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Architectural Theory Review

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On The Margin
Michael Tawa & Linda Marie Walker
Published online: 08 Oct 2013.

To cite this article: Michael Tawa & Linda Marie Walker (2013) On The Margin, Architectural Theory
Review, 18:2, 129-134, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2013.825939

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 Architectural Theory Review, 2013
Vol. 18, No. 2, 129–134, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2013.825939
EDITORIAL
ON THE MARGIN
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In principle, the book is unreadable, and it is
in the name of the unreadable that it
commands or that it calls for a reading. The
unreadable is not what is too poorly formed,
the erased, the scrawled: the unreadable is
what remains closed in the overture of the
book, what slips from page to page so as to
remain grasped, glued, sewn into the
binding, or else laboriously scribbled in
marginalia looking to catch the secret,
beginning to write another book. The
unreadable is that which is not at all
available to be read and from which alone
something is given to be read. Of itself the
book is virginal and sealed in itself; it begins
and ends in this sealing, it is always its
proper epitaph: here lies an unreadable.
There is always a closed and unreadable
book in the midst of every open book, held
apart between hands that turn the pages,
whose every revolution, every turning of
recto into verso, begins again to incomplete
the deciphering, the clearing of sense.1
For better or worse, I’ve begun to make my
texts as territories where I can tell stories.
It’s the genre of these stories which was
perhaps a little strange, because I wanted to
Q 2013 Taylor & Francis
write very delicate stories, the ones which
are hardly ever told, except when one talks
in a space of intimacy. When, in the evening,
I feel like recounting what has happened
that day, I do not recount a novel, I recount
an intimate gesture someone made, or a
little drama which might hold great
meaning. Besides, that’s what makes a
poem. It’s the little things that hold the
greatest meaning. I think we suffer from a
general restriction on all of that: we are
always asked “to make a spectacle”, with
grand actions, and grand images . . . 2
The margin is always a question of limits—the
space between a block of text and the edge of a
page, the boundary between land and sea, a
border or rim that delineates centre and
periphery, domus and civitas, substantive and
ephemeral, appropriated and expropriated. It is
foundational to architecture, given its corre-
lation with the interval. Without it, space and
time become unthinkable and inoperative. The
interval is a mark of difference and the margin is
the spacing-out and deferral of that difference:
a site opened up by differentiation and alterity.
Architecture always works on and in the
margins. This is why its constitutive field and
 WALKER and TAWA
the praxis that mobilises it must be conceived
as ethical—as a matter of constructing ways of
“being-with”.
The pause is a timing-out in the realms of sound
and movement. In conversation, it carries, like a
weight, a hesitation; as if suddenly held-up,
caught mid-stream, even caught-out; or it
brings to mind memories, experiences, dreams.
It is breath, the expanse (like a territory) of a
limit that reveals what is death-like in the
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breathless, in the coming-to-a-standstill; yet, it is
only with breath that the breathless can be
thought. The pause is only “bearable” momen-
tarily; it is an instant away from the abyss. The
speaker falls away, the writer is abandoned by
words . . . What can one do “then” but carry-
on across the pause, continue, survive, go-on
(writes Beckett3); the pause, the interval, the
limit are made; they are “drawn”—drawn-out,
drawn-in, drawn-up or down, and to such a
degree that they become “dizzy”, as, for
example, “the dizzy limit”: the intolerable
degree—too far, too close, too wide, too
loud, too high. All in all, the margin cannot
escape its making, by restriction, constraint,
hindrance, compression, detention.
And, yet, the margin (at the edges or between
borderlands) is by definition ambiguous and
unsettled because its condition of indetermi-
nacy is a prerequisite for every emergence of
the unpredictable, the unplanned, and the
undesigned in which anything can happen.
There are external and internal margins—for
example, between the inner face of an outer
skin and the outer face of an inner skin;
between the outer edges of a country (to the
sea or to other lands) and the inner edges of
the same territory (unto itself). There will
always be marshlands, moors, marais, and
morasses—the swamps, waste grounds, and
other lacunae that render a territory and its
130
texture heterogeneous and porous. Margins
are thus liquid regions subject to indeterminate
fluxions, liquefactions, and reformulations. This
is why the marginal conjures up dread, why the
State apparatus has the greatest difficulty
conceiving of it, let alone handling it beyond
the states of exception into which it consigns all
marginal conditions and beings.
