Architecture and Culture

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Towards a Theory of Cavernous Porosity

Atsuhide Ito

To cite this article: Atsuhide Ito (2016) Towards a Theory of Cavernous Porosity, Architecture
and Culture, 4:3, 477-484, DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2016.1239964

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20507828.2016.1239964

Published online: 11 Nov 2016.

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477

ARCHITECTURE
AND CULTURE

Atsuhide Ito 
Southampton Solent
University, Southampton, UK
Towards a Theory of Cavernous
atsuhide.ito@solent.ac.uk
Porosity
Keywords: Antigone, Walter
Benjamin, Cave, Plato’s cave,
Luce Irigaray, theory
Atsuhide Ito

ABSTRACT  This paper explores the metaphor of the cave as an attempt

to scrutinize the normative notion of theory as a vertical and skyward
construction. By highlighting the Enlightenment’s legacy of normalizing
theory’s relationship to natural light and incorporating geological time
into its construction, it explores the contrary mode of the cavernous
theory and its capacity to think beyond monumental time as a unit of
Volume 4/Issue 3 architectural duration.
November 2016
pp 477–484
DOI: 10.1080/20507828.2016.
1239964

No potential conflict of Towards A Theory of Cavernous Porosity

interest was reported by the
author.
Reprints available directly
from the publishers.
Photocopying permitted
by licence only.
© 2016 Informa UK Limited,
trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
When thinking about architecture, there is a tendency to think of it as
buildings and structures vertically erected towards the sky, thus to
the celestial. Beneath complex assemblages of vertical structures on
the ground, cavernous structures like sewage systems, nuclear waste
depositories, and bunkers lie like tentacles or rhizomes hidden from
the sight of inhabitants of cities. By drawing on the metaphor of the
cave, the normative notion of theory as a form of architecture built with
conceptual components above the theoretical ground is scrutinized.
What if theory is conceived through the metaphor of the underground
structures instead? A descent towards the cave will allow us to consider 478
lightlessness and porosity as significant elements in exploring the idea Towards a Theory of
of theory as architecture. Cavernous Porosity
Atsuhide Ito
The metaphor of the underground plays a crucial role in Sigmund
Freud’s notion of the unconscious, a layer hidden from external and
observable behaviors, in which unresolved psychological dynamics are
buried.1 Following Freud, the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani in
his fiction Cyclonopedia regards oil as a product of historical repression;
plants and organisms die and disintegrate in the underground to
become oil.2 Freudian notions of repression and the unconscious can
be applied literally at the planetary level. Negarestani deploys the term
“poromechanics” to describe the underground structures, while adding
hollowness to the image of the unconscious. Contrary to the idea of
the unconscious as a repressed and buried historical residue from the
past, the poromechanics is a rhizomatic structure that furnishes the
underground with hidden pathways. For Negarestani, the desert offers
a bleak and desolate image of death under which runs the oil through
porous underground structures. The desert becomes the image of death
generated by the unconscious which is the subterranean flow of oil.
Negarestani’s imagery is more an oracle of catastrophe than
a theoretical construction; it questions how theory can be conceived
as a manifestation or an illumination, rather than a construction of
sequential thoughts. Similarly in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
Walter Benjamin reflects: “Thinking involves not only the flow of
thoughts, but rather their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops
in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a
shock, by which it crystalizes into a monad.”3 The allusion to theory as a
kind of structure of thinking thus becomes a compressed manifestation,
a sudden moment of apparition illuminated by, for instance, a flash
of lightening. This opposes the Enlightenment’s conception of theory
as the outline of an idea, defined by a constant flow of light.4 A flash
of lightening does not reveal fixed outlines of a truth which remains
consistent. Far from theory as a solid construction in daylight, the
darkness of the night sky or the abysmal darkness of the underground is
a prerequisite for a momentary apparition of the oracle-image.
For the ancient Greeks, Theoria meant a group of delegates
who travelled to Delphi to witness the oracle and carried back their
speculative interpretations to respective villages.5 In this sense, the term
“theory” has premonitory and prophetic features. Teiresias, the blind seer
in Sophocles’ Antigone, gives a vivid prophesy, the “theory,” that consists
of a triad of oracle, image, and monad emerging in a singular luminous
moment, fast disappearing into the dark thunderous night. Benjamin
uses the flash of a camera as a metaphorical reference for such
illumination: to articulate the past historically “means to seize hold of a
memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism
wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to
