Postscript
1. CONDITION
The Fourth Wall of Architecture takes as its starting point the postmodern condition of twenty-first century late-capitalist Western society, which is regarded as a condition that estranges inhabitants from the bigger picture. The inhabitants have all become strangers to their own culture, or rather, tourists within their own culture. Unlike Camus’s stranger, whose estrangement from reality is characterised by resistance,[1] the estrangement of the tourist is characterised by a form of stupidity.
1.1 La condition touriste
The stupidity of the tourist is a lack of knowledge about the strange world the tourist visits, but accompanied by a willingness to accept anything he or she might learn without passing judgement:
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don’t cling to you the way they do back home. You’re able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You’re expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travellers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting in fold-out maps. You don’t know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm.[2]
The tourist’s detachment from his or her surroundings makes it possible to accept any cultural tradition without being offended, because in the tourist’s experience it is not of concern. This is exemplified by the fact that most tourists learn to speak a strange language by adopting insults, curses, and other profanities, without experiencing them as vulgar. The touristic detachment suspends every moral involvement with the world around.
1.2 Ideology
According to Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern estrangement of the bigger picture can be described as a loss of metanarratives.[3] More precisely, this is a loss of the belief in the metanarratives, but not a loss of the metanarratives themselves. Only now, they live on as cultural traditions, customs, anecdotes, and so forth. We have all become tourists in the face of history, detached from the truths of the metanarratives, but willing to accept them without moral judgement. It is in this sense that Slavoj Žižek’s formula of ideology can be understood:
The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital: ‘Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ – ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. […] The cynical subject [however] is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it’. […] The fundamental level of ideology, however, is not that of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself. […] if the place of the illusion is in the reality of doing itself, then this formula can be read in quite another way: ‘they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it’.[4]
This is how la condition touriste functions. We don’t believe in the metanarratives anymore, but we still act as though we do. Truth has become a historical fact, determined by archaeological research, etymological references, historical analysis, sociological framing, always held at a distance, as some kind of anecdote in a tourist guide, but it still functions as truth. The only difference is that now the belief in a truth has been relegated from the subject to different objects. The individual doesn’t believe anymore, but the things themselves believe in the individual’s place and in this way keep the metanarratives alive:
This seems to be a basic Lacanian proposition, contrary to the usual thesis that a belief is something interior and knowledge something exterior (in the sense that it can be verified through an external procedure). Rather, it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people. It is similar to Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper into a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking […]. In this way, the wheel is praying for me, instead of me – or, more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel.[5]
The question is, then, through what kind of objects do we still believe? What kind of objects still keep the metanarratives functioning, not as actively lived truths we still consciously believe in, but as truths held at a distance, passively experienced and still structuring our acts?
1.3 Architecture
The process taking place here, is a process in which a certain knowledge or belief is lost, but, as a compensation, the objects supporting this knowledge or belief are obsessively restored and preserved in archives, in museums, in vaults. A displacement of knowledge and belief takes place in this way:
Such a displacement of our most intimate feelings and attitudes onto some figure of the Other is at the very core of Lacan’s notion of the big Other; it can affect not only feelings but also beliefs and knowledge – the Other can also believe and know for me. In order to designate this displacement of the subject’s knowledge onto another, Lacan coined the notion of the subject supposed to know.[6]
These objects release the tourist from his or her responsibility and can then be accepted without judgement as historical artefacts or cultural traditions:
‘I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture’ seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. ‘Culture’ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them quite seriously. This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as ‘barbarians’, as anti-cultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take their beliefs seriously.[7]
Is it possible that architecture, in certain places, has assumed the role of, in Jacques Lacan’s terminology, this sujet supposé savoir? Is it possible that the physical environment we live in is still structured by certain truths and beliefs we don’t actively hold anymore, but still passively accept through our experience of this physical environment? And, if so, is there a form of architecture possible that can break this unconscious acceptance and again actively engage us in the way we live our everyday lives?
2. SIMULACRA
The idea of the simulacrum introduces a split in the practice of architecture. On the one hand there is the physical environment of the architectural artefact itself, the everyday life, the functionality, the flow of people. On the other hand, there is the simulacrum, through which the virtual image of the architectural artefact disconnects itself from the physical reality and becomes integrated in a larger discourse as a separate object, in which its function is to fix meanings, beliefs, or knowledge, something rarely experienced explicitly in the physical environment itself.
