something else: yet architecture drawn to those strategic specifics would presumably not
be a very cheerful place to live in at any length.
Still, it seems possible to posit, alongside the political and social ideology that
architecture might under certain circumstances be thought to express, those rather
different ideologies or specific ideologemes that are at work all around us in social life
and that architecture might only incidentally reinforce. I want to conclude with two of
those, which I will identify as humanism and chaos respectively, and then mention the
burning political problem which the concept of politics exercised here seems to prevent
us from raising.
PART ONE
By way of historical reconstruction and also in order to gauge the profound conservatism
of the present moment, I have lately been trying to reflect on exactly what it was we used
to stigmatize as humanism in the bad sense: old-fashioned philosophy and literary
criticism, metaphysics, the centred subject, narrativity as such (with or without a happy
end)? Liberal politics and social rhetoric? The Western great books and the great Western
Judeo-Christian tradition? The valorization of ‘Man’ (very much in the ironic feminist
mode)? In architecture, however, the strong form of humanism is not particularly
traditional (in the sense, for example, of some antimodern tastes and values that would
confront the various architectural modernities with indignation and call for the restoration
of Victorian cityscapes and historicist forms). Rather it is phenomenology itself, as that
has made itself felt in the area of space: and it must be said that however self-enclosed
Husserl’s phenomenology was in the problem of the structure and nature of mental
operations and intellectual acts—however much Heidegger then found urgency in the
relationship of human beings to time and anxiety (and following him, Sartre, to decisions
and freedom)—the work of Merleau-Ponty was always significantly committed to a life
in space. The analysis of perception and the Utopian vocation to restore bodily
experience to a kind of prelapsarian plenitude—which make up everything glorious about
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical writings—necessarily had as their complement the
experience of space itself in all its imaginable varieties. It is easy to see how this
conception of the vocation of philosophy would find its ally in an aesthetics of
perception, that is, in a defence of art as what dispels a numbness and a habituation of
perception and restores a more vibrant and articulated life in the world (clearly not all
aesthetics offer this justification and defence of art by any means; but it has been
influential in modern times, and not only in the idiosyncratic version of the Russian
Formalists). Here too a vocation of the art critic is inscribed, as someone who will open
up our perception of the works (and thereby presumably of the world itself): Ruskin and
then Proust.
But in architecture, the building really is the world, or almost: so that opening up our
capacities to perceive architectural space is already, and not even virtually, to extend our
capacities for perception itself in general. But it is a two-way street: the architects who
are seduced by this view of their vocation must then accept the human body as the
ultimate criterion and build buildings to its scale. Or rather, since it is already supposed
that this was done by the tradition, whence the valorization of antiquity and then of its
development in the Renaissance, architects are thereby bound to return to some of those
Rethinking Architecture 252