ililtt, GoiltPlHt IrHtG$, lltut]tilo]l Altlt

Ed Keller
I've always felt a strange agitation and sensual turbulence in museums. Of course, experiencing this through the complicated veil of Walter Benjamin's essay on mechanical reproduction has led me to question why I get so worked up. On the one hand, I side with Benjamin, agreeing that the politicization of art must be practiced to counter the aestheticization of politics. On the other hand, I also feel his struggle with the transcendentalpoint of view: the aura is something tangible that gets locked into material, into works of art. This setsup a very difficult conflict. I want to distinguish within what kind of art this can happen. Autographic pieces are works with which the author has directly manipulated, touched, and fought with. As opposed to allographic pieces which are merely notations that the author (architect, writer or filmmaker) has laid down to be recreated. Autographic pieces hold a kind of chthonic force which seemsto me to have captureda fragment ofthe soul ofthe creator through the vehicle of presence. This point of view is compatible with a post humanisVpostpost modernist view of cultural artifacts. Foryears,museumsseemto be giant orgoneboxes. Some are moreorgonic than others. The fragments that residein these museumscarry a trace, an indexical trace, of their past experiences, and not in only a cultural meaningful way but in an invisibly forceful not-cultural manner. Wandering through museums can be like moving through an untuned grand piano. We respond to certain fragments and their energies in a disorderly manner.

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WHAT ISAN ORGONE BOX? To quote from the skeptic's dictionary, which is found online, "Orgone is an alleged rype of "Primordial Cosmic Energy" discoveredby Wilhelm Reich in the late 1930s.Reich claimed that orgone energy is omnipresent and accounts for such things as the color of the sky, the failure of most political revolutions, and a good orgasm.In living beings,orgone is called bio-energy or Life Energy. Reich believed that orgone energy is "demonstrablevisually, thermically, electroscopically by meansof Geiger-Mueller counters." Reich, who ultimately was locked up after ha\'ing his books burned by the United Statesgor'ernment, was in prison becausehe "...refused to obey an injunction against selling quack medical devices such as the Orgone Accumu'Shooters,' lator and Orgone devices rvhich allegedly could collect and distribute orgone energy, therefore making it possible to cure for just about any medical disorder....". One can also find plans online to make orgone accumulators.Good luck. TUNING What if we could learn to tune an entire building to allow a more coherent resonance emerge? to Or a film? And what would this resonancebe withan invisible energy, or social stmctures we hope to destabilize? Of course,the role of a museum curator is to sensethis implicit order, and arrange our perceptions such that the sequence of art works becomes something more than a simple commentary on the artist'splacement in time, or a perceived theme that resonatesand mutates as one moves from one piece to the next. There would be something alchemical in this process;using aura as a dowsing stick to sense the essence of the work or develop a critical intuition. Essencein this case is no longer bounded by aesthetic or symbolic criteria but has to do with a set of impressionsthe work carries from its encounters with the material and temporal. In his introduction to Focillon's book 'The Life of Forms in Art' , Iean Mollino states: "The moment is a complex situation, in which
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multiple orientations and diverse polarities are placed side by side, meet and collide, and in the midst of which those ruprures occur rhar are called events. We thus come to the idea of multiple temporalities, of a layered temporality in which each domain, each level of historical reality, advancesaccording to its own rhythm and largely independent of the rhythms of other domains. We may in this way be led to observe a sort of mobile structure of time that displays, in accordancewith the diversiry of movement, manr- different kinds of relationships." .\s u'e Iive in an era where such a quasi-mystical capacin' of a rvork to organizefolds of perception around irself has been confusedwith the svmbolic responsibiiities the form and not its of directlv performatir-eor telluric qualities, my introduction to this text mav be leaving some of y-oulooking for a clearerlogic that emerges from a devitalizedmodernistor posr-humanist agenda. Then think about this example of the Prince Rupert drop - a phenomenonobsen'edby glassblowers. Most bits of molten glassdropped inro water will cool too rapidly and fracrure violently. If, however, one allows a molten bit of glassto drip like honey into water, having achieved a classicteardrop shapebefore touching the water, the glasswill rapidly anneal. It will not crysrallize, and when it has cooled its solid form will appear to be a teardrop shape. It will aiso have a very thin hair-like filament which trails away from the tail of the drop. The internal stressof the drops are visible. This stressdevelopsas a sort of surfacetension createdby the differential rate of cooling as the drop solidifies. One cannot attempt to smash this form with a hammer, if one directly pounds upon the drop. However, the slightest damageto the tail - such as snipping it off with a pincer - will causethe Rupen drop to explode. Leaving behind shattered glassand a powdery dust. (Protective gear is recommended for those who wish to rry this experiment.) How does this example substantiatethe implicit thesisthat a museum could be like a giant orgone box, fine runing the energies of people moving through the building in conjunction with the art displayed therein? Orgone accumulators are

