point of view of architecture as cultural discourse, the classical column and the piloti are forever joined in a moral debate: while the former celebrates the distinction between ground and sky—with all the metaphysical, theological, and feudal consequences that entails—the latter eradicates it.

For most of its adherents, the language model served architectural discourse by recuperating intrinsic attributes characteristic of every linguistic community such as continuity, tradition, custom, memory, and locality, values that were perceived to have been unduly relegated by modernism’s stylistic creed.2The linguistic schematization of architecture has proven exceptionally powerful as both an analytic and synthetic tool, yielding fresh insight when used to revisit the architectural history while fueling many of the diverse movements that have dominated the discipline in its wake. By providing a subtle means through which to discern the intrinsic continuities that join even the most adventurous of design speculations to the history of the discipline, the linguistic model allowed substantive accomplishments in contemporary architecture to be brought into high relief against mere stylistic novelty. Its operative ethic of invention was also borrowed from linguistics, which notes that for all of language’s history of abundant creativity—fiction and nonfiction—to say something new within a particular language, one never needs to invent new grammar (syntax) and rarely needs to invent new words (semantics). Even when one does invent a new word, e.g., “tele-vision,” the neologism is almost always formed by recombining existing semantic roots, rather than the coinage of a new sound/word ab initio. Such coining does occur, as in the mathematical term “google,” though its extension to “googleplex” returned to standard root recombinatorial form. Many new words wheedle their way into a language through misuse, contraction, and common error, as for example “finalize,” “mischievous,” and “atone.”

Of the 16,677 words that constitute the vocabulary of Shakespeare’s plays, about 2,000, more than 10 percent, had not been previously recorded. While most use root recombination, others, such as “bump,” appear to be inventions based on onomatopoeia or imitation. Many, such as “tortive” and “vastidity,” died at birth, but many others, such as “castigate” and “educate,” survive intact. In the context of this introduction, one of the most interesting of Shakespeare’s coinages is the word “critical,” which appeared first in Midsummer Night’s Dream but more famously in Othello’s “I am nothing if not critical.” Contemporary etymologists attribute to Derrida the inflection of the term “critical” to the specific sense in which Eisenman uses it to indicate a strategy of analytic reading, citing its occurrences in the philosopher’s 1973 writings. Eisenman, keen to secure a role for modernism’s legacy of intellection and design speculation within the linguistic scheme, deviates from his colleagues on three fronts. Today, the best known of these, of course, stands evident in the eccentric work that emanates from his practice. The other two are found in his writings: (1) he reads the history of architecture as a record of heresy (by certain architects and scholars) retold as orthodoxy, and (2) he theorizes architecture not just as a language, but as writing. While we consider the latter two without reference to the design work, the three are part and parcel. Thus, many of these essays begin with a critique of one of architecture’s conventions or traditions, then follow with a project by the architect intended to explore the heterodox implications of that critique.

Heresy

Eisenman is never so vivid in a graduate seminar as when presenting a pivotal moment in architecture not just as a creative leap, but as an act of heresy, from Alberti’s synthesis of sacred temple front with the profane triumphant arch to Tony Garnier’s apocryphal expulsion from the Ecole des Beaux-Artes for intentionally misplacing a column. Here the term “heresy” is exactly intended; its essential and distinguishing features are that it occurs with the horizons of orthodoxy and avows in principle its higher purpose, but challenging one of its dogmas. From the perspective of Catholicism, for example, neither an aborigine, nor a Jew, nor an atheist is a heretic; they are heathen or infidel. Nor is a Catholic heretic who abandons the faith or converts to another, but rather apostate. To be a heretic, one must be a baptized Catholic who affirms and practices Catholicism, but in such a way as to defy official church dogma. Heresy, therefore, is not merely a synonym for sin, laxity, or misprision. Rather, in its essence it is a purposeful and precise theoretical act of resistance that can only be perpetrated by a well-schooled predicant. Prominent Catholic heresies have elevated Mary to the status of Goddess and variously disputed the divinity of Christ, the infallibility of the pope, and the doctrine of transubstantiation. In 1835, Pope Pius X declared “modernism”—then defined as the love of all things modern above all things ancient—as the most insidious heresy then facing the church.

In those terms, Eisenman is Architecture’s consummate heretic, a high priest bent on challenging one dogma after another, but never so far as to deny the faith. Though he does not use the concept of heresy per se, its ratiocinations suffuse his texts, informing such key concepts as criticality and interiority. Often, the heretical imperative is associated with the art critic Rosalind Krauss, a recurring figure in the architect’s essays. His conviction that orthodoxy in architecture cannot help but serve entrenched power finds a kindred spirit in Krauss’s insistence that the visual arts mount a vanguard resistance to the insidious effects of late-capitalism’s forces of commodification.

Writing

At first, Eisenman pursued the linguistic model by sidestepping the semantic tactics favored by his colleagues, to explore the “deep structure” of architecture’s grammar, following Noam Chomsky’s theories of generative-transformative grammars. That effort gave rise to the architect’s disposition toward process-based design and to the experiments with architectural syntax launched in his early houses, traits that persist in the work of his studio to this day. Very soon, however, he shifted his attention from grammar to writing. When one recalls that the anthropological concept of “prehistory” refers to the period before writing, then the reasons that Eisenman so stresses the concept of writing for architecture become more apparent. All languages, written or not, produce continuity, tradition, and custom, but only the sustained, detailed record specific to writing gives rise to history, scholarship, intellection, speculation, criticism, and debate, the elements of discourse.

For Eisenman, a body of written discourse about architecture is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Such a body of writing in art history, after all, engendered the stylistic-periods model of architectural history that the linguistic model sought radically to revise, if not to replace. To establish the bona fides of an intellectually based speculative project within the linguistic scheme, architectural design itself must be shown to be a kind of writing.

As the architect begins to shift his focus from language to writing, he gravitates toward the texts of Derrida, the name synonymous with the most radical yet compelling reflection on writing offered by contemporary philosophy. Inevitably, Derrida’s ideas infect Eisenman’s thought. Noting that the structures and processes that semiotics had identified as the basis of all signification were precisely the same as those associated with phonetic writing’s relation to speech, Derrida generalizes the concept of writing into “archi-writing.” This provides the architect with the intellectual framework within which to theorize architecture as writing. Concomitantly, the philosopher demonstrates that writing, now the very possibility of meaning, also always destabilizes meaning. Hence, the meaning of any text is intrinsically instable, or as Derrida terms it, “undecidable.” He shows that, without exception, supplemental assumptions are always necessary to stabilize the meaning of any particular text. Meaning, therefore, can only be achieved at the expense of writing’s intrinsically destabilizing nature. Appealing to the inexorable logic of archi-writing, Derrida argues that the assumptions necessary to stabilize a text are themselves intrinsically instable texts requiring their own supplementation ad infinitum. All texts, therefore, form promiscuous chains of significations that can never terminate in any final, transcendent assumption with the power to stabilize the meaning of the resulting tapestry of chains—a situation expressed in his famous aphorism, “There is nothing outside the text.”

This work underscored the significance of Eisenman’s distinction between architecture as language and architecture as writing, and girded the architect’s suspicions that the orthodoxy of architectural discourse unjustifiably suppressed architectural experimentation. He had long argued that architecture was the language most vested in producing stability as meaning, from the stability of a building’s structure to the stability of the patterns of everyday life to the stability of familial, social, and political order and hierarchy. In his view, the orthodoxy of architecture served above all to prop up architecture’s ability to engender precisely those meanings. Such was the implication of his idea that an architectural column is not a vertical support but a sign of vertical support; we should now say . . . a sign of the stability of that support. With Derrida’s work, his criticisms of that orthodoxy deepened.

