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BENJAMIN Andrew TIME Question Fold
BENJAMIN Andrew TIME Question Fold
Questioning here can always proliferate and yet within the proliferation
what is maintained is the necessity to take up the fold's own architecture.
In other words what has to be given a specific place is the possibility of
the site as being that which may come to be architectural. (One difficulty
here, though it is a difficulty with far greater extension, is in giving
architecture, and with the architectural, sufficient specificity.) Working
with this text--to begin with Deleuze's text Le Pli --and thus tracing its
own architectural implications will entail following a two-fold strategy. In
the first place there must be the sustained attempt to extract that which is
present in Deleuze's formulation--reformulation perhaps--of Leibniz's
philosophy that allows for architecture, and in the second there will be the
attempt to locate that strategy within what can be called architecture's
opening. There different moments will continue to intersect and, in
intersecting, in their movement backwards and forwards, they will have
the effect of diminishing, and finally obviating ,the hold of prediction. With
the abeyance of prediction chance may play a constitutive role. It will have
a chance, finally.
In the first place, relation involves the recognition that what cannot be
precluded are connections and interconnections. There can be no absolute
differentiation. The recognition of the primordiality of relation is evident,
for example, in Walter Benjamin's assertion that what cannot be
eliminated from either the object of interpretation or the historical object
is the possibility of their having an 'afterlife' (Nachleben). Indeed it can be
argued further that the ineliminable linking of 'life ' and 'afterlife' is a
specific thinking of relation. [5]
In broad terms that which can be drawn from these differing formulations
is the co-presence of infinite and the finite, the limited and the unlimited,
as well as how their insistent presence is to be understood philosophically
and architecturally. It is this possibility that is also at play in the
description of the fold. However, not only is there this co-presence, there
is in addition the image of complexity. Complexity is the fold that as it is
unfolded opens up further folds, which in being unfolded reveal further
folds. What this means is that there can be no real beginning and, usually,
no real end. The nature of inside and outside is recast by the complex fold.
And yet of course within the movement there are real states. Static actual
existence is not precluded; rather, it is to be thought as an interruption
and thus as an eruption out of movement. In emerging, the static--the
actual--reveals, allows itself to be uncanny, by enjoining new relations.
The position of a necessary complexity works to reposition the Leibnizian
conception of complexity as fundamentally removed from the Cartesian.
The nature of the divide between them must resist the easy conflation
often provided by the complacency of history within which Descartes and
Leibniz are equated and linked by virtue of their forming part of the
Rationalist philosophical movement.
The initial and disruptive element of this opening is, ironically, its
conserving nature. What is held in place--though it is a holding that may
allow what is held to be questioned--is function. The nature of the function
is questioned and possibilities opened up which were not hitherto
accessible, by allowing the necessity of a specific enactment to be held in
abeyance. And with it in holding to the specific function as a question, the
process and thus the disruptive continuity of questioning is maintained.
Opening the relationship between form and function gives rise to a specific
and strategic question. If the link loses its coextensivity what, then, will be
at work in the opening? It is thus that the question of how the relation
between form and function is to be taken, and enacted, arises. It is a
question that defies the teleology and the temporality of prediction. With
the abeyance of prediction and thus with the absence of a necessary
relation between form and function chance will come to figure. The
necessary retention of a commitment to a form of function--a form that in
functioning questions the nature of that function--precludes the utopian
while maintaining architecture's critical dimension. In the practice of
contemporary architecture the fold has found a place in that opening. In
writing about Eisenman's Rebstockpark project--a project deploying
folding--John Rajchman notes: 'In Eisenman's words: " one must make
present in a space its implicit 'weakness' or its 'potential' for reframing".
The principles of his perplication are then that there is no place and no
space that is not somewhat "weak" in this sense, and "weakness" is
imperceptible prior to the point of view that one normally has of the space
or the place. [8]
Time and the fold can therefore be taken as working together in the
question. The question, however, is linked to the function. It is the
necessary ground of questioning. Libeskind's extension to the Jewish
Museum, while not taking up the fold as such, utilized the structure of a
question, indeed a plurality of questions. The questions that endure
concern the presence of absence, presenting that which resists
representation, Berlin's own relation to a now past Jewish presence within
it; other questions are possible. The questions, rather than
ornamentalizing the building, to be seen as additions, façades, etc., can be
taken to provide the building's actual structuration. The structuration
enacts questioning by resisting any provision of definite answers, while at
the same time maintaining, in a questioned form, the possibility of
representation, display and thus the work--a work reworked--of the
museum. Its being this complex and thus its having this complexity occur
at the same time. At the same time therefore it resolves and does not
resolve. At the same time therefore it is both finite and infinite. It is
precisely this possibility that Deleuze has identified in Leibniz as a
possibility for philosophy in which ontology and the question remain as
central and which architects have used--though it can always be achieved
in other ways--to inscribe the time of questioning into the fabric of the
building. It will be the inscription of time that will sanction, on the one
hand, the use of different geometric configuration, while on the other it
will link the presence of the building to another conception of the present.
In other words, allowing time the priority usually accorded to space will
cause both the building and the historical space (thus the historical time)
it inhabits to be rethought. This rethinking will, in turn, demand those
philosophical adventures which are, in part, at work in Deleuze's Le Pli .
The final question that must be considered is where this situation leaves
architecture's relation to philosophy. Again, it may be that the ultimate
point of connection is that both work to conserve. Architecture, in order to
endure as itself, must work to house and thus to shelter. What this means
is that architecture cannot be conflated with its language--present as
architectural images or metaphors within philosophical or theoretical
texts; it must have form. Accepting this necessity, architecture's
inescapable constraint, need not close down the question of form. Form,
however, will always be mediated by the immediate specificity of function.
Neither function nor housing nor shelter can be raised as though they exist
in themselves. The presentation of function --its being housed in a certain
way--is always inscribed within a network, of values and relations of
power. This network has a mediating connection to form, since it will
always come to be articulated by the form itself. In other words what is at
work here is the complex interconnexion that conserves architecture--
allows for the repetition of its telos --while accounting for the form of its
presence. The same presentational procedures also mark the philosophical.
A specific conclusion can be drawn from this state of affairs. In taking up
architecture from within the self-conserving place of philosophy, and in
architecture's own work with philosophy, it is the conflation of practice
with language that will need to be examined. While not denying he
materiality of language it remains the case that the materiality of
architecture and thus its mode of being present are different. While both
philosophy and architecture are inextricably bound up with those
constraints that hold and thus conserve the specificity of each, their
concrete determinations drive them apart. And yet while they are apart--
distinct from each other--they can come to be linked, and therefore in the
link they both form a part of a similar mode of thinking, since each will
sanction a critical stand that is constrained to work while holding to the
identity in question. The interplay of apart/a part means that running
through both philosophy and architecture is the centrality of time. Initially,
time is the repetition of the same, a repetition which, while conserving,
sets up the site of an intervention in terms of which what will come to be
repeated will be that which occurs again for the first time, an occurrence
which brings another time into play. This latter determination figures both
within and as the concrete instantiation of questioning.
NOTES
3. See, for example, Folding in Architecture, Architectural Design special issue no.
103, edited by Greg Lynn, 1993.
5. I have tried to develop this aspect of Benjamin's work in 'Time and Task:
Benjamin and Heidegger on the Present', in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, edited
by A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (London: Routledge, 1993).