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Windows (In Memory of Walter
Benjamin)
Reflections
Reflections
What do
we see reflected in the windows of buildings? Ourselves only.
Or better, our reflection - in which we believe. Which we believe to be ourselves. What is it we see, then,
in the windows of buildings? Not the interior of the building. Nor our interior. A reflection. Of ourselves and other buildings. Beneath its surface
patina, its iridescent coating, the sheen of oil on water, the thing remains
somehow beyond reach. The thing-in-itself of the building, as of ourselves, remains invisible, occluded from vision - veiled
in light. Remaining present yet unperceived behind a wall of
reflected light. By this route neither object
nor perceiving subject offer further information about themselves. Only by
considering the fact of reflection itself (and so reflecting on the limits of
reflection) can we learn of the interiors of things and so of the interiors of
ourselves.
(Ourselves only.)
But not only ourselves. That which
we ourselves have made. Reflected in that which (we ourselves...). Both
architecture and the concepts we use to comprehend it are susceptible to the
paradoxes of infinite regress. Both are made by ourselves
(ourselves only). Caught in these force-fields of reflection the problem is
rather: how is it that we can avoid recognising only ourselves?
Reflections
Reflections
Visions
on the surface (where all is surface, where the stream of images passes,
obedient to the laws of a mobile geometry).
Visions
from the surface (the tattooed skin of reflection, cinema of passing truth...).
...the passing of the sky, the passing of
clouds; alternating streaks of blue and white, travelling up a building like
the foam of waves and the blue of the sea as the tide washes over - or just a
sheet of swirling grey cloud coating the surface of the building like the sea
in a storm...
Grey skies: aluminium sea.
Blue skies: the lap of waves lilting on a lapis lazuli
sea. Urban dream. Blaze of gold as the sun hits the
glassy surface of the sea.
By night: black sea, silver sea. Then -clad only in an
aura of pale phosphorescence - the gorse glow of the ghost city rising up from
beneath the waves.
The
sea of windows.
Alchemy of girders and glass. The
secret of the philosopher's stone as applied to architecture; turning base
metal into gold. The minted gold of the symbol; the
gold of wealth burnishing the sacred. Glass as the
catalyst in the creation of the
Double
vision (degrees of reflection and the co-existence of images).
On the
surface - the silver print of the gelatine-coated image. Beneath - the bronze
blur of the daguerreotype. Layers of
photomontage accrete in the theatre of the urban eye. The fleeting forms of the
foreground glide quickly over the slow ghosts of the back-lit interior.
Pure vision into interiors. The voyeurism of the
beguiled eye. The path lead by curiosity. And at the opposite pole, the impure
vision of superimposed images. Of the two it is the latter that incites more
curiosity as to content, narrative and meaning (or is it the single image with
its ease of temporal extrapolation that more quickly holds the attention of the
passer-by - a differentiation of the image or of types of viewer)? If the
simple framed image is univocal in meaning, then it is the composite image, the
result of superimposition, a sharing of space and screen, that offers
equalisation or ambiguity (as to priority) and is thus the richer, offering all
the potentials of the double image. The very undecidability of ground becomes
the ground of the ethics and politics of the image. The undecidability as to
semantic or symbolic priority (closure) is therefore more important even than
the contest of contents. The passion of the double image; perhaps an
unravelling visual rhetoric - the image and its figure combined (but which is
which)? The sign has become symbol, with second meaning shown; together
becoming symbol again. Or as unlike combined with unlike (the very allegory of
allegory). Either way there is a demand for yet another link in the chain of
second meaning. The double image: a world revealed beneath a world, appearing
as fish in an aquarium, a vision in the sky, or the projection of an image onto
the urban landscape (the appearance of a face, a reflection in a window).
Result: in the realm of motivation, an unholy alliance is forged between the
desire within and the actions (supposed) within the semi-occluded,
semi-revealed interior of the building. Alternance of surface and depth.
Alternance of mirror and soul, of veil and sanctuary, of screen and ritual
altar. The revelation of things set aside (their ritual appearance). Alternance
itself as ritual. The periodicity of ritual compressed. The ritual of
alternance. Simultaneous presentation as intensified reframing; double coding
in a single space; a single space set aside for special meaning; the
reformulating of vision - like art. (Exactly like art.)
As the surface of the sea stills... sudden vision from
beneath the waves.
White sky; white sea.
