Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

megalopolis displays, commentates on them, and explains them, makes them
communicable. It calls melancholy being autistic and love sex. Like the way that it calls
fruges agro-alimentry products. Secrets must be put into circuits, writings programmed,
tragedies transcribed into bits of information. Protocols of transparency, scenarios of
operationality. After all, I’ll take it, your domus, it’s saleable, your nostalgia, your love,
let me get on with it. It might come in useful. The secret is capitalized swiftly and
efficiently. But that the secret should be a secret of nothing, be uncultivated, senseless,
already in the domus, the megalopolis has no idea. Or rather, it has only the idea.
Whereas the secret, because it consists only in the timbre of a sensitive, sentimental
matter, is inaccessible except to stupor.
I wanted to say only this, it seems. Not that the domus is the figure of community that
can provide an alternative to the megalopolis. Domesticity is over, and probably it never
existed, except as a dream of the old child awakening and destroying it on awakening. Of
the child whose awakening displaces it to the future horizon of his thoughts and writing,
to a coming which will always have to be deferred. It is thus, not even like some surface
of inscription which is there, well and truly there, but like an unknown astral body
exercising its attraction on writing and thought from afar; rather, then, like a mirage
which sets requirements than like a required condition—it is thus that the domestic world
does not cease to operate on our passibility to writing, right up to the disaster of the
houses. Thought today makes no appeal cannot appeal, to the memory which is tradition,
to bucolic physis to rhyming time, to perfect beauty. In going back to these phantoms, it
is sure to get it wrong—what I mean is, it will make a fortune out of the retro distributed
by the megalopolis just as well (it might come in useful). Thought cannot want its house.
But the house haunts it.
The house does not haunt contemporary thought in the way that it once pierced the
untameable, forcing it into the tragic mode. The untameable was tragic because it was
lodged in the heart of the domus. The domestic schema resisted the violence of a timbre
that was none the less irresistible. The tragic cursus stages this incommensurability,
between the beautiful ordinance of a rhymed space-time and the amazement procured by
the sublime encounter with an unprepared material, the tone of a voice, the nuance of an
iris or a petal the fragrance of a smell. A no-saying amid the always already said: stupor.
A stupid passion rises in the domestic dough. As though the god were dropping the share
he took in the common bake. Were letting the matter of time and space be touched in the
raw. All the same, this abandon, this bankruptcy can still be taken up by the domus, it
represents them as tragedy. Untameable dominated, sublime held to the rules of the
beautiful, outside-the-law redestined. Here is the reason why the megalopolis does not
permit writing, inscribing ‘living’ not only pastoral poems, but even tragedies. Having
dispersed the domestic schemas. So the untameable is not representable there. Timbre is
consigned by the megalopolis to the ghetto. And it’s not the ‘good old’ ghetto tolerated
by the domus, itself a somewhat domestic and domesticated ghetto. It is the Warsaw
ghetto, administratively committed to Vernichtung, the ‘rear’ of the megalopolitan front.
It must be exterminated because it constitutes an empty opacity for the programme of
total mobilization in view of transparency.
Where the untameable finds a way of gripping on, is domestic flesh. Either it
devastates it, or else the flesh reduces it, tames and eliminates it. They go together, in
their insoluble différend. With Nazism the big monad in the process of forming mimicked


Jean-François Lyotard 263
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