Finally, Derrida broaches a crucial question: how then does the meaning of a text—the meaning of a philosophical tract, a novel, a conversation, a building, a scene in a movie—seem immediately stable, apparently immune to a dependency on contingent supplementation? How, for example, does speech seem immediately to mean to a speaker what a speaker intends to say? The answer he offers is to posit an irrepressible “metaphysics of presence” wherein every text is always already supplemented by indefensible assumptions that escape critical scrutiny. This metaphysics of presence, then, is an insidious mechanism through which special interests—intellectual, political, historical, or psychological—covertly operate to instill unjustifiable confidence in the meaningfulness of a text. At its limit, the controversial consequence of the metaphysics of presence is that meaning as such in any form, discipline, or medium, though always present, nevertheless always arises strictly in the clandestine service of a special interest. Deconstruction names the inflammatory process of ferreting out and critiquing the operations of this confidence game in every discipline and institution with a vested interest in the meaning of a text—from psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and criticism to science, history, and law.

For a time, Derrida’s thought on archi-writing so approached Eisenman’s on architecture as writing that the two seem almost indistinguishable. Yet, in the essays of the first act, the philosopher of deconstruction remains at a distance, a disembodied authority whose message is transmitted more often than not by oblique reference. As we begin the second act, a more corporeal Derrida has approached, but in an extraordinary act of dramaturgy, the becoming flesh of Jacques Derrida—the meeting of the two men, their yearlong collaboration on the Chora L Work3Cf. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). garden for Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette, the flowering of a friendship, and the eruption of a brief but poignant clash in a public exchange of letters—occurs entr’acte. With “Post/El Cards . . . ” the opening essay of act II, Jacques Derrida has come and gone. Yet in that climactic lacuna a fundamental change occurred. From then on, Derrida, once authority, then man, becomes an apparition, a specter of misdeed who haunts the architect.

Eisenman never again invokes his friend to reinforce his own position; rather, he now scripts the philosopher’s arguments4In “L’ora che è stata,” for example, we find: “For Derrida, to have presence means to give something form beyond merely its appearance privileged by seeing, i.e., what I see is what I know to be and to be truthful. Thus, for Derrida, presence, and ultimately its metaphysics, is an illusory and uncritical assumption of sight. Derrida would further argue that this ur-presence, this form emanates from a system of concepts, and thus a language, and ultimately a writing which is an irreducible effect of language.” The author then goes on to challenge Derrida’s assumptions about sight and presence in order to distinguish painting from architecture. Readers well-studied in Derrida will no doubt find this practice exasperating, since the words and ideas the architect puts in the philosopher’s mouth rarely offer a rigorous representation of the philosopher’s actual position and can deviate markedly from it. While the curious relationship between the thought and lives of Eisenman and Derrida is a fertile topic for study on many levels, it is helpful to remember while reading these texts that the accuracy of the architect’s reports of Derrida’s thought does not in the end matter to the architect’s own conjectures. Eisenman does not seek to derive authority or force from his representation of Derrida’s position; like any speculation in dialogue form, the reports are but rhetorical devices to help the architect clarify his own position. through a cunning ventriloquy5I am indebted to the philosopher David Goldblatt for calling my attention to the merit of ventriloquism as an apt model for the complex relationships that take place among voice, speaking, meaning, and writing articulated by contemporary critical discourse. Cf. D. Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (New York: Routledge, 2006). so as to swerve away from them, slowly withdrawing architecture from archi-writing. Architecture remains writing, but gradually becomes writing unlike any other, in its physicality to be sure, but more in its mysteries, a secret writing, available only to a select cognoscenti: those inside architecture. Toward the end of this book, for example, one finds the author narrating a wizards’ contest staged in the fifteenth century between Luciano Laurana’s Ducal Palace in Urbino and Donato Bramante’s Santa Maria Della Pace in Rome.6See “Digital Scrambler” 2004 pages 133–49. If an elect, one can see two architects conjure space, geometry, concept, matter, and being into alternative metaphysical spells; if not, one will see only the dull corners of two courtyards, their differences trifling if perceptible at all. But then, as Eisenman frequently reminds us, architects love to cloak their powers behind the insignificance of corners.

The metamorphosis of Eisenman’s thought is well advanced by the publication of such abstruse texts as “Presentness and the Being-Only-Once of Architecture,” “Writing Inside,” and “Written into the Void.” In them, the crisis of the second act, which is to say, the crisis of architecture as writing, reaches a feverous pitch. Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss modulate from kindred scholars to character foils used to circumscribe the predicament of architecture that now compels the author’s thought. If Derrida embodies a conceptual project of writing that should entail architecture but cannot cope with architecture’s material passions, then Krauss embodies a project of vigilant intellectual resistance in the visual arts that also should entail architecture but cannot, or at least does not, cope with architecture’s own history of effects.

In her book The Optical Unconscious, Rosalind Krauss discusses a Jackson Pollock painting in relationship to its position in space. She contends that when a Pollock painting is placed in a horizontal position, . . . it is a “savage work.” But the moment the canvas is taken off of the floor and moved to a vertical position on the wall, Krauss continues, it becomes “naturalized,” reinstitutionalized and reinscribed into the discourse of painting.

All of this is said with an uncharacteristic innocence about the possible effect of the floor or the wall on this change in perception. She assumes one can lift things up and down, off and on, without any discussion of why the relationship between floor and wall, or, for that matter, between the floor or the wall and the painting, could cause this to happen. . . . Most of those outside of architecture assume that architectural conventions have a thought-to-be naturalness with respect to such things as walls and floors.

—“Presentness and the Being-Only-Once of Architecture” (1995)

Even for those as astute as Rosalind Krauss, floor and wall are just floor and wall: (“thought-to-be”) natural places to throw rugs and hang pictures. Where, then, is the possibility of a savage architecture, when architecture is that place that innately tames the savage? To address that question, Eisenman must retain the criticality that architecture as writing enables, but can no longer risk Derrida’s archi-writing, because its lack of discipline threatens to evaporate architecture into thin air.

As he begins to reformulate his approach to architecture as writing, Eisenman revisits architecture’s power to domesticate that he notes in Krauss’s book. Having long critiqued architecture’s orthodoxy for its urge to reinforce that effect, he now considers that perhaps the power itself constitutes the discipline’s singularity. Meanwhile, he defers another intriguing question, for who are those inside architecture, or should we ask where are they? For the moment, let us simply note in passing that the two provocations are issued in the same breath: “Most of those outside of architecture assume that architectural conventions have a thought-to-be naturalness with respect to such things as walls and floors.”

However affecting his break with Derrida might have been, on a personal level it was but a waning of briefly shared interests. On the other hand, a palpable disappointment tints Eisenman’s choice of Rosalind Krauss to represent “those outside of architecture.” The two not only share a long personal friendship and institutional history—Krauss’s seminal journal October began under the auspices of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies founded by Eisenman—but the architect identifies his project in architecture with hers in the visual arts.

Thus, however mild Eisenman’s rebuke of Krauss may seem to most readers, it should send a shudder through supporters of her work, for it unsettles a core premise of The Optical Unconscious. In that study, Krauss, much like Eisenman, attempts to fend off the effort by art orthodoxy to embrace belatedly the heretical transgressions of such works as Pollock’s drip paintings, Warhol’s piss paintings, and Twombly’s graffiti paintings by treating them ex post facto as if they had always belonged to that orthodoxy’s account of high modernism. She positions the works in question as direct, fundamental attacks on a “vertical gestalt,” the privileged position of the eye that establishes the domain of form, drawing, the figure, the mark, and the other intellectual and aesthetic values that determine optical consciousness as high art. The work she considers, on the other hand, stakes out the horizontal, a domain “below culture” associated with sex, violence, and excrement, the stuff of the unconscious.

Her argument unfolds through an insightful articulation of the various works of art in their relation to verticality and horizontality. Yet throughout the book, Krauss treats the vertical and horizontal uncritically, as natural attributes that derive from an erect body’s relation to gravity in abstract space.7Though Krauss makes extensive use of Freud, Lacan, and others, the principal resource for the arguments in The Optical Unconscious, especially those concerning the horizontal and vertical, obtain from the writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, a fact that makes her indifference to architecture all the more noticeable. While Bataille wrote little on art, he paid close attention to orthodox effects of architecture:

Architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of individuals’ souls. It is, however, particularly to the physiognomies of official personages (prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison pertains. In fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dikes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is, in fact, obvious that monuments inspire social prudence and often even real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real master.