Snow on frozen crests, dark shapes move beneath the
ice that covers the ocean.
Vision through the veil. Tales born of translucence.
Smoke eddies in the diviner's glass. Windows in time. Ghosts move in strange
orbits, occupy unlikely landscapes. Interior and exterior planes are combined.
There is a confusion of past, present and future. The passage of time, the
passage of shadows; there is life beneath the surface, but its nature is
unclear. The gift of vision, like the words of the sibyl, are enigmatic, closed
to certitude, open to guess-work, to the desire for novelty, to the will to
know - to the will to invent. The image seeks the warm wrap of process as we
succumb to the need to narrate, to recall, to foresee. Echoes of a past yet to
be invented, of a future present. A glimpse of predestination, or has the work
of mourning already begun? The spirits of time may be conjured forth from any
glass. Windows in time.
Like a reflection in rippled waters, the image made
pale by apparent distance may denote not only a physical change of ground, but
also connote a temporal change of ground from present to past or to
future. The other possible sense
suggests an infinite multiplication of distance, a qualitative shift in time,
placing the ghostly figure, like the watery reflection of the furtherest
uplands, as somewhere out there, beyond the pale.
Walls of jet and polished ebony.
Black mother-of-pearl.
Starless night on the sea...
Vision
denied. An absence of interior coincides with an absence of reflection.
(Reflection as a means to iconoclastic impassivity).
Black; absent colour of the total absorption of light.
The swallowing of light as a reflective medium. A darkness beyond suggestion
(true darkness is soft).
Black glass-clad buildings. Architecture with
attitude. Hard, shiny, reflective darkness -darkness that denies the images it
should reflect- has the (figurative) effect of placing dark glasses upon a
building. The blind effect of a closed interior; intention concealed. The paths
of vision are held in secret; the eyes to the soul of a building are covered
(access to identity is denied; or open only to a certain kind of suggestion). A
building blinded in appearance; yet the blinding is ours... Reflection becomes
a barrier to reflection; a screen for reflection. Denial and provocation in
one. Denial of vision as the provocation of the image. Sight too abhors a
vacuum.
Shadow moving behind shadow; shadows within shadows.
Shadows.
Gilded vision. Golden windows. Combining the solidity
of the Universal Exchange Equivalent (as was) with the mystic lustre of a
captured sun. Gold marks out the total building, a means of isolating a
building from its context, of making it stand alone - like some Western
brand-name hotels in the countries of the East. Warsawa's twin towers;
architecture as ideological residue; from the Stalinist wedding cake (ex-Palace
of Culture) to the gold cigar case of a Western hotel. A phallic contest
(Freud's cigar was never just a cigar). Symptom, sign and performance of the
imported financial domination of the East - plainly, a show off. Gilt-edged.
Gold tooth among so many (unpolished) ivories. The gold in windows. The gilt in
windows.
The blinding surface of the sea, as the sun shatters
on the waves masking all activity beneath in a shower of light.
Disguise; vision deferred. A return to the dominance
of the surface. Disavowal; the building made semi-absent (made semi-present).
The building vanishes. Becomes another. Becomes all but itself. Takes on the
features of everything around it. Perfect concealment; pure invisibility.
Showing nothing of itself. Pure surface, the concealment of skin; figure for
the concealment of an interior (or the concealment of its function). What is
there to hide? A secret? Or should we read hiding as showing (off). The display
of architecture, telling more than what it is, collecting space, making space
(with suggestion as the only means to augment lack... making time).
The vision in its frame. The figure and its ground
become an image in context (the context framing the figure/ground relation
found in the double image - a third element is added to the semantic cauldron).
The combination of the reflected image in windows (of the sky above, the
parallel opposite building, the reflection of the street, depending upon our
point of view and the optical laws of reflection) with the surface of the
building only further encourages the ambiguity as to time which has been the
temporal aspect of the framing and embedding of the image since the dawn of art
(and before, in the interpretation of natural framings). So always an aspect -
even if half-forgotten - of our immediate environment and our consumption of
images. Whether made by nature or the culture of human intervention, the visual
field is, in this way, made up of a combination of textures, planes, screens
and citations (even if monotheism occasionally dreams of the mono-logic image
of absence provided by iconoclasticism or refined by Abstract Expressionism).