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soliton wave, the likes of which grow from foot high standing waves to the size of tsunamis in the ocean, may be used as another materially based example.(More on this idea later as regardsDaniel Liebeskind'sBerlin museum.) Of course,the sensibilities of a crowd of people moving through a building cannot be modeled upon only rwo materialsinteracting accordingto a single form and a change in temperature. There are much more complex variables at play. There are, however, ways to identify the devices which could entrain groups of people or the perception ofsingle individuals, such that a coherent behavior emergesand can be observedand modeled. We live everyday in complex time. This is in tune with comments made by Bergson, Prigogine, Deleuze,Serres,delanda, and many other recent thinkers who posit that our previously monolithic, macroscopic, Iinear model of time is no longer viable, and should be replaced with a more nuanced, turbulent, simultaneously reversible and irreversible models. This should then be understood as a rehearsalfor practices in the design realm, where we might be able to come to some kind of useful conclusion about what the consequences living in complex of time may be, and how one might actually intentionally precipitate a storn of complex time. What exactly is complex time? Classicaldynamics developed a model for physics basedon time which is reversible. Time in which T = -T. In Bergson's writing this isolated, closed idea of time's absence from participation in the lived world has been challenged. Duration becomes the theoretical substrate for thinking about evoIution. I am not referring to duration in the form of a singular, simple time which can move forward and backwards, but a complex and multiply threaded time which has larger flows of continuity with eddies and stagnant pools within it. With crystals, sheets,and tsunamis, as well. Beckett notes that "The individual is at the seatof a continual processof decantation - decantation from the vesselof furure time, pale, sluggish, and monochrome,to the vesselcontaining the fluid of
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apparently constructed out of consecutivelayers of metal and wood. The Rupert drop is an example of a material predilection, a temporaVmateriality oriented intelIigence which captures the behavior of a system as it undergoesa phasetransition. We know that the molten glassis in a far from equilibrium stare as it encounters the water yet its form at that moment works synergistically with the change in temperature to arrest the energy in the phase transition and to temporarily delay the crystallization processunderway. The phenomenon of a 56

past time, agitated and multicolored by the phenomena of its hours." Theories of complex time have forced a dramatic rethinking of design research, and more'space' over a rethinking of self within designed (architecture, film, or narrative structure), since neither the device nor tJre body affected by the device exist in closed stasisany longer. Preexisting structures have been forced to give way to dialogue. The resulting new system that forms around a constantly evolving and shifting relationship between the object and the subject thus can be modeled through a dialogic paradigm, one in which dialogs are at fust intelligible and linguistic dialogs - language systems,or even forms - and which then may be understood as intersecting with material dialogs which become more abstract and physical exchanges of force and capacity. These dialogs are as effective as linguistic series; even more so perhaps, through the abstract, specific, meaningless dialogs of material behavior. The techniques that Bakhtin identifies in his writing on the evolution of the novel , for example, such as parody, hybridization, carnivalization, multiplicity of languagesand styles can all be applied within an extended model of dialog to matter. In such a case,we no longer look for an aesthetically or symbolically based linguistic series as a system to evaluate design; but search for the more energetic and intense flows that both matter and virnrality set in motion when they interact with blockages,valves, and intensifiers in their milieu. The Rupert drop is a simple example, but usefi.rl in that it demonstrates the facticity of a material behavior which defies exPectations. Elias Canetti's research in his work Crowds and Power provides a cultural rather than material example of similar phenomenon. He describes trigger points that characterize a crowd according to event, or allow a crowd to suddenly shift orientation or behavior. These trigger points emerge primarily from systemic conditions of shared emotion or event rather than in form. We can hypothesize an extension of this thesis into the testing of both form and event based phenoml'.lCT-N0TArchli?ciLre lirier 2tjti3 l0

