The alienating architectural machine projected by its alienated product, the architect
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals;
To the architect, the drawing, as any language, is a subjective process, dependent on the interpretation of what we see, but subjacent to that there´s something essential that may pass unnoticed. The architect as designer is also a canvas, painted by himself and always modulated, reesculpted by the multiple realities in which one’s submerged, or as proposed by Anne Marie-Willis, there’s always a loop of variating influences imposing their own inconstancy upon both the architect and the project:
“designing is fundamental to being human – we design, that is to say, we deliberate, plan and scheme in ways which prefigure our actions and makings – in turn we are designed by our designing and by that which we have designed” – Anne Marie-Willis
The prefiguration of the action is where the architect puts himself as the intermediary between what is and what is expected to happen. This prefiguration is dependent on the way the other will interpret it and in this frontier many complications can arise, sometimes even preventing the architect’s intents, as an author, to take place. Despite the architecture being experience and stretch beyond the symbols by which it’s composed, we can try to comprehend this problem through what Roland Barthes alerts about interpreting the creative activities without the original Author:
“We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.” – Roland Barthes
Not being only image, even if it’s constituted of symbols, and also based on external point of views to realize itself, the architecture is a foggy region between the seen and the unseen. It’s in this not seeing that much of it´s potential is lost or made real. This other side is what the theory tries to uncover and can be only be intellectually comprehended.
The urban tension, the many filters and focal points in shock inside the space are not visible in the moment of the experience. The architect’s duty is to know the space being altered, not only from the technical standpoint but also through the theoretic apparatus. Architecture is impossible without knowing the unseens behind the project. If a political, economic or social relation goes unnoticed and creates a future problem or maintain a segregatory status quo, for example, it’s not fair to exempt the architect since if the construction crumbled it wouldn’t be less of a disaster than your project perpetuating a historical problem in your country. This invisible side is part of the special reality and the architect must take responsibility over it.
In the city it’s wrong to suppose the architectural experience only as special, external and individualistic. This ideal autistic architect still thrives in the discourse used to comment the history of architecture. The creation of categories to such an extent that both drawing and project, where the intellectual, the design, the internalized activity happens, get to extremes that not only are far from real but also risk aesthetic and stylish solutions in flagrant opposition with a minor (as the term is used by Deleuze and Guattari to talk about literature) and less arrogant architecture.
Every action presupposes in some level a complex social and psychological mechanism. The German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein denied the idea of the human being composed by a dichotomy between internal and external or thought and action as totally distinct fields of the human nature. When proposing the humane as a psychophysical unit, Wittgenstein sees thinking and acting as one. Taking this concept freely and even with certain irresponsibility, we can think the architectonic prefiguration inhabiting the thinking and the acting as a process beyond the individual psychology, including the inescapable ranging from each society superstructure to each individual personality nuances.
The physical space is translated by the architect through the drawing – the language that will later become a text space – this intentional sewing to create a multiple tapestry of signs with their possibilities. The intentionality matters only as it relates to the designer’s thoughts since once it’s determined, there’s (or should have) an uprooting of the project before it can go to it´s true creation phase: the exposition to multiple and unrestricted interpretations steaming from the collective imaginary around those signs, bringing new meanings both for the project and for the signs at the same time. However, being a psychophysical unity, the architect and his entire creative production are based on an intellectual refinement that, in this situation, pass through the studies of a deep theoretical repertoire acting as a foundation for the architecture and is able of both to potencialize or to restrain. The architect truly capable of prefiguring an engaged architecture is that whose theoretical apparatus gives him the best tools to see that which is not visible.
The architect’s blindness was never a problem to megalomaniac projects, but allowed many to avoid seeing the favela removals; it does not prevent anyone from getting the diploma, but prevent many architecture students from seeing the neighborhood where they study and live, the people with whom they share the space, the surrounding shocks. Blindness and superficiality are both programmed, they have an agenda and it’s not in the best interest of the architect nor of the people who need his education.
We are being convinced that the architect is part of a fancy office or the hero of an aborted revolution, an egocentric artist, most of all an excess. Given this, to search for the unseen, this structure that, laid upon us, crush so many things is a necessity, an act of lucid rebellion. Without thinking outside the given conjuncture the architecture is just a name, a technic, one more product.
Modern literature and the death of the Author in Roland Barthes
“...literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost...” - Roland Barthes
It's common to see fans seeking explanations about movies and books on the authors, considering them the only reliable source of interpretation, but Anne-Marie Willis argues that the designer has no prevalence over his creation. And there's a great thinker foccused on literature who followed a somewhat similar line of thought. In 1968 Roland Barthes published “The death of the Author”, a instigating text about the relation of the Author, the Critics and of the Reader with the modern literature.
If both of them converge to a critic that undermines the importance of the creator, Barthes was more interested with literature and went beyond, showing that to question the image of the Author is also questioning the Critics. Barthes asserts that literature is independent, a body of symbols:
“All writing is itself this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices, and that literature is precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Probably this has always been the case: once an action is recounted, for intransitive ends, and no longer in order to act directly upon reality — that is, finally external to any function but the very exercise of the symbol — this disjunction occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins.”
Stéphane Mallarmé was a french critic and poet to whom Barthes credits the pioneering in this concept of literature:
“In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and foresee in its full extent the necessity of substituting language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own it; for Mallarme, as for us, it is language which speaks, not the author: to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality — never to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realistic novelist — that point where language alone acts, “performs,” and not “oneself”: Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author for the sake of the writing (which is, as we shall see, to restore the status of the reader.)”
Against the conventional critic and questioning not only the place of the author but even the literary canon, Barthes goes on with the idea that a work is always dependent on the reader:
“The Author is supposed to feed the book — that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child. Quite the contrary, the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.
[...]
We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.”
Opposing the image of the Author and that of the writer, he exposes what he consider to be a multiple writing:
"Succeeding the Author, the writer no longer contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous dictionary, from which he derives a writing which can know no end or halt: life can only imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, a lost, infinitely remote imitation.
[…]
In a multiple writing, indeed, everything is to be distinguished, but nothing deciphered; structure can be followed, “threaded” (like a stocking that has run) in all its recurrences and all its stages, but there is no underlying ground; the space of the writing is to be traversed, not penetrated: writing ceaselessly posits meaning but always in order to evaporate it: it proceeds to a systematic exemption of meaning. Thus literature (it would be better, henceforth, to say writing), by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a “secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law."
Barthes calls out the negligence with the figure of the reader and contests the idea that it depends on the Author:
"In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader: the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination; but this destination can no longer be personal: the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.
[…]
We know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author."
Subversive, “The death of the Author” is the kind of idea that still needs to be debated. And maybe this is the definition of any relevant thought. In 1968 Barthes made an objection that no reader nor writer should ignore, but that's still less popular than it should, at least out of the academic circles.