Tsinghua peregrinations
hotel room
“This profound boredom is the fundamental attunement. We pass the time, in order to master it, because time becomes long in boredom. Time becomes long for us. Is it supposed to be short then? Does not each of us wish for a truly long time for ourselves? And whenever it does become long for us, we pass the time and ward off its becoming long! We do not want to have a long time, but we have it nevertheless. Boredom (Langeweile), long time: especially in Alemannic usage, it is no accident that `to have a long time’ means the same as `to be homesick’. In this German usage, if someone has long-time for… this means he is homesick for… Is this accidental? Or is it only with difficulty that we are able to grasp and draw upon the wisdom of language? Profound boredom – a homesickness. Homesickness – philosophising, we heard somewhere, is supposed to be a homesickness. Boredom – a fundamental attunement of philosophising. Boredom – what is it?”[1]
In my room - a hostel for visiting academics - I flick television channels. In this idle wandering, I am at home in homelessness. I am exhausted from another long teaching day in studio, the focus and pace relentless. A documentary on the animistic practices of Tibet – demons of dwellings exorcised, circumambulatory gestures, priests in ceremonial garb and locals on a pilgrimage through desolate glacial landscapes. An old black and white film - I watch a tear form on the heavy eyelid lid of a young woman with much to bear, emotions welling up and surfacing on the topography of her face. Other things – world news that exclude the world, weather reports with nothing new to report, a pop singer, strangely familiar and uncanny advertisements. I understand nothing of the language, and yet every image and every sound sends me back into my own recollections, into the contours, the conjugations and the articulations of my own memory.
The circumstances of our interminably mediated environment make it impossible to be where one is, to know with any degree of certainty what constitutes the `where’ of where one is, to read with any degree of clarity the marks, traces, signs and registers of any place in which we find ourselves. The contours of such a place will have already been outlined for us, or by us, in relation to the depictions, resonances and configurations of other places and other times. Every place is therefore always-already anticipated, so that nothing in it or of it will surprise us, and our experience of it will always be one of confirming what we had already understood to be the case. In other words, as Paul Virilio observed, we will always have already arrived, even before setting-out.[2] In the interminable trajectory of always being elsewhere, anywhere other than where we are, we will always be in train – or as the French have it, en train de: in the middle of (something), or in some other way trying to do something, or to be on the road (to) somewhere (else). In that sense, every place will always-already be elsewhere, will always-already defer to the other-than-here. In this perpetual state of being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, any sense of the local and regional, of situational and radical specificity – environmental, cultural, technological - is either occluded or converted into the generalising or globalising perspective according to which everywhere is equivalent to, and as equivalently available as, everywhere else.
Homesickness, longing for home is not a state resolvable by any kind of return or resettlement. Rather, it is a terminal and interminable condition – possibly the foundational human condition, if the human is defined as thinking-being. It is not a sickness, but the proper disposition of thinking. Homesickness parallels the unsettled and heavy restlessness that accompanies philosophy as a practice of questioning – what Jean-Luc Nancy has called the gravity of thought, and Giorgio Agamben the state of dwelling in potential.[3] The lack or discrepancy, the distance or incommensurability which characterises homesickness – we are away from home, we are elsewhere, out-of-sorts and other-than-ourselves – establishes a pattern of deferral, which maps out and weaves a kind of ceaseless peregrination. Travel lends itself as a metaphor of thinking in train, of thinking in the process of being thought, and through that process, of producing a thinking. This wandering delinquency and waywardness is creative and poietic – that is, it has its own techne, its own manner of producing. Being out-of-sorts, being disoriented and in unfamiliar circumstances is called in French depaysement – literally the state of `(being) away from (one’s own) country.’ Far from being an affliction, this state is the very trajectory of desire that motivates travel. Être depaysé, being homeless, one wanders and wonders – that is, the mind begins to work, to field and articulate a thinking, to shuttle across ideas and memories, to construe and fabricate multiple narratives, to invent circumstances and states of being in the world.