man singled out by history at a moment of danger.” 6 Here Benjamin is
479 referring specifically to the theory of history and “the image of the past”
appearing at a moment of unfolding time, thus linking past and future.
He seems to be suggesting that a compressed fragment of the past
emerges as an oracle at a singular moment of the present. Rather than
seeing theory as a pyramidal three-dimensional construction, it can be
grasped as a momentary apparition, a particular kind of image: monadic,
condensed, reflective, and threatening. Instead of understanding theory
as a set of speculative explanations for a problem, Benjamin situates the
thinking subject as a seer who links the past and the unfolding future.
In Antigone, Sophocles assigns a symbolic role to the cave where
the protagonist Antigone chooses to die. Antigone commits suicide
hidden from the public, out of the reach of King Creon who has ordered
her execution. Antigone returns to the cavernous recess, like a womb, far
removed from Creon’s authority and law, to cross the boundary between
life and death. When analyzing Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Luce
Irigaray points out that the cave as a metaphor generates a mirrored
architectural symmetry between reality in daylight and the cavernous
chamber lit by a bonfire, a substitute for the sun.7 The implicit ideological
and architectural hierarchy between the world of natural light, an
important symbolic association with the Enlightenment later, and the
uterine cave comes to the fore. The cave for Irigaray is also a speculum
and she designates the cave in which Antigone dies with the term
“hystera, closure-envelope of metaphysics” in opposition to “Proteron
[where Creon’s dictatorial authority reins], defined as what is in front,
[which] is also earlier, the previous.”8 On the one hand, Irigaray pays close
attention to the descending passage in Plato’s cave to reach the recess
of the cave, implying inferiority; the cave as an inferior copy of reality. On
the other hand, Sophocles elevates Antigone’s singular act against the
normative law by staging his heroine’s suicide in the chamber of the cave.
To counter the normative convention of theory as a pyramidal structure
with defined outlines, the underprivileged space of the cave as speculum
distorts the seeming clarity of normative outlines. Olafur Eliasson’s
installation The Weather Project (2003–4) in Tate Modern, London, placed
an enormous disk emitting orange light in the interior of the museum; it
was as if to restage Plato’s cave in the contemporary museum by bringing
an artificial sun into a gigantic cave. Visitors had to follow the sloping
ground of the museum, making their descent to the lowest part of the
Turbine Hall, to approach the artificial sun. This movement of descending
to find the source of light runs contrary to the familiar imagination of
rising from the darkness of the lower space to reach the upper exit
where natural light gradually becomes available. The descent indicates a
desire for the secrecy of an interiorized and buried light, and a resistance
against the authority of knowledge shining in the external sunlight.
Thomas Demand’s photographic reconstruction of a grotto
(2006) allows us to penetrate the spectacle of Eliasson’s cavern in
order to inspect the textures of interior surfaces. It appears to be a
register of decay, and therefore of time, but it confuses and deceives
the viewer. The porous interior surfaces appear as if they are textured 480
by cavities, a product of a “drastic collapse in the depth of composition Towards a Theory of
where the contrast between solid and void is radically blurred.”9 This is Cavernous Porosity
Atsuhide Ito
as if a mould, a concavity, has acquired a strong presence as an object,
creating a confusion of the positive and the negative, substantiation
and hollowness. The collapse of the difference of solid and void into
the ghostly presence of a complex hollow structure prepares us for the
collapse of temporality; it demands that we rethink time on a geological
scale. Further confusion about the substantial nature of the grotto arises
from the fact that Demand photographs a real-size reconstruction of a
grotto made out of paper, which makes the grotto appear clinical and
lack the sense of historical time. By erasing historical traces of decay
in his production process, the photographer represents the idea of the
cave in the present tense, and even suggests the endurance of geological
structure beyond history.
Another architecturally constructed cave, Onkalo, is the focus of
Michael Madsen’s film Into Eternity (2010), and of Atif Akin’s photographs
Mutant Space (2015), which document the construction of a monumental
underground nuclear waste repository in Finland (Figure 1).
The bunker must be sealed for 100,000 years to avoid chances of
high-dose radiation being exposed to living organisms. The rhizomatic
structure of the depository built into the rocks is gradually sedimented
with nuclear waste, thus the coming history of the bunker will go
beyond the imaginable scale of human time – time will bear the burden
of the toxic unconscious for the next 100,000 years. The cave, in this
case a radioactive underground rhizome, disqualifies the notion of an
architectural monument as a triumphant technological achievement to