The effect is often one of plurivocity, perhaps at times the display of such -
even of the control of such for political effect. The re-framing of the
reflected image in the context of the sky, may appear to place it firmly in the
context of a host building standing alone; more usually, however, the actual
context will be that of a sequence of buildings, of a street or a particular
view. Except when the significant
context has not been in some way mediated by levels of the built environment
felt to be the basic units of
significance of the visual field, as incarnated in the urban experience, in
the experience of architecture.
*
The space above the waters. (Air, one must not forget,
is the only true element of space, offering an invisible content as the
complement of an equally invisible abstraction. It is the element we breathe as
well as the element in which we picture pure extension. Air is the default and
ever-faithful filler of 'space' - just as it fills our lungs. Space exists as
potential, to be filled or framed - just like the lung awaiting the gasp of air
that fuels all action, fulfilling potential. If space is the region of the
unfulfilled, then architecture is the fulfilment of space - the human presence
in the absence of pure extension. Intercession between earth and sky. Cradle of
the waters of reflection).
Remember the sea itself reflects the sky. Just like a
sheet of glass, an expanse of window. Reflection. As above so below. In this
way all that which lies above also has depth (depth is space with ourselves
poised at the edge of its limit). Height then measures the distance above us,
in its reversibility and its inversion, and in its comprehended incomprehension
- the distance from ourselves, the distance to ourselves. The measure is what
returns us to ourselves. A measure without quantity. This economy of metaphor
(an economy of identity) is also the economy of human inspiration, the source
of our love for flight; the pinioning of the eagle's wing into the line of a
building; the foam of the wave reaching for the heavens.
Water as
the element of reflection; the sea as an ocean of consciousness reflected.
Remember the sea...
...the
sea itself reflects the sky... air, the invisible element... with its motions
and violence... is reflected in the sea. Invisible to all, it finds the
likeness of its visage only in the sea...
Consciousness,
reflected in a sea of windows.
Remember the sea...
...reflects
the sky. The sea, itself, awaiting, malleable, is, if only on the surface,
affected by the invisible giant that floats above it. The weight of air
pressing upon it, keeping it flat. The capricious god that marks and wipes its
surface like a palimpsest. A surface no sooner scarred then cured, now
distorted like a face in pain, now stilled to the smoothness of a mirror.
Showing the face of its maker. An imprint found only in the sea.
Relief, the semblance of the deity in the shape of the
waters.
Writing, signs inscribed upon the body of the waters
by the scribe of the mind.
Waves, confessions of the air.
In the Book of Genesis, creation parts the waters
leaving the firmament floating between two seas, the sea above and the sea
below... creation's reflection caught above and below... with its reflections
in turn reflected... above and below... from above and from beneath...
And the
sea from beneath.
Like a
lotus flower or water lily seen from below... tangled in the dangling roots we
look up to the light filtering down from above.
From beneath, the surface of buildings is not a
reflection (or would we, if we were there, think that it was?) rather a glow
from the other side. Architecture as the glow from beyond - last streak of the
setting sun of the eternal in the collective, in the mass labour of humanity, in
its products, us out there, in transcendent mode. Not the false light of
illusion; but a positive light on our world, requiring only a better
luminosity, a more thorough-going phosphorescence, to be worthy of the worship
we wish to offer it.
From
beneath the surface of buildings...
What is
the glow that greets us emanating from the surface. Is it a product of
reflection or refraction? Does it reach us by means of the mirror or by means
of the prism?
Reflection.
Reflection (descending from above the sea to illuminate
the entire surface of the ocean, transforming it into a glittering golden
mass). A reflective surface which offers us ourselves through our valued signs;
light reflected, our hope of it, our symbolic investment in its powers - one
aspect of ourselves (our positive reflection on ourselves). The other aspect is
offered back to us as our own reflection; ourselves as faces. The face of the
multitude in the mirror of the sea.
Refraction.
Refraction. A membrane filtering through the light from above
(from beneath the sea, looking up to the glittering surface, reversed, like
living at the back of a mirror, seeing the reverse of the silver and the
strange light it lets through) the light left over after reflection. After
symbolic and actual reflection. The absorption of these by our need to swim in
a sea of recognition, water ceding place to a fixity denied by fashion. What
kind of light is it that remains? This half light that filters down, weak,
enigmatic, the remainder of reflection; reminder of a residue beyond sign and
self; a chimera that eludes meaning; but remains nevertheless (the reflection
of the remainder, changing as quickly as it appears, like light dancing on the
underside of water)...
