What Lacan said re: architecture

LORENS HOLM What Lacan said re: architecture Introduction: certain stereognoses Before the systematic establishment of geometric laws of perspective formulated at the end of the fifteenth century . . . painting passed through a stage in which various artifices made it possible to structure space. The double band that appears in the sixth and seventh centuries on the walls of Santa Maria Maggiore is one way of treating certain stereognoses . . . The important thing is that at a given moment one arrives at illusion. Around it one finds a sensitive spot, a lesion, a locus of pain, a point of reversal of the whole of history of art . . . that point concerns the notion that the illusion of space is different from the creation of emptiness. It is this that the appearance of anamorphoses at the end of the sixteenth . . . century represents.1 In this quote from Seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan recaps a recent session on anamorphosis in which he discusses architecture and its relation to painting. Architecture is that which is `organised around emptiness'. A trawl through the indices of Lacan's Seminars shows that this is the only place Lacan uses architecture explicitly, and discusses architecture's general conditions, at least in so far as these conditions are deemed primitive. This is surprisingly little, given that critical discourse revolving around issues of representation/perception in architecture has followed the lead of the visual arts in founding itself on the gaze. This discourse references the section in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Seminar 11),2 called `Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a', where the imaginary register has its definitive statement, but where architecture is not discussed and is barely mentioned. Lacan also develops the imaginary register in Seminar 1 Freud's Papers on Technique, Seminar 7, and Seminar 13 (unpublished). This paper will attempt to shift the grounds of the discussion of representation in architecture to these less known works. It will relate Lacan's idea of emptiness to the critical bits of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, in particular the structure of the scopic field, dominated by the screen and the objet a. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis has not entered the discourse of representation in architecture or the visual arts, even though it is Lacan's major work on visual culture and the arts. It treats of similar ground to Kant's Critique 30 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 Detail of Santa Maria Maggiore: certain stereognoses. of Judgement: the beautiful, the good, the relation of man to nature and God, sublimation, art, and architecture. For instance, Hal Foster does not reference the above quote in The Return of the Real, which seems central to a thesis about art as a screen for the emergence of originary trauma in the works of Warhol, Mary Kelly, and other contemporary artists.3 Nor does the corresponding architectural discourse, which addresses how architecture situates the subject of perception in the visual field. For instance, Beatriz Colomina, whose `Le Corbusier and Photography' was the first paper I know to use the operational montage as a way of situating the subject of architecture, also makes no mention of this Seminar.4 Furthermore, no one writing in the visual arts and architecture has taken a close look at `BaltrusaõÈtis' excellent dictionary of anamorphoses' (S7, p. 141) which is the source for most of Lacan's visual references, and which, once known, explains a lot about what drives his arguments.5 A visual argument motivates Lacan's text, but it is underplayed (latent? repressed?) by both Lacan (his text is not illustrated) and his readers (BaltrusaõÈtis is overlooked in the literature). Lacan's knowledge of projection and anamorphosis and their relation to architecture comes from BaltrusaõÈtis, who he cites in Seminars 7 and 11. His sensibility is sympathetic to BaltrusaõÈtis's rhetoric/ polemic, which positions perspective as a device which conflates realism and illusion, and which, when ana-morphed, produces hallucinations.6 It will be a fine day for Lacan studies if someone unpacks Baltrusaitis. If there is an imago of modern subjectivity, it is provided by the complex of visual references which the BaltrusaõÈtis text assembles. It brings together the optics of Newton and Descartes, and the perspective and projective geometry of Alberti, Niceron, Andrea Pozzo. This visual discourse includes also the tradition of optical devices like DuÈrer's camera lucida and the camera obscura, and in a different register Plato's cave; all of which have the peculiar character of sharing affinity to both consciousness and architecture, in that they situate a subject in relation to a visual world. These connections are exploited by Lacan and used as resources for the development of the subject±gaze relation. Lacan's optical device, introduced in Seminar 1 in the discussion of Freud's essay `On Narcissism', is also part of this tradition. What Lacan said re: architecture 31 This paper is concerned with what Lacan said about architecture, as a reconnaissance mission. While it may not matter what Lacan thought about architecture, and while it is far more important what architects who think about architecture think of Lacan, this paper is important because it brings into the discourse of representation, material which has largely been passed over. It is hoped that this paper will lead to a better understanding of architecture in its visual dimension, enabling discourse-building, which is the hard work, to continue.7 Architecture in 3D: anamorphosis Emptiness The opening quote proposed that painting and architecture are bound up with each other in certain stereognoses; and suggested that these knowledges notwithstanding, painting and architecture are bound up with illusion, the nemesis of knowledge.8 It summarises the previous chapter, `Marginal Comments', where Lacan introduced architecture in the discussion of anamorphism, in other words, in a discussion of the role and function of projection, and insisted that the development of architecture is tied to the development of painting. `There is behind it [anamorphism, the meaning of anamorphism] the whole history of architecture as well as that of painting, their combination and the history of this combination.' He proposes that architecture, like perspective painting, `can be defined as something organised around emptiness' (S7, p. 135); and later, in the chapter `The Death of God', that architecture enters the symbolic order by a process of `primitive sublimation' (S7, p. 175). This emptiness and its subsequent sublimation bears some scrutiny because, if it is not trivial, it is enigmatic. Teasing out the different iterations of this emptiness in Lacan's text and in architectural discourse is the main function of this paper. We assume that although it may be related to the simple and obvious fact that both the lines of a one-point perspective and the lines of the nave of a church ± to which one-point perspective has its paradigmatic application in the work of, say, Brunelleschi ± enclose empty space, this cannot be the whole of its meaning. For Lacan tells us that this emptiness and Holbein's death's head anamorphosis are related to Freud's Das Ding, the thing, `the Freudian Thing'. In the first place, we might ask about this title, why marginal? Margins of psychoanalysis? Marginally important? Marginal as pertaining to edges, contours, walls, the enclosures, of spaces and forms? Marginal as a (military) strategy, as a way to get a better fix on the centre (in order to hit a bull's-eye, 32 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 you have to stand back from your target)? Like Derrida's Margins. Marginal in that they concern art, religion and science which all dance around a central something (real, unattainable) called the Freudian Thing? Art represses, religion displaces, and science repudiates the Freudian Thing, all of which tropes are different forms of sublimation (S7, pp. 129, 134).9 We know where this is heading. Dispense with the conclusion now, so that we can trace an anamorphic line. By glancing forward, we may relate this emptiness, this thing, to the articulation of desire in the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis: to the blind spot in the visual field, that which in vision always escapes vision. We posit that which escapes desire in the architectural field; and ask how desire as it manifests architecturally remains unsatisfied in architecture. This paper thus presages the concept of architectural desire: an architectural blind spot, lack, objet a, or, simply, shortcoming, which signifies desire. This glance reveals a shift in Lacan's thought in the four years between Seminars 7 and 11. In 7, Lacan says that architecture and painting are organised around emptiness. In the discussion of the visual field in Seminar 11, he has all but ceased talking about architecture. And emptiness has been replaced by the blind spot, scotoma. It is as if he now regards only painting as the proper instantiation and representation of the field of vision, but not architecture. (Architecture does not represent space, it is space.) This paper will not pursue this shift in Lacan's thought, except to resist it. This paper is possible only if architecture is representation; and it is difficult to understand how, on Lacan's terms, architecture can be stripped of this role. For in the intensely reflective, paranoid, and hallucinatory register in which Lacan's thought exists, everything is representation. First, Seminar 7. The Thing is associated with desire and the real, that which is beyond symbolisation and imagery, which is the object of the tuche (the sneeze) or missed encounter with the real, and which is always screened by words and images in the process of repetition. I jump again to the language of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis because Evans tells us that the Thing is not used again after Seminar 7.10 It is replaced by the lost object in later Seminars, and by the objet petit a in `The Transference and the Drives'. In Seminar 7, Das Ding is `the beyond-of-the signified' (a nod to Kant and things-in-themselves).11 The subject's relation to it is `characterised by primary effect, prior to any repression' (S7, p. 54). It is thus not unconscious material, which Lacan maintains is a function of language, i.e. symbolisation, and whose main entry point to the unconscious is through repression. In the same context, it is referred to as `the primary object' which `failed to give satisfaction', and is related to desire and the pleasure principle. What Lacan said re: architecture 33 In Seminar 7, the Thing is involved in a similar hydraulics of desire as that of the objet a. In connection with the pleasure principle: `That is Das Ding insofar as, if he is to follow the path of his pleasure, man must go around it' (S7, p. 95). In connection with art: `it being understood that a work of art always involves encircling the Thing' (S7, p. 141). It functions in the same ways as the aim, or object of desire, which is that unknowable object which Detail from Lacan's text: the drive is the drive circles around but always a return journey. never attains. The drive is always a return journey. For instance, in connection with the oral drive, Lacan describes its aim as `the presence of a hollow, a void, which can be occupied by any object and whose agency we know only on the form of the lost object, the petit a. The objet a is not the origin of the oral drive. It is not introduced as the original food, it is introduced from the fact that no food will ever satisfy the oral drive, except by circumnavigating the eternally lacking object' (FCCP, pp. 179±80). Architecture is organised around emptiness in the same way that the drives circle around the objet a. This emptiness manifests in the visual world of architecture, which architecture can never fill. It might enclose this emptiness literally, in the sense that if architecture is about creating enclosure ± usually with walls, usually to protect its inhabitants from beasts and murderers ± then this enclosure encloses emptiness. Except that if it is literal, then the emptiness must always escape, like the tomato seed which always skitters away when we put our finger on it. And if not literally, then the architecture activity (the will to architecture corresponding to the thrust of the drive), then this activity is itself a double gesture, both a compulsive acknowledgement and screening out of originary loss and traumatic encounter with the real. It will remain unresolved at this point how literally or metaphorically we are entitled to take the enclosing function of architecture. We merely point out now that Lacan's text is always in several registers, and we leave ambiguous for the moment the two registers: architecture as enclosing emptiness and architecture as circling an originary lost object. 