the case that Eisen-man’s work enacts, or is to be understood in terms of its enacting, a
countering move, that is one where the purported initial homogeneity is contrasted with
or opposed by an initial heterogeneity. In either sense that would be to repeat the
either/or. There is, in fact, an additional premise at work here.
The tradition, in its attempt to make the heterogeneous (for example the figurative) a
secondary event that presupposed a homogeneous original event (for example the literal),
always privileged the Same over diversity. The temporality here is straightforward; one
precedes the other. Unity, identity, the Same, in other words any conception of the
homogeneous or the self-identical, is positioned as being prior and thereby as having
priority. However this priority, that which was prior, is, in Nietzsche’s sense of the term,
a ‘fiction’. It is an attempt both to still becoming and to naturalize that which was always
a secondary event. Naturalization here means that an event becomes redescribed (for the
‘first’ time). It appears to be original because the act and effect of this first ‘redescription’
has been forgotten. The forgetting therefore is fundamental both to the positioning of
unity, the homogeneous, the Same, etc., as original, as well as accounting for how this
particular designation is repeated in and as tradition. Overcoming forgetting is, here, the
recognition of forgetting. It is thus that the object/event is reworked, giving rise to a
mode of interpretation.
The result of accepting this description is that not only does the ‘original’ event
become the site of heterogeneity, thereby calling into question any straightforward
opposition between heterogeneity and homogeneity; the ‘literal’ becomes a trope, thereby
undermining the distinction between the literal and the figural. Works, objects of
interpretation have to be reworked and thereby reread and reinterpreted. The initial
object/event/site of interpretation will no longer be the same as itself. Self-identity will
have become fractured. The work will have been repeated. But now the repetition will no
longer take place under the reign of the Same. Here, in the reworking the work will
become repeated and therefore re-presented for the first time.
The obvious consequence of locating the heterogeneous as prior is that it provides a
way of interpreting works in terms of the attempt to suppress (to forget) that original
heterogeneity. (The philosophical enterprise associated with Derrida can, in part, be
situated here.)^15 The suppression is demanded by tradition and yet it is precisely the
activity of suppression that marks the unfolding, if not the very possibility, of the strategy
enacted by the text/work/ object of interpretation. There are, of course, those works
which, rather than assuming an initial homogeneity and therefore necessitating that form
of interpretation whereby that initial assumption is shown to be impossible, attempt to
present, within the plurality of ways it is possible, the reality of an initial heterogeneity.
Such works are affirmative. The works, writings, buildings of Peter Eisenman are in this
sense affirmative.^16 This does, in a sense, mark their importance. They count as
developments within architecture. They mark either a break or refusal of nihilistic
repetition. It also opens up the problem of sensibility; of the experience of that which can
no longer be assimilated nor understood in terms of the categories and concepts handed
down as the unfolding of tradition. In sum this could be described as the problem of
avant-garde experience.
BUILDING EXPERIENCE
Rethinking Architecture 280