Likewise, transgression does not deny specificity or difference. Rather it highlights and
celebrates it. It reveals the difference between what is before and beyond the limit. Yet
transgression does establish the principle that the limit may be transgressed, and
challenges the condition of openness and exclusion.
Transgression, then, can help to expose how architecture could be otherwise. Indeed,
if this volume is to have the impact intended, the understanding of architecture as a
hermetic self-contained discourse will have been revised. Not only must traditional
thinking about architecture be radically rethought, but the very boundaries by which it
has been ‘delimited’ as a separate area of endeavour must themselves be redefined.
The question of tradition lies at the heart of this problem. The premise of this volume
is that in order for architecture to rethink itself it must not be constrained by the
limitations of tradition. To accept uncritically what has been handed down would be to
subscribe in Andrew Benjamin’s terms to ‘the recuperative and nihilistic unfolding of
tradition.’^16 Even the attempt to recuperate is misguided if, as Foucault comments, there
can be no ‘return’.^17 Yet equally, to follow Andrew Benjamin’s argument, an absolute
break with tradition is impossible, in that the break must be defined against tradition,
thereby maintaining a relationship with tradition. If it is impossible to escape tradition
entirely, we might understand rethinking as a form of reworking, which refuses to be
limited by tradition. This reworking addresses not just the practices and thinking that
have been sanctioned by tradition, but also the definitions that have been inherited. The
very identity of architecture has to be readdressed so that what rethinking entails is a
‘refusal to take over the answer to the question of identity’.^18
This refusal to be limited by tradition—this insistence that the identity of architecture
must be called into question—necessarily implies that the very notion of definition must
be interrogated. In other words, the nature of the boundary that defines architecture needs
to be reconsidered, and the relationship between what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ needs to be
readdressed. Terms such as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ imply a strong demarcation between
self and other. Traditionally, architecture’s relationship to other disciplines has been
premised on a marked sense of alterity and exclusivity. Architecture has been given
clearly defined boundaries. Architecture, for example, is architecture because it is not
painting or sculpture. The nature of these boundaries therefore needs to be interrogated in
a way that does not deny the specificity of the discipline of architecture, but rather in a
way that attempts to redefine its relationship to other disciplines. What this volume seeks
is a new understanding of boundary, based not on exclusivity or opposition, but on an
openness to other disciplines. By revising the very concept of boundary, architecture’s
own position—its defensiveness against outside discourses—will be renegotiated.
Architecture will be opened up to the potentially fruitful and provocative methodologies
that other ‘disciplines’ have already embraced.
Franz Kafka tells a tale about a door in his well-known short story, ‘Before the Law’.
It is a parable about access and denial in the context of the law.
Before the law stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man
from the country and prays for admittance to the law. But the doorkeeper
says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment.^19