Cf. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). But the context of verticality and horizontality for all of the paintings she discusses is neither nature nor a body in abstract space; it is always an architectural interior, as if the history of painting’s orthodoxies and heresies were not joined inextricably to a parallel history of architecture.

Of course, the book treats a specific set of artworks, and Krauss bears no obligation to acknowledge that architecture might churn with the same critical ferment as art. What is suspect, however, is how she takes architecture for granted given that the specific work she discusses depends so strongly upon it, in particular as the scene of transgression. But in her writing, it either ceases to exist, transcending into pure horizontality or verticality, or serves merely as a medium of convenience, as self-evident as it is irrelevant:

By 1955 Twombly had stopped making paintings with the expressionist’s loaded brush and had started using the sharp points of pencils to scar and maul and ravage the creamy stuccoed surface of his canvases instead. He had begun, that is, down the attack route which is that of the graffitist, the marauder, the maimer of the blank wall.8Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).

To achieve this scene of violence, Krauss here relies on a synonymy of stucco surface and blank wall. Yet, why was it not also a case of violence when an architect before Twombly first schemed to smother the warm, reassuring face of ruddy brick into a wan, featureless oblivion with stucco?

Her indifference to architecture borders on callous when elsewhere she dubs works such as Richard Serra’s molten metal Splashes as heir to the horizontal transgressions of Pollock’s drip painting, given that Serra explicitly pronounced these as works executed “between floor and wall.” Less obvious but perhaps more telling is the supportive role architecture might have played for Krauss in the ambition of The Optical Unconscious to contest in the arena of the psyche the abiding influence of Clement Greenberg.

In the name of modernism, Greenberg called for autonomy in the visual arts, nominated painting as the prototype of high art among the visual arts, and endowed “flatness” as the teleological conclusion of a history of painting that reached its apotheosis in modernism.9Cf. these excerpts from Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” (1951):

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The enclosing shape of the picture was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with sculpture. Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.
To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much . . . to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract. All three are part and parcel of the same dogma, one that Krauss’s entire oeuvre struggles to discredit. Pollock’s drip paintings are a decisive test. Because Greenberg successfully appropriated Pollock’s drip paintings to support his doctrine, of necessity Krauss must wrest away custody and exaugurate them to restore their heretical standing. Architecture might have helped her cause, had she let it.

Greenberg derives his conclusions about flatness by isolating the history of painting as an internal movement of formal influences from one painting to the next, adequate in and of itself, a position that resonates with Eisenman’s early studies of Terragni. He does not deny that paintings occur in and reflect a larger context, but holds that the specificity of the discipline is to be found entirely in its characteristic practices. But unlike Eisenman, whose formalist readings were largely intended to overcome the reign of aesthetics in architecture, Greenberg’s formalism is joined to his quest for an objectivity of taste, a project born in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Historians such as Krauss argue that a broader intellectual context is necessary to understand the formal and material evolution of art practices, hence her appeal to Freud, Bataille, Lacan, and other cultural theorists.

In such a broader context, Greenberg’s notions of disciplinary autonomy and his the-orization of flatness as the apotheosis of autonomous painting are not quite so compatible, particularly if one considers architecture not as passive background but as influential historical process in its own right. Under the influence of formal perspective, the principle that every painting was a “window view” was well established by the Renaissance. By the nineteenth century, artists start to challenge that principle by abandoning strict perspective, loosening color-edge relations, and otherwise compressing the view into the windowpane itself, a process that cannot be separated from the development of clearer, more reflective, and larger glass panes and the concomitant proliferation of and elaboration upon windows in architecture during the same period. As one historian writes,

The way towards the comprehension of a formal approach, linked purely to the plane and renouncing illusionistic effects of depth (as can already be seen in Matisse’s Porte-fenetre of 1914) has been “flattened”—in the true sense of the word—in part and above all by the motif of the window in the painting of the nineteenth and twentieth century. . . . Just as the representation of perspective in Western painting began with the idea of observing spatial depth through a window, it came to an end with the idea of regarding the figure of the window as subject of an entirely two-dimensional pictorial architecture.10J. A. Schmoll as quoted in B. Reichlin, “‘Une petite maison’ on Lake Leman: The Perret—Le Corbusier Controversy,” Lotus International, no. 60 (1989): 59–83.

In this view, flatness in painting would be no more autonomous than its counterpart in modern architecture’s horizontal windows and glass walls, both of which are in part treated in terms of painting in architecture’s discourse. Less a destiny than a signpost in an ongoing process whose motives and ramifications are always as political as formal, flatness grew out of the dialogue between architecture and painting as but another possibility to explore in the relationship between window and picture.

In Krauss’s dogged assault on Greenberg, she everywhere challenges his Kantian assumptions such as flatness. One by one, she brings each of these assumptions to its knees by trespassing beyond the limited horizons of art history proper to examine the institutional, economic, and psychological forces that produced them.

In that spirit, if one sets aside Krauss’s own metaphysical abstractions and reads The Optical Unconscious from the perspective of the co-evolution of painting and architecture, keeping firmly in mind the relationship between painting and window, Krauss’s insights amplify extraordinarily. Just beneath the surface of her arguments lies an alternative, a more specific, concrete proposition: that the radical heresy of these artworks is not to abandon verticality for horizontality, but to abandon for the first time in painting the paradigm of the transparent window in favor of the opaque floor or wall. The window arrests time and motion by fixing the gaze, the vehicle par excellence for optical consciousness. The impenetrable wall and floor, on the other hand, make time immediate and set action into motion.

While Krauss uses the psychic domain of the unconscious to retire the vacuous cliché of the existentialist mark that surrounds these works, she is unable to avoid the action of these works entirely—drip, urinate, and scratch—precisely because the unconscious, as Freud argued, can make its presence known only through action. The transgression of Warhol’s urine paintings occurs when the canvas is not a horizontal, but a floor. And the “heterogeneity of trash” that Krauss says Pollock “dumped” onto the surface of his 1949 masterwork Full Fathom Five—the nails, buttons, tacks, keys, coins, cigarettes, matches—comes into its own as refuse once the canvas becomes the floor. In that sense, one might argue these paintings must be displayed on a wall, because only there do they utterly defeat the window as the existential gestalt of optical consciousness.

According to Eisenman, architecture so insinuates into the horizontal and vertical framework of our nature that it becomes that framework, standing not just for the natural but as it. So, in the end the goal here is not to indict Rosalind Krauss for indifference to architecture, but rather to call attention to architecture’s occult power to seep into critical thinking unnoticed. His attempt to reconceptualize architecture as writing unlike any other now turns on that power.

Insidedness and Presentness

As writing, architecture is always conventional, a mobile, transient, and historically determined scheme of signification, and the early essays articulate the heresies that arise when the orthodoxy of architecture is confronted by a frank analysis of that written conventionality. Now his problem gets much thornier, for how does architecture forge a critical disposition if in its essence it is destined to extinguish criticality itself? The architect does not cut through that dilemma so much as ravel a Gordian knot around it with tortuous formulations so unfathomable that they teeter on madness.

from “Writing Inside”

What, then, is this unique insidedness that is architectural, and why must it be written? Why this necessity of defining architecture as a unique interiority? First, since architecture has a literal insidedness (it will always have ‘four walls’ and will always enclose and shelter), any other mental construct having inside as an idea will always be in a different relationship to this literal interior than, say, any writing would have to a previously thought internal or external, such as fiction to science writing. Thus, the idea of architecture must first fight its way into architecture in such a way that science writing does not have to do with literary writing: it must literally overcome this literal insidedness. But if it can also be thought that this literal insidedness always contains an architectural idea, then such ideas are already inside and outside of architecture at the same time. But it must be remembered for this architectural idea to exist inside, it also must overcome this unique instrumentality, the fact of architecture’s literal being.

from “Presentness and the Being-Only-Once of Architecture”

More than any other term [presentness] combines both the idea of time in presence, of the experience of space in the present, while at the same time its suffix -ness causes a distance between the object as presence, which is a given in architecture, and the quality of that presence as time, which may be something other than mere presence. This creates the idea of a spacing between presence and the quality of presentness. However, this does not in any way implicate two other characteristics of presentness: that is, its quality of an already given, and its capacity to render that already given as necessarily subversive.