Or, if we are below (or were below and are above... or
anyway, have become conscious of an advent, which takes on the form of an
inversion) then reflection is refraction, and refraction, reflection. Our
reflection was but a seepage, filtered through - given faces by our fertile
imagination (a colossal prosopopoeia, a personification from which to front the
desperate appropriation of ideals borrowed from a place other than our own) or
else the faces of others... Refraction it was that offered us back our true
image (light dancing on the underside of water).
*
Archaeology of levels on the horizontal plane. A
ninety degree tilt of the vertical compass from its fidelity to the North.
Despite the mutually reinforcing force fields of gravity and the fall of light
(and the human response they call forth, eye-raising) it is the horizon that
wins as the model for discreteness in architecture. It is as if gravity and the
pressure of light, the weight of light, had compressed all architectural
endeavour into layers of strata shot through with ever-finer lines of compacted
differentiation. What would a decompressed architecture look like: the pure
lift of spires is our only clue. The rest is the accretion of stone,
experience, memory; three sedimented layers, themselves sedimented into three.
A visual continuity perpetually refreshed at every turn of the architectural
clock and at the turn of every city corner.
The phenomenology of the built environment is a
geology. Three levels present themselves for excavation; gifts to our
perception, expectation of the architecture around us, breath of urban visual
life, water in which we swim.
Divided, not as one had been lead to expect, by the
segmentation of the vertical, with its basic unit, the individual building and
its vertical orientation (only really ever true if it has the luxury of
standing alone - and even then it is read or perceived according to its
context); but by the natural division of our experience into discrete and
sedimented layers. The several horizons of architectural perception, the three
levels of city life, the parallel zones of urban experience; a phenomenological
zoning. (Each zone, each part, with its own symbolic language, its own temporal
affiliations, its own network of temporal-semantic valencies). Even two-storey
suburbia is not immune to these levels - and ceremonial buildings seem at times
positively to define their parts against the simple three part form - giving
the free-standing two-part building (symbolic function above entry function) of
sacred or state purpose (contrasted against the three-part high-rise canyon of
the modern city street, itself evolved through the classical and the medieval).
But even here they reassert themselves. The three parts.
Three
parts.
Each with
its own angle of reflection on eternity (each with its own angel refracting
eternity). Each with its cementing role to play in the social flux, its
justification of 'our way', its window on the world we inhabit. The one we
make, the one we participate in. And the one we don't - the hard edge of the
reality principle.
The
three-tiers of the urban. Three parts to experience.
With a
window for each of the three parts... each with its own sail to catch the wind
of temporality, each with its own angle on time. Each with its own angel of time.
Solar. A give-away glint of light from the unreachable
high above. A message from the heavens, like the ray of the Annunciation
slanting down (from left to right) from the painting's top right to the place
of us mortals below (down to the picture's bottom left, place of Hell in
religious iconography - but see also the history of photography). It is the
glint of solar windows, hinting at an interior which looks out over the city, a
dwelling on the skyline, the possibility, perhaps, of the presence of a
penthouse - most mythical of urban sites. If relatively unobtrusive, an elite
place - rather than a palace. If blazoning its presence, a palace on stilts;
luminous, a discernible entity floating on the surface of the submerged city,
an ocean filled with tree-trunks leading up to the sun-blest zones above.
Shafts of light pierce through (from left to right; the right of the Other, or
objective point of view) reminding us of the darkness in which we live, yet
providing an aim, an aspiration, an ideal. If the penthouse carries a
suggestion of more intimate fantasies, then this aspect is anyway attenuated or
sacralised (as taboo, transgression, or transgressive privilege) due to its
embedding within solar features. A dream palace, site of power, the sight of
power - to be consumed, flaunted. The city's expensive haircut. Conspicuous
consumption.
The window on the solar; pointer and place; place and
palace (ersatz heaven, place of the gods, palaces of the gods). Deixis thereof... reflecting, refracting from the
house of the blest; the angle of refraction an infinite line, free of gravity.
Communicating by metonymy (by touch, of course) its otherworldly luminosity to
the aspiring earthbound, those who have climbed to the top of the ant-hill -
and would have us mistake them for the tall shadowless immortals, whom in a
kinder light we prefer to call angels. They live there and we wish to join
them. But the eye moves on. Rising from the glass pane, prism of rays
refracted, conduit of light, embedded, like a diamond in a backlit silhouette,
in a structure itself soaring, a vital geometry which reflects the sky,
pointing up to its source and centre, the great orb of the sun, which itself
turns into a gesture upwards and beyond, to the stars and yet further out, to
that utmost limit of our reason, to the metaset of our beliefs - returned to us
from beyond the stars. Horizon of thought: horizon of the solar. Meeting place
of architecture and the infinite. Resting place for the feet of angels.
