Khorographos: space scripting
Khorographos: space scripting
Michael Tawa
Pretext
Two questions frame this inquiry: how can the city enable citizens not merely to live, but to live well; that is, not only to find their way in a utilitarian sense, but also in a profounder, more enduring and engaging sociocultural sense. How can the city provide not only the physical amenity necessary to a livable environment, but also the mental indexes and contexts fundamental to human life, to life that connects person to community, and that connects both person and community to place. Pivotal here is how the city might enable the construction of situated identities: individual citizens and collectives that are collocated in space and time, in relation to particular kinds of spatialities and temporalities.
Evidently, this prompts a series of questions around history and of memory: how might the city make possible multiple kinds of recollection—remembering one's own situatedness or displacement, one's own personal history, but also the histories and archaeologies of place; how might the city enable the recuperation of such human and territorial; how might the city itself become an apparatus or enabling infrastructure for such recuperation?
One way of thinking about history, memory and recuperation in relation to the city is through the theme of narrative. What stories does a city tell? How does it recount those stories? What spatial tactics are mobilized and deployed to narrate them? How are they received, inscribed in and retained by urban fabrics? What role do they play in how the city constitutes itself as a place? In other words, what relationships might be construed and built between remembrance as a foundational human need, narrative as a foundational human construct and the spatial and material fabric of cities—their gardens, streets, squares and buildings—in order to choreograph and script civic life and civil society at the intersection of human, urban and environmental dimensions of place?
While the inquiry will here be situated within a Western framework, cross-cultural references will also be made—for example, to Chinese landscape practices and the concept of Country in Australian Aboriginal culture—so as to provisionally scope-out the importance of narrative to place; to signal parallel, resonant indices that can challenge and enrich Western perspectives; and to serve as a reparative counterpoint to contemporary urban trends pointing to a generalized virtualization and disembodiment of civic life.
If, with the promulgation of virtual communities, the urban commons can no longer be situated within the physical coordinates of particular concrete spaces, and its formation can no longer take place within the temporality of particular times—and, if this were to be considered problematic or risky for human-being—what agency and critical role might be taken up by practitioners of the designed environment? Would a practice of resistance to these inevitable trajectories be possible? How might it be framed and played out? How could landscape, urban and architectural design enhance the capacity of the city to act as a common ground and receptive support for choreographing political life? In what ways might the city counteract the virtualization of experience and its disaggregation from material contexts? Are designed environments capable of enabling deep engagement with place?
To conceptually frame these questions I have drawn from numerous philosophical and cultural sources in what might appear to be a rather syncretic manner. My general approach is to bring together as diverse a range of material as is prompted by the thematics of a question, but to do this in such a way as to foreground parallels and attend to emergent possibilities arising in the interstices and overlaps. My goal is not to produce any kind of systematic veracity founded on incontrovertible evidence, but rather, as a designer attending to the tectonic possibilities of assemblage, to produce consilient neighborhoods of sense that resonate without necessarily amounting to any singularity. I also make extensive use of etymology. Again, this is not geared to legitimation or validation—I am not after originary meaning. Likewise, I am more interested in how multiple meanings, strangely imbricated in words, can be unpacked to form semantic landscapes that can be traversed, or semantic threads that can be woven in multiple ways to produce multiple registers of sense around the key themes and problematics of the inquiry. In that sense I proceed slowly and tentatively, as a bricoleur caught up in a process of making, fabricating and confabulating. Ultimately this is the work of storytelling—whether scripted through cultural, architectural, landscape or urban practices.
A major contrast in what follows is between the city as a virtual environment for civic life, mediated by computational systems and informatics, and the city as a concrete socio-spatial and socio-temporal environment whose actual, formal and material presence contribute to the constitution and practice of that civic life. My contention is that virtualized civic life runs the risk of excluding and forgetting the circumstantial, of devaluing the earth, of promoting a kind of suspended, disengaged existence—and that carries significant implications for civic life as it does for a public domain that might nourish it. If, with ubiquitous computing, one can be anywhere at any time, then one is effectively nowhere, and the situational can then cease to matter.