. . .

The importance of presentness as a term for architecture is that it distinguishes [architecture as] a writing from [architecture as] an instrumentality of aesthetics and meaning. Presentness as a writing is the possibility of a subversion of the thought to be convention of type in architecture; that architecture has within it an insidedness which is an already existing possibility for the subversive. Presentness is both the possibility of, if not the need for, architecture to stabilize itself through the reabsorption of the transformation of type brought about by this subversion, and simultaneously the resistance to this reabsorption.

With these excursions to insidedness and presentness, Eisenman cuts his final tether to Derridian thought. So thoroughly have Derrida’s deconstructions of inside/outside relationships and the metaphysics of presence affected the architect’s own theories that he cannot but retain them, so he now appropriates and radically rethinks them. He proclaims architecture as that unique writing in which, by dint of the metaphysics of presence, the signification of the natural becomes the natural. On that point Derrida might provisionally concur, en route to its deconstruction. But for Eisenman, the “metaphysics of presence” no longer denotes a suspect, feigned metaphysics as it does for Derrida; from this point forward, the metaphysics of presence peculiar to architecture is for Eisenman an actuality.

Utterly confounding to be sure, but are these twisted monologues merely mad ravings, or are they dramatic tricks used to put into play a plot that some part of Eisenman knows better than openly to dare? The peril for the architect of such a venture into metaphysics is crystal clear. The linguistic movement arose in large part as a response to the discrediting of modern architecture’s claim to produce direct functional and social benefit. Though modernism broadly materialized as corporate style, the better future for all it promised did not. The linguistic movement rewrote architecture’s manifesto of validation, promising a more familiar, meaningful world rather than a better one. In the first act, Eisenman joined that program with the proviso that architecture must explore more challenging, less familiar meanings. To be sure, he flirted with existential issues throughout the early essays, but the only validation his intentionally difficult, written architecture required at that time was the thought it provoked among those few intellectually prepared and given to read it.

In one possible interpretation, he seems in these essays to be attempting to erect an existential infrastructure through which the specific intellectual machinations of a critical practice surreptitiously infiltrate the world without being absorbed into mainstream practice, so that architecture’s insidedness affects those “outside of architecture.” That is why throughout act two passion, aura, will, affect, and even experience first join then supplant reading as bona fide encounters with a critical architecture.

The architect appears to claim that what is unique to architecture as writing is that, by dint of its metaphysics of presence, all metaphors of interiority that architecture writes come to assume existential standing as actuality, because the medium of the writing is not ink but building. He seems to suggest that a building is the singular situation where “I am inside” is not only an intellectual fact but an existential truth, one that always feels “literal.” From that position, he suggests that all metaphors that relate self to interiority draw upon building as their referent, even such everyday truisms that we each live inside our own bodies and have inner lives. Since architecture as writing insinuates itself into the quotidian expectations of built interiority, it also insinuates itself into all metaphors that refer to that interiority.

Recall that the enchantment of metaphor derives from its power to transfer an attribute from a referent (the “proper term”) in which that trait is an actuality to a recipient in which it can only be figurative. So, “scratching at the door, the wind wants in” transfers as figural description the attributes of a dog to the wind. Eisenman takes care, more or less, not to argue naively that interiority is metaphor in every other discipline, but reality in building. In keeping with his commitment to architecture as writing, he suggests something more arcane: Interiority is metaphor in every discipline including architecture, but the “literal insidedness” of lived building inevitably confers actuality upon architecture’s interior metaphors. Since it is the metaphor, not the real building, which achieves this strange actuality, much as it is the writing, not the ink, that conveys upon literary metaphors their own special magic, critical architecture need not become the basis of a new mainstream to affect the world.

In this construal of his thought, presentness would denote both the possibility of and the reason for architectural subversion. Standing at any historical moment as the natural, buildings present a world as the world, and architectural presentness names the gap between the two. The gap, however, cannot be the distance between signifier and signified, since the architect asserts that architecture uniquely collapses that latter gap to an absolute minimum. Thus, there is no “real world” to reveal, nor is there another world to which one might make a visionary leap—the naïve error of early modernism. All other or future worlds that might today be imagined already perforce belong to this one, if only as metaphor. But, there is the delusion that this world is a thing rather than a moment in a process. The gap of architectural presentness, therefore, is the distance that separates being from becoming.

Though the philosophical minutiae of the argument may elude us—and be warned, there are stranger moments to come—at a more intuitive level, it is easy enough to grasp where it is going and why. Architects at the vanguard of nontraditional design are often charged with academic elitism, the conviction that to serve its own rarified intellectual interests, a small group of architects unduly imposes its experiments on the public. The problem is that in a very real sense, the charge is accurate. But no more so than a similar one leveled at the small group of physicists, mathematicians, painters, filmmakers, writers, composers, and others. All use a highly coded technical argot to communicate difficult concepts and techniques precisely and efficiently as they attempt to expand the knowledge of their respective disciplines through theoretical speculation and experimentation. Only in the case of the other practices, such scholarly elitism is usually less of a charge than an expression of admiration, even gratitude.

The difference between architecture and the others turns on the sense of architecture’s imposition, which seems invasive in ways that no other discipline is. We are free to choose whether or not to indulge vanguard speculation in other practices; we cannot escape architecture so easily. We can avoid an experimental film, book, painting, or piece of music, or quantum gravity theories. But we have to use buildings and cope with their idiosyncrasies, and we have to see them whether we want to or not. Because buildings force themselves on us, we believe that an architectural experiment should be intended to serve us by virtue of an improvement in function or appeal, one that might spread widely as a prototype or style.

At a psychological level, we each feel an intense intimacy with buildings, particularly with the house. The house and other buildings appear as central symbolic figures throughout our cultural foundations in our histories, fables, and myths; we design them in our first childhood drawings and haunt them after we depart from life. The House-Tree-Person drawing, a staple of psychological testing developed by John Buck in 1948, formalized the early and deep identification with the house noted by Freud and Jung. In an obvious way, the identification conveys to us the same conservative resistance to change in buildings that it does to the other choices that shape our daily lives, from our haircuts, clothes, and food to the people whose company we prefer.

But more pertinent to Eisenman’s thought, the unabated presence of architecture and our profound familiarity with it combine subtly to erase our perception of the significant difference between the building profession and the expert practice of architecture as cultural research and discourse. In his theories, that erasure shows up as his proposal that uniquely in architecture, the distance between the architecture signifier and signified has collapsed to an absolute minimum, beneath awareness. We are aware easily of the difference between experimental film and the familiar representations in entertaining movies, and then between these and reality; likewise, we are aware of the difference between current research in quantum gravity and our familiar understanding of gravity vaguely remembered from high school, and then between these and our lived relation to gravity, which requires no understanding, either Newtonian or Einsteinian, to walk or play catch.

In a sense, the middle term in these relationships acts to buffer us from the self-interested conceits of the small, elite circles of intellectual experimental filmmakers or theoretical physicists. Their work has no immediate bearing on our lives, nor do we ask or expect it to. Because we relate to our buildings not as familiar representations of reality, i.e., as the middle term, but as reality itself, nothing buffers us from the self-interested conceits of the experimental architect. Like such endeavors in other disciplines, the work of such architects is remote with no immediate bearing on our lives, but because they seem to be experimenting on our lives, the remove seems arrogant and irresponsible.

It is at this point that the significance of architectural writing and of the architectural metaphor emerges, because they help the architect accomplish three goals: to demonstrate the necessity of an expert intellectualization and argot to enable architectural research to be conducted at the highest level, to show that despite appearances we are as buffered from the conceits of that research as we are from those in any other discipline, and, most important, to demonstrate how such research is valuable in its own right, without any pretense to prototypical or stylistic generality, the value of architecture’s “being only once.”