Figure 1
Atif Akin, Mutant Space (2015). Courtesy: Atif Akin.
481 manage height, tame gravity, and contain time. The depository’s capacity
to contain toxicity exceeding humanly imaginable time is destined for a
geologically defined post-human time.
Contesting the normative notion of theory as a construction of
concepts with clear outlines on the theoretical ground punctuated by
a rhythm of thinking, the darkness of the cave functions as a metaphor
in which a different kind of theory, appearing as an inconsistent form,
acts against the authority, clarity, and normality of theory in daylight.
The theory deriving from the underground, I would suggest, counters
the notion of theory advocated by Theodor Adorno as a rational–critical
process, less tainted by ideologies. Here we should return to Benjamin
to seek a scenic context for the theory emerging in the dark. Adorno in
his letter to Benjamin complains about Benjamin’s lack of abstraction
and thorough speculation which disables the construction of theory.10
Benjamin’s response emphasizes his intention to grasp the moment of
illumination and observe what the monad, as a compressed fragment of
the contemporaneous situation, conveys to the observer. For Benjamin,
theory is not an accumulative process of building a monument that
towers in the world of natural light or extends its shadow back to
the Enlightenment. Instead, it is as if he lived in the cave and tried to
grasp the instantaneous revelation in a momentary flash of a light.
The theoretical position of the momentarily luminous cave differs
fundamentally from the ground on which the tradition of the theory of
architecture stood. Theoretical clues in the cave are not aided by clear
sight. On the contrary, the experience of navigating through porous
spaces in the cave is enriched by the lack of light, the compulsion to
touch the complex interior surfaces and engage with confusing senses
and sentiments.
Contrary to the consideration of theory as a vertical and
pyramidal construction of concepts, punctuated by a rhythmic structure
in a consistent light that defines its form, I have so far argued that
theory emerging from the cave relies on the momentary flash of light in
the dark and demands the thinking subject to navigate through pores.
Rather than clarity and consistency, theory as a cavernous exploration
embraces distortion and inconsistency; these qualities are no longer
seen as inferior to their superior counterparts. In the cave, theory is not
a construction or an explanation, but an excavation through which the
thinking subject explores and attempts to grasp a vision; this would
be drastically different to the totalizing vision gained from the top of
a towering skyscraper, or from the one who looks up from the ground
to trace a clear outline of the building. The vision gained in the cave is
momentary and inconsistent but counters the normative theory’s erect
posture, its relationship to light and anthropocentric time as legacies of
the Enlightenment.
The maintenance of the distinction between cosmic time and
anthropocentric time poses a problem for Ben Woodard who criticizes
the correlationists and the phenomenologists as they “disregard pre-
existential time as not existing properly until it is grasped by thought.11 482
Woodard’s point is to scrutinize the anthropocentric conception of Towards a Theory of
time and to argue for a post- (or pre-)human time. However, if time Cavernous Porosity
Atsuhide Ito
beyond the monumental needs to be conceived, does the distinction
between anthropocentric and pre-existential/cosmic time need to be
erased? Negarestani, contrary to Woodard, regards interconnected
categorizations as necessary.12 Cosmic time “belongs to nothing and
no one. [Cosmic time] is absolute time of pure contingencies […].” To
make a distinction from cosmic time, Negarestani calls the temporal
conception of time, as humans experience it, as “vital time.”13 Vital time
is a necessary condition for the “temporality of beings” and allows “their
ontological determinations.”14 On the one hand, spaces on the ground
are subservient to the solar rhythm of day and night that generates ontic
experiences. On the other hand, in the underground, time is engraved into
the expanding pores of the cave, as if the earth’s cavities are multiplying.
The pores of the cave as a form of putrefaction embody the process of
transition from the vital time of being to the cosmological time of the
post- or pre-human. Putrefaction that constructively creates pores is a
“compulsion to return” to the inorganic and cosmic time.
The pyramids, as discussed by G. W. F. Hegel in Aesthetics,
appear at first as an exception, as their monumental structure on and
above the ground is an enclosed cave in which the dead attempt to
abnegate decay.15 Once built, they are meant to be closed for eternity.
Hegel remarks, when talking about the pyramids:

especially relating to mausoleums, there comes clearly to the

front the special purpose of architecture, namely to furnish
an enclosure merely. This essentially implies that architecture
does not merely excavate and form caves but is manifest as
an inorganic nature built by human hands where necessary for
achieving a human aim.16

