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In the text The Logic of Sense (1969), Gilles Deleuze notes a moment in which
‘dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial and
absorption’.1 Deleuze finds this moment in literature. It can equally be found
in music and in art. It is this moment that I find in architecture, and particu-
larly that architecture which I refer to as bare architecture. This moment
involves a liberation from selves, and in particular myself. This moment also
involves a flight from death. Particularly your death. Bare architectures strike
raw sensations and prompt rawer thoughts. These are architectures that strip
one bare and allow one to be apportioned to others and outsides. These archi-
tectures fail to reconstitute subjects. Instead, we are set adrift like the clouds
and the tides that these architectures make proximate. These architectures
operate like diving towers encouraging us to breathe in deeply and then let go.
There is a diving tower, a plongeoir, that at high tide stands in Mont-Saint-
Michel bay (Figure 9.1). Mont-Saint-Michel bay occupies an edge of the
English Channel or ‘La Manche’, depending upon the shore upon which one
stands. When one approaches from England it is definitely the English Channel
and when one approaches from France this water becomes La Manche. The
channel is the narrow arm or ‘sleeve’ of the Atlantic Ocean. At low tide this
diving tower does not stand in Mont-Saint-Michel bay but, instead, stands on
Copyright © 2017. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.
156 Postscript
Victorious, but not consistently so. In World War II a German raiding force
momentarily occupied Granville. The coast guard still uses a German Gun
Battery as a lookout tower. Defending territory often puts one in contact with
the outside: the chaos of the sea and sky; as much as the other: the foreign
and foreigner. What exactly was fortified and what was liberated in Granville
is hard to say.
I came to Granville to see the rare editions of Jean Cocteau at the Musée
d’Art Moderne Richard Anacréon. You can see the diving tower from the
Musée. In lieu of the deep interiors of the Musée and the intensity of Cocteau,
I head outside and move on to the steps that adjoin the park, the elevated
promenade that adjoins the sea, and the diving tower that seems to be without
adjacency. The tides are extreme here. The bay runs up to the walls of the
promenade when the tide is high and at least 200 metres from the edge of the
promenade when low. This is a place of strong currents and flows. Why the
tide is so extreme here, I do not know.
This diving tower is as raw as such a structure might be: a single concrete
column, a ladder, an inverted stainless steel cone that forms a platform,
and a railing. The concrete column is approximately 6 metres high and has
Copyright © 2017. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4987652.
Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.
Postscript 157
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4987652.
Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.
158 Postscript
sits as a perfectly horizontal tangent to the gentle arc of the horizon beyond. At
this moment the three-dimensionality of the object collapses into two dimen-
sions. The architecture becomes a datum line. As the architecture collapses
into two dimensions the Earth surges. It feels as if the water is suspended
in the sky. It’s not flat and laid out horizontally but rather flat and vertical.
The horizon line, composed of water to the left and to the right of the diving
platform, bends to the curvature of the Earth itself. The cirri in the distance
become more intense, more poignant, as if painted by Turner. It is moments
like this that allow me to feel completely aligned with that which is beyond
me. As if the sensation wades with me. Everything drifts like a school of fish
in the wake and wave of Virginia Woolf. It is a surface effect, an exteriority, but
a deeply affecting one. It is moments like this that place bodies in proximity
to ‘an unthinkable or unthought deeper than any internal world’, as Deleuze
prompts.2 These are moments when the complexity of existence spills into a
singularity. The singularity of being here. Only here. And now. Only now.
This singular sensation is intense. An extensive intensity. It is a spatial
unfolding of a kind, a spasm of depth into intense surface. It is also a spasm
of self and selves. I’m not aware of myself at these moments. And for a
moment I forget you too. I always feel guilt when this happens. No, I always
feel guilt after this happens. At the time, in these moments, I’m joyously lost,
lost as a ‘mysterious “he”, this “he” that is of no person anymore’, as Deleuze
writes of Maurice Blanchot.3 I am lost as you are lost. It is an arbitrary plane
of departure but a departure no less. Such moments carry me far and they
implicate everything. This diving tower is like a pin-pointing. A singular leg.