His case for the last of those three goals depends entirely on his account of architectural metaphor. An analogy will help. While most of us can never understand how or why or even what such a counterintuitive idea means, we know from modern cosmology not only that we are not at the center of the universe but that the universe itself has no center. In fact, physicists never say this in their actual work; rather, they write forbidding equations that predict well various measurements of the universe. The equations intrinsically imply the absence of any center as an aftereffect. Nevertheless, because it is a kind of writing, metaphors can and do disseminate from their work to change the way we feel about ourselves, our relation to one another and to the cosmos, without any of us having to pay attention to physics at all. Likewise, most of us will never understand with the discriminating specificity of expert film theorists the how or why of the counterintuitive nondiegetic jump cut, a development within the forbidding theories and techniques that have developed around montage. In it, the film instantly jumps from a scene in the plot to a scene totally unrelated to the previous scene or to the plot. Nevertheless, whether or not we ever actually see the technique in a film, it also spreads from the discipline as metaphor to change our sense of the reality of ourselves and the world, multiplying our points of view and expanding our sense of coincidental simultaneity with events far removed. An important point is that for the work conducted within the horizons of any expert practice, any attempt to take cognizance of these unpredictable cultural effects is of little value and can be counterproductive; the work best proceeds in its own rarified terms.

Along these same lines, Eisenman’s argument implies that the rare experiments of speculative architecture disseminate as metaphors from expert practice to affect our sense of ourselves in the world, with one important difference. Because of the unique nature of the architecture metaphor, we, or at least those of us outside of architecture, are virtually unaware of those effects. The new sense of self in the world they produce seems always to have been the natural state of things—the way they, we, and the things around us have always been.

A fascinating generalization of Eisenman’s thought might consider that each and every discipline, not just architecture, generates at least two kinds of disseminating metaphors: those, like symbols, of whose figurality we are consciously aware, and those that act beneath consciousness by virtue of a metaphysics of presence specific to that discipline and its material practices. One pitfall of such a generalization, however, is that it exposes a chink in Eisenman’s entire conceptual project as regards writing.

In only one discipline, writing, in the familiar sense of the term, does metaphor behave as an actuality in the same way as architecture’s interiority becomes actual inside a building. That is, only in writing does the term “metaphor” not refer to anything outside itself. In all other uses, the term “metaphor” refers to writing’s metaphors in the manner of a concealed simile. Is not what we mean when we refer to an architectural metaphor or a film metaphor an effect that behaves like writing’s metaphors? To be honest, whenever one reads of architecture as writing in the texts of either act, one always hears “writing” as a metaphor. But as long as the architect kept within the general scheme of poststructural semiotics, we were willing to suspend that feeling as habit. Once Eisenman starts to discuss architecture as a unique writing, however, that suspension can no longer be sustained without question.

This is not to say that Eisenman’s project has failed in essence, but rather that his thought begins to circumscribe an as yet unthought process that cannot be writing or archi-writing, but some calculus for the production of effects, figural and metaphysical, in each discipline specific to that discipline. While not writing, it produces writing-like effects, but also, while not phenomenology, it produces phenomenological effects, and again, while not aesthetics it produces aesthetic effects.

In any case, returning to our task, let us repeat where we left off: the gap of architectural presentness separates being from becoming. To maintain the illusion of being, the orthodoxy of architecture works always to conceal presentness and to minimize its effects. Churchill must have intuited as much when in 1941 he declared, “We shape our buildings and afterwards they shape us,” as he called for London’s bombed House of Commons building to be restored “in all essentials to its old form, convenience and dignity.” A critical architecture endeavors to write architecture about the gap between being and becoming, without denying the difference or choosing sides. Critical architecture is neither the ally nor a causal agent of becoming. It recognizes the value of a stable architecture and acknowledges that the forces of history that fuel becoming are too myriad and capricious ever to be harnessed. Critical architecture staves off the ossification of any historical state into empty cliché.

In the exorbitance of Eisenman’s delirium insidednesses proliferate—counted—there is, for example, another insidedness that architecture somehow has “within it,” the “insidedness which is an already existing possibility for the subversive,” and still yet another, if one summons “those outside architecture.” And it turns out that there are also at least two presentnesses. The first, as manifested by Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, can be reabsorbed by architecture’s orthodoxy, but the second, as exemplified by that same architect’s monastery at La Tourette, will not.

Though its name changes several times over the course of these essays, presentness, especially the second presentness that resists reabsorption, guides the second act. Tracking the author’s mercurial shifts in terminology can be vexing, but a reliable clue is to stay attentive to the many moments in which a different form of a concept arises, such as another kind of insidedness or index or code. For example, “The corner [at Bramante’s Santa Maria della Pace] is the uncovering of an internal possibility of architecture, which, because there is no precedent, acts as a different form of index.” There are many such moments, they are easy to spot, and it is a good bet that every time you run across one, it is an instance of presentness.

Unabsorbable presentness of the second kind is the soul of critical architecture, the one trait that distinguishes it from all other architectural experiments. If the effort of the latter is to produce new prototypes of value—to discover new functionalities, construction methods, or experiences, to explore new styles or provide any other new instrumentality that the practice as a profession can produce as a commodity—the effort of the former is the opposite. By definition the second presentness cannot be about production at all, since it pursues a dislocation of values that so refuses commoditization as to be only-once. Intoxicated by his vision of a new and better world through architecture, Le Corbusier imagined much of his work as new prototypes. He reproduced multiple Villas Savoye in a sketch for a proposed suburb in Argentina, for example. In Eisenman’s scheme of things, Villa Savoye achieves its profound influence on architecture and its effects on the world precisely because it failed as a prototype.

The second presentness, therefore, cannot be seen as such, it can only be read in certain buildings by certain people, and only exists in a privileged but vulnerable discussion. Recognizing it requires erudition and therefore gives rise to the boundaries that divide those inside architecture from those outside. And, as the basis for a discussion of the values of architecture as such, it gives rise to the possibility of an ethics founded on becoming rather than being. Yet as an architectural metaphor, it too percolates into interiorness as an actuality, though differently from the first, reabsorbed presentness.

From these tormented ecstasies one can just make out the lineaments of a cycle in which insidedness writes one moment of a becoming world as material actuality, and an orthodoxy of architecture forms to stabilize that writing as being. Through presentness and the heretical bent of a select few, the stranglehold of orthodoxy is loosened, and the process of becoming renews. An unabsorbable residue of presentness prevents the cycle ever from completing itself as a final stability, pushing it into a spiral whose historical vector cannot be said to point toward progress, but may fairly be said to point toward increased intricacy. When architecture’s metaphysics of presence sublimates revealed presentness into a new insidedness, a turn of the spiral completes.

By its very nature, this cycle cannot be seen, because it operates through metaphor. Nor can it be conclusively demonstrated, since the transubstantiation of metaphor to actuality is metaphysical. But it should at least leave circumstantial evidence.

With a glimpse of that cycle, whether or not it is truly inside Eisenman’s thought, this second act is introduced—at least as far as one dare introduce the midst of such a drama. We have met the main characters, outlined the plot, and tracked the protagonist to the threshold of a destiny. Now, each reader must make the tale his or her own, and we all must await the next act.

An Optional Epilogue Wherein a Brief Search for Any Evidence Suggesting the Cycle

Any sound reader will surely understand that as a response to these texts, the alleged sighting of so wondrous a cycle is more a hysterical symptom than an explanation. But for those enticed, let us take one step too many, though nothing in these texts demands it, asks for it, or even permits it. We have already linked Eisenman briefly to another famously tormented soul teetering at the brink of madness. Keeping Eisenman’s speculations in mind as we examine the circumstances of Hamlet, we might begin to wonder whether the Prince or Architect is quite so mad after all.

I could find myself bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

—Hamlet II.ii

Since Freud first suggested an Oedipal tinge to Hamlet’s behavior in his Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalytic readings have come virtually to govern the play, spawning such seminal offspring as Ernst Jones’s book-length elaboration of Freud’s suggestion in Hamlet and Oedipus, Olivier’s landmark film adaptation, and Lacan’s structuralist correction of Freud in his influential essay “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” Yet, the twentieth century’s many psychoanalytic readings of the play are but the latest stage of a protracted evolution. Over the four hundred years since its birth, Hamlet has slowly changed from an unheralded tragedy of middling popularity into an archetypal drama of psychological conflict. One key to that transformation has been the attention—theatrical and intellectual—received by the seven soliloquies of Hamlet that structure the play, prompting one overzealous contemporary critic to write, “The soliloquies are in effect the hidden plot of the play because, if one puts them side by side, one notices that the character of Hamlet goes through a development which, in substance, is nothing other than the history of human thinking from the Renaissance to the existentialism of the twentieth century.”