Likewise, the marginal is a textual zone not
subject to the laws of a narrative, to the arc of
resolution or outcome, and yet contained or at
least held by it without being bound to it. Like
marginalia written on or in the margins, it
threatens to unbind the text—putting it to the
test and displacing or translating it into other
contexts and into other texts; un-grounding or
giving it wings, or under-grounding and bogging
it down in minutiae, in peripherae. This makes
the marginal a correlate of the cinematic off-
screen and out-of-frame; or indeed of the very
centre that is so evident, so “before-one”, and
under one’s nose that the gaze is bedazzled and
settles on “order”, on a known arrangement
that in turn marginates (the beautiful dress, the
melancholy dog, the exquisite daisy, the laden
table). The marginal insinuates itself by
transgression, opening the inside to what lies
outside, instantiating the parergon—literally
what is outside ( par-) the work (ergon): the
hors-d’oeuvre or the out-of-work that never-
theless works into and through the work,
bearing and producing it.4 According to
Derrida, because the frame essentially frames
a distinction between inside and outside, it
“precipitates” a metaphysics of presence
founded on the interface of a limit.5
Longing now flows into the margin from inside,
as the inside wears itself thin. This longing, when
admitted to, extends any subject infinitely. It
spoils containment lines; it exhausts and
exasperates; it exposes cracks and unsettles
 ATR 18:2-13
plans. This is what happened to Walter
Benjamin during his stay in Moscow (he was
often exhausted, irritated, and his plans and
meetings were delayed, avoided, missed,
boring, etc.); his book from this stay, Moscow
Diary, is all-margin because it is all-longing.6 He
is walking the streets, going to the theatre,
meeting people, writing, yet he knows he is
outside, in the cold. And this is doubly so
because the woman he loves, Asja Lacis, also
keeps him at bay (in the cold). He waits and
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waits, for her and for Moscow; Moscow is one
large freezing waiting room. Moscow Diary is a
book (or room) of longing; every day, every
hour, is devoted to crossing (or trying to cross)
the margin, and the margin is written like a ritual
(scene by scene, sentence by sentence), as if
ritual will bring him to the city and the woman.
At the end of his visit, Moscow is, he writes,
“drawing much nearer to me”: “I feel the desire
to learn Russian . . . it is very warm and the sun
is not blinding, so it is easier for me to observe
what is going on around me on the streets and I
consider each day a gift . . . because Asja is now
often near me . . . I am therefore seeing many
new things”.7 Here, in his self/hope, the margin
opens up onto the city, it dissolves for a moment.
Margins are marked by signs, impressions, or
visible traces of limes. Making marks means
drawing and tracking; configuring tractates;
branding or tagging something so as to assign
it to a particular order or consign it to a
particular destiny. Because it defines boundaries
and delineates, marking is also a form of naming;
and, by inference, a form of cosmogony, a
manner of bringing into existence. The word
“margin” consists of two etymological roots:
MA/ME, meaning “measure” (matter, matrix,
material, metre, mensuration, dimension,
mother, marine; cognate with MAR/MORI ¼
body of water, sea), and GEN, meaning to
produce, procreate, “generate”. The margin is
EDITORIAL
not a line, but an interval, zone, a place, a
generative field or fertile region of production,
invention, and innovation. In this milieu, this
intermundum, antinomies are held in suspense;
they vacillate. Opposites liquefy and yield to the
apperception of otherness. They become unlike
and unseemly; they become other to each
other. In this place, both poet and architect
practise the antiphonic work of collecting and
naming that has its own temporality and
ambiance of slow drift and flow.
This (slow drift and flow) suggests the
“continuum”—that the inside/outside, our
subscription to “in” and “out”, is a way of
bringing to bear “management”; a geometry
that is helpful, useful and productive, that holds
our attention steady in view of the (baroque)
infinite, and gives us small portions to work on/
with. No margin(s), or all margin(s); the margin
then is imagined as un-delineated, un-differ-
entiated, space; imagined as “nothing”, on the
fringes and in the fray of the continual, the next
thing after the last thing, a small infinitesimal gap
between text and non-text, today and
tomorrow, film and not-film. Agnès Varda’s
film, The Gleaners and I, was made of scraps—
what was filmed, what was accidently filmed,
what was left over—and was, as an assemblage,
the fraying of one “this” into the other “that” (a
merging). Margin/fray writing writes toward the
gap (it can’t see) trying to sight/site the
excluded, forgotten, discarded, erased,
unknown; or toward the tiny, the floating (a
seed, an ant, a thread, a circumstance).