Between virtual and actual there is an ambiguous borderline. For that reason, I have drawn several themes from post-structural philosophy to help mobilize a counterargument that avoids oppositional thinking. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's couplet territorialization/deterritorialization is useful to broach the double gesture of being in-place and of displacing oneself simultaneously and interminably—whether virtually or concretely.[1] Likewise, Giorgio Agamben's pivotal themes of indiscernibility and indeterminacy that challenge dominant oppositional thinking, pitting city against country, human against animal, architecture against landscape, inside against outside, private against public, and so on. In this respect, what is interesting is less the definitive borderline and non-communication between such antinomies—between city and country for example—than the porosity of their interface and their transactional, choreographic capacity.
The motif of khôra, space—in Plato, then in Heidegger and Derrida—is useful to conceptualize space as radical receptivity and capacity for affordance, rather in terms of its normative conception as emptiness and deficiency. Such a concept of space—not void, but full of as yet unexploited or unexercised possibility—can be clarified through a recurrent concept in Giorgio Agamben's thinking: that of potentiality or latency.[2] The question then arises as to how such implicit potentiality might be incorporated into designed environments so as to become readily available and mobilizable.
Another critical motif is the tight relationship between space and narrative, between place and storytelling. Spaces are known and remembered in relation to what took place there; to the events that render them memorable and remain there, harbored and suspended, awaiting recollection. Derrida's reading of khôra in relation to receptivity, naming, inscription, memory and narrative[3] triggers important questions for the city and its urban and landscape settings. How can khôra—as the collective, interstitial zones of a city: cavity, room, courtyard, garden, public square, park, natural reserve or `wilderness'—be construed so as to function mnemonically; that is, as a setting that enables recollection and recuperation of the sociocultural, urban, political and environmental memories of place, together with their future projections and reconstitutions. How can the landscape within, around and beyond the city be conceptualized, framed and constructed to provide the kind of radical receptivity that Derrida ascribes to khôra?
The collective spatial practices of a civil society might be spoken of as choreography: a dramatization or playing-out of place-engagement, together with the stories and memories inscribed there. The coinage khôreographos then brings together Platonic and Derridean khôra with the notion of `scripting' (Greek graphein)—in the theatrical, cinematic or more accurately kinematic sense of organizing how a story is to unfold: in this case, how place is made to unfold in the mind and in the embodied or kinesthetic experience of the citizen. From `script' and `narrative,' themes lead to allied notions of `thread,' `weave,' `chord' and `yarn,' returning to the spatial cognate `yard' as that girded or bound enclosure that delineates the khôra as site of potential engagement and recollection. In that sense, the urban commons, the public realm, becomes an apparatus, device or infrastructure that retains the memory of what may have been erased, demolished, forgotten or overlooked, and makes it available for recuperation.
Choral works: city and landscape
The archaic Greek city is founded on one tactic: territorial appropriation—that is, land-grab. The ancient city—the polis—furnishes that tactic's enduring socio-spatial, political model by way of a boundary wall that traces a foundational architectonic gesture—the spacing out and articulation of inside and outside, private and public, culture and nature. Two distinct regions, brought into relationship through a rupture that assures communication between them: the city gate. Polis is from Greek pollus, many, and the etymon *PEL, fold. Hence the city is a kind of pullulation in the landscape—a pall, maybe even an appalling irritation.[4]
The polis—city-state and basic unit of political sovereignty—comprises two key components: astu, the city proper as a formal assemblage or agglomeration; andkhôra, agricultural land, hinterland and wilderness. The astu is the cultic, political, jurisprudential and economic center of the polis. Its structure comprises an acropolis, or fortified hill; an agora, or public square and market; temenai, temples; and the boulterion, or place of the council. In this figuration, the city is conceived over and against the country—astu over and against khôra; and country is, literally, what counters the city, its counterpart.[5]The polis is the political ensemble of the city and its territory, remotely apprehended as an objective entity.[6] Seen proximately and from the inside by its own citizens (politai) the city is astu. Considered in opposition to its surrounding territory, the agros, astu is a site of the sophisticated, astute life of civilized society.
