by Apostolis Artinos
The place is opened up, abandoned in its diffusion, up to the very limits of its total denegation, its negative trace, its atopic trace, its total spatial availability. Thus, every place is in fact a self-impossibility, its emergence in the in-possibility of its Real trace, the dis-closure of the Real itself, its conception and dwelling. Finally, the place where the human isbeing.
This topological diversion of space also constitutes substantially a reversal at the level of the symbolic order. Thecapital position is no longer taken by the indetermination of our spatial origin but by the conscious trait of our topography. When I’m talking of space here I don’t refer to thisuninhabited “pure extension” of Heidegger but to the original impossibility of the place itself, the zero degree of its trace; a labyrinthal, enclosed and incommunicable spatiality, which is not available to the communion of its subject but only to the fluidity of its movements; a vigilance instituting an action, the one of generating the place, the one of mourning in reality, since the place is about to yield yet again its position to its atopic death, to the eternal return of its spatiality. Thus, the scenes of the place aren’t but its two moments, of its emergence and its withdrawal, the tension between those two moments, their singularity and their awaiting; when the place becomes a challenge to itself, a rare and suspended transparency of its Real trace in the horizon of the immobile order of the other. A newly born point in the order of void, a reserve of energy spilled over from the fissures of the anonymous other.
“Space is what is granted to enter its limit”, Heidegger suggests, in the linguistic universe of definitions. “Language is (or may have become) a thing of space”, Foucault formulates on his part. The liminality of the place is thus informed in the illimitable of its spatial beyond. In any case, every limit isn’t but the receiving of this beyond. The curvature of cosmos is chiseled by its own exteriority. Its gravity and other introvert movements aren’t but the conditions being dictated and exposed in the imaginary of their diversions, in this scandalous and unconsumed presence of the Exterior. The relief of the place as well as the condition of dwelling will always be the gestures of the other, the “aura” of things that also becomes here their authentic destiny. On the other hand, the infinity of the place grants an open horizon to the place, a real possibility. The place is not depleted in its objective dimensions, in the relief of its reality, but opens up to its own infinity, the infinity of its points. Space as a negative destiny of the place thus becomes its field of development; the challenge here is not letting this infinity surrender to the nonsense of its duration but to the truth of its historic vigilance. Besides, the place isn’t a void of sense; all of its points are points of its very revelation, points that echo its own destiny, its own finality. That is why places – and not spaces – are finally the ones exhausted, withdrawn, washed up to oblivion, in the weakness of their silence, their original seduction. The places are fragile due to their very truth, this impossible “non-” that has them withdrawn by its absence. That is why their emergences always take place in the atopy of the fissure, in the place of void. Thus, their eventual births have no precedent, no genealogies, they aren’t but extracted.
The lived spatiality of the space, a basically romantic position that holds forth its psychological and empirical speculation against the logos of Enlighten rationalism, constitutes a perspectivism grounded on this very impossibility of the subject, its availability to the attraction of the other. Thus, the place constitutes the difference, given that it receives the difference of the other, the trace of this radical otherness coming from the exterior; an otherness that raises the trace of its subjectivity together with the wound of its alienation. Since the early phenomenological approaches by Husserl, the space is already acknowledged as the birth place of inter-subjectivity. A progressive spatiality manifested by a bodily and psychological recovery of the world, its empirical reconstitution, up to the famous heideggerian “being-in-the-world” and the incorporated truths of Merleau-Ponty. On the contrary, both in space and in the contemporary interlinked spatialities, the subject is informed in its indifference, its emaciated trace. In the horizon of simulation, as Baudrillard showed us in his singular way, there is no difference of the other, only its simulation and its final disappearance. Thus, the subject becomes the content of the place, its mode of inhabiting.
Heidegger pointed out that the subject is always a dwelling subject, and the place a place inhabited by the subject; the place where the Being raises its dwelling, always under the eyes of the other, the “sky” or the “deities”, according to Heidegger. The importance rests on this external horizon that constitutes the “differance” of the place. It is this “under” that characterizes the place as being always the place of the other, the place belonging to the ephemeral trace of its dwelling that becomes the ephemeral trait of the place itself. And this is so because, if the place is the dwelling place and its dwelling is an ephemeral dwelling, the place is an ephemeral trace, a disturbed and dispersed totality which the subject is called up, under the eyes of the other, to “re-assemble” and give form to, making it possible, visible and true. “The bridge recollects the earth as a landscape around the river”, this seductive wording by Heidegger from “Building, dwelling, thinking” institutes the architectural gesture as a gesture that reveals the world, collects and composes all of its dispersed points by dedicating them to its unity. And he is unambiguous: “what happens is not the fact that the bridge is raised in a place but the fact that, from the bridge itself, a place is firstly born”. Architecture becomes the gesture that defines the place, de-scribes it and abandons it to its exteriority, to the trace of this surrounding Exterior. Architecture is not the gesture of the Ego, the familiar conscience, as Bachelard suggested, but this gesture of the external other that raises my own cabin, the scene of my own singular dwelling, inside its own world; this scene of my own exclusion and my own re-entering the world. Levinas has put it quite nicely: “we come in the world not from an open universe but from within the four walls of a house”. It is this very ejection from the place of the other that also opens up the ultimate possibility of our insularity. My exclusion in the cabin of the self becomes the only way provided by the other for me to coexist with the other, to suffer the exteriority of the other, the very exteriority of the world. There will be no protection for the human being other than the protection provided by the four bare walls, according to Pentzikis. Thus, the ejection becomes an injection, a closed insularity in the place of addressing the self, an opaque spatiality, undividable but consumed in its integrality and that Bachelardian fervor. The exterior lies on the inside in a more intense way, since it defines the place, the place of Being, its fixation in viewing the world, the view of the other.