To the margins belong particular kinds of
geometry, particular signatures of alteration,
modulation, or reformation where a system
changes, or where a system must change to
adapt to or resist changes in its external world,
situation, or condition. These shifts or folds of
form or scale at the margins of a system, a
131
 WALKER and TAWA
being, a body, a limb, a gesture, or an
enunciation, indicate a kind of yielding, a
necessary manner of deferring to or accom-
modating the different, the other, the alien, the
unfamiliar, the alter(nate) ego. Such morpho-
logical shifts give rise or give way or give place
to relationship, to connection, to interaction.
Because of this, because of their transactional
register, they are marks of ethical and
pedagogical nuance—they collect, they collo-
cate, they make room for being-with-one-
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another; for being-with as a sort of learning-
with, attending-to and listening-out-for what-
ever might take place or emerge in the midst, in
the intermundia of situations, encounters,
conversations, and choreographies.
A pre-eminent figure of the margin is the
fragment: a residual piece no longer held by the
overarching order that once constituted an
assemblage or network. There, in the terrains
vagues of cities, images, ideologies, histories,
and literatures, it awaits reconfiguration in new
assemblages that overflow its borderlines. This
indefinite overflowing is the characteristic
bearing of the margin. As such, the mar-
ginal—the interstitial, the in-between that is just
there, in the midst—conforms to the inter-
textual and the interlinear which, as Walter
Benjamin saw it, constitutes “the prototype or
ideal of all translation”.8
The margin must remain marginal and periph-
eral to itself as much as to what it marginalises,
differentiates, or articulates. And so this
collection of margin-voices can neither aim at
nor attain thematic, structural, or organisational
consistency. Every essay is marginal to itself; all
are marginal to each other and to “architectural
theory”. Even those that might be construed as
architectural theory will have already been
rendered marginal because, with the margin,
everything is in the borderlands, out-of-frame,
132
or off-screen. There is no as-such, no hacceity,
no forma or eidos; hence no mimesis, no
methexis. The marginal is always improprietous,
improper. In this lies its capacity to surprise, to
irritate, to trigger, to mobilise, and to produce.
The marginal is the primal site of interpretation,
of hermeneutics—and not incidentally of
critique, of the de-installation, dis-establish-
ment, and de-stitution of a “centre that cannot
hold”.9 If “things fall apart”, then Hermes is at
work. Whereas Hestia was the deity of the
hearth, associated with ousia and essia
(immutable and permanent essence),10 oikodo-
mos (house-building), and oikonomia (house-
hold/stewardship), her counterpart, Hermes,
was the deity of the periphery—the boundary
rider who “glides edgeways through the
keyhole” and whose delinquent loitering
about the margins makes of him a cipher of
hermeneutic practice and terror.11
One must wait with Hermes because he is the
trickster, because he is hospitable, good
company, bringer of dreams. He waits with the
dead and leads them to the underworld; in the
meantime, we wait for him. We make “place” to
wait in . . . with our memories, with our hopes
and fears, with our thought-life as it surges back-
and-forward; and, especially, to strike out from –
toward others, and others in ourselves
(to glimpse the electric-self). This is an honour;
a small means of making peace with/by memory.
Memory is not to be taken “lightly”, as medicine;
it’s a terrible brew (poison and balm) of
what has been amassed (and preserved), and
what is now remembered—impressions of
impressions, preserving in preserving, associ-
ation upon association. Memory is here, at
hand, and faraway, out of reach—and all at
once. We dwell in the “terrible” presence, and
in the present-continuous, of a resistance to
see what was “seen” (experienced), and of an
 ATR 18:2-13
endless screening of what does rise to thought
(as if “seen”). We witness our own forgetting.