Not every critic is so willing to set aside the rigors of historical context to arrive at an interpretation of the play. Studying the adventures of the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from its original staging to modern productions, the Shakespearean scholar James Hirsh gathers a convincing body of evidence to support his contention that the monologue was not originally written as inner reflection.11James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). Revered today as the apotheosis of Hamlet’s troubled introspection, the speech has become central to the play’s corresponding reputation. Yet, according to Hirsh, Hamlet feigns the soliloquy as a stratagem to press forward his scheme to “catch the conscience of the king,” knowing full well that he is overheard by Claudius and Polonius.

To support his thesis, Hirsh notes that the feigned soliloquy occurred frequently in Shakespeare and throughout Elizabethan drama, a version of the eavesdropping scene so popular with audiences at that time. He argues that the writing of the soliloquy in question evidences a distinct style associated with the device that differs from soliloquies with other dramatic purposes, and goes on to list a considerable number of plot and staging anomalies that arise when the soliloquy is not treated as a contrivance. Finally, he outlines events and cultural factors that over the history of the play’s performance have contributed to today’s misunderstanding of the original intent of the scene. Changes in post-Renaissance culture such as the decline in the popularity of eavesdropping scenes and the emergence of an individualist sense of self in Romanticism reinforced the soliloquy’s misinterpretation. Modern literature’s fascination with the conflicts that roil in and as our inner lives only redoubled that reinforcement.

Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of the play, widely credited as the first to be wholly conceived in response to Freud, is a particular target for Hirsh:

In the play Hamlet speaks the “To be” passage with three other characters within earshot, one of whom is in full view. In the film version, Hamlet is not merely alone but has fled to the most isolated locale in Elsinore. Once the locale and its implications have been vividly established, filmgoers are shown the back of Hamlet’s head, which is then briefly replaced on screen by the startling image of a human brain. It is at this point that we hear the famous words “To be, or not to be” spoken by Olivier in a voice-over as an interior monologue. In two different ways Olivier has thus made literal the post-Renaissance cliché that this speech represents Hamlet’s innermost thoughts. A moment later, Hamlet does speak some of the lines, and the remainder of the words alternate between speech and voice-over interior monologue.12James Hirsh, “To Take Arms against a Sea of Anomalies: Laurence Olivier’s Film Adaptation of Act Three, Scene One of Hamlet,” 1.2 (e-journal): 200–201.

Given the ancient correspondence between building and body (and notwithstanding such literary metaphors as the “dark corners of the mind” or “the eyes as windows to the soul”) nothing could provide a more suggestive instance of the architecturalization of psychic interiority than Olivier’s film treatment of “To be, or not to be.” While the voice-over renders the soliloquy as inner thought, the brief nondiegetic cut to a human brain locates that inner-thought inside (metaphorically) Hamlet’s brain, which is in turn inside (literally) his skull, confounding interior metaphors as haphazardly as it does equivalencies among self, mind, brain, and body. That an audience in 1948 would so take for granted that a thought actually is “spoken inside” a brain is testimony both to the power of interior metaphors and to their historical mutability, considering how recently had formed the equation between mind and brain necessary to enable the film’s device.

In a striking parallel to Hirsh’s critique, Ernst van de Wetering and other art historians13Cf. Ernst van de Wetering, “The Multiple Functions of Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt by Himself (London: National Gallery Publications, 1999). have raised doubts over the assumption about Rembrandt’s self-portraits that prevails among scholar and layperson alike: “Over the years, Rembrandt’s self-portraits increasingly became a means for gaining self-knowledge, and in the end took the form of an interior dialogue.”14M. Gasser, quoted in translation by van de Wetering (ibid.), 10. Van de Wetering refutes the premise that introspection accurately reflects Rembrandt’s original intent. He musters a wide range of evidence to support his dissent, but the cornerstone of his argument is that the experience of the self presumed by such interpretations of the paintings, particularly a self engaged in an “interior dialogue,” did not arise until more than one hundred and fifty years after Rembrandt lived.15According to van de Wetering, the use of the term “self-portrait” did not occur until the nineteenth century. Titles and references to such works until then typically took a form similar to “Portrait of Rembrandt by the Artist.”

From our interpretation of Eisenman’s thought on the power of certain of architecture’s metaphors, the point of interest raised by these studies in self-reference would concern their dependence on metaphors of interiority such as “interior dialogue” or “innermost thoughts.” Eisenman suggests that whatever or wherever the interior of one’s “inner life” today may be, the sense of that interior would be as mutable as the architecture that informs it.16It is interesting to consider how Derrida’s approach to these texts would differ from Eisenman’s.

Let us for sake of argument assume Hirsh implies that a single, decisive interpretation of Hamlet might reliably be derived from a study of the play’s original context, including the author’s intent and his audience’s expectations. It would not be particularly ingenious to point out that the ambiguity of the writing that enabled the erroneous interpretation to gain such momentum in the first place provides an apt point of departure for counterargument. Had Shakespeare rendered Hamlet’s feigned soliloquy more precisely and thus less immune to corruption, might not the play have been more likely to share the fate of its long-forgotten companions? Given the unchecked decline in the popularity of such scenes, surely some of these other plays sank into oblivion at least partly under the weight of all too obvious eavesdropping devices.

In any case it is unlikely that such a discussion would hold interest one way or another for Derrida and his followers. It is common error to attribute to deconstructive reading both a celebration of the intrinsic ambiguity of writing and a challenge to the priority of original intent. Not only were both of these well-established tenets of literary criticism long before the work of deconstructive readings began, but each, in its own way, operates to assert in principle the possibility of a determinable meaning as such. To identify ambiguity asserts in principle the possibility of certainty; likewise and on the same principle, to challenge the priority of an author’s intent asserts the possibility of a decidable meaning notwithstanding that intent. Since the principle itself is the quarry of deconstruction, it is far more likely for a deconstructive reading to scrutinize the moments in any argument that seem incontestable than to revel in a text’s obvious contingencies.

Thus, short of daring our own deconstruction of Hirsh’s Hamlet, we might hazard a guess that a likely strategy of such a reading would be to stipulate the historian’s contention, but then to scrutinize the structure of the feigned soliloquy. Noticing that a feigned soliloquy is writing (the playwright’s) pretending to be writing (the character’s, who must script the “soliloquy” to feign it) pretending to be immediate speech, it is clear that the trope multiplies the metaphysics of presence as few others. Not only must the character know that he will be overheard by someone not present, but he must be certain how he will be understood and what the outcome of the stratagem will be. So too must the playwright know a similar array of effects, for, does not every soliloquy in a play amount to a feigned soliloquy for the benefit of the audience? In fact, does not every play reiterate the structure of an elaborately executed feigned soliloquy by its author?

Readers familiar with accomplished deconstructive readings might expect three outcomes of such an excursion into Hirsh reading Hamlet: (1) It will operate through strict attention to all of the implicated writings taken together as one continuous text: the soliloquy, the play in its various folios, performances, and other manifestations, Hirsh’s writings, and other writings to which he appeals. (2) It will turn out that according to that extended text, the structure of the feigned soliloquy belongs not merely to the curious dramatic device that bears its name, but to the structure of all plays, all criticism, probably even to knowledge itself. (3) We will discover how untenable assumptions necessary to distinguish a feigned soliloquy as such operate to serve a special interest, probably in this case the immediacy and adequacy of speech to itself, given that the study of the relationship between speech and writing launched Derrida’s entire enterprise.

The privilege Eisenman claims for architecture’s metaphors of interiority further seals the break with Derrida, for the philosopher will not broach the actuality of any metaphor’s referent, neither as naïve reality nor as existential authenticity. Derrida strives again and again to demonstrate that the “actuality” of the enabling referent in any metaphor is itself already a metaphor, a version of the argument that “nothing is outside of the text.” Derrida might well concur with Eisenman’s discussion of architecture’s metaphors of interiority, but only to identify yet another instance of the metaphysics of presence, his pejorative catchall for the uncritical operation of untenable suppositions. For Eisenman, from this point forward, the “metaphysics of presence” denotes instead the operations of a genuine metaphysics peculiar to architecture that distinguishes his discipline from the undisciplined and immaterial realm of arch-writing.