34 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 Lacan's argument continues with a historical/analogical account: architecture's role is subsequently taken over by painting, a role which it fully achieved with the invention of perspective. At certain moments, classical architecture attempts to recapture the role taken over by painting, by making use of the devices of perspective. With the invention of anamorphism several hundred years after perspective, the illusionism that had been perspective is shown to be what it really is, a signifier for some other hidden reality which emerges from behind illusion. The surprise/shock/interest provoked by anamorphism signifies the real in the same way that the disgust of shit, as opposed to shit itself, signifies the real. Anamorphism is related to, or is an act of, sublimation, which is an effect of the way the signifier (the symbolic order) screens us from the real. By a kind of sublimation which harks back to Hegel's Aufhebung, the illusionism which was embedded in the imaginary order enters the symbolic. It is worth quoting The Ethics of Psychoanalysis at length because Lacan offers an account of primitive architecture which, by its august and originary tone, its invocation of teleology and necessity, places his writing within the tradition of origins to which the primitive hut, architecture's myth of origins, belongs. The primitive hut is always empty, not just because it awaits its first occupants, but because it is self-referential. Laugier's hut is not an essay in occupaCellule No.1: an originary architecture. tion, but in the interrelation of architectural components. Occupation comes later, as something outside and accidental to the essential work of architecture. Hegel's account of the originary architecture speaks of a corresponding emptiness, in a similarly sonorous tone. Further, his account of the succession of the arts is a gloss on Lacan's history of architecture ± the passing of the baton of emptiness, first to painting, then to language. What Lacan said re: architecture 35 This object [anamorphism] could never have been produced, never have had a necessary meaning without a whole preceding development. There is behind it the whole history of architecture as well as that of painting, their combination and the history of this combination. . . . [P]rimitive architecture can be defined as something organised around emptiness. That is also the authentic impression that the forms of a cathedral like Saint Mark's give us, and it is the true meaning of all architecture. Then subsequently, for economic reasons [because it is cheaper?], one is satisfied with painting images of that architecture, one learns to paint architecture on the walls of architecture; and painting, too, is first of all something that is organised around emptiness. Since it is a matter of finding once more the sacred emptiness of architecture in the less marked medium of painting, the attempt is made to create something that resembles it more and more closely, that is to say, perspective is discovered. . . .12 From the moment that perspective was discovered in painting, a form of architecture appears that adopts the perspectivism of painting . . . Go and see Palladio's theatre in Vicenze . . . Neo-classical architecture submits itself to the laws of perspective, plays with them, and makes them its own. That is, it places them [the laws] inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture. From that point on one is entangled in a knot which seems to flee increasingly from the meaning of this emptiness. . . . the Baroque return to the play of forms, to all manner of devices, including anamorphosis, is an effort to restore the true meaning of artistic enquiry; artists use the discovery of the property of lines to make something emerge that is precisely there where one has lost one's bearings or, strictly speaking, nowhere. Rubens' painting that suddenly appears in the place of the unintelligible image reveals what is at issue here. At issue, in an analogical or anamorphic form, is the effort to point once again to the fact that what we seek in the illusion is something in which the illusion as such in some way transcends itself, destroys itself, by demonstrating that it is only there as a signifier. And it is this which lends primacy to the domain of language above all, since with language we only ever have to do with the signifier . . . (S7, pp. 135±6). In The Aesthetics,13 Hegel writes, `The first of the particular arts . . . is architecture considered as a fine art. Its task lies in so manipulating external inorganic nature that it becomes cognate to mind, as an artistic outer world'. (In cognate to mind, there is implicit the idea that architecture is in a narcissistic relation to its subject.) It is afflicted with a species of emptiness which is beyond the contingent emptiness of an unoccupied building. `In this material and in such forms, the ideal as concrete spirituality does not admit of being realised. Hence the reality which is represented in them remains contrasted with the Idea, as something external which it has not penetrated, or has penetrated only to establish an abstract relation.' Hegel's originary architecture is empty because Spirit is not yet in it. Architecture conforms to generic rules of composition (symmetry) and physics, and it is still mired in its materiality, like Lacan's Thing, which he calls a brute `dumb 36 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 reality' (S7, p. 54). Spirit is not yet embodied in the forms of architecture, the way it will be, first in classical Greek sculpture and then in Renaissance painting. Architecture is an empty temple awaiting the entry of God in a `lightning-flash of individuality'.14 For the Lacan of Seminar 7, anamorphosis recalls a psychic prior reality screened by architecture and perspective, a priority which seems to be both temporal and logical. With anamorphism, architecture and perspective enter the symbolic order, which relates this screening function to what Lacan will later call repetition (the return of the real as an encounter with nonsense or horror) and the automaton (the screen of signifiers, which screens the encounter with the real).15 Hegel's architecture represents a degree zero of Spirit, a condition of Spiritual entropy before matter is fully formed into an art in which we can recognise Spirit. Architecture is empty of Spirit. In this sense, architecture is keeping something out. Hegel's sublimation (Aufhebung) is the engine which drives the succession of the particular arts. KojeÁve defines Aufhebung as `to annul or destroy' and `to preserve or carry forward'. Each particular art is destroyed, replaced, preserved by the next one, so that even poetry, the last of the arts and the acme of Spiritual expression, carries within it the hard empty kernel of architecture. Architecture . . . memorial to the Spiritually bereft, to Death, to ultimate loss. For Hegel, architecture becomes the emptiness carried forward in languages. Architecture the unutterable. For Lacan, it is in the act of sublimation of anamorphosis-as-image by anamorphosis-as-signifier, that we are reminded of the unutterable real which architecture and perspective circle around. BaltrusaõÈtis and anamorphism Lacan introduces anamorphism with three examples taken from BaltrusaõÈtis. (1) The vanitas anamorphism in Holbein's The Ambassadors. `It looks roughly like fried eggs' (S7, p. 135); `the effect of an erection' (FFCP, p. 88). (2) An eighteen-metre long fresco in a chapel built in Descartes's time. Both of which only become recognisable images when viewed from marginal positions. And (3) an anamorphic copy of a Rubens crucifixion, which is organised around a cylindrical mirror. . About the Holbein: `The pleasure is found in seeing its emergence from an indecipherable form' (S7, p. 135). This is also the pleasure of psychoanalysis. Lacan introduces anamorphism in a way which suggests the exegesis of unconscious material in a visual, as opposed to verbal, psychoanalysis. As if visual material might hide something, thereby having an unconscious dimension.16 What Lacan said re: architecture . . 