This macrocosmic set up is paralleled by a microcosmic correlate at the scale of the individual house, the oikos. This is how Aristotle describes it:
“…the natural unit established to meet all man’s daily needs is thus oikos….Then, when a number of oikiai are first united for the satisfaction of something more than day to day needs, the result is the village (kome)… Finally the ultimate partnership, made up of numbers of villages and having already obtained the height, one might say, of self-sufficiency (i.e. autarchia)—this is the polis. It has come into being in order, simply, that life can go on; but now it exists so as to make that life a good life… So from all this it is evident that the polis exists by natural processes, and that it is natural for a man to live in a polis; he who is apolis [city-less, apolitical] is, by nature and not by chance, a being either degraded or else superior to man.”[7]
Plate 1. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country (1338, Palazzo Publico, Siena).
The diremption between city and country is explicit in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country (Plates 1 and 2).[8] The Platonic references of this work’s antithesis, Bad Government and the Effects of Bad Government in the City, which Lorenzetti painted opposite the former (Plate 3), are evident. The figure representing bad government shares the name Tyranny with Plato’s `worst city,’ corrupt Atlantis. In this companion work, the urbs or astu is forcefully delineated from the countryside or khôra by a monumental city wall and gates.
Plate 2. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country (1338, Palazzo Publico, Siena).
On one side of the wall, civil (or, in the case of Bad Government, uncivilized) society—whose conduct is tightly framed within the streets and alleyways of a dense urban context. On the other side, agricultural lands—appropriated, fully marked-out and rendered productive (or, in the case of Bad Government, inoperative).
Plate 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Bad Government and the Effects of Bad Government in the City. (1338, Palazzo Publico, Siena)
Plato’s paradigmatic cities provide a useful indication of the relationship between astu and khôra within the polis. Plato's cities are not principally urban or architectonic figures; their major register and function are political and ethical. Each city is a geometrical, spatial and territorial assemblage corresponding to one of four political systems that Plato seeks to either valorize or devalue in line with the principles of his philosophy. These are—in order from the first to the last, from the most just to the least just—timocracy (Athens), oligarchy (Kallipolis), democracy (Magnesia), and tyranny (Atlantis).[9] In paradigmatic Athens,[10] the number of householders or holdings must be fixed at five thousand and forty `hearths.’ Each holding is twofold - with one part near the centre of the village and another near the boundary:
"And they must also divide the twelve sections of the city in the same manner as they divided the rest of the country; and each citizen must take as his share two dwellings, one near the center of the country the other near the outskirts (τοῦ μέσου καὶ τὴν τῶν ἐσχάτων). Thus the settlement shall be completed."[11]
In this way citizens dwell between and actualize two forces: the centralizing attraction of a civic and domestic communitarian polity, and the individualizing distraction of a choretic, peripheral and centrifugal deterritorialization. Interesting here is not the opposition between astu and khôra in the polis, but the manner in which the dual setup between centre or middle (meson) and periphery (eschaton), between town and country, between city and landscape, mobilize a transactional, alternating relay that passes between them to constitute the rhythm of civic life.