city
“The city I am talking about (Tokyo)) offers this precious paradox: it does possess a centre, but this centre is empty. The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which is to say, literally, by no one knows who. Daily, in their rapid, energetic bullet-like trajectories, the taxis avoid this circle, whose low crest, the visible form of invisibility, hides the sacred `nothing.’ One of the most powerful cities of modernity is thereby built around an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs and trees whose own centre is no more than an evaporated notion, subsisting there, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perpetual detour. In this manner, we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.”[4]
Once Forbidden, the City has become the Palace Museum. Everything in it is about boundaries and the organisation, management and negotiation of boundaries. The layout that no-one sees is incontestably hierarchical – centred, axial, symmetrical, zoned according to political and social function and status. The spatial system is about territorial assertion and appropriation, exclusion and control. Under any mode of survey, the system is rigid, rigorous, internally self-consistent and seamless. On the ground, the situation shifts. The main shrines are on axis. But in one’s movement across the terrain, one doesn’t traverse the halls right through. One has to duck-in behind walls placed cross axially at the rear of each hall, before exiting to courtyards behind, and then on to the next pavilion. To either side of the axis, secondary zones are laid out, each with main and subsidiary halls in microcosm patterns of the whole city. Distinct quarters are enclosed by high walls and heavy gates, linked by a system of narrow lanes and streets. At the next scale, the residential quarters, individual dwellings and gardens are laid out in a similar orthogonal patterns. Entering any of the dwellings – the concubine’s quarters in the north east for example – the rigid orthogonal geometry and hierarchically scaled forms break down completely. Axial symmetries fade although they are still present, and the relative size and absolute spatial relationships between various pavilions becomes ambiguous. In the residential quarters and courtyards the rigidly imposed order absents itself in favour of an indeterminacy, which in turn brings a high degree of proximity and intimacy to the domiciliary space. There is no awareness of the overarching hegemonic order of the city – that is, of its plan. Each dwelling exists in kind of private and unreachable isolation. While the whole complex is tightly organised and co-modulated, the loose open-endedness of each dwelling affords each domiciliary group an excess of possible ways to use the space available between the walls. This also works in scales reducing to the fine grain of each dwelling – entry porch, covered ways surrounding the compound, major and minor courtyards paved on several linked levels, low walls and ledges, trees for shade and for calibrating the seasons, water collected from roofs and channelled to storage tanks, in-between threshold spaces and gateways, peripheral pavilions for guests and utilities, generally two main pavilions – one central in the compound, the other directly behind and attached to the rear (north) wall, several layers of screens, doors and windows to hinge or slide-open in summer and batten-down in winter. The whole arrangement seems to be about dwelling on the edge, in-between, always shifting to more suitable space in and around the compound, always on the way somewhere else. It also seems to be fundamentally about adaptability – maximising the potential uses of each component, each space and each cross-sectional profile; erecting temporary structures for shade or shelter; responding to circumstance and happenstance; living in makeshift fashion.
The City might be forbidding, but in a foundational way it affords. It makes substantial allowances for domiciliary efficacy. The architecture serves socio-cultural, imperial and political motives, but at the same time, it provides for and attends to the everyday. Courtyards and buildings are all structures, frameworks and armatures, capable of receiving the makeshift componentry of life – banners, ceremonial dress, palanquins, shade cloths, lanterns, tassels, furniture, carpets, pottery, ancestral images, signs and poetic script, animals, makeshift stalls. All of these can be positioned-in, fixed-through, hung-from, tensioned-on, stretched-across, laid-out, attached-to, inserted-in, wedged-between, strung-out, made-fast, leant-against. In its use, it is an architecture of appurtenances, accessories, attachments and adjuncts. Because an accessory is what gives access (to), the prepositional and accessorial character carried by the architecture makes it good for all these things. It works because of them and what it admits is the production of diverse and indefinitely variable social, cultural and domiciliary practices. Significantly, when architecture works in this way, it ceases to be noticed. It absents and erases itself in favour of the presentation and foregrounding of the everyday, in favour of the com-partition and co-appearing of the politeia, if not the polis.
Forbidding and affordable – these two, like yin and yang, are not in any way opposites or even complements. They do not co-exist, either in simultaneity or in parallel. There is no space and no duality between them. Rather, they are one-in-the-other or one-becoming-other-of-the-other. The sense of yang is becoming-yin, the sense of yin is becoming-yang.[5] The forwarding or foregrounding of one is played-out by the retreat or backgrounding of the other. Their pulse constitutes the stages and phases of a single double gesture that, like the contraflexure of tides and twilights, produces the ambience of an ambiguous, indefinite and indeterminate limbus, in which all distinctions and all boundaries interminably waver and wander.[6]
restaurant
“What cannot be seen is called evanescent;
What cannot be heard is called rarefied;
What cannot be touched is called minute.