37 About the Rubens copy: `It is formed of a polished cylinder . . . and around it you put a kind of bib or flat surface on which there are also indecipherable lines . . . you see the image . . . emerge in the cylindrical mirror'. It recalls the lamella which defines the rim structure of the drives (the flat seminal homme-lette, Descartes's little man, spittle of the erogenous zones) from which the thrust emerges as a kind of distortion of its surface. The whole thing is vaguely erotic. What emerges on this erect cylindrical mirror is an image of the crucifixion, Christ's lithe limp erect agonised body. About the chapel: `you can see for a brief moment the extraordinarily dispersed lines come together and perceive the body of the scene'. Like the mirror image brings together into a coherent image the discombobulated body of the infant. The Ambassadors What initially attracts is the sumptuous rendition of expensive equipment and other worldly goods. (For the men who have everything.) The death's Detail of The Ambassadors: the emergence of desire. head image is put into relation with these goods. Because of the projections, one can only see either the goods or the skull, but never both together. The smear seems to hover in front, not behind, the space. Lacan compares it to an erection and to seminal fluid. (Imagine the instant this photograph was taken: the artist is about to strut in front of his painting, preceded by a massive erection.) Death is the ultimate loss. So the smear,17 associated with desire and the body, the erogenous zones, appears as a screen in front of the painting, like Parrhasios's curtain, and not behind it. And death, the ultimate loss ± objet a ± only appears on the oblique view, the view you get when you try to peer behind the painting to see what it veils. Anamorphism also illustrates literally how optical projection which defines the world transparent to our vision can become opaque when it undergoes the distortions associated with desire and death. The smear seems to cover an area of the pictorial space, and only becomes transparent again when the skull appears. This is not a matter of unfogging the glass, 38 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 but of changing position. The lesson of anamorphism is that no matter where we are positioned in a space, there is another position in space which we might occupy, from which point everything, as we see it now, would be anamorphic. Anamorphism reminds us that there is always another point of view, another take on things, from the position of an Other, which is invisible or opaque to us. Said the jilted lover, `You never look at me from the place from which I see you' (FFCP, p. 103).18 It is associated literally and metaphorically with desire, for position, vector, and spin of the viewer are indicators of desire. Rubens copy The cylindrical catoptric anamorphism is a species of optical device. It has affinities to architecture. Unlike the other examples which remain flat on the canvas, this one is produced by elements distributed in three-dimensional space: a vertical cylinder (caryatid) and a horizontal surface (plinth). They set up relationships with each other. The fact that they are primarily optical only means that they do not explore the full range of relationships that obtain in an architecture; this device is a model of architecture and not a full fledged building. Christ leaps out of the primordial soup, like Botticelli's Venus. The vertical cylinder transforms the drawing into something readable ± visible and intelligible ± the way the elevation of a building transforms the plan into something visible and inhabitable. It is a vision machine, in that it makes visible what had been invisible. It is an analogue of creation, in that it transforms a formless mass of colour and swirling lines into a well-formed object that stands up in a space. It traverses painting from abstraction to figuration and from figuration to illusion. The Rubens copy demonstrates that anamorphism is a threedimensional painting, because it is constituted by a distortion or swelling in the visual field. A visual image literally stands up; in order for it to be intelligible, it has to stand up. This is not a Detail of Niceron's text: anamorphic projection of distortion of the image an ear. What Lacan said re: architecture 39 (PhotoshopTM image-stretching functions are actually not what anamorphism is about, even though the effect may be the same). Like the tower scene in Vertigo, in which Jimmy Stewart's fear of heights and desire for Kim Novak manifest as a simultaneous elongation and flattening of cameraspace, anamorphism is a distortion of the visual field itself, in so far as that field is a function of projection. This may be more obvious in the case of the cylindrical mirror, but the same thing happens with the vanitas skull. In that case, the area of the picture plane upon which the skull is projected has rotated into the third dimension. The plane upon which three-dimensional space is represented rotates, or otherwise moves, into three-dimensional space. The picture plane is an opaque surface which may appear transparent, but only from certain privileged angles.19 Lacan says very little about the chapels, the images of which are reproduced from the plates of optical treatises by Jean-FrancËois NicËeron and his contemporaries.20 They show paintings projected obliquely onto the chapel walls of `a convent of the Minim Friars in Rome as well as Paris' so as to form anamorphic paintings of the saints.21 These images are important because of their visual import to Lacan's argument.22 The anamorphic saints are produced in an unusual way. Anamorphism is a species of projective geometry. It is the general case of projection through a plane, of which perspective projection is one limit. In this case the plane is set perpendicular to Detail of Niceron's text: anamorphic projection of a the principal line of fresco in the chapel of the Minim Order. projection, Alberti's prince of rays, the throne of vision. In the case of the vanitas skull, the plane of projection was rotated to an oblique angle to the prince of rays. In the Minim chapel engravings, the anamorphism is produced indirectly. A portrait of a saint is shown mounted perpendicular to the chapel wall and is then projected from the eye point so that it streaks the wall obliquely. In other words, the anamorphism is produced by the transfer of an image from one plane to another. Anamorphism is presented as a relationship of picture planes set 40 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 at angles to each other, one normal, one oblique, the latter of which happens to be architecture. The former way links perspective and anamorphism in a continuum, but links it to a solitary projection point and plane; the latter involves anamorphism in a series of inter-projecting image planes. Whilst the former may suggest, although by no means entails, a species of prioritised Cartesian subject, the latter makes graphically explicit a universe of displaced image screens and multiple projection points, which will be sympathetic to the diagram of the scopic field, Lacan's operational montage, when he develops it four years later. These chapel walls also begin to explain the unusual relation which Lacan posits between painting and architecture, as if painting were a paper-thin liner on its interior walls. In the Niceron engravings, the images are literally projected upon the walls. In Lacan's account, architecture and painting are linked in an interactive exchange based on imitation, which becomes plausible when they are superimposed with such optical precision. First, painting imitates architecture. Then, when painting discovers perspective and can finally get it right, i.e. when painting has Detail of Niceron's text: anamorphic discovered the laws (stereoprojection of a fresco in the chapel gnoses) which governed of the Minim Order. architecture (architecture's unconscious), architecture starts to imitate painting. It becomes possible for architecture to represent itself, as if its two-dimensional image were slide-projected upon its walls. Apart from the intimation that painting is the ego image of architecture, and painting's history its psychoanalysis ± in which the unconscious material of architecture is exposed, followed by a kind of transference ± two related things are at work here. At this point (Brunelleschi, the early Renaissance), architecture has passed into the discourse of representation. Architecture no longer merely encloses emptiness, or makes space: it represents it. This is a kind of mirror stage in the development of architecture, by which it enters the imaginary order. As if architecture might be at one and the same time architecture and the representation of What Lacan said re: architecture 41 architecture. The second point: this representational architecture is a symptom of the fact that in a world of optical projection (one-eyed, stationary) inaugurated by the discovery of one-point perspective projection, there is an equivalence between two- and three-dimensional space; such that perspective is a two-dimensional representation of a threedimensional space, and architecture is a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional space. Lacan does not say this, but it is a function of perspective projection, and it will have bearing on the characteristics of the scopic field, what I provisionally call the flattening of the screen, which we will enter later. If we transfer the lesson in Lacan's discussion of anamorphism to architecture, then if architecture is organised around emptiness, it is not because it encloses emptiness, but because this architecture, like the picture surface with which it is identified, holds the emptiness out. (Do not interpret organised around too literally as encloses.) Emptiness aka the Thing lurks just behind the surface of the imaginary register, of which the picture plane is an analogue. The image we have perpetrated is that in the case of anamorphosis, the picture plane peels up or cracks, which threatens to reveal the reality outside. If we are unlucky, we might glimpse the real with a sidelong glance. There are other properties of an architecture which holds the real out: it is an architecture of pure surface, which cannot contemplate an underneath, a behind the coat of paint, because behind that coat of paint is the unimaginable. It must always only ever offer to view, more surface, even when the surface is scratched. Piranesi In another register altogether, the register where the problem of architecture is a problem of language, Piranesi explored the emptiness of an architecture understood as a surface of representation. In the facËade of Santa Maria del Priorato or the walls of Piazza dei Cavalieri, the hard brittle detailing is set off against a palimpsest-like featureless substrate as if to indicate that the detailing is to be understood as a surface effect of language, with no structural, formal or geometric relationship to its substrate. In the Vedute di Roma, Piranesi presents a shambolic and falling down classicism scattered amidst the modern fabric of Rome.23 In Entrance to the Villa Sette Bassi, a Corinthian portal is little more than the rubble infill once the cladding has fallen off. The architecture is literally a crumbling screen of limestone signifiers. Underneath is a reality which the language cannot contemplate because it has no means to acknowledge it. The monuments of Rome are shown to be only skin deep, about 50mm of limestone cladding. 