Khôra, khortus, hortus: from chasm to garden
The Greek word for space is khôra, from the etymon *KHA, gape, gap, chasm, yawning abyss—cognate with *GHER, grasp, enclose. The common interpretation of the word is `inhabited region, territory or land'[12]—but the range of allied terms and their implications for urban and architectural tectonics is considerable: cave, cube, cup, cap, cape, scape, shape, escape, landscape, capital, coping, chapel, chorus, court, cohort, yard, garden, horticulture, hortus conclusus, yawn, gawp, gape, chasm, khaos, guttural, gullet, goal, glut, grasp, garth...[13] Throughout this resonant lexicon, the general sense emerges of an open, interstitial region in the midst of a given circumambience—a clearing in a forest; a cave in a mountain; a public square in a city; a garden in a town; a courtyard in a house; a cavity in a wall.[14] Khôra is an undifferentiated site of production—what Plato referred to as the "receptacle" (khôra) and "nurse of all becoming" that receives all bodies (panta dekhomenes somata phuseos) and "provides room for all things that have birth" [15]; or, architectonically, the room that makes life possible; the porosity that alleviates mass and gives prospect; the doors that render architecture operative and the fissures that welcome deterritorialisation.
In the loose leaf paratext to his 1993 Khôra, Jacques Derrida noted that the book is the first chapter of a trilogy around the aporia of naming—specifically in terms of what “The Timaeus names khôra (locality, place, spacing, emplacement) as that ‘thing’ which appears to ‘give place’—without ever giving anything.”[16] The self-contradiction of khôra is that it functions as a generalized matrix of becoming that is always-already unaffected by or unidentified with whatever it gives place to. Hence khôra is both full (of what it makes possible) and empty (of any specific possibility that might arise in it). Derrida reads khôra—here in the demeanor of Socrates—as radical receptivity, as “receptacle of everything [pandekhes] that will henceforth inscribe itself”[17]:
“His speech receives, in the event itself, more than it gives. As such he is ready and prepared, disposed to receive everything that will be offered to him… Once again the question returns: what does receive mean. What does dekhomai mean… Dekhomai, which will determine the relation of khôra to everything that it is not and that it receives (it is pandekhes, 51a), plays out across an entire scale of sense and connotation: receive or accept (a deposit, a salary, a gift), welcome, gather (recueillir), if not await,.”[18]
This receptivity of khôra determines it as a `place of inscription,’[19] identified with the receptacle (ekmageion) of becoming—the imprint-carrying medium that is “always ready to receive” the stamp or seal of inscription,[20] as an “always virginal”[21] wax tablet marked with “inerasable characters.”[22] Echoing the gift of Mnemosyne (memory), mother of the Muses,[23] Derrida then moves from khôra, through ekmageion to the mnemonic and technical functions of writing and the archive—that is, to the scripting and inscription of narratives.
Yard/yarn
As that which receives and gathers, space (khôra) aligns with a key domiciliary zone: the courtyard. A dual sense is evident in this word `courtyard' through the conjunction of the etymons *KHA, gape, gap, chasm and *GHER, grasp, enclose, gird. Cave, square, garden, yard—these are all species of porosity,[24] sequestered portions of spatial extension, mobilized and made habitable through gestures and tactics of appropriation. Such gestures are cosmogonic, clearly—since what is at stake is the creation of a world from what is not yet one: kosmos from khaos, form/essence from matter/substance, culture from nature, civilization from savagery, the tamed from the wild, humanity from animality, the political life (zoon politikon) from bare life (bios). A further sense is relayed by the connection between khôra and the girdle or limit that assures it—khorde, chord, yarn. If the association of yarn-twisting (thread making) and yarn-spinning (telling stories) originates among sailors in the early nineteenth century, it is because weaving, splicing, binding, naming and measuring are apposite tactics germane to narrative and khorography.[25]
The close relationship between narrative, inscription and space—and the pivotal role they play in the constitution of place—can be gleaned from the Chinese landscape tradition. In Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone a new garden—Prospect Garden—is described and its various features named.[26] The garden's spatial organization and the naming of its diverse vistas and elements show an intricate interdependence between narrative, rhetorical and spatial or khorographic registers. Here, naming is not solely descriptive but allusive and poietic [27]—that is, naming produces and fabricates. Given in relation to traditional texts, the ‘best name’ is one with the most hidden, indirect, intricate and ingenious sequences of allusion. For example the main mountain is named Little Censer “after the famous Censer Peak in Kiangsi.” The name refers to another mountain, and doubles it in miniature. To make the allusion less direct, another strategy is to name it “after the line in Chang Jian’s poem about the mountain temple: A path winds upwards to mysterious places.” Here the name does not only refer to a mountain. It also defers to a path, leading elsewhere.