These three cannot be fathomed
And so they are confused and looked upon as one.
Its upper part is not dazzling;
Its lower part is not obscure.
Dimly visible it cannot be named
And returns to that which is without substance.
This is called the shape that has no shape,
The image that is without substance.
This is called indistinct and shadowy.
Go up to it and you will not see its head;
Follow behind it and you will not see its rear.”[7]
I had spoken to my colleague Xu Yinong about Francois Jullien’s book on the bland.[8] The theme had struck me deeply, and I had been working through some of its implications for architecture. In a context where architectural achievement is normally marked by formal bravura and articulational innovation, any interest in the bland would be incomprehensible. Appreciation of the bland requires an unusual atunement – certainly not one that could be cultivated within the breathless rhythms, short attention spans and big picture concerns of contemporary cultures and practices. The relentless morphing of modernity’s obsession with the expressive and sculptural destiny of architecture continues across its numerous avatars: postmodernity, neo- or transmodernity, poststructuralism, deconstruction. Cyborg or prosthesis, gestural or event space, architecture remains intricated in formal purposing if not posturing. Jullien’s foregrounding of the bland gave me to think the possibility of architecture’s retreat and withdrawal. Not exactly the death of architecture. Nothing like minimalism, and nothing like flexible space either. Rather, it would be an architecture that – in its conceptual, practical and artefactual dimensions - engages the potential of the erased and attends to what might arise in and as the effaced. An architecture of the barely there. One that makes room for whatever arrives, whenever it comes to be. Maybe something like Gilles Deleuze’s any-space-whatever,[9] or a place that would welcome the one Giorgio Agamben has named Quodlibet ens - whatever being.[10] I had imagined this as an architecture concerned fundamentally with accommodating the unprogrammable, operating circumstantially, without premeditation and strictly according to the makeshift. I was working with the idea of architecture as armature – that is, as a framework for the whatever-comes of the makeshift; and with the idea of architecture as furnishing and seasoning – that is, as what ornaments, arms and renders efficacious.
In a local restaurant near the University of Tsinghua, Xu Yinong and our Tsinghua hosts Xu Maoyan and Hong Rongrui order dinner. In a true spirit of hospitality, I suspect my interest in the idea of the bland had already been discussed. The food brought to the table is all chalk and cream, off white, every flavour barely discernable, every dish a variation on every other dish, an ornament of another ornament - the whole meal an articulation of the bland and yet not without flavour. Dumplings, fungi, noodles, sauces and broths, solid and liquid, textured, stringy, resistant and slippery. Savouring the bland meant experiencing not the distinctive particularity of each ingredient, but the interminable blending and deferral of flavours. Not the individuality of each dish but the variegation and co-modulation of the whole assembly. The flavours and savours are never isolatable, nameable, identifiable, exclusive of others. They wander and waver, so that one is never certain. One is always left wondering and building possibilities of relationship and association. The question was not so much what something was in itself – in its proper and self-same identity. Rather it concerned the conditions and the effects of its compartition – what Jean Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community called comparution:[11] the co-appearing or compearance of shared partedness, or the interminable and providential inclining deferral (clinamen) which prepares and provides conditions for spontaneous happenstance, for the makeshift, for the advent of whatever-comes in any-space-whatever.