Hirsh and van de Wetering argue that our modern sense of self is unwittingly retrojected onto premodern representations of self-address, as if the self were natural and remained constant in history. That the modern experience of self finds immediate expression in metaphors of psychic interiority, a presumption that permeates the arguments of both historians, would for Eisenman implicate architectural presentness. As would the fact that despite its acute historical awareness, the modern sense of self is experienced as if it were natural, an actuality of being, rather than a becoming that mutates in history. “Most of those outside of architecture assume that architectural conventions have a thought-to-be naturalness with respect to such things as walls and floors.”

In our take on it, Eisenman’s thought intimates that interiorness and presentness collaborate to bear on any change of self vis-à-vis interiority. All that remains for us, then, is to find something from architecture’s history of vanguard experimentation to suggest architecture’s implication in the change of self mapped by Hirsh and van de Wetering, appreciative of the fact that Eisenman never suggests anything like straightforward causality.

In late 1923, a dispute broke out in the pages of the periodical Paris-Journal when August Perret attacked Le Corbusier’s introduction of the horizontal window. For months, the two carried on an acrimonious debate. At first, it revolved around technical and aesthetic issues such as the use of structure, the management of light, and the formal articulation of massing. Soon, however, the stakes escalate. Perret accuses Le Corbusier’s window of violating man himself. Expounding upon the consecrated virtues of the vertical window and its relation to the body, he declares, “The horizontal window is not a window. A window is a man!” The confrontation becomes a classic defense of established orthodoxy, represented by Perret, against the insult of Le Corbusier’s heresy. Indeed, in the heat of things Le Corbusier writes to Perret that he gives the impression of “an Olympian God prepared to give utterance.”

The architectural theorist Bruno Reichlin has analyzed the record of the debate as it spread beyond the Paris-Journal to an ever widening circle of combatants, including other architects, art historians, art theorists, interior designers, and philosophers.17Reichlin, “Une petite maison,” 59–83. Reichlin writes:

Perret rejects the horizontal window because for him it is the symbol of a profound change which calls into question the values heretofore rooted in his culture, especially those rooted in the personal experience of the interieur.

His essay cites one after another opinion on the effect on the interior of the general tendency toward more glass and the horizontal window:

“The large window creates too much of a connection between the room and the outside world . . . one ought not go so far as to impair an artistic isolation of the room. . . . We can feel alone in [our room] either with our thoughts or our friends.” [C. Gurlitt]

“Seen from outside, the “machine for living” has no face, and inside one would be unable to think, love, suffer. One would not know how to die well there, but it would inspire one to suicide. It has no soul.” [Baillie Scott]

Reichlin summarizes the debate with the conclusions that the vertical window revered by Perret protected the “suffused, phantasmagorical half-light of the interieur, which attenuates the dense reality of objects . . . form[ing] a protected place of ideological and affective identification.” And his assessment of the effect of the horizontal window suggests our cycle:

Through the efforts of Le Corbusier, the subterranean but progressive crumbling of that microcosm, with all the changes in the experience and culture of habitation that it implies, suddenly assumed an architectural, formal and iconographic identity. The strip window ripped open the protective casing of the private man and the outside world poured into the interieur.

The allure of larger and more complex expanses of glass began at about the same time that Shakespeare wrote and Rembrandt painted. Robert Smythson’s Hardwick Hall of 1597, for example, earned the tag “more glass than wall.” Soon after, a pairing of tall but narrow casement windows that often extended as low as the floor came into vogue in France and spread throughout Europe as the French window. But the momentum of architectural transparency was restrained by the limitations of glass-making technology and further braked in both England and France by the friction of a tax. England’s window tax, enacted in 1696, remained in force until 1851. Although France did not enact its “doors and windows tax” until 1798, it remained in effect until 1926(1). The technology to produce larger, clearer panes and plates of modern architecture did not begin to develop until the late nineteenth century, with the most dramatic advances occurring between 1905 and 1914, just as Le Corbusier began work.

In terms of our cycle, might not “the subterranean but progressive crumbling of that microcosm” be the manifest effects of presentness produced by architecture’s fascination with windows, a fascination arrested long enough by technology and taxes to allow the presentness to be absorbed into a new interiorness expressed in France as its culture of the interieur? As the objectivity of the outside world slowly invades the domestic interior over centuries, might not the stirrings of the Renaissance psyche slowly take form as the attenuated phantasms of the Romantic psychic interior? And as the architectural interior becomes even more objective, no longer a retreat from the outside world but an outside world within an outside world, might not the psychic interior eventually too have condensed into the fully formed and independent inner world of Freud and modern psychology? After all, we have seen already a co-evolution of painting and architecture along the same lines and over the same period.

Certainly Eisenman could not ask for a better statement of second presentness than Reichlin’s suggestion that the inchoate changes in the culture of the interieur “suddenly assumed an architectural, formal and iconographic identity” with Le Corbusier’s horizontal window. That window, after its perfect statement in Villa Savoye, continues to exercise a profound effect within the discipline even today though it has yet to be reabsorbed.

If we permit more of these wild speculations, it would seem that the second presentness of Villa Savoye would, unbeknownst to all, including its architect, have marked a completion of a turn of the cycle and the beginning of yet another. In that next cycle, Le Corbusier’s unabsorbed horizontal window would no longer be a window as such, but would transubstantiate into one of architecture’s unique metaphors as actuality, perhaps, strangely, an architectural metaphor of architecture as metaphor. It would set into motion the formation of a different sense of the interior, perhaps one no longer an inner world as such, but an inner world that is itself experienced in its actuality as self-conscious metaphor, a “written” postmodern psyche that might be isolated as such, analyzed, theorized, and historicized by exotic philosophers such as Lacan or Derrida and architects such as Eisenman. Or used to different ends by scholars such as Hirsh and van de Wetering. Would then the horizontal-window-as-self-conscious-sign have found its second presentness in Venturi’s house for his mother or Koolhaas’s Villa dall’Ava? Certainly, neither of these has yet to be reabsorbed. Then, one might fairly ask, whom have we become now?

Of course, none of this comes close to the standard of proof or even measured argument. But it is interesting to think about.

1 Reading this passage, I recall my initial encounter with a “real” Mondrian, the painter who then stood for me as the purest of conceptual painters. To my dismay, the painting confronting me was incongruously palpable, its canvas set forward from the plane of its frame to assert its physicality, its white fields overpainted with brushstrokes obviously meant to convey impasto, now tattooed with craquelure. Duchamp’s brusque dismissal of “all those miserable frescoes which no one can even see any more” crossed my mind: “We love them for their cracks.” »

2 The linguistic schematization of architecture has proven exceptionally powerful as both an analytic and synthetic tool, yielding fresh insight when used to revisit the architectural history while fueling many of the diverse movements that have dominated the discipline in its wake. By providing a subtle means through which to discern the intrinsic continuities that join even the most adventurous of design speculations to the history of the discipline, the linguistic model allowed substantive accomplishments in contemporary architecture to be brought into high relief against mere stylistic novelty. Its operative ethic of invention was also borrowed from linguistics, which notes that for all of language’s history of abundant creativity—fiction and nonfiction—to say something new within a particular language, one never needs to invent new grammar (syntax) and rarely needs to invent new words (semantics). Even when one does invent a new word, e.g., “tele-vision,” the neologism is almost always formed by recombining existing semantic roots, rather than the coinage of a new sound/word ab initio. Such coining does occur, as in the mathematical term “google,” though its extension to “googleplex” returned to standard root recombinatorial form. Many new words wheedle their way into a language through misuse, contraction, and common error, as for example “finalize,” “mischievous,” and “atone.”