The various tropes of deferral involve play and pun by shuttling between explicit texts and allusive references. This peripatetic practice[28] rehearses a poetic tradition while construing the garden's spatial organization and scripting or choreographing its experience. As much a rhetorical landscape as an arrangement of mountains, streams, pavilions, bridges and plants, the garden provides a context for remembrance where sequence and juxtaposition of elements can trigger recollection. But the garden is also a world; and its design a practice of world-formation.18 Landscape elements and settings—each with its own associations, propensities, ambiences and affects—are brought into strategic assemblage. Places are especially significant where a conjunction of conditions literally provokes or compels activities—“sipping tea,” “playing the qin,” “seeking inspiration,” “burning incense for sweet smell.” Each vista or prospect has a distinctive name that frames such conjunctions—for example, “pear-tree blossom in springtime rain,” “rushes in the winter snow.” Hence the garden is not merely a place of reflection or aesthetic meditation. It is a mnemonic apparatus for recuperating, recollecting and producing culture through the choreographing of courtly life; it is a civilizing, memory-machine.
In Australian Aboriginal concepts of place, narrative is central to the constitution and reconstitution of subjectivity, situated through traditional kinesthetic practices of storytelling and walking Country.[29] These practices are paralleled in Western Desert painting typical of the Ngaanyatjarra region around Patjarr and the Warburton Ranges. In Yankaltjunkunya (2000), the Ngaanyatjarra painter Pulpuru Davies reiterates a well-known story: two totemic animals, emu and turkey, pursue each other across a land they are at the same time producing.[30] The landscape we see in the painting registers traces of demiurgic peregrination in the same way that the physical landscape functions as a mnemonic apparatus of memorialization—much like a book, library or archive. The land in turn conscripts human beings into an acculturated being-with-Country, comprising a diverse set of comportments, responsibilities and practices.
Plate 5. Pulpuru Davies, Yankaltjunkunya. (2000)
The painting functions across many registers. It is a map of the land that identifies specific locations, historically significant places or mythically significant events. Practically, Yankaltjunkunya functions as an aide memoire for the landscape itself, and a trigger for the process of narrative production, storytelling and cultural sustainment. The delineation of components in the painting is left loose so that each narration might function as a distinctive interpretation and adaptation of a generic story. As some totems are shared across territorial borders between different groups, one painting or one narration will only ever represent one part of a much larger story within a constellation of narrative responsibilities. In that sense stories never totalize into singular authorized versions, but always remain open to interminable repetition, reiteration and variation. Worthy of retention here is the intimate connection assured by the painting between physical and mythical landscapes, between these and the purely graphic or cartographic traces in the work, and between the patterns of everyday living practices and the cosmographical tracery of world formation that the painting registers. The painting serves as an enabling framework that opens indefinite narrative and interpretative variations, but it is also a veil that dissimulates the whole story: a story that cannot be recounted to strangers—strangers to culture, but also those strangers to women that are their men, who possess their own forms of representation. It is precisely as a site of veiling-unveiling that Yankaltjunkunya draws its narrative force.
As a map, what matters in the painting is not its cartographic or artifactual dimensions, but its choreographic or space-scripting register. Free of perspectival depth, its overlaid patterns and strata foreground an archaeology of place—at once ecological, geological, social, spatial and mythical. It marks an inventory of ecosystems: familial and totemic lineage and association; circuits of peregrination and ceremony; cosmogonic trajectories; geographical patterns and forms. As such, the painting in fact produces the places it depicts and places the people who produce it. This performative or presentational rather than representational function determines stratifications not focused on aesthetics but on the ethical factors that ground community. This is the painting’s depth and potency—not a formal or aesthetic spacing of layers, but a means of arraying Country as a resonant field in the midst of which one’s being-in-common emerges.