42 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 The real site of the classical language, the coveted solicited classicism, so structured so hard so precise, so much the origin and foundation of the architecture of modern Rome, are the informe 24 steaming clots of undifferentiated lumpen masonr y which are strewn all over via Appia, like Lacan's dumb reality. In `The Lamella of David Lynch', Slavoj ZÆizÆek25 Detail from Vedute di Roma: the emergence of aligns the real with the the real. interior of the body. He cites the slimy ecto-bits which explode from the stomach in Aliens, which remain beyond what can be described in words and images, the symptom of which is the sense of horror they provoke. This is the lesson of Piranesi's Rome. What lies beneath the surface of architecture is an unstructured, undifferentiated, unarticulated reality. There is a double gesture in Piranesi's work which distinguishes his engravings from those of his contemporaries. Architecture is projected forward as a paper-thin language system, at the same time it is retracted into a prelingual state of lumpenness. The symbolic order is exposed as a decorative effect upon the real.26 Of course Piranesi's paper prints are screens too. The ruins do not really look like this. They are an effect of representation, and of the social conventions, ways of seeing, and other agitations of a sweaty mind; all of which structure representation. Architecture in 2D: trompe-l'úil Zeuxis and Parrhasios In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Zeuxis and Parrhasios have a paintoff to determine which of them is the best painter. Apparently in ancient Greece this means the most illusionistic painter. Zeuxis goes first. What Lacan said re: architecture 43 He paints a still life: when he unveils it, birds try to eat the grapes. When Zeuxis tries to unveil Parrhasios' painting, the veil turns out to be painted. Zeuxis could fool the birds, Parrhasios could fool a painter. The painting turns out to be a veil (is a veil a still life?), which is what Alberti said 2,000 years later. Ryman's pure white paintings have the same aspiration.27 They expose painting as a veil. The white ground signifies not only the limitless possibilities for representation but points out that every painting conceals a piece of the visual world. Every painting is also a blank spot. Most painting tries to hide this fact by being so full of life. The white walls of the gallery conspire with painting. The neutrality of the white wall suggests that there is nothing significant behind the painting for the painting to conceal. The whiteness of Ryman's paintings signifies that it is a blank. A painting blank or template, like any template, is both empty and full of possibilities. In this sense, Parrhasios painted the first white painting. Analogously, a blank or white architecture would be empty. It would proclaim its allegiance to the cultural discourse of whiteness through its originary status. It is important to distinguish this white architecture from white walls. Again white walls are a kind of decoy. White walls do not an empty architecture make. Such an originary architecture might not have white walls, but it would have white space. It would be empty the way Hegel's originary architecture is empty of Spirit, inert, the opposite of haunted. It would not be featureless, it would not be stripped of its individuating characteristics (Parrhasios' veil had folds like Leonardo's drapery studies; Ryman's work is rich with tapings, brushings and other framing devices) but it would expose architecture's originary devices. It would be a blank, so that it could be full of generative possibilities. It is easy to see the stripped-down forms of Absalon's Cells 28 in this light; we are perhaps only a little less conditioned now to see Laugier's neo-classical primitive hut ± reduced to posts and rafters ± in the same light.29 We have to ask what this emptiness of architecture is. We might look a little more closely at the emptiness of Parrhasios' veil. In Zeuxis' painting the birds are fooled because the grapes are not there. Painted grapes are not grapes. In this sense, representation signifies the absence of what is represented. The same could be said about Parrhasios' painting. Zeuxis is fooled because the curtain is not there. The painted curtain signifies the absence of a real curtain. The difference ± and here we get into one of those conundrums of self-reference ± is that the curtain is blank: in other words, it is a blank. Like Ryman's white blanks, Parrhasios' painting is not concealing anything because it is not representing anything.30 Whereas the painted grapes signify the absence of a presence (grapes), the painted painting is still a painting, it signifies the presence of an absence 44 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 (painting). If there is anything which the curtain could be said to be concealing, it would be a painting, and a painting ± as representation ± signifies an absence. To reiterate, Zeuxis thought he was looking at the absence of a painting, i.e. a real curtain covering a painting; it turned out to be the absence of a curtain, i.e. a real painting. In the same sense, an architecture which represents itself, like Lacan's projected architecture, might disappear behind its representation. Such Villa Schwob, facËade: the presence of an an architecture would absence. signify the presence of an absence. Works which intentionally problematise representation, like the monumental blank framed facËade panel of Le Corbusier's Villa Schwob, proclaim their own absence.31 Although it is not possible to make formal generalisations, we might look for symptoms of this phenomenon in the empty facËade or the excessively repetitive one, which effect an erasure.32 In `What is a Picture', Lacan distinguishes `the natural function of the lure' from `that of trompe-l'úil', and concomitantly the response of the birds from that of Zeuxis. The birds are hungry. They respond to a basic instinct at the level of the body (Freud compares hunger to libido). Their response has nothing to do with the illusionistic aspects of representation. Whatever says grapes to birds `would have to be something more reduced, something closer to the sign'. Ducks will seek cover if a shadow passes over them, even though the shadow does not resemble that of a hawk. Zeuxis is a traveller in the imaginary and symbolic registers, in this he has one over on the birds. He responds in a way that already implicates him in the economy of revealing and concealing, which is the mark of illusionistic representation. Lacan says that he tried to pull back the veil of the visual field to see what was hidden behind, which Lacan defines as the objet a, the absent object which is the cause of desire, but which never satisfies desire. This is the absence which, in its different manifestations, motivates all the drives. (The What Lacan said re: architecture 45 thrust of the drive is always a return journey.) His response is telling, for it acknowledges the status of the visual world as a screen for originary loss. Imagine if, following Zeuxis, following Alberti, everyone's impulse in the presence of a painting was to look behind it. This is Lacan's point, that every perspective, like the visual field of which it is a homologue, is a veil. Lacan says that you don't deceive someone by showing him a painting of grapes, you deceive him by showing him a `painting of a veil . . . something which incites him to ask what is behind it'. The point of trompe-l'úil painting is not to give `an illusory equivalence of the object', i.e. to fool us about grapes, but to fool us about painting. `[P]ainting pretends to be someVilla Farnesina: refraction through a denser thing other than what it medium. is'. We think it is a curtain, in fact it is a painting. This is evidenced by the fact that the pleasure of trompe-l'úil is the surprise of discovering that you were fooled when the representation does not move with your point of view. `For it appears at that moment as something other than it seemed, or rather it now seems to be that something else . . . This something else is the objet petit a' (FFCP, p. 112). Lacan is thinking of architectural trompe-l'úil, where a wall is painted as the seamless continuation of a space. This relates to the painted walls in Lacan's history of architecture (Seminar 7). This is the case where the illusion is most markedly destroyed when you move out of position, for the painted lines no longer align with the built ones. When an architectural trompe-l'úil is seen from the wrong angle, the space appears to have 46 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 refracted through a thicker medium. It ana-morphs. The moment we move from our preferred position in the Hall of Perspectives, and realise that porch and view of Rome are illusions, is the moment they signify the opacity of our transparent visual field, behind which hides the real.33 Most stage spaces are a little anamorphed; Lacan mentions the most famous and most self-consciously classical one, Palladio's Teatro Olympico in Vicenza. One of the few anamorphic spaces to straddle the imaginary line between reality and representation, and hence one of the most disturbing, is the choir of Bramante's Santa Maria Presso San Satiro in Milan (1486), which is a kind of perspective painting in high relief. The total depth of the choir, which looks from the entry to be about ten metres deep, is about half a metre. Viewed from the altar, it is almost morphed beyond recognition, like Holbein's vanitas.34 These spaces place the laws of perspective `inside of something that was done in painting in order to find once again the emptiness of primitive architecture'. They are not identical with the spaces they represent. We now have two bifurcating possibilities both of which are functions of Lacan's screen: an absent three-dimensional architecture, absent behind what it represents, and which functions like the objet a in the field of architecture; and a trompe-l'úil architecture, which signifies that the visual field is not transparent but conceals something real. The screen is the middle term between the eye and the gaze in the scopic field. It is the opaque surface which carries spatial representations: it opens out onto a space (think Peruzzi); and it conceals the world (think Palladio). This needs now to be related more directly to the discourse of representation. Architectural discourse: literal and phenomenal transparency In their seminal article, Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky delineated modernism in terms of two types of transparency, which has a bearing on the emptiness of Lacan's architecture and the later development of the screen in the imaginary register.35 They distinguish the literal transparency of the glass walls and open floor plates of Gropius's Dessau Bauhaus (1925±6), from the phenomenal transparency evinced by the facËades and interior spaces of Le Corbusier's Villa Stein at Garches (1927), in which two or more forms interpenetrate without optically destroying each other. The latter is related to the tendency in the still-life paintings of, for example, LeÂger and Le Corbusier, for the objects to share contours and therefore to oscillate between distribution in spatial depth and alignment on the picture plane. Whilst the authors allow both Bauhaus and Garches to retain their status as icons of modern architecture, there is no doubt about which they What Lacan said re: architecture 47 consider to be more interesting. The one has a transparency which resides in the material properties of glass; the other is conceptual, and occurs despite the materiality, and perhaps because of the opacity, of its constituents. It is the mark of a reading event. Phenomenal transparency is the opposite of architectural trompe-l'úil painting. Depth exists at the surface of the screen, not behind it. Instead of what looks deep turning out to be flat, flatness turns out to have depth. Phenomenal transparency is a kind of opacity in the field of vision, which occurs precisely when we cease to see the plane surface as transparent giving on to depth, and begin to see it as a screen. The facËades and spaces of Villa Stein seem to oscillate between these two conditions: between a transparency which opens onto the presence of depth and an opacity which insists on its representation. The literal transparency of glass modernism has an affinity to trompe-l'úil where visual space is projected upon the plane surface of a wall. The transparency of the Bauhaus is effected by seeing the interior Villa Stein, rear elevation: phenomenal through its elevations. flatness. The optical (one-eyed) relationships in both cases are similar. The difference between the Bauhaus and trompe-l'úil is that the Bauhaus never ana-morphs