Might a concept of architecture based on the bland and the makeshift relieve it of its burden of meaning and representation? An architecture which means and represents nothing, but which instead sends meaning and sense into production – that is, an architecture that works not by fulfilling a predetermined operational function, but simply by working in the sense of the Greek ergon: doing, labouring, producing, making. The word is related to `organ’ and `wrought,’ through the etymon *WERG = to prepare, fashion, form, embellish – as in `wrought or dressed timber,’ and `wrought iron’; and to `wring,’ squeeze-out or extract (water) – as in `wrought-up,’ stirred, excited, stimulated. The sense of a twisting which produces comes from the etymon *WERTH = to turn, become, exist. Something that works, but without meaning (anything), in fact produces. It makes possible the advent and the conjugation of sense, even to excess. In architecture, this might mean a practice of formal and geometric effacement, poised on the bland, the banal and ultimately the effete.[12] An architecture of the indistinctive and the unremarkable, of practically nothing and possibly everything – and which yet works. Withdrawn from all presence, exhausted of all meaning, irremediably and indefinitely available to whatever-comes - now that would be a revolutionary architecture. It may be a tall tale: that it is only when it advances its own withdrawal that architecture in fact works. That is, it is only when it is for something, and for something other-than-itself, that it performs and produces as such.[13] What appears would be the disappearance of architecture – or, rather, that architecture happens to work only when it makes room for the other-than-itself, only when it attends to the furnishing of place, only when it equips place for a being-together-with-others. What might be this other-than-itself that architecture advances, even as it withdraws from the scene? And how might it be that through the perilous turning, double gesture or double bind of its forwarding-retreat, architecture finally succumbs to its own poverty and its own ethical destiny?
temple
“Thirty spokes share one hub.
Adapt the noting therein to the purpose in hand, and
you will have the use of the cart.
Knead clay in order to make a vessel.
Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose at hand, and you will have the use of the vessel.
Cut out doors and windows in order to make a room.
Adapt the nothing therein to the purpose in hand, and you will have the use of the room.
Thus what we gain is Something, yet it is by virtue of Nothing that this can be put to use.”[14]
The Dongyue Temple on Chaoyangmenwai Dajie, Beijing (1319AD) is a complex of axially arranged ancestral halls and peripheral cells surrounding a series of courtyards. Each cell features a moral tableau depicting a `department’ with jurisdiction over various levels of the Daoist cosmology. There is a Department for Controlling Evil Spirits. The sign outside says: ‘Our forefathers held that there must be propitious omens indicating the rise of a nation while there must be demons and devils that cause the fall of a nation. If there are any human or natural calamities it is because people are leading loose and idle lives and they begin to commit sins. As a result divinities as well as gods become furious and therefore they would bring forth calamities on the people as a warning.’ There is a Mammal Birth Department: ‘The function of this department is to place those souls who have committed during their life-times an equal amount of good deeds and evil deeds into a mid-range rank which is mammal rank as a warning to those who fail to accomplish good deeds.’ Others include the Department of Implementing 15 Kinds of Violent Death, Final Indictment Department, Department for Promotion of 15 Kinds of Decent Lifestyle, Department of Opposing Obscene Acts, Department of Petty Officials and the Deep-Rooted Disease Department. Each tableau is in a discrete alcove, at the end of which one or more Daoist anscestors sit in judgement over variously afflicted beings, lined up on each side of the room. The Dongyue Temple is now the Beijing Folk Culture Museum.
I must have been misinformed. The Tao Te Ching read to me, all those years ago, like a meditation on metaphysical realities about existence, space, time and emptiness, effective strategy and dispositional efficacy. I would have expected a kind of abstract space of erasure, fit for meditation on the impalpable, the unseeable and the unnameable – even on the bland. But what drew my attention to Dongyue, the reason I was even there, was the description in my Lonely Planet guide: “The morbid Taoist temple of Dongyue Miao is an unsettling albeit fascinating experience.” Even then, I didn’t expect it to be quite so amusing. Did law abiding Daoists ever really take these wonderful banal scenes and childish characterisations seriously? Did the tableaux ever frighten anybody or cause anyone’s life to change course? What took me by surprise was the weight of moral content, but also and unexpectedly, the sheer interchangeability of that content. Clearly those alcoves could have equally housed the figures of gods or demons, as they may do in other `minority’ parts of China, or as they certainly do in the temples of India, which are more familiar to me. There, the alcoves and figures would have been tended through complex ceremonies of dressing, anointing, censing, marking, decorating and other ritual practices. At Dongyue, the tableaux were without the trace of human use. They reminded me of the strange and uncanny stillness of museum dioramas.