Recuperation
If the classic polis is characterized by interiority—a bounded astu over against the expanse of a circumambient, appropriated khôra—the contemporary city must be its radical other, characterized by an extreme interpenetration of astu and khôra where interiority and exteriority, boundary and access, have become indiscernible and indeterminate. Countering the uni-centric, physically defined territories and textures of classic cities—with their city walls, gateways, districts, temples and marketplaces—contemporary cities are polycentric, ryzomatic networks of relays, with ambiguous boundaries that must be interminably negotiated and recast. Computational technologies are making possible ubiquitous, simultaneous presence in multiple locations at multiple times—or at least a simulacrum of presence—through a virtual evaporation of the circumstantial and the particular. Such virtualization transposes the politeia from concrete space and time to a non-place that is everywhere and at all times interchangeable. Yet, being everywhere simultaneously also means being nowhere; or at least it means not being where one is, being always-already elsewhere, always-already absenting oneself so as to remain interminably indeterminable, always-already in touch so as to remain interminably out of reach. Alternatively, it means being-divided, so that where one is can be definitively uncoupled from the locational specificity, spatiotemporal coordinates and orientations of a physical place: the situated human body, the body of the earth, the body politic. At risk is a devaluation of place-embeddedness and time-embeddedness that in turn furnish the grounds for a generalized sequestration from, disinterest in and disavowal of context and environment—consigning the latter to forgetfulness and the politeia to the disingenuous, surreptitious designs of a pervasive attention economy.
This kind of khorographic amnesia weighs heavily on the possibility of public space—of a public domain that is structurally and genuinely open to the unencumbered formation of communities, of situated beings-in-common. The advent of conurbations further erode prospects, exacerbating the erasure of centres and boundaries in favor of extensive multi-nodal urban networks that permeate so many terrains vague. As public domains are increasingly privatized, shifting from concrete to virtual spatialities and temporalities further disable human beings' capacities to engage deep connections to situated place. The formation of publics and communities—particularly publics and communities of resistance—is now largely practiced within the virtual dimensions of social media. As Jordan Geiger contends in his 2015 survey, Entr'acte,[31] citizens can no longer be considered subjects of the polis but rather actors and `actants,' with the capacity to form, dissolve and reform as necessary. On the other hand, the virtual realm is resolutely under the control of vested interests within the post-capitalist economy and its apparatuses. In this context, the conditions of freedom and enslavement within physical and virtual public domains become indistinguishable. Keller Easterling's afterword to Entr'acte is a sobering advance warning about the vigilance necessary to counter novel, incessantly reformulated dangers emergent "in all concentrations of authoritarian power and all obstructions of information whether digital or spatial."[32]
What, then, might constitute the conditions for a counteractive civic space of resistance, for an urban commons that might unclench and up-build a circumstantially engaged polity? A useful theme in this regard might be the idea of recuperation; as might be Derrida's reading of khôra as radical receptivity. The difficulty is to adapt and frame such ideas tectonically so they can function productively in the programming and design of landscapes, cities and buildings. What renders a public space or an urban garden recuperative? What renders it receptive? What kinds of zonings, boundaries, thresholds, levels, scales, frameworks, porosities, densities, transitions, nodes, relays, interactions, continuities, discontinuities, aspects, prospects, inclinations, declinations, revelations, occlusions and infrastructures might be incorporated as the fabric of a public domain so that it becomes capable of receiving life lived in its variegated complexity? How can the material conditions of designed environments receive, register and indicate the memories of a place and its future prospects? How can such recuperation not merely recollect and memorialize but also produce culture?