2.1 Representation
The classic relation between architecture and power is one of representation. This means that the function of architecture within an ideological discourse is to represent the power structure that produces the discourse. In other words, architecture gives a concrete, tangible dimension to an otherwise abstract entity in order to establish the power of this entity. Kings, dictators and religions thus relied heavily on architecture to establish their power, and have for this reason produced some of the most remarkable architecture.[8]
Developments in communication technology, however, have diminished the relevance of physical space (proximity is not a condition for communication anymore, email and mobile phones have rendered the physical address useless) and transferred the function of representation from the field of architecture to the field of mass media (the house doesn’t represent the inhabitants anymore, instead their social media profiles do).[9]
2.2 Simulation
According to Jean Baudrillard, this substitution of mediated images for their physical reality has progressed to the point that the signs of the real, which are being used in the system of mass media, have overtaken the real itself. The image of the real has replaced the real and has become a new reality, or, as Baudrillard calls it, a ‘hyperreality’:
The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control – and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. […] In fact, it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere. […] By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials.[10]
The consequence for architecture is the disconnection between the physical architecture and its representational function. On the one hand because the physical architecture has lost its representational function and is replaced by its virtual image (as an image, a statistic, a calculation), and on the other hand because this virtual image of the architecture doesn’t signify the physical architecture anymore: the representational link between the sign and the real is broken:
Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum – not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. […] Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference.[11]
The idea of architecture and representation is thus replaced by the idea of architecture and simulation. What occurs here is a split between the architectural artefact and its virtual image: both live on separately in different realities. The everyday reality of the physical building has little connection anymore to the virtual image of the building used in the system of representation.
3. THE PARADOX OF ARCHITECTURE
The split between the physical experience of the architectural artefact and the representational function of its virtual image, results in the creation of two separate realities. The transgression of this separation, of this limit, can result in a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect) questioning both the meaning of the physical environment and the representational function of its image.
3.1 Paradox
The split between the representational function of architecture and its physical reality can perhaps shed new light on the paradox of architecture, formulated by Bernard Tschumi:
the strange paradox that seems to haunt architecture: namely, the impossibility of simultaneously questioning the nature of space and, at the same time, making or experiencing a real space.[12]
Tschumi argues that it’s impossible for the conceptual questioning of a space and the physical experience of this space to coincide. In this sense it could also be argued that the representational function of the architectural simulacrum and the experience of the physical reality of the architectural artefact are two separate realities that don’t coincide. In the same way Tschumi then argues that a rare moment is possible in which the experience of space becomes the concept of the space, this work tries to develop a practice of architecture in which the realities of the physical architecture and of its representational function do coincide.
3.2 The moment of architecture
In relation to the paradox of architecture, Tschumi defined the moment of architecture as this moment when the experience of space becomes its own concept, the moment when real space and ideal space converge:
it is my contention that the moment of architecture is that moment when architecture is life and death at the same time, when the experience of space becomes its own concept.[13]
Viewed in regard to the opposition between the architectural simulacrum and the physical reality of architecture, this moment of architecture can be defined as the moment where the representational function of architecture becomes explicit in the physical experience of the architectural artefact; in other words, when the split between the physical architecture and its simulacrum is transgressed in the physical space itself. It’s in this way that the architectural transgression that Tschumi proposes, can be understood:
Architecture seems to survive in its erotic capacity only wherever it negates itself, where it transcends its paradoxical nature by negating the form society expects of it. In other words, it is not a matter of destruction or avant-garde subversion but of transgression.[14]
It is this architectural transgression that defines the moment of architecture, the moment when the experience of space becomes its own concept.
3.3 Transgression
Tschumi’s ideas about the moment of architecture and its transgression draw of course from Georges Bataille’s work on eroticism, in which Bataille formulates this transgression more poignantly:
Transgression opens the door into what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains these limits just the same. Transgression is complementary to the profane world, exceeding its limits but not destroying it.[15]
The architectural reality that wants to undermine the representational function of its simulacrum needs this point of transgression in its physical space. This means that the physical architecture needs to be based on the limits and expectations the discourse demands from it, but needs to employ these limits and expectations in such a way that it undermines and negates them, but without destroying them. In doing so, the architectural artefact becomes a tool to undermine a certain discourse from within.
3.4 Verfremdungseffekt
This undermining of limits and expectations can also be found in the work of Bertolt Brecht and his definition of the Verfremdungseffekt:
playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious.[16]
Brecht explains that to achieve this effect ‘the artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him […]. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place.’[17] This Verfremdungseffekt could be interpreted as a tool to achieve the moment of architecture described by Tschumi. This would result in an architecture that constructs spaces that try to break this fourth wall separating the physical space and the discourse, resulting in a veritable Verfremdungsarchitektur.
In short, Brecht achieves this Verfremdungseffekt by breaking through the wall that separates fiction and reality, that separates the play onstage and the unseen spectators in their seats, not by eliminating the fourth wall but by making it the subject of the play and thus making it explicit. Through the Verfremdungseffekt, Brecht makes the concept of theatre the subject of the play itself, and thus the concept of theatre becomes experienced in the space of the theatre, achieving Tschumi’s moment of architecture.
