Rethinking Architecture| A reader in cultural theory

(Axel Boer) #1

refusal of dominance still has to house what had hitherto dominated. The architectural
question, even within philosophy, can never be ignored. In addition it can now be
understood that the question of tradition involves a repetition in which concepts and
categories are handed down. Moreover repetition is not neutral but involves dominance
and therefore power. The resistance to, or refusal of, tradition must take place in relation
to the conceptual and categorial. (The way in which dominance and power figure here
gives rise to another philosophical task.) They need to be housed while their domination
is resisted. This interplay of resistance and inclusion marks the tension within the domain
of contemporary interpretation. It goes without saying that there are many works of
philosophy or architecture that involve a simple repetition of tradition. Descartes
conceived of his philosophical task as avoiding nihilistic repetition. The task failed as it
was premised on the reinscription of another repetition.
Understood ontologically, therefore, the repetition within Cartesianism becomes the
repetition of the same within the Same. This repetition is linked to the particular
conception of the object within Cartesianism. In the Discours de la méthode Descartes
describes the connection between truth and the object: ‘there being only one truth about
each thing whosoever finds it knows as much about that thing as can be known.’^4 The
object of knowledge like the subject of knowledge must be a unity. Subject and object
must be homological in themselves as well as constructing a homological relation within
the act of knowing. Ontologically therefore they must be the same. The origin must be
unified if knowledge is to be possible. Repetition is the repetition of Sameness. What
Cartesian repetition cannot include is a conception of repetition that is not articulated
within and therefore as the Same. This takes place in the positive sense in terms of a
repetition of and within the Same and in the negative in terms of the postulated complete
rejection of repetition. If repetition is to be rethought then what has to emerge as central
is the ontology that sanctions a repetition in which what comes to be repeated is at the
same time same and different. (The time of this simultaneity is complex.)
These tentative deliberations concerning ontology can be taken a step further. One
way of interpreting Descartes’ reinscription of a repetition within the attempt to break
down the repetition of tradition is that the work—Descartes’ own text—as an object of
interpretation thereby becomes a site that is no longer reconciled with itself. Its desire for
original unity was rendered impossible by that which intended to establish it as a unity; as
unified. The aspiration (understood as intentional logic) for an initial and original unity
gives way, within the recognition of its impossibility (an impossible possibility), to an
original heterogeneity; that is to anoriginal heterogeneity. The origin has become
redescribed. The foundations are renewed within repetition such that they are then
repeated for the first time. The consequence of this means that if there is to be a refusal to
take over and carry on that which tradition hands down then there has to be another way
in which this task can be understood. It is precisely in these terms that it will be necessary
to rethink the force of the claim that ‘architecture houses’.


THE HOUSING OF ARCHITECTURES


The limit already emerging within the architectural constraints determined by teleology
are also at work within philosophy. There are two aspects that are of strategic importance
here. The first is the envisaged relationship between philosophy and its object, and the


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