and loses its transparency. It never exploits this representational capacity of architecture. The screen in both Lacan (operational montage) and Freud (screen memories, dream facËade) is not so simple as the plane surface involved in optical projection. For Lacan's and Freud's screens have quite different properties from the slide projector screen. The dreamer is not a projector and does not thereby project images onto a screen, nor does the dreamer look through a glass to the scene seen through the glass. Rather the screen screens a reality which is otherwise unattainable. The content of the dream is only accessible as facËade. The dream is like Piranesi's monuments: no matter how deeply they are gouged, we never see inside them, but only more surface. Unlike the facËade of a building, it is not possible to step 48 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 through it to inhabit the plan, and do all the things that architects do when they have free reign to explore a building, like locate the spaces which correspond to elements on the facËade. In the world of the dream, more analysis never leads inside the dream in the sense of passing through its facËade into something else which corresponds to it, but only to more facËade. It is a short step from here to the register of the imaginary in which there is only ever the screen and to the visual world where, like Piranesi's architecture of pure surface, everything is a surface for representation. We can blame the invention of perspective on the thickening of the screen and its delamination from the visual field, as if, before the invention of perspective, screen and field were one transparent thing. Or perhaps before the invention of trompe-l'úil illusionism, but this was only possible in a systematic way once perspective was invented and whole architectural spaces could be treated illusionistically. Any 2D representation of space ± be it Peruzzi trompe-l'úil, pre-perspectival fresco by Giotto, or Ryman `blank' ± will screen what is behind it from view. This is the general quandary which representation finds itself in; and even transparencies like `The bride stripped bare . . . Even', must be understood in these terms. When this representation is a perspective or photograph it becomes problematic, because of the systematic one-to-one correspondence between 2D surface and 3D visual field. This identity suggests that the visual field is always a screen; that it is opaque like the photograph or the painting. Before the invention of perspective, the visual world was reality. What you saw was what you got. With the invention of perspective and the identification of the visual field with its representation on a two-dimensional plane, the visual world becomes imaginary, with the screen screening a reality we know not. It took 500 years after the invention of perspective for psychoanalysis to invent a subject which was adequate to this condition. The illusion of illusionism is not so much that we forget the opacity of the painted surface and think that we are looking at a real space, but that we forget the phenomenal opacity of the visual field itself. We forget that, lurking in the fringes of thought and consciousness is the terrifying possibility that the visual world is itself a screen, and that it screens something from our vision. In architecture, this illusion is perpetrated by surfaces with literal transparency. It is an illusion foisted upon us all the time, every time we look out of a window, but particularly in certain works of modern architecture like the Bauhaus, whose spaces unfold as a matter of transparency. The screen-like nature of the visual field ± and of architecture which is its built form ± only becomes apparent in moments of phenomenal transparency; moments when, standing before Villa Stein, the world becomes opaque. What Lacan said re: architecture 49 Not many architectures which are capable of entertaining this possibility will entertain what lurks behind the screen. Le Corbusier's work does not indulge in this level of malevolence. We saw how Piranesi's Vedute exposed architecture's status as a threatened and threatening surface. It is arguable that he could only do this in the obsessive and agitated environment of the engravings where the architecture was already identified with the surface of representation (his engraved paper = its limestone cladding). Other art forms higher up the Hegelian chain of Aufhebung more readily contemplate this possibility. In Stephen King's novella The Langoliers, the langoliers are little spheres which race along the airport runway shredding the visual world under the wheels of the accelerating 747 like sheets of paper, revealing not the earth fill under the tarmac but an impenetrable black emptiness. In Village of the Damned, George Sanders tries to keep the mindreading devil-children from penetrating his head so he can detonate his bomb. He does it by imagining Piranesi's wall. The wall is crumbling visibly before their gaze. Behind it, his mind's eye, lurks psychic annihilation.36 The opacity of the visual field predicated by Le Corbusier's phenomenally transparent work is acknowledged at Garches by the thin strip of space which delaminates the facË ade libre from the plan. This space announces that the facËade floats, and is not a projection of the plan in the manner of, figuratively speaking, the Renaissance facËade or, literally speaking, the Bauhaus elevations. The vertical depth relation (perpendicular to page, perpendicular to facËade, the line of sight) is severed by a series of sharp shallow striations of Villa Stein, facËade: phenomenal depth. space. This space also announces that the facËade has a phenomenal thickness, a thickness which exists as a visual reality, corresponding to but distinct from the literal but invisible thickness of the bearing wall masonry facËade of, for example, the Renaissance palazzo. 50 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 The screen and the flatness of depth We ended the discussion of the Minim chapel with the possibility of an equivalence between two- and three-dimensional space; such that perspective is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional space, and architecture a three-dimensional representation of a two-dimensional space. This is not belied by Lacan's tripartite diagram of the structure of the scopic field, the operational montage which was achieved by montaging one perspective diagram inverted upon another. On one reading, a viewing subject is located opposite its object, with a screen in between. The object is the gaze, which objectifies the subject. By a related reading, the real (gaze) is located opposite the symbolic (the viewing subject, subject of language), with the imaginary (screen, bearer of images), in between. Students sometimes model it by setting up two slide projectors aimed either side of a back projection screen. In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, the screen is that which: . . . . . . has as an analogue the picture surface; fractures in cases of anamorphosis; goes opaque when kissed by Narcissus (desire); is the site of the objet a (object of desire, trauma of the real); had its first iteration as the mirror in the mirror stage; is instituted by the symbolic order. The screen does not support the tripartite reading for long. It seems to be the herald of a resolutely twodimensional world. To the extent that the operational montage is read as spatial, it collapses as soon as we remember that the screen is the opaque site for the representation of space. Detail of Lacan's text: the visual field. In each iteration of the screen in different contexts ± Minim chapels, architectural trompe-l'úil painting, modern architecture ± we are led to the conclusion that the screen predicates an identity What Lacan said re: architecture 51 between two and three dimensions. In the visual register, all images are projections in two dimensions. There is nothing but the screen. The gaze and the subject, to the extent that they are geometric positions, are inscribed on the screen. Likewise for space. The screen is identical to the visual field. In so far as the diagram represents the structure of the subject, it is not spatial at all, except in a metaphorical sense. In this case, the structure is not tripartite, but bipartite: it is a screen vis-aÁ-vis projections. The subject does not look at the screen, the subject is the screen. The subject is a surface. The other positions ± gaze, ego ± are projections of that surface. One position seems to the subject to be the point from which the subject looks; the other the point from which the subject feels looked at. These two positions are about two different identifications that the subject makes, and in the realm of subjecthood, all identifications are self-identifications. The gaze is inside each subject.37 The gaze is the manifestation of the objet a in the visual field (it manifests differently in different drives), and the objet a is `the little bit of the subject lost to the subject'.38 In Lacan's tuna can story, the glint of light represents the little bit of himself which he does not understand, the bit he feels uncomfortable with, is alienated from, misrecognises (he thought he might be a fisherman, in fact he's a poor little rich kid) (FFCP, p. 99). Objet petit a Phenomenal flatness suggests something about the reading of architecture. It directs our attention toward the surfaces of architecture, and upon any architecture which manifests as surface, whether it be the literal opacity of Villa Schwob, the phenomenal opacity of Villa Stein, or the screeny graphicy aesthetics of, for example, Jean Nouvel or Rem Koolhaus, whose spaces seem to manifest as series of screens of varying degrees of translucence and reflection depending upon the amount of information they are required to carry. It suggests further that the surfaces upon which we might expect the objet a of architecture to be found are the surfaces of photographs of architecture, and not on the walls, nor even the painted or reflected walls, of architecture. It is not merely that the photograph ensures that we are in a discourse of surface and flatness (a kind of corrective against errant discourse). Rather: the sign of the objet a in architecture has to do with the relationships which an architecture establishes with the media of representation. We are looking for an architecture which, like the psychoanalytic subject, represents itself to itself; accepting in this predicament the scope for misrecognition. We are no longer interested in using Lacanian 52 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 discourse to position the subject of perception in architecture. This is Colomina's turf. According to the present reading of Lacan, architecture is the subject. Architecture represents itself. We know from the mirror stage (although it is never said so clearly) that the little bit of the subject lost to the subject is the subject's image. An identity is gained, an image is lost. In a similar vein, the relation of architecture to its image is one of identity and loss. This harks back to the originary dialectic between a primitive architecture and its representation by painting. Perspective painting is the mirror stage of architecture, and thereafter architecture is involved in `a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency and anticipation'.39 