Of the 16,677 words that constitute the vocabulary of Shakespeare’s plays, about 2,000, more than 10 percent, had not been previously recorded. While most use root recombination, others, such as “bump,” appear to be inventions based on onomatopoeia or imitation. Many, such as “tortive” and “vastidity,” died at birth, but many others, such as “castigate” and “educate,” survive intact. In the context of this introduction, one of the most interesting of Shakespeare’s coinages is the word “critical,” which appeared first in Midsummer Night’s Dream but more famously in Othello’s “I am nothing if not critical.” Contemporary etymologists attribute to Derrida the inflection of the term “critical” to the specific sense in which Eisenman uses it to indicate a strategy of analytic reading, citing its occurrences in the philosopher’s 1973 writings. »

3 Cf. Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, eds., Chora L Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997). »

4 In “L’ora che è stata,” for example, we find: “For Derrida, to have presence means to give something form beyond merely its appearance privileged by seeing, i.e., what I see is what I know to be and to be truthful. Thus, for Derrida, presence, and ultimately its metaphysics, is an illusory and uncritical assumption of sight. Derrida would further argue that this ur-presence, this form emanates from a system of concepts, and thus a language, and ultimately a writing which is an irreducible effect of language.” The author then goes on to challenge Derrida’s assumptions about sight and presence in order to distinguish painting from architecture. Readers well-studied in Derrida will no doubt find this practice exasperating, since the words and ideas the architect puts in the philosopher’s mouth rarely offer a rigorous representation of the philosopher’s actual position and can deviate markedly from it. While the curious relationship between the thought and lives of Eisenman and Derrida is a fertile topic for study on many levels, it is helpful to remember while reading these texts that the accuracy of the architect’s reports of Derrida’s thought does not in the end matter to the architect’s own conjectures. Eisenman does not seek to derive authority or force from his representation of Derrida’s position; like any speculation in dialogue form, the reports are but rhetorical devices to help the architect clarify his own position. »

5 I am indebted to the philosopher David Goldblatt for calling my attention to the merit of ventriloquism as an apt model for the complex relationships that take place among voice, speaking, meaning, and writing articulated by contemporary critical discourse. Cf. D. Goldblatt, Art and Ventriloquism (New York: Routledge, 2006). »

6 See “Digital Scrambler” 2004 pages 133–49. »

7 Though Krauss makes extensive use of Freud, Lacan, and others, the principal resource for the arguments in The Optical Unconscious, especially those concerning the horizontal and vertical, obtain from the writings of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, a fact that makes her indifference to architecture all the more noticeable. While Bataille wrote little on art, he paid close attention to orthodox effects of architecture:

Architecture is the expression of the very soul of societies, just as human physiognomy is the expression of individuals’ souls. It is, however, particularly to the physiognomies of official personages (prelates, magistrates, admirals) that this comparison pertains. In fact it is only the ideal soul of society, that which has authority to command and prohibit, that is expressed in architectural compositions properly speaking. Thus great monuments are erected like dikes, opposing the logic and majesty of authority against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence upon them. It is, in fact, obvious that monuments inspire social prudence and often even real fear. The taking of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things: it is hard to explain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the people against the monuments that are their real master.

Cf. Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). »

8 Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994). »

9 Cf. these excerpts from Greenberg’s “Modernist Painting” (1951):

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.
It was the stressing of the ineluctable flatness of the surface that remained, however, more fundamental than anything else to the processes by which pictorial art criticized and defined itself under Modernism. For flatness alone was unique and exclusive to pictorial art. The enclosing shape of the picture was a limiting condition, or norm, that was shared with the art of the theater; color was a norm and a means shared not only with the theater, but also with sculpture. Because flatness was the only condition painting shared with no other art, Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.
To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much . . . to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract. »

10 J. A. Schmoll as quoted in B. Reichlin, “‘Une petite maison’ on Lake Leman: The Perret—Le Corbusier Controversy,” Lotus International, no. 60 (1989): 59–83. »

11 James Hirsh, Shakespeare and the History of Soliloquies (Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003). »

12 James Hirsh, “To Take Arms against a Sea of Anomalies: Laurence Olivier’s Film Adaptation of Act Three, Scene One of Hamlet,” 1.2 (e-journal): 200–201. »

13 Cf. Ernst van de Wetering, “The Multiple Functions of Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits,” in Rembrandt by Himself (London: National Gallery Publications, 1999). »

14 M. Gasser, quoted in translation by van de Wetering (ibid.), 10. »

15 According to van de Wetering, the use of the term “self-portrait” did not occur until the nineteenth century. Titles and references to such works until then typically took a form similar to “Portrait of Rembrandt by the Artist.” »

16 It is interesting to consider how Derrida’s approach to these texts would differ from Eisenman’s.

Let us for sake of argument assume Hirsh implies that a single, decisive interpretation of Hamlet might reliably be derived from a study of the play’s original context, including the author’s intent and his audience’s expectations. It would not be particularly ingenious to point out that the ambiguity of the writing that enabled the erroneous interpretation to gain such momentum in the first place provides an apt point of departure for counterargument. Had Shakespeare rendered Hamlet’s feigned soliloquy more precisely and thus less immune to corruption, might not the play have been more likely to share the fate of its long-forgotten companions? Given the unchecked decline in the popularity of such scenes, surely some of these other plays sank into oblivion at least partly under the weight of all too obvious eavesdropping devices.

In any case it is unlikely that such a discussion would hold interest one way or another for Derrida and his followers. It is common error to attribute to deconstructive reading both a celebration of the intrinsic ambiguity of writing and a challenge to the priority of original intent. Not only were both of these well-established tenets of literary criticism long before the work of deconstructive readings began, but each, in its own way, operates to assert in principle the possibility of a determinable meaning as such. To identify ambiguity asserts in principle the possibility of certainty; likewise and on the same principle, to challenge the priority of an author’s intent asserts the possibility of a decidable meaning notwithstanding that intent. Since the principle itself is the quarry of deconstruction, it is far more likely for a deconstructive reading to scrutinize the moments in any argument that seem incontestable than to revel in a text’s obvious contingencies.

Thus, short of daring our own deconstruction of Hirsh’s Hamlet, we might hazard a guess that a likely strategy of such a reading would be to stipulate the historian’s contention, but then to scrutinize the structure of the feigned soliloquy. Noticing that a feigned soliloquy is writing (the playwright’s) pretending to be writing (the character’s, who must script the “soliloquy” to feign it) pretending to be immediate speech, it is clear that the trope multiplies the metaphysics of presence as few others. Not only must the character know that he will be overheard by someone not present, but he must be certain how he will be understood and what the outcome of the stratagem will be. So too must the playwright know a similar array of effects, for, does not every soliloquy in a play amount to a feigned soliloquy for the benefit of the audience? In fact, does not every play reiterate the structure of an elaborately executed feigned soliloquy by its author?

Readers familiar with accomplished deconstructive readings might expect three outcomes of such an excursion into Hirsh reading Hamlet: (1) It will operate through strict attention to all of the implicated writings taken together as one continuous text: the soliloquy, the play in its various folios, performances, and other manifestations, Hirsh’s writings, and other writings to which he appeals. (2) It will turn out that according to that extended text, the structure of the feigned soliloquy belongs not merely to the curious dramatic device that bears its name, but to the structure of all plays, all criticism, probably even to knowledge itself. (3) We will discover how untenable assumptions necessary to distinguish a feigned soliloquy as such operate to serve a special interest, probably in this case the immediacy and adequacy of speech to itself, given that the study of the relationship between speech and writing launched Derrida’s entire enterprise.

The privilege Eisenman claims for architecture’s metaphors of interiority further seals the break with Derrida, for the philosopher will not broach the actuality of any metaphor’s referent, neither as naïve reality nor as existential authenticity. Derrida strives again and again to demonstrate that the “actuality” of the enabling referent in any metaphor is itself already a metaphor, a version of the argument that “nothing is outside of the text.” Derrida might well concur with Eisenman’s discussion of architecture’s metaphors of interiority, but only to identify yet another instance of the metaphysics of presence, his pejorative catchall for the uncritical operation of untenable suppositions. For Eisenman, from this point forward, the “metaphysics of presence” denotes instead the operations of a genuine metaphysics peculiar to architecture that distinguishes his discipline from the undisciplined and immaterial realm of arch-writing. »

17 Reichlin, “Une petite maison,” 59–83. »

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