A Beside: Learning to be Opaque
Since the dispelling of all sorts of fogs is the cornerstone of the
modernist enterprise and its prime patrimony from the enlightment, it
is no wonder that the rise of a certain 'dangerous' opacity,
inextricably connected with communication (what isn't now?) and its'
technology, is causing uneasiness (or elation, depending). This is so
particularly among those who have fetishized transparency in its various
modes, especially as its role, by no means transparent, in the great
modern institutional panopticons.
The concept of public space serves to provoke anxiety now, not
least of all among architects, the self-professed 'custodians' of that
arena. Inasmuch as that space is the site of the
conflict/collision/meeting of the particular and the general, it may
always have caused a certain uneasiness for those who passed though it
(even though now we only seem to pass through it, the modernist emphasis
seems to be on living in that space.) we have only to think of Walter
Benjamin's meditations on glass/transparency when he wrote in 1929,
"Everything to come stands under the banner of transparency." ... And
subsequent modernism's infatuation, both materially and ideologically,
with the possibilities of transparency, and its utopian placement, as a
form of psychic management of the public arena. We have only also to
think of Philip Johnson's early glass house, any downtown AND suburban
office park and before that, Bruno Taut and the Glass Pavilion in London
at a turn of the century expo.
It has turned out however that transparency may not be the tool of
leverage it was originally conceived to be. In thinking that glass
would allow the public arena to be expanded inward to the interior, the
architects of modernity were perhaps hoping for the instauration of
Adolfe Behne's sentiments that "When all intimacy has ceased, man begins
to breathe." Of course, it didn't turn out to be that simple.
Transparency now seems to be a duplicitous quality, something that
postmodernism in its many variants has become aware of, even to the
point of instigating various forms of opacity, mirroring (doubling), and
renewal of ideas of particularity and singularity at the expense of
generality, albeit in the form of the frame surrounding the glass
(which, as we know, can readily transform, even shatter, the contents of
the frame if sufficient torque is applied. Early theorists were quite
aware of this and attempted to minimize the framework as much as
possible. In a true public space there would be no framework, an
apparent impossibility).
Early on, it became apparent that, as Pierre Missac puts it (and a
certain almost almost metaphysical taint seems to bleed through):,
"Quite rapidly, the brillant light came to seem unbearable, ..., as
though needing to feel the space around them enclosed by walls..."
Subsequently tinted glass, special louvers, etc were devised. Much of
what the 'philosphers of suspicion', Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud and
subsequent continental theory, have had to contribute to the
modernism/postmodernism debate has been a re-examination of the
frame--and quite often at the expense of transparency. Transparency now
has a pharmakonological aspect, which takes two forms, neither
apparently at odds with each other: its ability to shatter into deadly
shards and its ability to affect transmissibility--terrorism and
communication (the most advanced, most dense form of data transmission
now uses glass cable; one way glass has long been used for surveillance
purposes. And just as an aside we should remember that glass has always
played a part in scrying, divination, and prophecy [and transparency is
always on the way to becoming a screen or mirror or, ultimately, for
glass, a slab of granite; something which it shares, no doubt, with the
body) . As it turns out, prophecy -- and even enthusiam as public
religious 'discourse'-- is never very far from any discourse on public
space.] Both of these aspects now account for current anxieties
regarding public spaces.
Utopian transparency has given way to dystopic C3: military
terminology for Control, Command, Communication. The opening up of
interiorities via transparency has now come to be seen as a pillaging of
interiorities, both historical (and certain forms of postmodernism hold
responsibility here) and psychical in the form of evacuation ( -- or
'hollowing out' as Adorno put it --) of subjectivities and subsequent
re-filling in the form of commodity fetishism, criss-crossed and
maintained by an information infra-structure. This data highway now
promises to do for the interior landscape (and perhaps also
exteriorities--the boundaries seem to becoming increasingly porous) what
the physical highway has done to the physical environment: erosion of
distance, a speeding up and densification of temporal ordering,
alteration of sense ratios, the eradication of local communities,
fragmentation, heterogeneity. In contrary motion are various forms of
institutional consolidations, mergers, and alliances on a global scale;
formation of non-contiguous communities ('inoperative' in Jean-Luc
Nancy's phrase) as well as uprisings of more archaic communities based
on race, ethnicity, religion, and recreation; a curious static-ness of
human nature' wherein mythological structures seem to be constantly
erupting, especially through technical media and cinematic special
effects
While high theory seems to be increasingly shorn of gravity,
floating free of earthly constraints, the popular imagination becomes
increasingly mythologized, dwelling on draconian fantasies, neo-gothic
architecture, subterranean, even uterine, formations taking precedence
over Corbusian garden cities, the tracing of enatic lines over (and
sometimes against) agnatic geneologies--the fearful Return of the
Mothers, Goethe's Faust might exclaim.. The atrium has now come to
encompass all of space, an invagination wherein even the space between
buildings comes to seem merely the interior of another, vaster space,
albeit a space enclosed in darkness and water (one has to only think of
the city scapes in many popular recent movies: Bladerunner, the Batman
series, the recent Judge Dredd; in fact, in almost every movie wherein
the environment is equal to or takes precedence over character, certain
mythological dicotomous restraints seem to apply.)
The public space, then, as it is activated through terrorism,
communication, commodity fetishism, and prophecy seems to be taking on
some of the tensions which Julia Kristeva ascribes to psychoanalysis in
its attempt to counterbalance authority and transgression as in the
following quote: "The ensuing equilibrium preserves the vitality of
this discourse, a vitality that grows out of the immanence of death (the
discourse of knowledge) and resurrection (the discourse of desire). As
a result, psychoanalysis upsets the social contract, which is founded,
according to Freud, on an act of murder. Analysts do not shy away from
being dead fathers of knowledge, but the are also subjects of affect,
desire, and joissance. Consequently, they are distanced from schools
and institutions and concentrate instead on restructuring other people's
psyche.." (New Maladies of the Soul, 35).
Architecture is, however, an even more peculiar form of
pyramidology, literally exhausting interiors, eviscerating natural
structures, trees to lumber, volcanic interiors to cement, melting
beaches to glassine surfaces, a peculiar form of resurrection indeed
where the dead are the first priority. Little is left for the public
space but the ghostly dance of commodities, objects, deaths brought back
to life under the sign of Saturn: leaden, melancholic, the world itself
become a thing, "the planet of detours, delays" making one "apathetic,
indecisive, slow" (as Susan Sontag once described a certain modern
temperament).
No wonder then that architecture becomes the chosen site for the
terrorist's attempts to communicate, interrupting by re-inscribing a
discourse of particularlized destructive desire onto bunkered
generalized knowledge (the industrial state, as the Unabomber has it;
the scientific method itself!), attempting an instauration of his own
particularized brand of prophecy, 'signature effect' (of neccessity
irrational, Benjamin's destructive character' smeared across the
landscape) requiring as his glass ball, shards, fragments, as his only
recourse, working perhaps 'backwards' from desire (the hope for SOME
sort of resurrection--personal, social--) rather than 'forward' from
knowledge, the inevitable chiasmatic crossing forming the new public
space (always doubled now, uncanny, paranoiac, mobiated).
And as sorcerers and those who live in the blues have always known, crossroads are dangerous places.