What of the other is it ever given me to understand? Will he not always remain distant and foreign to me, and will not her thoughts and beliefs always remain dissimulated – dispersed in the possibly comprehensible but always inaccessible conditions, turns of phrase and figures of thought which constitute everything that I am not? The other remains in radical altereity – unapproachable and yet always proximate, incomprehensible and yet always thinkable, illegible and yet always ready to be read.
bookstore
“In principle, the book is unreadable, and it is in the name of the unreadable that it commands or that it calls for a reading. The unreadable is not what is too poorly formed, the erased, the scrawled: the unreadable is what remains closed in the overture of the book, what slips from page to page so as to remain grasped, glued, sewn into the binding, or else laboriously scribbled in marginalia looking to catch the secret, beginning to write another book. The unreadable is that which is not at all available to be read and from which alone something is given to be read.
Of itself the book is virginal and sealed in itself; it begins and ends in this sealing, it is always its proper epitaph: here lies an unreadable. There is always a closed and unreadable book in the midst of every open book, held apart between hands that turn the pages, whose every revolution, every turning of recto into verso, begins again to incomplete the deciphering, the clearing of sense.”[15]
In an academic bookstore near the university of Tsinghua, I buy for my colleague Fung Stanislaus a Chinese translation of Deleuze’s Cinema 1. The Movement Image. I have no idea whether or not he already has it, or would even use it. I figure it might serve his interest in the manner in which China is receiving and circulating western philosophy. I lose myself among innumerable shelves of the latest publications and translations, every one exquisitely produced. I wonder at the implications of what foreign books are selected for translation, why those and not others, and what effect just these books might have on the intellectual currents of contemporary China. I find a remarkable collection of books on regional dwellings, mostly photographs, in grainy black and white.[16] Small and glossy on dense and weighty paper stock. Old Houses. Timber Structures of the Dong Minority Nationality, Family Houses in the Huizhou Style in Southern Anhui, Traditional Chinese Dwellings of Fujian. The images have the look of a turn of the century survey, but are the work of a young contemporary photographer. I am especially taken by the round masonry farmhouse dwellings of Fujian, around Nanjing County. I’m drawn to the cambered wooden lintels used in southern Anhui, and the terraced timbered villages of the Dong in south west China. Right then, I imagine myself elsewhere, in some other time, travelling through minority regions, making my way along riverside contours or walled village streets, through welcome gates or up to the doors of anscestral halls. I manufacture an entirely fictional originary experience of genuine Chinese architecture.
The Ethnic Culture Park on Beichenlu, Beijing, is a 45 hectare site of reconstructed life size replica buildings, bridges, villages and landscapes, representing 16 Chinese `Nationalities’ or `minorities and minority areas’ including the Tibetan, Korean and Taiwan Nationality Areas. I had glimpsed this vast site from the periphery several times on taxi and bus trips into the centre of Beijing, and was attracted to its striking and uncanny artificiality. My colleague Xu Yinong, originally from Beijing, was unimpressed by my interest, so I managed to steal a couple of hours during the last cold day in town to wander about alone. Everything, from the concrete trees to the Tibetan shrines and stone houses, the landscapes and entire village streets, was clearly fake. But at the same time, everything appeared to have been made in strict accordance with traditional patterns and methods, constructed by craftspeople local to the regions represented, and of very high tectonic and material quality. In 2 hours I accomplished an architectural tour of all China, without ever leaving the Capital. I was reminded of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, whose exhaustive collection made clear to me the arrogance of touristic experience, which anticipates in advance what has always-already been seen, imaged or otherwise installed, what is always-already known, appropriated and possessed. No room then, no possibility of experiencing the other in its radical otherness, no originary experience, nothing surprising, nothing but the irreparable world-weariness of the constant and constantly mediated traveller we have all become.
But what is fake? The etymology is unclear – the word coming into usage from slang, meaning spurious, counterfeit, deceptive, forgery, a sham, trick or dodge. Yet, as in factitious and counterfeit, the key etymon is the Latin: facere = to make. A counterfeit is a forgery, something simulated, a pretence and misrepresentation – literally, something made contrary-to or against. Against what? Clearly what is at play here is the Platonic concept of imitation (mimesis). An artefact imitates the supernal and genuine idea (eidos) or form, and will always be less than, or hierarchically remote from it. Every artefact will always be disingenuous. It may participate (methexis) to various degrees in the eidos, it may even be adequate to it to a greater or lesser extent, but it will never be fully identified with it. It will always be a copy and an inexact simulation of the original, and it will always carry a discrepancy which marks the degree of its non-conformity or inadequacy – in other words, its imperfection. Platonic mimetics destines every artefact to defectiveness and defection, and every artefactual practice, or craft, to craftiness and trickery.[17] Everything fashioned, manufactured, made by artifice, every confection and every artefact will always be factitious. There will always be something of the fake in it, and it will always fake it, it will always work by sleigh of hand in its attempt to emulate or represent the idea instead of which it stands. The creative power or craving that attends to every craft - like every faction - can work for or against.[18] The fact of doing has no ulterior motive, it is simply moved to make. The distinctions we make between original and copy, authentic and inauthentic, real and simulated, all derive from this Platonic perspective on mimesis and representation, on what it means to make and on what it means to depict.