Contrary to Derrida's reading, receptivity in the context of design cannot be delivered through absence of determination, minimal specificity or open-endedness. Receptive places must be designed, which means that they must be designated, articulated, measured and materialized. Resilience—that is, the capacity to rebound, be genuinely flexible and adaptable to multiple registers—demands of designed environments that they consist of multiple overlaid and simultaneous propensities, suitabilities and proclivities in order to give purchase to political life. Yet in any particular place—a landscape, a garden, a courtyard, a house, a street, a city—the state of these propensities, while present and always available, must be retained in a state of latency since it is in the density of unrealized potential, rather than in actualized potential, that khôra affords the highest degree of receptivity and gives access to the highest degree of recuperation.
In the designed environment, three scales of recuperation might be ventured: the recuperation of what has been definitively lost—to be managed by practices and apparatuses of recollection, mourning and grief; the recuperation of what has been erased, but leaves traces—to be managed by practices and apparatuses of mapping and assemblage; the recuperation of what has been concealed, but is recoverable—to be managed by practices and apparatuses of procurement, modification and reconstitution. Likewise, three registers of recuperation might be ventured: the recuperation of environmental conditions that have been occluded—such as topography, hydrology, climate, ecology, species, processes and systems; the recuperation of political and sociocultural indices that have been overlooked—such as indigenous and non indigenous, settler and immigrant histories, stories, practices and events associated with place; the recuperation of designed environments that have been demolished or altered beyond repair—such as constructed landscapes, urban fragments, infrastructures and buildings.
The gathering of these three scales and registers of recuperation implies a particular kind of practice in which research and assemblage alternate within a reiterative process to build texture and thickness into the environment being designed. Such an environment can then function as a score or script, open to multiple kinds of performance by the citizens who occupy and use it. The diverse registers that constitute the design do not totalize functionality to a singular script, to an explicit name. Rather, and because those registers exist in consilient discrepancy, the script will always lend itself to interpretation, and every interpretation will always be original. In such a scenario, design becomes a question of space-scoring or space-scripting—that is, of khoreographos: setting up and framing spatiotemporal settings so as to afford multiple, implicit possibilities of composition and infiltration, combination and performance. Playing these out, the citizen is drawn into a twofold process of recuperation: retrieval of a spatiotemporal order (external, objective) that at first appears ambiguous and unresolved, but that in time slowly gathers and begins to make sense; and retrieval of an individual engagement with place (internal, subjective) that pivots on personal memory and recollection.
By scripting spacetime in such a way as to enable this kind of recuperation, design can promote deep, embodied and mnemonic engagement with place. At one level, such engagement counters the virtualization of being-in-common that characterizes contemporary political life. At another level, it keeps open the possibility of personal and collective investment in place through recollection and storytelling. As a khorographic practice, design shifts its field of operation from aesthetic and formal concerns to ethical concerns, from tectonics and technological tactics to issues of tact, solicitude and care. The implied infrastructural function of designed environments, or their equipmental status as apparatuses of affordance, must mean—as for every perfect instrument, whose function should be exercisable seamlessly and without impediment—that the ideal state of a designed environment can only lie in its effective withdrawal and disappearance: its own obliviousness and forgetting.
Notes
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1988).
[2] Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, transl. Daniel Heller-Rozen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also The Open: Man and Animal, transl. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
[3] Jacques Derrida, Khôra (Paris: Galilée, 1993).
[4] Related words include Greek pollos, abundance; polemos/pelomai, warfare, polemics; hoi polloi, the masses and Latin pollutio, defilement, contamination.
[5] See Jean-Christophe Bailly, Le Champ Mimétique (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2005), 228: “The city conceives and constructs itself as an ordered and geometric clearing in the midst of a forest of branching and fleeing signs which continue to carry a dimension of dread... Greek religion can be understood in its ensemble and in its contrasts as the effort to render compatible these two distinct universes, that of the city entirely given to measure, and that of a world sensed as immense, dangerous and unmapped (inarpenté).”
[6] Michel Casevitz, Edmond Lévy and Michel Woronoff, "'Astu' et 'Polis,' Essai de Bilan," Lalies 7: 279-285.