ena to judge their efficary in producing systemic effects in larger social structures. Bakhtin's examination of narrative structures which demonstrate a more intimate involvement between the characters of a narrative and the furnitures that surround them in that space is instructive. He suggeststhat the evolution of the novel parallels the transformation of early cultures (what Lukacs calls "integrated civilizations" in his 1923 Theory of the Novel) toward self awareness, producing a "modern" rift between subject and world. We see in this proposed evolution a moment where the character becomes able to both influence and be influenced by the world around them - changing the very nature of the time they inhabit and the way they engage destiny. Over a quite long historical span, the map Bakhtin provides of characters drawn from Apulius, Cervantes, Rabelais, and Dostoevsky reveals this change in the destiny of the character who is profoundly inflected by the spaceswithin which the story unfolds. Both the spatial and the symbolic nature of a space is not neglected in Bakhtin's development of this - as DeCerteau says, space is practiced place, and the manner of that practice is addressedby Bakhtin, showing that in a narrative structure where there is litde contamination between the nature of the character and the spaceof the narrative, a simple, unchanging time is the substrate of the story. This substrate can be mapped out as a circular or endless temporality [cf. Eliade in his The Myth of the Endless Return.] Integrated civilizations do not have the ability to separate self from world, and so self and time remain in a unified, continuous flow. This manner of being in time is not restricted to ancient civilizations: we have all lived through it at one point in our lives or other (adolescence). Hence the usefulness of this model for us as supposedmoderns. The separation, or distance, which develops as epic time dissolves into modernity and is replaced by a form of alienation is a moment where the individual recognizesa distance between themselves and the world around them - and where they begin to pafticipate in what Bakhtin calls the critical interanimation of languages.

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This doesnotyet reach, however, the logical condusion that Bakhtin identifies in novels by writers like Dostoevksi, where the evolution or destiny of the characters is in a constandy evolving state thorough their interaction with the spaces and events they encounter. Their identities, in fact the very capacitiesof living which they bring to redity, change over the course of the tale. We seehere a three part evolution of the individud's relation to time and lived space.In the first, the destiny of the individual is an isolated system - it exchangesno information or energy with the world around it. In the second, the individual's destiny is a closed system. They may exchange some energy, but deep transformation of the system and exchange of energy and information is not achieved. The third example opens the floodgatesand allows destiny to mutate as the individuals engage in the forces of the world surrounding them and change it in turn. This is conveniently close to the three part schema that the philosopher Charles Peirce develops as his logical categoriesoffirstness, secondness and thirdness. Let me discussthese in a brief, and perhaps rather hasty gloss of Peirce. Let's say that firstness can be evaluated ast}te condition an entity experiences direcdy, in absence 58

of self reflection or signification (in absence of time). Secondnessis the modern state identified above, where the individual or system becomes aware by identifying difference between itself 'other." and an Secondnessis the presence of simple form of time and memory. Thirdness is a state whereby the individual or system no longer exists within a blind spot, where it is itself part 'see' of the signifying relationship, and now can itself within the relationship as well as seeing the relationship. This final state would be the virnral copresenceof multiple strands and sheetsof time, all hybridizing and cross fertilizing each other. There is a connexion I would like to discuss berween the idea of thirdness found in Paul Ryan's model and the idea of what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. Heteroglossia is that condition in a novel, or in spoken everyday life, where the characters and the reader, the author and the medium, become mixed in a profoundly hybridized state. Heteroglossia results in an activation of rnemory that is deliberately complex. It insists that both the reader and the author (and by default of the characters) exist in a multithreaded temporality which does not allow a singular state of being (or firstness) to dominate. In fact, we can argue that Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia and the novel's inventive role in producing it is in synch with the condition of thirdness. Thirdness here is not necNOT-NOT Architecture , winter 00 2003

essarily the transcendentally motivated teleology it may seem to be... at least not entirely. Thirdness by its nature incorporates firstness and secondness. In Paul Ryan's diagram called the "relational circuit," there is a cyclic closure between firstness and secondness. These statescan all connect, and should probably be imagined to do so in a simultaneous time, as opposedto a sequential time. We don't have to go from lst to 2nd to 3rdness, but they can exist as all three at the same time, or they, we, and it can rapidly oscillate back and forth from state to state. Now the key question emerges: What are the devices which occasion oscillation from state to state? Earlier I suggestedthat museums accomplish this transition. somehow. Michel Serres has distinguished the difference between an engine and an organism. Engines process a lot of energy, but litde information in relation to the scale we recognize them to be engines - for example, ttre lots of gas,but if we combustion engine processes

(l)

less

FORCE
more (IV) EFFECTS

more MEMORY less TIME

consider it qua its status as a single engine, very little information. Even in a contemporary engine with embedded computer chips, the information processedpales in comparision to the energy. Even a single celled organism, however, processes vast amounts of information in parallel to the energy it takes in and outputs. Every bit ofinformation it processes-about its environment, and internally through constant response to genetic programming- directly affects its destiny. The combustion engine's destiny depends on gas,primarily. The organism's destiny is a consequence of integrated multiple informational flows and energy. These informational flows are both long term and short term flows of memory and can be