This “terrible” then is a ground, pounded
down, churned over, sown, plucked, and
plundered; through habits and patterns, we
find a narrow stretch of life, ourselves as ground
(a marging of our memory) that acts upon other
and various grounds—the earth, the book, the
friend, the job, the writing. Our ground—moving,
enigmatic, gossamer, tangled, poetic, sugges-
tive—is groundless (immaterial, ethereal), yet
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it points and argues and insists and imagines;
and, to its frustration and wonder, it catches
itself by surprise, by sympathy, by trips and slips,
reveries, and fantasies.
Perhaps, architecture has a conscious (a self-
conscious) presentation to the world; and,
perhaps, that means that it has an un-conscious,
a memory beyond memory, that we sense via
the “parts” (inside and outside) that seem
neglected, unresolved, difficult, ugly, useless,
generous, or in some way “out of character”. It
would be too easy to ascribe this marginal
register of architecture to the designer alone
(to his/her unconscious), or to the vicarious
circumstances that condition its production.
Maybe it is architecture itself that attracts these
parts to itself over time, surreptitiously,
delinquently—corners, balconies, porches, win-
dows, corridors, rooms, ledges.
Architecture—its joins, joints, openings, clos-
ings, heights, widths, materials, colours—is in
each manifestation an imaginary-realm, a
Notes
1. Jean-Luc Nancy, Sur le Commerce des Pensées. Du
Livre et de la Librairie, Paris: Galilee, 2005, 41.
Translation by Michael Tawa.
EDITORIAL
tremulous communal “mind”, layered, pro-
jected, withdrawn, composed. Architecture
comes-to-be as translation, as afterlife, that is
elusive, yet revealed through our participation
with its remembrance, ecstasy, vibration, and
underworld. James Hillman’s distinctions
between the “underground” and the “under-
world” through a nuanced discussion about the
gods, the myths, and their geographies are
crucial here; the underworld spirits are plural,
he writes; the underworld is “an innumerable
community of figures”:12
Because the underworld differs so radically
from the underground, that which has its
home there, dreams, must refer to a psychic
or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits,
ancestors, souls, daimones. These are
invisible by nature, and not merely invisible
because they have been forgotten or
repressed. This world is fluid, or dusty,
fiery, muddy, or aetherial, so there is nothing
firm to hold to—unless we develop intuitive
instruments for seizing impalpables that slip
through our fingers or burn at the touch.13
What carries the “plural” on, in the tiny world
of the journal, are the essays that follow,
spectral-things that convey the “invisible” in the
visible (like concrete’s water, like waiting’s
opportunity, like translation’s movement).
MICHAEL TAWA and
LINDA MARIE WALKER
2. Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text
and Politics, New York: Columbia University
Press, 2009, 19.
133
 WALKER and TAWA
3. Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing,
New York: Grove Press, 1967.
4. The key etymological root is PER ¼ to go
through, experience, fare, travel; cf. Sanskrit:
paraya ¼ to conduct across; paras ¼ beyond,
further; Greek: peras ¼ I pass through; poros
¼ a way; peran ¼ beyond; para ¼ beside;
peri ¼ around; Latin: porta ¼ gate; portus ¼
harbour; Anglo-Saxon: faran ¼ to go, fare
(experience, peril, far, for, from, part, parent,
periphery, portal, opportunity).
5. Jacques Derrida, “Parergon”, in La Vérité en
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Peinture, Paris: Flammarion, 1978.
6. Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, trans. Richard
Sieburth, New York: Harvard University Press,
1986.
7. Benjamin, Moscow Diary, 106.
8. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator”, in
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry
134
Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, 69 –
82.
9. The references are to William Blake’s poem, The
Second Coming (1919), and Gilbert Simondon’s
concepts of supersaturation, metastability, and
crisis, which are foundational to the process of
individuation. See Gilbert Simondon, L’Indivi-
duation Psychique et Collective, Paris: Aubier/
Flammarion, 2007, 12; and Michael Tawa,
Agencies of the Frame, Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 49.
10. Plato, Cratylus: 401c-e.
11. Jean-Paul Vernant, Myth and Thought amongst the
Greeks, trans. Janet Lloyd with Jeff Fort, London
and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983,
127– 175, 232.
12. James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld,
New York: Harper & Row, 1979, 40.
13. Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld, 40.