The mirror stage is the birthing scenario of the objet a in which the subject loses its objet a to an image, and we hope to capture it in a photograph. Objet a might only appear in an image of architecture, and not in architecture itself. Or only appear in the space between architecture and its image. In The Return of the Real, Foster suggests that the repetitive screen printing of Warhol's Marilyns are an attempt to screen the real. He is particularly attentive to the effects of repetition and misregistration.40 Following Foster, we begin Objet a at Ville d'Avray: architecture represents our search by itself. looking for repetitive facËades and serial spaces, which are the effect of the architecture representing itself. Having been appraised of the nature of the screen, we might look for repetition in photographs of architecture. We might find symptoms of the objet a in, say, the visual misregistrations between architecture and its image, as if Lacan's slide projector were no longer perfectly registered on his interior. We might begin by looking at how Le Corbusier's purest villa architecture, which was as much an endeavour of publishing as of building, solicits the camera. What Lacan said re: architecture 53 This underscores the fact that the psychoanalytic subject is culturally and historically determined. The objet a (under any name) was not available until the accidental discovery of the power of mirrors one fine day in the primordial forests of classical Greece. It might not have been available to the subject until the invention of perspective projection, and perhaps not fully available to the general public until the invention of photography. Lacan's metaphor is architecture Gilded mirrors It is clear that Lacan has a deep affinity for the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Baroque interior, the kind with huge mirrored wall panels surrounded by g i l d e d fr a m e s with lots of curlicues, mirrors that replicate rooms endlessly, interiors which never end. No other architecture matches the convoluted, folded, anamorphic nature of Film still from Last Year in Marienbad: the mirror stage. his thought and language as does the interior and plot of that consummate mirror movie, whose namesake is the town which hosted the conference where `The Mirror Stage' was read.41 This is an architecture whose aesthetic and spatial effect is based upon the mirror's potential for endlessly replicating and fracturing space upon its surface, and it is closely linked to the work of virtuoso perspective two-pointers like the Bibiena brothers, scenographers who produced endlessly replicating stage interiors.42 This architecture recalls the engravings of the Minim chapels, which in turn recalls the camera obscura, all of which are machines for the projection of space upon the interior and whose effect depends upon the dialogue between two- and three-dimensional surfaces. It recalls Lacan's originary architecture, in its exchange between image and architecture, projected 54 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 picture and interior. It is an architecture of almost obsessive attention to surface and surface encrustation, framing, multiplicity, and, most importantly, the surface effects of language at the expense of depth; the architecture which an ideologue die-hard structuralist like Le Corbusier called les horreurs de Rome, all the while illustrating some of the most beautiful interiors in Rome, including the painted trompe l'úil state rooms of Castell Sant' Angelo.43 It is an architecture with correspondingly little interest in overt manifestation of structural geometry and organisation, in plan or facËade, which are the signs and characteristics of both the Italian Renaissance and European modernism. These observations make the sense of his text clearer, but they raise the question of the metaphoricity of the text generally (the subject is a boudoir) and, specifically, the relation of his machines to the structure of the psyche. We can ask, for instance, what is the status of the mirror in the mirror stage.44 I provisionally distinguish metaphor from model. In metaphor, something in one register explains the function or structure of something in another. Lacan uses anamorphosis to explain the emergence of desire in the subject. He relates a phenomenon in painting to a state of mind, which involves jumping registers from painting to psyche. Model is reserved for more direct relations between terms, as when they inhabit the same register and can be in one-to-one correspondence. A scale model is a model of a building because they are both objects, but a photograph has a metaphoric relationship to the building, if it exposes certain relationships, as for instance Le Corbusier's photographs of Ville d'Avray, which pose the question of an architectural gaze. Similarly, in that order [the order of images], which is particularly satisfying for the subject, connoted in psycho-analytic experience by the term narcissism ± in which I have striven to reintroduce the essential structure it derives from its reference to the specular image ± in the satisfaction, not to say self-satisfaction, that diffuses from it, which gives the subject a pretext for such a profound meÂconnaissance ± and does its empire not extend as far as this reference of the philosophical tradition represented by plenitude encountered by the subject in the mode of contemplation ± can we not also grasp that which has been eluded, namely the function of the gaze? (FFCP, p. 74). So, what is the status of the mirror in the mirror stage? `The Mirror Stage' lays the groundwork for the imaginary order. It is a reading of Freud's `On Narcissism: an Introduction (1914)'.45 Lacan's self reflective world of virtual images is a metaphoric elaboration on Freud's use of words like projection and its cognates (N, p. 88) and self regard (N, p. 92ff.). It has the same metaphoric status as does the mythic narrative of Narcissus. This confirms: What Lacan said re: architecture . . . 55 that the scopic field, whose structure is diagrammed by the operational montage is in the subject's head; and that the geometral point of Lacan's gaze is Freud's ego ideal (`imposed from without' (N, p. 95) `it is the common ideal of a family class or nation' (N, p. 96)); and that consciousness ± which is that observing agency (N, p. 91, n. 1) which monitors the ego on behalf of the ego-ideal ± is the self-reflexive series of relationships diagrammed by the operational montage. Lacan's mirror image must be understood as an elaboration on figurative and literal reflection, and may include those aspects of self image `conveyed to the subject by the medium of the voice' (N, p. 90). Where Freud writes `What he projects before him as his ideal . . .' (N, p. 88), Lacan writes that the mirror stage will institute the I in a drama in which it moves `from insufficiency to anticipation' (MS, p. 4) and leads `to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development' (MS, p. 4). The subject is also `caught up in the lure of spatial identification' (MS, p. 4) ± we are all, to varying degrees captivated by our own image in a store-front. Lacan differs from Freud on the role of the voice. Although he does not rule voice out, he insists upon the temporal priority of the imaginary order. Thus he maintains in `The Mirror Stage' that the subject's identification with its mirror image occurs `before it is obDetail of Lacan's text: an optical architecture. jectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject' (p. 2), `before its social determination' (p. 2). In `The Two 56 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 Narcissisms' and `The Ego-Ideal and Ideal Ego' (Seminar 1: Freud's Papers on Technique), Lacan defines the relation between voice and image with his optical device; and this device, while it would be a fantastic model for an architecture (in league with the camera obscura and Plato's cave, or Laugier's primitive hut, or Absalon's), it can only be understood metaphorically ± or at most analogically ± when applied to the subject of perception. It is an elaborate machine with plane and concave mirrors, which situate the virtual image of the subject (narcissistic identification, future objet a) within an environment of real images (visual field). This catoptric environment represents the imaginary order, but the symbolic order determines the angles of the mirrors, and hence determines what is reflected back to the subject.46 It models certain relationships, but bears no direct relation to the subject, either projective, formal, scalar, etc. It is only by a metaphoric leap, the leap that allows meaning to travel, that we can call it a model of the subject. We will provisionally accept that one-eyed space is not the same as twoeyed space, and that therefore we cannot make a corresponding identity between the scopic field and the visual field as we could between the twoand three-dimensional iterations of the screen. The photograph is identical to the scopic field/screen because it is synchronic, instantaneous, single point, stationary, and opaque.47 This is another reason for using the photograph of an architecture, and not the architecture, in our scopic analysis. To define the metaphoric relationship between scopic and visual fields more precisely, we have to re-enter Lacan's text. The production of meaning Lacan defines metaphor as the replacement of one signifier by another along the vertical substitutive axis of language.48 This vertical stack of signifiers is a kind of meaning vending machine. This year's signifier is pushed out the bottom to become next year's signified. Thus meaning is continually created and circulated around the world. Interpretation ± including this paper's ± is one of the ways that visual images are brought into the symbolic order. (By writing, I delineate the signification of images.) For Lacan, images continually move into the symbolic order, and in particular the anamorphic image becomes a signifier for absence and emptiness. It is the special case because it is the originary one, which inaugurates meaning, where before there had only been images which were not signifiers.49 But this applies equally to the relation of the mirror to operational montage. Within Lacan's text, the mirror signifies a series of intra-subjective relations. In the case of the architecture that represents itself, its projected image What Lacan said re: architecture 57 becomes the signifier, behind which the architecture, the signified, is screened. There are other ways that things can be related in Lacan's text (there are metonymic relations), but at the level of meaning, this is all there is. Metaphor is the site of interpretation, and it does not get better than this. The final species of emptiness is architecture in its pre-linguistic state, which is not known, but must be posited in order to hold Piranesi's stones up. It precedes meaning; it is what holds meaning together, the cement (cement was invented by the Romans) which cements the metonymic Nixon on the relationship of signifiers on the campaign signifying chain. The cement trail: `You which will be next year's image never look at on the metaphoric axis. (Are me from the signifiers pushed off the top of place from the stack as well?) Alternatively, which I see it is architecture at a time before you.' the symbolic order, when it is the potential but not yet