studio
“Hold fast to the way of antiquity
In order to keep in control the realm of today.
The ability to know the beginning of antiquity
Is called the thread running through the way.”[19]
The studio had always been a pretext, it was always going to be other than it seemed. We all had our reasons: to see China for the first time, to be with family, to aerate stale academic drudgery, to fast-track graduation, to gauge how western or non-western we are, how modern or pre-modern, to savour earthiness, to sense the desert infiltrate a city, to wander through sites and buildings until then only known through reading and depiction, to savour the bland – or at least to savour, once again, the impossibility of being other than one is. To be none other than one is, in a place that is other than it seems. This was the nature of the studio. The set-up was common enough – to design the adaptive reuse of an obsolete power station, to provide a community centre with an undefined program, to negotiate the cross-cultural circumstances of two groups of radically different staff and students – one working with home ground advantage, the other thoroughly depaysé. Cross cultural and collaborative practices, adaptive reuse, community – all laudable and timely themes for consideration, debate and engagement through architecture and placemaking. Effectively though, the real work of the studio happened in other, unanticipated registers.
It took the best part of a week to become familiar with some fairly mundane and predictable differences – such as climate and studio environment, rhythms of working, teaching and learning practices, discrepancies in knowledge and skills, language barriers. Other differences were persistent and irreconcilable – for example, the contrast between students valuing and wishing to retain and reinhabit the industrial history and artefactual qualities of the power station and those free enough to raze the site, or to preserve a few structures for symbolic value alone. The first group wished to implement a long, and to our hosts an incomprehensible process of mapping that might deliver implications for design. The second group moved swiftly to well formed tectonic propositions, emulating the fast pace of real world development just outside the window. To the first group, the other seemed reckless, disinterested in tradition and too eager for solutions. To the second group, their colleagues seemed unduly slow, indecisive and ineffectual. Each in their own way proved to delay the other’s progress for uncommon reasons. The studio was itself a palpable workshop on community – on how communities might form, segregate and dissolve; on what being-in-common might and might not mean; of how to encounter and manage disagreement and radical difference; of how to keep working in spite of inoperative alliances. None of this would have been possible in any but the intensive three week format of the studio. In normative settings of intermittent studios over 4 months, difficult encounters can be avoided or postponed until urgency fades or reasons are forgotten. In this case, the difficulties endured, and in time became formative. The tight framework compelled dialogue, insight and productivity in ways impossible for extended studio settings.
There remained one distinct and I think shared recollection for me – fatigue. Nine hours a day for twenty one consecutive days, broken only by three weekend day-long relentless and saturating sightseeing. Everyone was exhausted by the long hours, the pace and the sheer production of work required - but more so by the constant focus and negotiation necessary to keep the undertaking from stalling. Fatigue can be paralysing, but in some circumstances it can be energising and productive. It can prompt resistance. In other words, a state of dysfunction, fatigue, becomes operational – it begins to work. I recalled the translation of a passage in Jean Baudrillard’s The Society of Consumption[20], which broached its political and contestational dimensions:
“Fatigue is not passivity opposed to external social over-activity – it is on the contrary the only form of activity opposable under certain circumstances to the constraint of general passivity which characterises actual social relations. The fatigued student is the one who passively suffers the teacher’s lecture. The worker, the fatigued bureaucrat, is the one from whom has been removed all responsibility in their work. Political `indifference,’ this catatonia of the modern citizen, is that of the individual from whom every decision escapes, and who maintains only derision for universal suffrage. And it is true that this also goes through the physical and psychic monotony of chain and office work, the muscular, vascular and physiological catalepsy of imposed standing or sitting positions, of stereotyped gestures, of all the inertia and chronic under-use of the body in our society. But the essential is not there, this is why we will never heal `pathological’ fatigue by sport or muscular exercise, as naïve specialists say (nor by tranquilisers or stimulants). Fatigue is a latent contestation, which turns in on itself and becomes `ingrown’ into its own body, because, under certain conditions, it is the only available contestation for the dispossessed individual.”
