specific process: one marked by an origin, a goal and a creator. This is not, however, the
only way in which teleology figures within architecture.
The important additional dimension concerns the effect that specific elements within a
building or house are supposed to have. The effect is continually thought to have been
predictable. Whether or not the prediction is valid, what is at work within such an
architectural practice is a thinking that involves the inclusion within itself and within the
‘house’ of either a repetitive monotony or a decorative excess that enacts no more than
the attempt to mask the specific effect; the effect as the effect of function. The necessity,
both within architecture and philosophy, of rethinking repetition—of moving on from the
domination of the Same—cannot be over-emphasized. Now it could be argued that the
attempt to subvert the dominance of the Same is precisely what Descartes is doing. The
problem here is to identify on exactly what level the Same is to be located.
In regards to architecture the Same is explicable, for the most part, in terms of
teleology and thus in terms of function. The instance becomes, as was mentioned, either a
particular instantiation of the general designation in the sense that the particular is
coextensive with the general, or the particular is viewed in terms of its excess; that is that
state of affairs where the general functional designation defines the excess. The repetition
of the Same therefore is the repetition of function. Now the question here is, what would
an architectural thinking be that was no longer dominated by the telos given by tradition
to architecture? It is by returning to Descartes that an answer to this question can be
given.
Within Descartes’ attempt to establish the completely new—absolute originality—a
certain philosophical strategy was deployed. Of the many philosophical oppositions
within which Descartes’ architectural ‘metaphor’ is positioned (thereby positioning itself
and the oppositions) the two which were the most central were reason and chance and the
one and the many. It is clear that they are related. Within the Cartesian texts the
oppositions are advanced in terms, for example, of the distinction between the
understanding and the imagination. In addition it is a retention and repetition of these
terms, amongst others, that defines—defines in the sense of reorientates—the
philosophical task. Furthermore it is the presentation of the opposition between reason
and chance and the one and the many that sustains, supports, perhaps even provides the
architectural metaphor’s foundation. In other words it is the repetition of these
oppositions that provides the conditions of possibility for Descartes’ arguments within
the ‘metaphor’. The city of reason as opposed to the city of chance is one that has been
constructed without any retention of that which preceded it. It needs to be the work of
one mind—the subject of epistemological certainty—as opposed to the joint operation of
diverse minds. The consequence of this is that the possibility of breaking with tradition,
in the Cartesian sense, that is of ending repetition, can itself take place only if the
oppositions that sustain this possibility are themselves repeated. The Cartesian break with
tradition ends up reinscribing tradition as that which allows for the possibility of the
break. It is only if the oppositions that characterize the history of philosophy are allowed
to be repeated that Descartes’ desire to ‘begin again’ is in fact possible. Now there are
two important conclusions that can be drawn from this reinscription of tradition.
The first is that it makes clear in what sense the Cartesian conception of tradition is to
be understood. The second is that it allows for a critical understanding of what is at stake
in the claim that an absolute break with tradition is impossible. It now emerges that a
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