Facade. Often equally unreachable -if less distant in
social and symbolic terms- there are the windows of the facade. Yet in any
high-rise street they are still far above us and it is this distance that spurs
on the imagination. These windows may be differentiated by their surface area
and relative discreteness: they range from the all-encompassing through the
segregated to the variegated. From the glass totality of the curtain-wall
(reflecting sky, other facades and skylines) to, at the opposite pole,
small(er) discrete units or openings - with or without the frame of an (often
historicist) lintel or casting. This latter type (the discrete window) leads to
the small room fantasies like those depicted in Edward Hopper's paintings; a
voyeurism of the imagined image. The sheer
sides of the curtain wall reflect back the ocean. (A wall of glass stands at
the rim of the ocean).
The window on the 'facade' is often found to be a
window onto our more venal dreams. Our utopias of the flesh. What bodies might
lie behind such windows and what might they do? Denial of vision; the
ambiguities of angle, half-seen, half-imagined; the light slanting-off to
reflect and conceal; all limits feed suggestion. Impassibility breeds desire.
Absence titillates the stray everyday strands of passion; filaments of
electricity, frayed by the working day, blindly seek their respite in an earth
made of glass. Windows: glass magnets attracting the incidental powder of
desire. Released by the friction of urban passage; remainder of everyday
sensuousity (feeding the sensuousity of the everyday); the remains of passion,
background noise of desire. Now aimless - now oscillating around a pole of
attraction. Released at the lightest touch; light enough not to disturb our
everyday trajectories: just distracting enough to gild the latter with a patina
of sensuality; gathering its sheen from its (vain) belief in being somehow
illicit. This blind semi-conscious swooning, luke-warm delirium of the unseen
and the unseeing, is what is provoked by the wall of windows; as much by the
canyons of glass of the urban scene as the all-to predictable glow of the
upstairs light in the curtained bedroom. The infinite tendency of desire is
linked to our unseeing knowledge of the presence of others, in confined spaces,
be it work or repose. Play is our imagination's response; sexual play, the
natural course of the imagination (the labour in place behind the office
facade, becomes the place of sexual labour). 'Going up-stairs'. Waiting (in
whatever shape or form, race, sex, or habit). The ecstasy of the saint without
religion (sex is the religion). The angel in the bedroom.
Entry-fronting. Unwinding luminous strip of urban
passage. Itself punctuated by openings; entrances, exits, caverns of
illuminated treasures. Inescapable generality of the strip of being manifested
on the horizontal level, near infinite continuity of function and of human
scale, a band of existence lining every thoroughfare, generated by the
proximity and ubiquity of human use and passage, a passage slowed by the temptations
framed and illuminated one after another, bright cube by bright cube, tableau
by frozen tableau, a sequence of framed film stills, snippets of narrative the
story of which has been lost, or must be constructed, or just a set of family
photographs, replete with posture and mis-en-scene, all facing front, posed
before the camera, posed for the eye of the beholder, beheld behind glass. Most
dramatic are those vast encompassing screens, walls of plate glass, windows
onto other worlds, that are the shop windows of store fronts; and the effect is
similar, from the tableaux theatre of the windows of major department stores to
the intimate displays of corner shops. (As with the transparency of offices, so
we find, in the see-through interiors of coffee shops, the option on
people-shopping, as if - over and above the visual consumption of the physical
- commodities could look back, as if one could buy recognition).
In the window of the entry-fronting. The proximity of
the object. Desire at its most intimate. Subject/object together in a
force-field of glass. The very seed-bed of our wanting, hot-housed; under
glass. As we stare we enter a closed-circuit of identifications, where
reflection of self and appearance of object are brought together in the window.