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understood to be multiple strands of time. This is why Serrescalls the organism a conveftor of time. It folds and bundles faster and slower strandsor sheaves time together, allowing the of speed of a sentence read by a person to mingle with the caffeine they had for breaKast. These speeds convert each other. Complex time is an experienceof the overlap of multiple times, and the consequences these of overlapsare determined by the intensity of memory locked into the systemsor individual. Foucault notes that: the body is the inscribed surfaceof events (traced by languageand dissolvedby ideas), the locus of a dissociatedself (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity) and a volume in perpenral disintegration. Genealogy,as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the processof history's destruction of the body... genealogy...seeksto reestablish the various systemsof subiection: '...

not the anticipatory power of meaning, but the hazardousplay of dominations." This quote illustrates the idea that the body is adiagram ofthe forces exerted upon it: social, economic, political, rnoral, and ethical. These forces determine the configuration of the subject through language,film, social organization, architecture, modes of production, and the like. Such a model views habit itself as a force and demands an examination of its relationship to mechanismsof perception, forms and program. This exposition provides us with the criteria necessary to evalute how devices work. We must establish the frame by which they set up system boundariesand then question how these boundaries permit significant, destiny altering interaction between systemsover time. Systemic amnesia facilitates the gap between experience and memory that becomes, in Deleuze's words, "an instrument of freedom... a machine which should triumph over mechanism," "to use the determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very

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determinism had spread." As I mentioned above, the idea of the Rupert drop seems apropos to Liebeskind's Berlin Museum. At what scale does this projecr engage the city - is it a giant orgone box? Perhaps. Certainly, it is wrapped in enough metal now to interest contemporary Reichians. More likely, the building has placed itself in a cultural context such that it brings certain absent histories in the city to the fore. The absenceof memory in the city- the city's own amnesia- is a rigid body- like the Rupert drop - filled with incredible tensions. Perhaps Liebeskind's project is the snipper that will cut the tail of this drop. Other tensions existed in Bilbao... and the museum there, yet another giant metal clad box, has managed to catalyze them. Economically, politicaliy, the ciry had been frozen and the building and accompanyingglobal presshype has changed that arrest (and Gehry's destiny). Whether thesebuildings are really Orgone boxes or not is not the issue.Whether they accomplish a runing of social stmcture is the issue. Which aspects function allographically,and which autographically, is the crux of the question. There are other examplesI could cite which work toward this goal, such asTschuim's designfor the park at La Villette. Amnesia in this case,in relationship to cornplex time, is not a sacrifice of responsibiliry, but an intensification of awarenessand responsibiliry. is Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia one general form of amnesia:The partial method toward this monovocify which one finds within the earlier examplesthat Bakhtin examines in his essayon the chronotope are contrastedby the heteroglossic conditions which accumulate in examples from Dostoevski,in the daily life of a peasantor by extensionin the visitor to the Berlin Museum. 'another's speech Heteroglossia, Bakhtin says,is language...."It may be useful here in another's of to contrast the different storytelling strategies installation Liebeskindand the Ralph Appelbaum in Pei Cobb Freed'sWashington, D.C. Holocaust Museum. To clarify - this hyridization in architecrure is not the incorporation of compositionai strategies
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lifted from other disciplines,but is the incorporation of techniquessuch that a condition of thirdnesswill emerge. Thesetactics are effective only when chained to other larger vimralized systems - economic, religious, political, ideological. The deviceswe find usedin certain forms of minimalist art approachheteroglossia through an odd landing pattern: Strategies dislocation are iniof tially impenetrable, however, as in the minimal compositionsof Reich, Glass,and Adams, after a certain acclimatization period a shift in perception occurs - a shift analogousto the one that a perceiving subject also experiences.In Dan Graham's pavilion projects(cf. the installation on the roof of Dia Foundation in New York). This shift in perception opens the viewer up to continuously deepeninglevels of information and rhythms which the work begins to articulate. In this way, the work becomesa mise en abyme of the world - what Deleuze calls the Time-Image. The work occupiesa machinic realm that could be called, perhaps, a radical phenomenology, in the way that it can function purely upon the sensibiliry of the eye or the ear. To the contrary, I argue with Bakhtin, Tschumi et al. that a formal maneuver is not sufficient to accomplish heteroglossia,but must be chained to an event (narrative) which qualifies the form. Working to mix program with minimalist spatial techniques can be informed by the shift in scale which allows EliasCanetti to catalogcrowd rypes according to events and psychic states: baiting crowds, feast crowds, the hunting pack, the war pack. It is clearly implied by Bakhtin that the dialogic principles he identifies asemerging within a novelization of writing and speechgenreshas an ethical result. In heteroglossia, refractedseriesof the selvesis fundamentally different from a unitary languageand culrure which does not recognizea distanceberween the individual's daily life, their life within representation,and myth. The examplehe givesvis-a-visthe illiterate peasant is illustrative ofthis and can be quoted at length: 'Consciousness finds itself inevitably facing necessiry of having to choose a language. the