A recollection of my brief and modest experience of schoolboy rowing provided a more relevant instance. By the third quarter of every finals race we competed in, the body would become completely overwhelmed by exhaustion, and be incapable of any work outside the boat. But the pace, rhythm and build up of strokes set up long before, and the awareness of working with others to kick the boat along through the water would motivate and move the body - in a very real sense from outside. The fatigue seemed to dissolve any palpable sense of physical exhaustion or pain, and create conditions for the body to assert itself unconsciously and with force. There was a high degree of circumstantial awareness through all the senses, but a total disinterest in anything but the rhythm that is being lived and strangely, effortlessly worked-through. This was a kind of limit experience, a kind of aporia[21] that, instead of constricting and preventing access, in fact dilates the boundary one is up against and opens in it a space of release. In the midst of this forgotten exhaustion comes an uncanny calm and purposiveness:
“And when thought and speech disappear one in the other, identical, non identical, it is as if fatigue passes into another fatigue, the very same, to which he ironically gives the name of repose. Tired thinker… Let us admit that fatigue renders speech less exact, thought less vocal, communication more difficult - is it not that, through all these signs, the inexactitude proper to this state attains a kind of precision which would finally serve exacting speech by proposing something to incommunicate?”[22]
Notes
[1] Martin Heidegger, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Translated by William McNeil and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995 (1929-1930): 80.
[2] See for example Lost Dimension. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991.
[3] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Gravity of Thought. Translated by Francois Raffoul and Gregory Recco. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997 (1993); Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of Prose. Translated by Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt. New York: State University of New York Press, 1995; and `On potentiality,’ in Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999: 177-184.
[4] Roland Barthes, `Centre-city, empty-centre,’ in Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992 (1970): 30-32.
[5] I owe the idea and the turn of phrase to Fung Stanislaus.
[6] For a treatment of limits, see my `Limit and leimma: what remains for architecture?’ in Harriet Edquist & Hélène Frichot. Limits: Proceedings from the 21st Annual Conference of SAHANZ. Volume 2. Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004: 455-460.
[7] Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, XIV: 32-33. Translated by D. C. Lau. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (1963): 70.
[8] Francois Jullien, In Praise of Blandness. Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics Translated by Paula M. Varsano. New York: Zone, 2004 (1991).
[9] Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 1. The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001 (1986): 108ff.
[10] “Quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which.’ but rather `being such that it always matters’.” Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993 (1990): 1 ff.
[11] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community. Translated by Peter Connor and others. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991 (1986): 28-9.
[12] From the Latin: effetus = exhausted by and past producing offspring.
[13] See my `Making-for’, in Linda Marie Walker (ed.), Warm Filters, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 2000, pp. 4-9.
[14] Tao Te Ching, XI: 27-27a.
[15] Jean-Luc Nancy, Sur le Commerce des Pensées. Du Livre et de la Librairie. (On the Commerce of Thoughts. Of the Book and the Library) Paris: Galilee, 2005: 41. My translation.
[16] Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, various dates.
[17] See my `What is theory for?’ in Architecture + Education 2000, Proceedings of the 1st Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia International Conference. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2000: 59-66.
[18] German: kraft = power, energy; Anglosaxon: crafian = to crave, demand.
[19] Tao Te Ching, XIV: 34.
[20] Jean Baudrillard. La Société de Consommation. Ses Mythes ses Structures. Paris: Gallimard, 1970: 291-297. My translation. Translated by Chris Turner with a foreword by George Ritzer as The Society of Consumption. Myths and Structures. London: Sage Publications, 2004 (1998).
[21] An aporia is an impasse – a state of reaching a boundary and finding no way through. The word is from the Greek: a- = without + poros = way, means, passage. Poros also means furniture – in the sense of what procures (some usage, acquisition or gain). Aporia thus also means unfurnished – that is inoperative.
[22] Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien Infini. Paris: Gallimard, 1969: XX & XXI. My translation. Translated by Susan Hanson as The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.