The feedback loop of the self. The ghost of the self, gift of optics, now
transported into the realm of objects. Visualised together with its objects of
desire. A heaven of possessions. A heavenly possession. Repeated in show after
show, in window after shop-window, in so many displays, tableau mort, waxwork
cabaret, frozen theatre, mis-en-scene of the inner life, strip cartoon of the
soul, a succession of freeze-frames, an endless parade in an endless gallery of
phantasmagoria. A museum of present life. In the objects it offers, a present
to life of its future. Life as it will be lived in a week's, a month's, a
year's time. A life story as foretold in the pictures of the art gallery whose
relation to its waiting audience is that of the future to the present, of
divination rather than record, of prophecy rather than preservation. The future
on display. Available (at a price) but also by the mere fact of its presence as
vision. A present of vision. Future deportment revealed in a sequence of
shrines; the secret of our tomorrows fearlessly told. Small wonder so much is
invested in such displays - they feed our own tenaciously-held tendency to
display (identity, gender, class, generation, hierarchical niche; target of
niche marketing). Our investment in ourselves. The forgotten variable in the
algebra of exchange theory. Desire of the self, desire as recognition (with its
detour of desire for others), commodification and the desire for objects,
recognition and the desire for others, identity exchange at its most everyday.
The perpetual degree zero of rituality. What kind of process is it that we have
become involved in: has ritual in fact become ensnared in the irresistible rise
of the commodity? Or has commodity exchange itself become utilised by the
ever-present, ever-coiling tendrils of our identity rituals? (And who can
tell?) The angel in the mirror.
Ritual
finds its freedom in the expanses eroded by the corrosive tides of
capital.
The sea of commodities requires new rituals as its
compass.
*
Gift/Commodity/Market. The arrival of the market, the
mass, (post)modern, 'open' society, spells, not the end of the gift relation
and its roots in human identity, but its continuity on a new bed of human
exchange relations. New opportunities continually emerge. Commodification
spreads ever-wider afield, penetrating our inner-selves now as much as new
markets overseas (through services and technology). Forming ourselves even; even as it is forming
alliances with its oldest enemies, with reason (which would once have
supplanted the sea it swims in, the market) and with the gift (sacrificial,
unequal exchange) relation in its intimate affinity with our identity. An
identity once believed to be commodification's supposed antithesis and cure, or
held to be its out-dated precursor - each wing of the binary supports a
different metaphysics. This process, traceable back to all prior civilisations,
further back if exchange itself is at issue, further back still if the gift is
the nexus of exchange, this process, rather than supplanting so-called
primitive behaviour, appears, on the contrary, to act as a new arena, a fresh
field of operations for ritual forms of behaviour. If anything the ubiquity of
the market offers to the gift a field of immanence, a free space, an ocean of
potential movement, freeing it from closed cycles of paranoid cohesion, giving
it reign over fresh rituals of identification (in exchange, to be sure, for the
creation of new pastures for its multiplication, new plugs of the commodity
into the self). The gift plays traitor to the community it creates, the social
body it unites, through the body itself, betrayed by the mind, caught on the
hook of recognition; the commodity extends the rule of its precursor,
pretending its own priority and independence. And so the preponderance of the
gift relation is maintained, not least in those processes employed in secreting
identification, in manufacturing sacrificial forms (as once the approach of the
festival saw an explosion of goods for destruction, display and barter).
Looking different (today) to be sure (but not as much or as often as might have
been thought) compared to their older manifestations. Thus a genie is released,
rather than suppressed, by modernity and its endless work of uncoupling,
fraying, unthreading of tradition (making free that which it would have lead us
away from, releasing that which it would have bound, perpetuating that which it
wished hounded to extinction). Now free to appear in many forms according to
the necessities driving them, dictates of desire and identity, possession and
recognition. Using the plasticity of modern social relations and the exchanges
through which they make themselves manifest, to take form, to run free. Free
from the total organisation of previous systems of socialisation, no longer
tied into calendar-specific ritual forms, nor those designed to appease
contingent, diagnosis and cure (yet in all 'secular' advanced capitalist
societies, religious festivals become commodity festivals, the continuity of
their identity function being maintained as the gift fulfils its essential
function, shedding inherited incidentals).
A process reconfigured in the rarefied reflection of society, a
reflection to be found everywhere around us in the ubiquity of windows.
In windows.
In
windows.
The temporality of desire (I). A promise ever-present
(in the present) in the side-ways glance and ever-distracting feature is
confused with the future promise as the forward march in time. A confusion of desire and time. Yet we walk
on (until the next distraction). Out of this confusion of present and future,
desire posits its own eternity; a double centred, double orbit, made up of the
force field of present desire, inconceivable in its end, and its correlate,
bait and end, the sexual object (the obscure object of desire). Obscure indeed,
existing only in the belief that 'it is always already happening there'
(somewhere) always all around, the suburb of sensual invocation, the city as
sexual circuit; the community as the community of the caress, the human family
as a continual round of incest.