realised site for meaning. Not an architecture empty of Spirit aÁ la Hegel, but an architecture empty of meaning because meaning has not yet been invented, which may be more or less the same thing, since meaning is the province of Spirit. In this case, the image does not screen a lumpen real; until its integration into the symbolic, the image is the lumpen real. Lacan's project aligns Freud with twentieth-century French thought. Lacan integrated Freud to Saussurean linguistics (the subject is an effect of language) in a manner analogous to LeÂvi-Strauss's application of linguistics to anthropology. One of the points of this paper is that Lacan effected a similar integration of Freud into visual thought. Lacan started with Freud's `On Narcissism' (`The Two Narcissism' and `The Ego-Ideal and Ideal Ego' in Seminar 1). He stitches Freudian psychoanalysis, via BaltrusaõÈtis's images 58 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 of projecting machines, into the visual/optical/representation tradition, divested of its metaphysics and divine inspiration, which had already begun to model subjectivity and its relation to the world. Freud's thought was raw material, an empty lumpen real, the Freudian Thing, which required assimilation into the symbolic order of twentieth-century French thought and visual tradition. Lacan's project has the opposite sense to Piranesi's project, picking up Piranesi's stones to restore the illusion of meaning to architecture. We suggest that Lacan's use of non-enclosing topological forms like the Klein bottle, Mobius strip, or Borromean knot, which are discussed at length in Seminar 13, are part of the same project. On this view, Freud failed to integrate psychoanalysis into the physical sciences, a project he was ambivalent about. Lacan ± dubious also, of this project ± looks instead to the discourse of formal mathematics (at least `scientific' if not empirical). The mobius, for instance, has two sides but only one surface. Its logic can articulate a binary opposition, interior/exterior, but the terms are seen to run into each other.50 These forms offer interesting challenges to ways of thinking about architecture, because architecture and space-making, typically conceived, are about enclosure and threshold. Emptiness might be more clearly articulated outside a discourse of closure because then it would be more difficult to conflate with an empty nave; and it is possible that an architecture of, for example, folded surfaces (as, for instance, the architecture of Greg Lynn) would have a manifest affinity to the screen. The articulation of emptiness within a mobius space is an obvious next step for this paper. These forms also raise interesting problems about their status, metaphoric or otherwise, in Lacan's text. According to Schneiderman, Lacan adopted these forms in response to an enlightenment tradition which produced the unfathomable suffering of two world wars ± an intellectual tradition which valorises the systematic, is founded on binary oppositions, and whose formal metaphors include, for example, Plato's cave, the Trojan horse, the camera obscura. If Hitler might have listened to Mozart and read Kant, what hope does anti-fascist intellectual resistance offer ± be it communism, existentialism, etc. ± since it inhabits the same forms of thought. Because of their resistance to closure, and their conflation of inside and outside surfaces, the Klein bottle et al. have the potential to offer the model of a new form of subjectivity. Similarly, Lacan's seminars almost never provide the satisfaction of intellectual mastery, of finally arriving at a conclusion, but remain critically open.51 What Lacan said re: architecture 59 Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959±1960, Book 7 in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (New York: Norton, 1992), 140. Hereafter referred to as S7. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton Press, 1981). Hereafter referred to as FFCP. Hal Foster, `The Return of the Real', in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). Beatriz Colomina, `Le Corbusier and Photography', in Assemblage 4. See also my `Reading through the Mirror: Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier' in Assemblage 18, which was inspired and influenced by her work. Jurgis BaltrusaõÈtis, Anamorphoses ou Perspectives Curieuses (Paris: Olivier Perrin Editeur, 1957). For instance, Damisch refers once to `the now classic book of Jurgis BaltrusaõÈtis' in The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). `La perspective est geÂneÂralement consideÂreÂe dans l'histoire de l'art, comme un facteur de reÂalisme restituant le troisieÁme dimension. C'est avant tout un artifice . . . Nous en traitons ici, les aspects fantastiques et le coÃte absurde.' About anamorphism, `C'est un reÂbus, un monstre, un prodige'. And `Le sujeÃt de cette eÂtude est l'histoire d'une illusion ouÁ le reÂel et l'apparence se trouvent artificiellement disjoints par des savants et des artistes'. Anamorphism annihilates the natural order of things and their representation, by applying the same rules of representation as perspective does. After its invention, perspective can no longer be aligned with a science of reality. `La perspective n'apparaõÃt plus comme une science de la reÂaliteÂ. C'est une technique des hallucinations.' The second edition of BaltrusaõÈtis, revised, enlarged, and retitled Anamorphoses, ou Magie artificielle des effets merveilleux (1969) was translated into English as Anamorphic Art, trans. W. J. Strachan (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1977). Although the English translation makes BaltrusaõÈtis available to English language Lacan studies, it is of limited value because it is derived from the second edition (Lacan would have had the first), whose layout was revised. The relation of text to images has a directness in the first edition, which gives it a polemic, manifesto-like quality, which is lost to the coffee-table production values evinced by the later editions. (The first give-away that something is amiss are the endpapers, which have been printed white on black. What significance could white on black have in this context?) Since a close reading must be attentive to this relation, only the first edition is relevant to Lacan studies. stereo-, having or dealing with the three dimensions of space, or involving viewing with two eye pieces (as in a stereoscope), to get the effect of depth; -gnosis, knowledge, recognition (Webster's 7th New Collegiate). Thus stereognosis is either 3D knowledge or two-eyed knowledge, which is not necessarily the same. Most of Lacan's examples are from the tradition of perspective representation (painting and optics), which assume the single eye. This bifurcation, so noted, is the beginning of an argument that the scopic field is not to be equated with the visual field, meaning the (two-eyed) visual world we are always in, and nor should architecture be understood as a built version of the scopic field, as image producing machine; although both scopic field and visual world/ architecture are obviously related. For instance, one of the salient features of our visual field is that we are always moving in it; and one type of blind spot 60 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 which Lacan does not countenance is the thickening of the screen associated with speed, although desire is frequently associated with movement, and the drives are understood to travel around their object. The question of the relation of architecture or perspective to the scopic field is ambiguous in Lacan's text, as it is never clear whether Lacan uses them as metaphors for mental structures, or examples of psychoanalytic readings offered by way of example, etc. We will return to the question of metaphor later in this paper. Both The Ambassadors and Las Meninas displace interest from the centre of the painting (prince of rays, vanishing point, gaze) to the periphery, where the most significant elements occur (the skull, the light which animates the reflected space). `[I]n its relation to desire, reality appears only as marginal' (FFCP, p. 108). Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), 205. Kant says that positing things-in-themselves is a logical conclusion of the ways we think about and represent objects in space and time, although (1) we can by definition never know them, and (2) they are consequently of no use to us whatsoever and thus not the objects of a legitimate enquiry. It is tempting to equate things-in-themselves with the Thing, especially as Lacan seems to (S7, p. 55), but they are in totally different registers: one is a logical, the other a psychic boundary. At best there could be a correspondence. This is the perspective by incremental approximation account of the development of perspective, as in John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (1957; Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1987). Although it is not known how familiar Lacan was with Hegel's Aesthetics, these topics are also covered in The Phenomenology of Spirit, with which Lacan was familiar through KojeÁve's lectures. Fragments of his course were compiled in Alexandre KojeÁve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: lectures on the phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James Nichols, ed. Allan Bloom, assembled by Raymond Queneau (New York: Basic Books, 1969). Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin Classics, 1993), 90±91. See chapter 5, `The Tuche and the Automaton', in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. See also Hal Foster's gloss on this in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 132±8. For which see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 33±93, for the dialectic of revealing and concealing in the work of, e.g., Duchamp and Max Ernst. The anamorphism looks as if Holbein smeared his paint by Freudian slop (sic), or in frustration and passion. It then dried. It suggests that the visual world is material, not abstract and transparent, but thick and gooey, rather like oil paint. Italicised in the original. The full quote is `When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that ± You never look at me from the place from which I see you'. The desire to close this gap would remain unfulfilled even if you were looking in the mirror, and the love was self love. Anamorphic architectures are highly inflected by fear and desire, and other strong emotions. The most obvious examples are haunted houses, which are literally animated by psychic forces. Doors slam, floors seem strangely out of kilter, walls swell, there is a sense of being gazed at. The haunted house is a What Lacan said re: architecture 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 61 good example of Lacanian sublimation. In The Haunting of Hill House, the swelling of a wall is not only a visual image. There is nothing scary about a swelling wall, per se. The degree to which it is scary is the degree to which it signifies the presence of spirits. Jean-FrancËois Niceron, La Perspective curieuse (Paris: Jean Du Puis, 1638), revised, translated into Latin, and republished with better plates as Thaumaturgus Opticus (Paris: Jean Du Puis, 1646). Not clear what the `as well as Paris' referred to, until I discovered that he was quoting from a picture caption in BaltrusaõÈtis. Lacan was standing in