Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

At any rate, it is only for the last of men, the nihilist, that the disaster of the domus and
the rise of the megalopolis to the stars can procure an (evil) delight. Not only for the
ingenious one who rushes ahead of what is coming in order to control it, but for his
cousin, the well-meaning philosopher, who makes a virtue out of redundancy. It is
impossible to think or write without some façade of a house at least rising up, a phantom,
to receive and to make a work of our peregrinations. Lost behind our thoughts, the domus
is also a mirage in front, the impossible dwelling. Prodigal sons, we engender its
patriarchal frugality.
Thus things past are remembered ahead. The beginning the awakening, offers itself
only at the end as its inscription by the writing of the remembrance, in its working-out.
Always to be reread, redone. And the dwelling of the work is built only from this passage
from awakening to the inscription of the awakening. And this passage itself does not
cease to pass. And there is no roof where, at the end, the awakening will be over, where
we will be awake, and the inscription will have ceased to inscribe. There is no domus as
the rhyme of time that is so. But nostalgia for the lost domus is what awakens, and our
domain nowadays is the inscription of this awakening. So only transit, transfer,
translation and difference. It is not the house passing away, like a mobile home or the
shepherd’s hut, it is in passing that we dwell.
The only kind of thought—but an abject, objective, rejective thought—which is
capable of thinking the end of the domus, is perhaps the thought suggested by techno-
science. The domestic monad was still almost ‘naked’, to use Leibniz’s terms, not a large
enough means of memorizing, practising, inscribing. It is decomposed as the big monad
forms in its greater complexity, the one that Heidegger, coming from a quite other kind of
thinking, from thinking which determined itself quite otherwise, names the Gestell. Much
more complete, much more capable of programming, of neutralizing the event and
storing it, of mediating what happens, of conserving what has happened. Including, of
course, and first of all, the untameable, the uncontrolled domestic remainder. End of
tragedy, flexibility, permissiveness. The control is no longer territorialized or
historicized. It is computerized. There is a process of complexification, they say, which is
initiated and desired by no one, no self, not even that of humanity. A cosmic zone, once
called the earth, now a miniscule planet of a small stellar system in a galaxy of pretty
moderate size—but a zone where neg-entropy is rife. The domus was too simple, it left
too much remainder that it did not succeed in taming. The big techno-scientific monad
has no need of our terrestrial bodies, of passions and writings that used to be kept in the
domus. What it needs is ‘our’ wonderful brains. When it evacuates the dying solar
system, the big monad, which is cosmically competitive, will not take the untameable
along with it. Before imploding, like the other celestial bodies, with its sun, little Earth
will have bequeathed to the great spatial megalopolitan monad the memory that was
momentarily confided to the most intelligent of earthly species. But the only one of any
use for the navigation of the monad in the cosmos. So they say.
Metaphysics is realized in the physics, broad sense, operating in the techno-science of
today. It certainly requires of us another mourning than the kind required by the
philosophy of disaster and redundancy. The line taken is not that of the untameable, but
of its neglect. To do the (quasi-Leibnizian) physics of the unconscious, we might say. No
need for writing, childhood, pain. To think consists in contributing to the amelioration of
the big monad. It is that which is obsessively demanded of us. You must think in a


Jean-François Lyotard 261
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