(The
phenomenology of openings also applies to windows).
In windows.
In
windows.
The temporality of desire (II). Windows, traps for light, traps for the soul;
bait for our waiting curiosity, our will-bending desire. Window walls, a
permanent texture of desire-inciting surfaces; the populace, so many slow
walkers lured into fantasies - like sleepwalkers lured by a dream. What lies
beyond (like a sleep walker awakening into another world)? What happens, has
happened; will or could happen... in windows. Frames for fantasy; frames for
future events desired. Placed behind windows as the structure bestowing
permission. Impossible to access; therefore allowing all (in windows everything
is permitted, as with the image, as with the sign). Removal, distance,
deferral; all give permission to that which we would not really want, at home,
in the present... (not at home, not in the present). Certainly not. Not here,
not now. Utopia, on such a reading, would be an unwanted guest, a fantasy to be
perpetually held at arm's length, like images on a screen. Only taken literally
by those who confuse 'now' with the eternal 'then', temporality with eternity.
The founding of hell on earth is due to a category error - more precisely, a
temporal category error. (A leap, which no doubt originates in the priority of
the subjunctive mood, best described with reference to a rhetorical
figure: metalepsis, the conflating of distant cause for a present effect,
or, more generally, of the sewing of one time into the place of another, a leap
displacing temporalities and bridging the gulf of eternity).
Or. Utopia. Already realised in our architecture, in
the dreams of windows. The future perfect is to be found reflected there, where
the rhythms of rooftops and spires glow golden in the sun, run silver in the
rain. The reflection of the ideal, already realised, in windows. The golden
cities of the future are already here. It is only the comportment of the human
element that does not measure up to the ideal. An ideal that they have set and
we have built.
In windows.
In
windows.
The imagination allowed full reign, allowed a short
taste of what it believes and feels it must and should have, this is what we
see in windows. In short, windows are kind of symbolic summary of the fantasy
element in all our lives, past lack and present desire projected into the
future. The hunger of loss whetted by the vision of satisfaction. Desire (the
ever present pull, the tug of the everyday, our social desire, the omnipresent
map we carry, alone and together, formed by others, but never precisely shared
by others - like translation, before that other translation; the reduction to
childhood and the unconscious). Our desire of self and our desire of others, of
our desire for others, and our desire of others; a cipher which when
interrogated will spell out all the bases of our desire, all our lack, and so
all our bondage, that which holds us in, holds us back, forms us; all that
which makes us sane. And this reflection is to be found in all other sites of
the image, framed images, a reflection tuned by a virtuoso in the realm of
television and the big screen, in the little screen of our computers, in the
pictorial arts - perhaps in the image as such and even in representation in
general. The 'non-real element' (of the thing represented, not the sign or
image) permits the creativity which is turned as much on ourselves as on the
objects around us.
Yet windows do more than reflect back and exacerbate
our tendency to fantasy. Windows are always more than just mirrors, not least
when this is the only facet to which they permit us access. In their nature as
simultaneous ground and figure, as surface and reflection, as the co-existence
of real and illusionistic interiors, they represent the otherwise invisible
glue of the social, the general effects of our own particular position in the
skein of exchanges and knots that make up the self and its communities of
identification, representation prompting a reflection on recognition. Windows
and the architecture in which they are set, an architecture of which they
sometimes make up the visible entirety; working as gigantic mirrors, colossal
lenses, giving us back ourselves (more or less, always more, always less). At
once the attachment to a familiar landscape, the disruption of change, the lack
of place in an unfamiliar culture. As in 'culture shock' - the recurring thrill
of the modern, the permanent revolution of capitalist change, enjoyed by the
young - rendering a once familiar environment uncanny for the old.
We underestimate the role of generational difference
as the governing unit of collective time, marking-off the minutes on the clock
of innovation, periods in the music of fashion, register of change,
consciousness of the passing of cultural time, horizon of experience (the
justification of a generation: the generation of justification). An experience
exemplified in the gift of Modernism to Modernity. In epoch, period and style
coeval with the history of windows. Reflecting the times in a re-enactment of
the genealogy of temporality.