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\\:rh each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst illiterate peasant, miles away heteroglossia...an from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in severallanguagesystems: he prayed to god in one language(Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried to speaking yet a founh language...all theseare different languages, even from the point markers. of view of abstract sociodialectological ...As soon as a critical inter-animation of languagesbegan to occur in the consciousness of our peasant...then the inviolability and predetermined quality of these languages came to an end, and the necessityof actively choosing one's orientation among them began." This example differs from a cynically critical position (certain strains of modernism and postmodernism) in that it suggests affirmative practice an which might emerge from the employment of hybridized and heteroglossicdesign techniquesor, as Bakhtin clearly states,in the practice of everyday life. In this way it could effect a complete reinvention of value systems, the midst of in practice.The exampleof the conducting a critical peasantis perhapsclosestto the examplesthat we might find in de Certeau, and clearly illustrates the potential role of heteroglossia and hybridization as devices to foster an expanded subjectivity. It would be absolutely KEY to identify the architectural and cinematic locationswhere what '... Bakhtin in this passage calls the critical interanimation of languages...'might occur, as only there could the double affirmation he is suggesting actualize itself. An absolutely translucent example may be found in the recent film A-fter Life by Kore-eda. The premise of this film is simple. After dying, one has a week to choose a single memory and make a shon film of this memory to take into eternity. This memory is the only one you will take with you. There are caseworkers who assist you with making the choice and filming the memory. Each character Kore- eda introduces us to has a

different responseto this assignedtask. We also learn that the caseworkersare individuals who for varying reasons could not decidewhich memory to take with them when they were asked to choose.They have remained in a sort of limbo. One caseworker, it turns out, had a previous life relationship to several people who passthrough his division. [Iltimately his encounter with these people who he knew during his life prompts him to make a choice which at the end of the film positions his memory in a remarkable place. He films his own memory on another person'sset- a person he was indirectly related to- and this set is a bench which actually was a key location for him in his own life. In fact it was chosen as well by his fiancee,for her own memory to take into eternity. But he also includes in his short film his fellow caseworkersat the institute. This is a beautiful analogy for the workings of memory in general and of course an allegory of the filmmaking processin general. If we examine this example in terms of Peirce's conical diagram of memthirdnessand Bergson's ory, we find that this person has cleverly placed his memory consciouslyin both his own present, his own past,and his own future. does not want to lose his own past - hence he usesthe bench which both he himself had sat on during his life, his fiance had chosen for her own set,and her husbandhad chosenfor HIS set'he does not want to lose his present memory as a caseworker- so his film includes footage of himself on the set, and his fellow caseworkers'he does not want to move into eterniry unaware of the intensive realm of mernory- so he makes sure that the film records his awarenessof all three states.He short circuits the limits of memory. Like Chris Marker's hero in La fetee,he cannot return to the time he yearns for- but he takes a complete awarenesswith him. Perhapsthis is but thirdness (total awareness), without the final connexion back to firstness (direct experience) that Paul Ryan suggestswe need to complete the relational circuit. How would a museum function to achieve this? Fiim? Architecture, space, or narrative? Elsewhere, I have written about what I call sav{rrhiieclLre ,rnter NOI-N0T 00 2003

'He

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age practices. The savageis a precondition- or perhaps a result- of thirdness, and the establishment of complex time. I have suggestedthat through our conscious encounter with complex time a reconfigured subject may emerge. Cessation of habit critically deployed leadsto a human constandy engaged in the production, the living, 'active affections'. of Spinozist To borrow a tenn from John Knesl, an encounter with complex time leaves us stuttering gods. To stutter, GODLIKE, would like to be a god such 'The as Borges has described in his short story Circular Ruins': one who invents herself through dreaming, a constitution moment by moment of intentionally...to the body, the consciousness, establish a new relationship to fate.

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