[7] Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. See also Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 461.
[8] Lorenzetti, accessed March 14, 2017.
[9] All references to Plato are drawn from Edith Hamilton & Huntington Cairns, eds. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, transl. Lane Cooper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Plato, Republic, Books 8 and 9 describe the characteristics of each city, together with the corresponding dispositions of their citizens; see 543d-545c; 547e. See also Book 5 of Plato's Laws, 745b-e. Aristotle gives his version in Politics, Books VII and VIII; see Aristotle, Politics, accessed May 1, 2017.
[10] Plato, Critias, 109b-112c.
[11] Plato, Laws, 745e: ἐσχάτων (eschaton) is from the etymon *EGHS, ex-, and can mean last, furthest, uttermost, most remote, out of/beyond, external to.
[12] Susan E. Alcock. "The Essential Countryside. The Greek World," in Classical Archaeology, ed. Susan E. Alcock and Robin Osborne (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing, 2012), 124-132.
[13] See Latin cavus, hollow; chorus and Greek khoros, circular dance, dancers, enclosed dancing ground; khortos, pasture and Latin hortus, garden; Greek khaos, abyss, gape, what is vast and empty.
[14] Martin Heidegger defines khôra as “that which separates itself, deflection of all particular things, what effaces itself, that which thereby precisely admits something other and ‘makes room’ for it (Platz macht)”; and khaos as “the yawning (das Gähnen), the gape, that which rents itself in two. We understand khaos in close connection to an original interpretation of the essence of aletheia as the self-dilating/opening abyss (cf. Hesiod, Theogony).” See Derrida, Khôra, 101-2, fn 2 and 4
[15] Plato, Timaeus, 51e-52b. See Keimpe Algra, Concepts of Space in Greek Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 79.
[16] Derrida, Khôra, 1, 3 (my translation). For the formative agency of the paratext, as something `off frame’ yet pivotal, see Gerard Genette, Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[17] Derrida, Khôra, 61.
[18] Derrida, Khôra, 62.
[19] Derrida, Khôra, 68.
[20] Derrida, Khôra, 69.
[21] Derrida, Khôra, 75.
[22] Plato, Timaeus, 26b-c.
[23] Plato, Theaetetus, 191a-e.
[24] Architectural theorist Benoît Goetz develops the idea of porosity, using Walter Benjamin’s writings on Naples to suggest that the anfractuous and perforate urban fabric is fundamental to enabling the communitarian, hospitable life of a vital polity. See Théorie des Maisons. L’habitation, la Surprise (Paris: Éditions Verdier, 2011), 113-136.
[25] There are parallels in the Sanskrit sutra, which can variously mean thread, textile, suture, sew—and text, manual, aphorism, scripture, rule for ritual conduct. The central space of a Hindu temple, where the deity is installed, is called the garbhagrha, womb-house—or, more accurately, seed (garbha)-grasping (grha). For the sexual symbolism of this couplet see Stella Kramrish, The Presence of Shiva (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), 1988.
[26] Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, transl. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 324-352.
[27] Used here in the sense of Greek poiesis, from poiein meaning to make, produce, articulate, versify.
[28] David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames, “The Cosmological Setting of Chinese Gardens,” unpublished manuscript, 14; and John Makeham, “The Confucian Role of Names in Traditional Chinese Gardens,” unpublished manuscript, 13, 18.
[29] See my “Place, Country, Chorography: Towards a Kinaesthetic and Narrative Practice of Place,” Architectural Theory Review 7 (2002): 45-58; and Agencies of the Frame: Tectonic Strategies in Cinema and Architecture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 57-59.
[30] The definitive painted version by Pulpuru Davies, Yankaltjunkunya (1991), is in the archive of the Warburton Arts Centre. See Davies, accessed November 26, 2016.
[31] Jordan Geiger, ed. Entr’acte. Performing Publics, Pervasive Media, and Architecture (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).
[32] Geiger, Entr’acte, 215.
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