front of the class reading out of the book and got a little ahead of himself. This is a textual punctum, a moment of recognition which seems to slice through the media of representation to a past present moment. Lacan slipped up a couple of times. He mis-locates The Ambassadors to the Louvre, and mis-identifies the Minim chapel as Jesuit. Anamorphism is a species of visual joke, a kind of interior ha ha, which can be lumped together with jokes, puns, slips-of-thetongue, and all the other psychic detritus which Freud shows us to be the screen of the unconscious, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Marcel Duchamp was also very interested in Niceron's work on projection in connection with Etant DonneÂs: 1. la chute d'eau, 2. le gaz d'eÂclairage (1946±66), which is about a certain stereognosis. Duchamp builds a three-dimensional (literal depth) perspective (phenomenal depth) for two eyes, thus mobilising paralax and depth of field. John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). Wilton-Ely contains the complete plates of the Vedute and the Carceri. Piranesi is an easy one, because the body of work is so vast, and so full of symptoms. Piranesi was involved in a vicious polemic, conducted at the level of language, about the origin of Roman classicism in Etruscan or Greek architecture. Piranesi supported Etruscan as the foundation for a cultural hegemony and priority of Roman classicism over Greece. The concept of the informeÂ. See Bataille's informeÂ. See also Lacan's homme-lette, which forms the rim (as in anus), the site of the drives, which occupies the site of his erogenous zones. In Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink and Maire Jaanus (eds), Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 205±20. More or less what Tafuri described as a two-pronged attack on language and abstraction. Tafuri called him the evil genius on account of his demolition job on language. See Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: avant-gardes and architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 25±54, in which he defines operations on language as the project of the avant-garde. Many people were in the Vedute business in eighteenth-century Rome, but only Piranesi was able to convey a sense of the emerging malevolence and horror which lurks beneath this (architectural) language. In the engravings of, for example, Vasi, Paninni or Canaletto, the ruins are restored or romanticised to convey a sense of melancholy or nostalgia. See for instance Robert Ryman's (1930±) Ledger (1983). Absalon (1964±93) was an Israeli-French artist. Laugier's image shows a personification of architecture gesturing regally toward the hut. Because of her position next to it but not in it, because of her 62 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 position as personification on high, because of her Olympian remove (intellectualist) from the cares of the world, she will only ever have an anamorphic view of her primitive hut (= gaze in the architectural field, or Other of the subject). The illusionistic painting of a curtain is quite different from the painting of grapes or almost any other objects. It is a visual pun (source of psychoanalytic insight). Villa Schwob (1916), La Chaux-de-Fonds. Colin Rowe relates the facËade to a mannerist facËade motif; see Colin Rowe, `Mannerism and Modern Architecture', in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976). Schwob used a prototype concrete frame which was refined in later works as the Domino frame, one of the icons of modernism. The Schwob facËade is thus an answer in advance to the literal transparency of the Bauhaus. See for instance the blank graphed facËades of Jean Nouvel. In the Cartier headquarters (1990), and several other corporate projects, the signs and characteristics of the interior are erased by repetitive writing on glass. Using different means altogether, the stultifying repetition of the same block form in Hilberseimer's urban projects (1924, 1930) suggests a problematising of representation, and a consequent sense of erasure. Baldessarri Peruzzi (1481±1536), the Hall of Perspectives, Villa Farnesina, Rome (c. 1512). All these examples are mentioned in BaltrusaõÈtis. Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, `Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal', reprinted in Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 159±83; first published in Perspecta, the Yale Journal of Architecture, 1963. No one has made much of the connection between phenomenal transparency and the screen in Lacan's imaginary register, although Anthony Vidler suggests that there ought to be one; see `Transparency', in Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 217±26. See Stephen King, The Langoliers, published in the collection Four Past Midnight (New American Library, 1991). See Village of the Damned, 1960, directed by Wolf Rilla, starring George Sanders, screenplay by Rilla and Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by Wyndham Lewis, The Midwich Cuckoos, 1957. This is borne out by the genesis of the operational montage in the mirror stage. The mirror stage is one half of this diagram. The positions of subject and gaze are superimposed by the reflective power of the mirror. Foster, The Return of the Real, 141. Lacan, `The Mirror Stage', in Ecrits, a Selection. (New York: Norton, 1977), 4. Foster, The Return of the Real, 127±70. Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais, director; Alain Robbe-Grillet, screenplay) is set in a Baroque chateau of mirrors and is about the replication and fracturing of experience in appearance and memory; in particular, how desire unfolds in the register of images real and virtual. See the screenplay (New York: Grove Press, 1962). The Bibiena family were the most prolific practitioners of the Bolognese school of quadratura or illusionist architecture. Two generations of brothers dominated the scene from last quarter of the seventeenth century, producing elaborate one- and two-point perspective screens for stage sets. Lacan never talks directly about two-point perspective, in which the vanishing point does not align with the position of the I/eye of the subject. It is not clear what about What Lacan said re: architecture 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 63 the gaze and the blind spot changes once this structural identification is abandoned. Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: 1923), `La lecËon de Rome'. It must be noted that all psychoanalytic texts are metaphoric; even to use the words entity or structure in connection with the psyche is to attribute the properties of material (contour, thingness) to what is immaterial and known only through its linguistic symptoms and traces. Lacan, `The Mirror Stage', henceforth referred to in text as MS; and Sigmund Freud, `On Narcissism: an Introduction (1914)', in On Metapsychology, vol. 11 of the Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 1984), henceforth referred to in text as N. Freud's Papers on Technique, 1953±1954, Book 1 in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 140: `Now let's postulate that the inclination of the plane mirror is governed by the voice of the other.' By synchronic I mean that the time ± a past moment ± in each photograph is equivalent. I am dependent upon Evans, Introductory Dictionary, for this discussion. See Evans, entry on metaphor and metonymy. It is difficult to understand the pre-lingual status of the image, and the relationship it might have to the subject. The pre-lingual subject does not exist: it forms when it loses a little bit of itself to the Other, which loss happens in language. The identification to which Lacan refers in `The Mirror Stage' would be something like the identification a bull makes when he charges the red cloth for the first time. This red has to precede signification as the theoretical limit of signification. Freud's `the Uncanny' is a classic example of a mobius argument, in which two words of opposite sense, heimlich and unheimlich, are shown to cohabit each other's surfaces. See Sigmund Freud, `The Uncanny', in The Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949). See Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan, Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1983), chapter 8. This book suffers from not having a bibliography, footnotes, index, or chapter titles. Image credits Page 30 Page 33 Page 34 Page 37 Detail from Veduta interna della Basilica di S. Maria Maggiore, plate no. 87 in Piranesi, Vedute di Roma, 1748, 1778. Reprinted from J. Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). Diagram of the drives. Reprinted from Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton Press, 1981). Absalon, Cellule No. 1, 1992, Tate Gallery. Reprinted by permission of Tate Gallery Publishing. Detail of Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors. Reprinted by permission of The National Gallery, London. 64 Critical Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 2 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 42 Page 44 Page 45 Page 47 Page 49 Page 50 Page 52 Page 53 Page 55 Page 57 Anamorphic projection of an ear. Reprinted from Niceron, Thaumaturgus Opticus (Paris: Jean Du Puis, 1663). Detail from Plates 66 and 67, the chapel of the Minim Order. Reprinted from Niceron, Thaumaturgus Opticus (Paris: Jean Du Puis, 1663). Detail from Plate 66, the chapel of the Minim Order. Reprinted from Niceron, Thaumaturgus Opticus (Paris: Jean Du Puis, 1663). Detail from Avanzi d'un portico coperto . . . la via di Frascati, plate no. 79 in Piranesi, Vedute di Roma, 1748, 1778. Reprinted from J. Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). Le Corbusier, Villa Schwob, facËade, La Chaux de Fonds, 1916. Reprinted from W. Boesiger (ed.), Le Corbusier, 1910±65 (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1967). Baldassarre Peruzzi, Hall of perspectives, Villa Farnesina, Rome, 1512. Reprinted from M. Milman, Trompe-L'Oeil Painting: the illusions of reality (Geneva: Editions D'Art Albert Skira, 1982). Le Corbusier, Villa Stein, rear elevation, Garches, Paris, 1927. Reprinted from Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (eds), Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council and Hayward Gallery, 1987). By permission of F. R. Yerbury/ Architectural Association. Le Corbusier, Villa Stein, facËade, Garches, Paris, 1927. Reprinted from Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (eds), Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council and Hayward Gallery, 1987). By permission of F. R. Yerbury/Architectural Association. Diagram of the operational montage. Reprinted from Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: Norton Press, 1981). Le Corbusier, Interior of Ville d'Avray, 1925. Reprinted from Michael Raeburn and Victoria Wilson (eds), Le Corbusier, Architect of the Century (London: Arts Council of England, 1987). Still from Last Year in Marienbad. Reprinted from Robbe-Grillet, Last Year in Marienbad (New York: Grove Press, 1962). Lacan's optical device. Reprinted from Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud's Papers on Technique 1953±1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Nixon on the campaign trail, Time Magazine, 29 March 1968. Reprinted from M. H. Pirenne, Optics Painting & Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).