The metrics of the frame, the door or the window will become the only safe code of this communication. When Le Corbusier built the house of his mother in 1923, on the shore of the lake Le Mans in Switzerland, he constructed a tall fence, a wall that excluded the house from the eyes of the world. But he took care in opening a small window in this enveloping shell that allows for a single view, a sneak glance at the place of the other. Thus, the understanding of the world takes place through its architectural framing, where the fluidity of its movements is informed in the daily cycle of intimacy suggested by the verb “to dwell”. The architectural trace really becomes a constitutive trait, a factum of origin, since it spatializes the world by means of sketches of its “differances”; a gesture that distances itself from the fluid and diffuse naturality of the space and focuses on the condition of its communication, the aesthetic and conceptual grasp of its frame. The difference of the other is located in the very points of its dialectic transparency. In the late work by Le Corbusier the bearing elements of the building are always organized around this coming aura of the other. At the height of its structures, this united empty space is organized around a focal point: the receiving of the infinite spatiality of the world, its “ineffable space”.
When the other returns to the blindness of its own points, then there are secret places, opaque regions being unavailable but bearing the void of their solitude. In “He who was notaccompanying me” by Maurice Blanchot, the hero crosses over a long, poorly lit corridor, which is framed by doors letting sounds of sighs. We will never know if this corridor belongs to a hotel or a hospital, if the sighs are of pain or of pleasure. We are equally unaware of what happens in the room of the dying Malone, by Beckett, where he registers thoughts inadequate to reality. They are both places of unknown identity, solitary and scarcely diagnosed events; heterotopic conditions that, in their own opacity, abolish the very image of the world, the possibility of its total representation. It is not the other that perturbs my Being, but the eclipse of the other, an eclipse that will never register a “differance”. Thus, the heterotopic conditions don’t describe the place but inform an upsetting and reflexive environment, a spatiality abandoned to the Real of the local, the eventuality of its coming and new-producing imagery.
In the contemporary – although not so contemporary – pictorial, techno-scientific environment, the “ideal absolute space” of Kant is withdrawn not to its empirical localization, as it does in Heidegger, but to the environment of its infinite formal duplications; an indeterminacy that doesn’t detect any local reference, not even a structural reversal other that this total realization, our availability to the libidinal play of repression. The pictorial, revelatory spatialities that nowadays dislocate experience connect the desire to a virtual orbit of interlinking but they do so in such a depth beyond limits that its paradigm is no longer valid. The pictorial nature of this spatial experience becomes then a denegation of its own self, a negative skeletal structure dedicated to its permanent destruction. It is characterized by a Delezian “hatred for interiority” that is abandoned to an abstract and deterritorialized field of infinite codifications and automations. The folds of “a thousand plateaus” suggested by Deleuze and Guattari don’t correspond by their own nature to a solid, architectural, topological horizon but to its diversion, the metaphysics of its “mobility”. Locality here is no longer revelatory of the familiar place, but its ambiguity, its indeterminate and impossible trace. The trace of desire is informed in the very moment of its total withdrawal and repression. That is why the very scandal in pictoriality will never be its virtual horizon, the horizon of seduction according to Baudrillard, but the place of its diversion, the parasite that has it thrown out again in the muddy waters of the Real, those muddy waters already present in Stalker by Tarkovsky.
When the structure of the place vanishes, in the universe of its unlimited liberation, then what rises is the repressed field itself, the symptom of the place, the trace that the place bears and the wound of the Real. It thus becomes a provocative field, a true event, this event of the place that grants the possibility of its registration to the diffusion of realities, an action that would then historicize and signal its own desire. This registration of the spatial trace in the topography of desire is in fact something more than a mere phenomenological diversion, conceived as a reversal of phenomena. The place isn’t only a diversion of points, points of local desire, but the emergence of a new possibility of Being. Thus, the surface of the spatial is corrupted and inscribed by the recordings of a lived no less than impossible experience. It is this “depth of the surface”, according to Musil, that gives to the points of the imaginary space the ontological depth, an existential possibility of perspective. Thus, the place is registered in this very fragility of its caring for. Repose; then the place is yet again withdrawn to its ontological indisposition, to its imaginary folds. The Other has me located in the place and dislocated in a scene of seduction; this heterotopic condition of the language itself, the language of desire, the desire of the other; the possibility of dwelling not in the familiar place suggested by Heidegger but in the uncanny one, the mere impossibility of the other. Thus, the seduction of the place is being seduced by the other, the other that isn’t a place, in a way that the place will always be the place of addressing and calling this other. An impossibility that turns the calling itself into an impossible calling, a call for death, since, so far as we address this other, we withdraw, we submerge in our original nothingness that, in the end, will be the zero degree of desire itself.
Photos: Philip-Lorca di Corcia