A singular athleticism. A syringe in the outstretched arm or sleeve of the
Copyright © 2017. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4987652.
Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.
Postscript 159
interiors. And I had to fly home knowing you were dead. Or at least part of me
flew home. I always felt that when you died; when your heart stopped warm
on my side of our bed; I always felt, I was altered. And it wasn’t superficial.
The rhetoric of that time, provided by 100 Hallmark cards and clichés attached
to bouquets of flowers, was that: you will live on in my memories. It would
seem that we have to descend into rhetoric and cliché in order to deal with
such intensities. ‘She will live on in your memories’. She. Whilst there may be a
truth to such sentiments, it’s a trifling truth. You may live on in my memories
but the bigger sense I had, I have, is that when you died so did part of me. I
don’t know which organ it is, or which portion of every organ; but part of me
is dead. And there are times when I am joyous about this. I’m joyous because
in that organ and in this portion: There you are. That part of me that is dead
was yours. Will always be yours. It was the part of me that moved with you.
On my side of the bed and yours and indiscernibly between.
My thinking on this platform, on this diving tower, has nothing to do
with the oppositional construction of absence or presence. So little these
days falls into an either this or that logic. To have been touched intensely is
always to have been touched. To have lost you that night is to wake afresh
each day to absence. The profundity of absence. The presence of absence; in
every memory and instant – and thus it is not a distinguishing or distinct
feature. I am left operating between absence and presence. Between a thanat-
opolitics and creative choasmosis. This is what schizoanalysis is. A constant
constructing in that which tears me apart.
I took to the air when you died. Orpheus took a tunnel. Cocteau a Room.
Roland Barthes a street. Deleuze took a window. Blanchot would take a long
Copyright © 2017. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
corridor. Some take texture, some text. When Henrietta Moraes died she was
searching for a quote from Oscar Wilde. It was: ‘This wallpaper and I are
fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do’. It was her. Cirrhosis of the
liver. Woolf took to a pen before taking to a river with pockets full of stones.
She wrote a letter, by hand, to Leonard Woolf. It was the third suicide letter
she’d written. ‘I can’t read’, she wrote. ‘If anybody could have saved me it would
have been you’.7 The letter is just headed ‘Tuesday’. It could be any Tuesday.
Words run the gap between the self as lost and the self as found. Between the
desire cast afar and the object of passage. The text of the world often occupies
that between just as bodies do. Just as bare architecture does. When I’m here at
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4987652.
Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.
160 Postscript
the edge of this platform, on this diving tower, above this sea, in this air; and
you’re not – there is always a part of me that’s also not here. I am, as Blanchot
writes, ‘in constant contact with two shores’.8
I took to the air as you took to the earth. It wasn’t that I loved less but that
I loved more. I hoped the plane would crash. But I also knew it wouldn’t. I
knew there was a job to be done. Children to raise. Our four. Erasing myself
wouldn’t have raised them. Or so I told myself and whispered to you. I remain
terrified that this was the conceit of a second Orpheus, unable to collapse the
difference between life and death by taking one’s own life. Thereafter to be
punished by the gods. And torn to shreds by Titans.
It is best to dream of accelerated gliding. When literature sweeps me away.
When music sweeps me away. When architecture sweeps me away; and I lose
myself in the here and now; I get closer to you. I get closer to you because I get
closer to the Earth and to the Real. To feel the beating heart of the planet and
to be held by all clouds. A diving tower, a plongeoir, is never about a plummet.
It’s about flight. And each time I dive I imagine an arc cast into the air – a
hyperbolic arc – that might sweep us away.
Copyright © 2017. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. All rights reserved.
Smith, Chris L.. Bare Architecture : A Schizoanalysis, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4987652.
Created from usyd on 2021-09-20 00:50:21.