4. FICTION
The transgression of the split between the physical space and its representational function is an attempt actively to engage the audience with the ideology that structures the physical space. This transgression can also be described as a transgression of the split between fiction and reality and results in an architecture that questions its own meaning. This transgression causes fixed meanings and conventions to slide, it undermines expectations, it problematises everyday life.
4.1 The fiction of architecture
In Brecht’s theatre, the fiction of the play is not exposed as fiction in order to expose some other, true reality. It is exposed as fiction to prevent the audience from subconsciously identifying with the characters in the play, which should become a conscious, critical act. The fiction that needs to be exposed is thus not the content of the play, but the conditions in which the theatre takes place: the condition that the theatre is experienced as real (in the sense of the subconscious identification of the audience with the characters), even though the audience knows that it’s fictional. This again brings to mind Žižek’s formula of ideology, already mentioned above:
But if the place of the illusion is in the reality of doing itself, then this formula can be read in quite another way: ‘they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it’.[18]
Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt can be seen as a way to make this knowledge explicit in the activity itself, thus undermining the ideology still active in the act. This undermining of the ideology is achieved by breaking the fourth wall of the theatre, as a result of which the audience is estranged from the conditions in which the theatre takes place and is thus confronted with the ideology structuring the theatre.
This estrangement could then be seen as a transition from the estrangement of the tourist to the estrangement of Camus’s stranger. Whereas the audience of the theatre was formerly an audience of tourists, passively following the rules of the game, they are now an audience of strangers, confronted with the ideology that structures the rules of the game:
I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.[19]
The practice of a Verfremdungsarchitektur is thus a form of architecture that tries to confront its inhabitants with the ideology that structures their everyday life through the built environment. It is a practice of architecture that tries to confront the subject with the space and its representational function. It tries to convert the passive presence of the subject into an active, critical presence. The architectural fiction that needs to be exposed can be defined as the fiction of the discourse. This is all the meanings and conventions fixed within the discourse and presented as natural and universal, but which is always contingent and temporal. The exposing of the fiction of the discourse can then perhaps best be understood through the concepts of two literary devices, which are used in the field of literature to break the fictional dream of a story.
4.2 Masks
The practice of a Verfremdungsarchitektur is a way of creating architecture that questions its own reality. It poses the question of whether this reality is not merely a fictional construction. And, if so, what then is the reality behind the fiction?
A possible answer can be found in Žižek’s notion of the mask, in which he argues that the mask, or the fiction, is more true than any so-called reality, the mask is maybe the only reality we have:
From the 1950s, social psychology varies endlessly the motif of how, in public life, we are all ‘wearing masks’, adopting identities which obfuscate our true selves. However, wearing a mask can be a strange thing: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more truth in the mask than in what we assume to be our ‘real self’. Recall the proverbial impotent shy person who, while playing the cyberspace interactive game, adopts the screen identity of a sadistic murderer and irresistible seducer – it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an imaginary supplement, a temporary escape from his real life impotence. The point is rather that, since he knows that the cyberspace interactive game is ‘just a game’, he can ‘show his true self’, do things he would never have done in real life interactions – in the guise of a fiction, the truth about himself is articulated.[20]
It is at this point that reality and simulacrum converge, intertwine, and, in the end, pose the question of whether there is ever a possibility of experiencing reality. In this sense it is perhaps the fiction itself that is real, but only when experienced from a conscious, critical position.
[1] Camus: ‘I summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark I admit was highly paradoxical: “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game’ (as quoted in Carroll 2007: 27).
[3] ‘The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv).
[8] Georges Bataille already formulated this view of the discursive function of architecture in 1929: ‘Architecture is the expression of the true nature of societies, as physiognomy is the expression of the nature of individuals. However, this comparison is applicable, above all, to the physiognomy of officials (prelates, magistrates, admirals). In fact, only society’s ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses itself in actual architectural constructions. […] The fall of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of things. This mass movement is difficult to explain otherwise than by popular hostility towards monuments which are their veritable masters’ (Bataille 1929: 117, as quoted in Lahiji 2005: 128).
[9] In his essay ‘Bad Dream Houses’, Bart Verschaffel explained the consequences of these developments in communication technology: ‘Before the introduction of the mobile phone and the virtual mailbox (the email address), fixed physical places were necessary to contact each other. These fixed places (the place where people lived and worked) or addresses had a significant social role, they were the anchor points of communication: the places where you could go see someone or wait for someone. The mobile phone, wireless internet and the miniaturisation of the archive (the memory stick) make it possible for people to be contacted at any moment and to have all information at all times. The developments in communication technology resulted in a disconnection of the house from the public, which ultimately undermines the representational function of the house’ (Verschaffel [2006] 2010: 146–47; my translation).
[10] Baudrillard (1994: 2).