He implies that pyramids are an adaptation of the labyrinthine

structure of the cave built on the ground as a way to connect the
realm of the sacred to the nether world; this symbolically links the
cave to the pyramid. Further, he remarks, “In comparison with the
buildings on the surface such excavations seem to be earlier, so that
the enormous erections above ground may be regarded as imitations
and above-ground blossomings of the subterranean.”17 The cave holds
the fundamental symbolic connection between architecture and death
as the dysteleological destination from vital time to cosmic time in
and beyond the Anthropocene. Building, to return to Martin Heidegger,
is an act of emplacement; by building a bridge, a particular locality
begins to be signified and, according to him, through this process the
world unfolds itself for the being to be able to dwell in the place.18 The
Heideggerian conception of architecture forcefully integrates cosmic
time into anthropocentric time. In so doing, Heidegger ties his theory
483 of architecture to the ground. In contrast, Negarestani’s architecture of
the cave, by postulating the Freudian axiom of “a compulsion to return,”
proposes the negative process of putrefaction as a way to bring the
temporality of the Anthropocene into cosmic time. In this process of
putrefaction, the porosity of the cave weaves time and space into each
other while resisting the solar time on the ground, and thus allows us
to think of geo-architecture built by excavation beyond monumental
and vital time. The compulsion of putrefaction as a return to cosmic
time illuminated by momentary flashes offers a theory of architecture
in the Anthropocene that resists the natural light as a prerequisite for
conceiving a theory.

Atsuhide Ito is an artist. He is course leader and Senior Lecturer

in Fine Art at Southampton Solent University. He deploys acting,
painting, pedagogic activism, and video. Through the methods of
social engagement and re-enactments, his works blur the boundary
between reality and fiction and question already established narratives
between past and present. His recent writings include “The Uto-Pianist,”
Seismopolite: Journal of Art and Politics (2014) and “Instituting Tempera
in the State of Precarity,” in Inscriptions: The Almshouse Tempera Project
(MossBook, 2015).

ORCID
Atsuhide Ito   http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5728-5690

Notes

  1 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond The Pleasure
Principle,” in On Metapsychology – The
Theory of Psychoanalysis: ‘Beyond the
Pleasure Principle’, ‘Ego and the Id’ and
Other Works (London: Penguin, 1991),
275–338.
 2 Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia:
Complicity with Anonymous Materials
(Melbourne: re.press, 2008).
  3 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations:
Essays and Reflections (New York:
Schocken, 2007), 253–264.
 4 Ibid., 262–3.
  5 Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests:
The Shadow of Civilization (London:
University of Chicago Press, 1992).
  6 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” 255.
 7 Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other
Woman (New York: Cornell University
Press, 1985).
  8 Ibid., 320, 244.
 9 Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 187.
10 Giorgio Agamben, “The Prince and The
Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno
and Benjamin,” in Infancy and History: On
the Destruction of Experience (London:
Verso, 2007), 117–137.
11 Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth:
Towards a New Geophilosophy (New York:
Punctum, 2013), 52.
12 Reza Negarestani, “Undercover
Softness,” in Collapse: Philosophical
Research and Development, Vol. VI, ed.
Robin Mackay (Farnham: Urbanomic,
2012), 402.
13 Ibid., 403.
14 Ibid.
15 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on
Fine Art Volumes I and II, trans. T. M. Knox
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
16 Ibid., 653.
17 Ibid., 649.
References
– Agamben, Giorgio. 2007. “The Prince
and the Frog: The Question of Method
in Adorno and Benjamin.” In Infancy and
History: On the Destruction of Experience,
117–137. London: Verso.
– Benjamin, Walter. 2007. “Theses on the
Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations,
253–264. New York, NY: Schocken
Books.
– Freud, Sigmund. 1991. “Beyond the
Pleasure Principle.” In On Metapsychology,
275–338. London: Penguin.
– Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the
Other Woman, translated by G. Gill. New
York: Cornell University Press.
– Harrison, Robert Pogue. 1992. Forests:
The Shadow of Civilization. London: The
University of Chicago Press.
18 Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, 484
Thinking,” in Basic Writings: Martin
Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell Towards a Theory of
Cavernous Porosity
(London: Routledge, 1996), 347–363.
Atsuhide Ito
– Heidegger, Martin. 1996. “Building,
Dwelling, Thinking.” In Basic Writings,
edited by David Farrell Krell, 347–363.
London:Routledge.
– Hegel, G.W.F. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures
on Fine Art Volumes I and II, translated by
T.M. Knox. Oxford: the Clarendon Press.
– Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia:
Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Melbourne: re:press.
– Negarestani, Reza. 2012. “Undercover
Softness.” In Collapse: Philosophical
Research and Development Vol. VI, edited
by Robin Mackay, 379–430. Urbanomic:
Farnham.
– Woodard, Ben. 2013. On an Ungrounded
Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy. New
York: Punctum Books.