take the form of the unanswerable question of whether film is a kind of language (even to
assert that it is like a language—or like Language—sets off metaphysical resonance).
This particular period of film studies seems to have ended, not when the ontological
question was identified as a false one, but when the local work of transcoding had
reached the limit of its objects, at which point the judgment of the pseudo-problem could
be allowed to take its course.
Such a rewriting programme may be useful in our present architectural context,
provided it is not confused with a semiotics of architecture (which already exists), and
provided a second historical and Utopian step is added onto this key one, whose function
is not to raise analogous ontological questions (as to whether built space is a kind of
language), but rather to awaken the question of the conditions of possibility of this or that
spatial form.
As in film, the first questions are those of minimal units: the words of built space, or at
least its substantives, would seem to be rooms, categories which are syntactically or
syncategorematically related and articulated by the various spatial verbs and adverbs—
corridors, doorways and staircases, for example, modified in turn by adjectives in the
form of paint and furnishings, decoration and ornament (whose puritanical denunciation
by Adolf Loos offers some interesting linguistic and literary parallels). Meanwhile, these
‘sentences’—if that indeed is what a building can be said to ‘be’—are read by readers
whose bodies fill the various shifter-slots and subject-positions; while the larger text into
which such units are inserted can be assigned to the text-grammar of the urban as such (or
perhaps, in a world system, to even vaster geographies and their syntactic laws).
Once these equivalents have been laid in place, the more interesting questions of
historical identity begin to pose themselves—questions not implicit in the linguistic or
semiotic apparatus, which begin to obtain when this is itself dialectically challenged.
How, for example. are we to think of the fundamental category of the room (as minimal
unity)? Are private rooms public rooms, and rooms for work (white-collar office space,
for instance) to be thought of as the same kind of substantive? Can they all be deployed
indifferently within the same kind of sentence structure? On one historical reading,
however, the modern room comes into being only as a consequence of the invention of
the corridor in the seventeenth century; its privacies have little enough to do with those
indifferent sleeping spaces that a person used to negotiate by passing through a rat’s nest
of other rooms and stepping over sleeping bodies. This innovation, thus renarrativized,
now generates cognate questions about the origins of the nuclear family and the
construction or formation of bourgeois subjectivity fully—as much as do queries about
related architectural techniques. But it also raises serious doubts about the philosophies of
language that in effect produced the formulation in the first place: what is, indeed, the
trans-historical status of the word and the sentence? Following Heidegger and Emile
Benveniste in their different ways, modern philosophy significantly modified its vision of
its own history as well as its conception of its function when it began to appreciate the
relationship of its most fundamental (Western) categories to the grammatical structure of
ancient Greek (let alone the latter’s approximations in Latin). The repudiation of the
category of substance in modern philosophy can be said to be one response to the impact
of this experience of historicity, which seemed to discredit the substantive as such. It is
not clear that anything similar took place on the macrolevel of the sentence proper, even
though the constitutive relationship of linguistics as a discipline to the sentence as its
Rethinking Architecture 248