Genealogy. The birth of time as the time in which we
exist, the experience of human temporality, is the birth of the past and future
from out of the closed womb of the present (an event breaching the walls of the
present, announcing the death of the eternal present). Emerging from out of the
residue of an event that constitutes memory (if good) a residue constituting
the nascence of desire, the desire for return (if bad, the birth of terror, the
anticipation of the return of pain). It is in the persistence of a sensation,
insisting as sign, empty mark in the flesh, after the demise of the physiology,
the sense inputs that supported it, that provoked it, have gone, that we find
the birth of memory and birth of desire (or its opposite, fear) for the
remembered state. The status quo ante is the past (the past in the present) our
modality on this event colours our desire for the return of the event or its
continued absence, its place in our future (the future in the present). Time is
born with the outside, the other, and the terrifying self-knowledge of
dependency (debt), the fear of offence, and so the origin of
self-mortification, of religion (of debt in general, of the religious impulse
as self-abnegation), a relation born of power, of our position on a gradient of
power (our helpless inability, the limitless ability of the Other).
Eschatology. It is the proximity of the future to the
outside of time that explains the secret of the ubiquitous success that belongs
to the rhetoric of eternity (the past too shares in this secret, its
furthermost limit notoriously blurs into the time before time; mythic time).
Yet it is humans that make time inhuman. The forward horizon of the future with
its permanent sense of semi-presence is transformed utterly in the course of
its translation into the radically absent outside of time. As the degrees of
presence tick away only nothing remains. A nothing which will be made to hold
everything. Although prior, the future (together with its mirror opposite, the
past) is accorded less profundity in the world of metaphysics than the figure
that is derived from it (a figure which has becomes the indispensable support
for all metaphysical construction). In this way, in the world of the image, as
in the world or experience, any approaching presentation, any present absence
(be it a horizon, a limit approached or surpassed, or even the merest
suggestion of another time) can be transformed with little effort from the
intimation of a future event yet unexperienced (replete with dread or
anticipation) into the absent certitude of first and last things. If the event
or feature in question is interpreted as already having happened, as
constituting the past, subject of fond or restless memory, then it may just a
easily be made to work as an image of the elsewhere, as the past slides into
eternity in the work of mourning. From
past and future, then, eternity is rhetorically derivable: but its most
insistent home is closer still to the everyday currency of our temporal being.
It is our sense of the present which is itself its own worst enemy, a traitor
to its own, source of its negation and subservience to the beyond. Indeed the fuller, the more intense, the more
insistent, the sense of presence; the more its opposite is vaunted, until the
present itself is deemed but a shadow of the illuminated form beyond. Plato
seized the trope from religion; henceforth it will animate ideology and reason.
From the eternal 'now' to the eternal only the simplest of elisions is
required; an omission that counts for everything; we generalise, forgetting our
contingency like children, to conjure up something beyond time itself.
Eternity. Deriving its rationale and power from its specific coding in any (and
every) sublunary system of belief, a contingency that gives the lie to its
claims of universal priority.
Eternity. The figure behind reflection. Once the gap
between image and thing is admitted. Regress to eternity. In every examination
of reflection by reflection. Regress to eternity. Whence the force of the image
(the iconoclasts were right). Break all
mirrors before the true depth of the sea that urges human claims to
transcendence is revealed. Break all mirrors before the true shallowness of the
waters that nurture the flower of human ambition is exposed. For the narcissism
that feeds the eternal flame springs from a circularity that, like a braid tied
tightly back, scrolls back round, and - like a snail's shell coiling down
through ever smaller turns - winds down to nothing. Opening up to a void beyond
reason. The shortest loop imaginable; the greatest span: now and forever. Not
the now in forever, but the forever in now. The ambiguity behind every image.
(Image of our image-making). All images reveal the immortal in man. All images
lie.
The image burns in the shadow of its other, now lost
to time (just as the sign resounds with the borrowed voices of language and the
echo-chamber of the universal). The eternal-in-waiting is the magnet that
subtly re-routs the paths of meaning in the image (as infinite deferral
re-routs those of the word). Gravity bends the light of meaning. The sun burns
at the centre of the solar system. (Image and word, wave and particle, inhabit
the divided vision of the quantum world, we live in both, both universes
undecidable.)
Magnesium is the lead in the window of the image: hope
of landfall ignites the flare.
Copyright 2003 Peter Nesteruk