Post-Modernity
Introduction to Post-Modernity
Notional Definitions
Epistemological Foundations
Why Post-Modernity?
History and Memory
Modernity
Paradigm formation
1889-1925
Normal Science
1925-1950s
The End of Modernity
1950-1960s
Post-Structuralism
1970-1979
Post-Modernity
1960-2000
1979-2000
Post-Structuralism - Post-Feminism – Post-Colonialism
1970-1979
19851980Post-Theory
1995Globalization: A Permanente Condition
 Epistemological Foundations
The End of Master Narratives
De-Centring the West from inside and outside
Deconstruction
The End of the Logos
The End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
The End of Certitude
The Past and a Reflexive Present
The Return to Representation as Simulation
Double Codification/Intertextuality -History and Memory
John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges
Borges at the Cross-roads
Ficciones 1941-1944
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges (1967)
“Literature of Exhaustion”. Atlantic Monthly, (August): 2934
[Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote] […] if Beethoven’s Sixth
were composed today, it would be an embarrassment; but
clearly it wouldn’t be, necessarily, if done with ironic
intent by a composer quite aware of where we’ve been and
where we are.
John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges (1967)
But the important thing to observe is that Borges doesn’t
attribute the Quixote to himself, much less re-compose it
like Pierre Menard; instead, he writes a remarkable and
original work of literature, the implicit theme of which is
the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original
works of literature.
For [Borges] no one has claim to originality in literature;
all writers are more or less faithful amanuenses of the
spirit, translators and annotators of pre-existing
archetypes.
John Barth and Jorge Luis Borges (1967)
His Ficciones are not only footnotes to imaginary texts,
but postcripts to the real corpus of literature.
 Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
Borges: The composition of vast books is a laborious and
impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred
pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition it is
possible in a few minutes!
A better course or procedure is to simulate that these books
already exist, and then to offer a resumé, a commentary.
More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have
preferred to write notes upon imaginary books. Such are.
Tlön, Uqbar Orbis Tertius.
 Borges’ postmodernity is founded in a variety of
narrative devices concentrated in particular in a discursive
plurality, such as rhizome, deconstruction, metadiscursive play, intertextuality, heterogeneity,
subjectivity, minimalism, irony, fragmentation, erasure
between fiction and criticism, between art and non art,
between reality and fiction, author and reader.
These characteristics will become, during the 1970s and
onward, the fundamental ones in literature and art.
What Borges did was to deconstruct the Modern
paradigm and create the literary and artistic
postmodernity
Inter-Textuality
and
Double Codification
Three Forms of Inter-Textuality
Intertextuality
Intertext
Palimpsest
Rhizome
 'Intertextuality' is a term coined by July Kristeva, but
which we shall use to cover a somewhat broader range of
theories than those which she expounds in her seminal work
on intertextuality, "Word, dialogue and novel” or in
Problémes de la structuration du texte (1969).
The theory of intertextuality insists that a text (for the
moment to be understood in the narrower sense) cannot
exist as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and does not
function as a closed system.
In Art:
Termed coined in the 1960s to describe art which abandons
all pretensions at either expressiveness or illusion.
It is generally three-dimensional and either shaped by
chance, i.e. a heap of sand – or man made up of simple
geometrical forms, often used repetitively.
In Literature: Taking structures from an original text and
inserting them in a new text, thus going through a variety
of transformations.
The New Philosophers
and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jacques Derrida and Writing - Deconstruction
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic
Thinking and the non-binary thinking
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
Foucault and the Power of Discourse
Lacan and the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real Orders
Deconstruction
What is Deconstruction?
It is not a Method
It is not a theory
It is a particular manner of reading, a special hermeneutics
It consists in inhabiting the structures and meanings of a
texts in order to expose the falacy(ies) of an stutatement of
truth.
Deconstruction
Firstly, there is a critique of the human subject.
The term 'subject' helps us to conceive of human reality as a
construction, as a product of signifying activities which are
both culturally specific and generally unconscious.
The category of the subject calls into question the notion of
the self synonymous with consciousness; it ‘decentres’
consciousness.
Deconstruction
Thirdly, there is a critique of meaning. In post-structuralism,
broadly speaking, the signified is demoted and the signifier
made dominant. This means there is no one-to-one
correspondence between propositions and reality.
 Lacan, for example, writes of 'the incessant sliding of the
signified under the signifier'.
Deconstruction
The post-structuralist philosopher Derrida goes further; he
believes in a system of floating signifiers pure and simple,
with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referent
at all.
While structuralism sees truth as being 'behind' or 'within’ a
text, post-structuralism stresses the interaction of reader and
text as a productivity.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction works at t suspending all that we take for
granted about human language, experience and the 'normal'
possibilities of human communication.
Deconstruction is the active antithesis of everything that
criticism ought to be if one accepts its traditional values and
concepts.
Deconstruction
That literary texts possessed meaning and that literary
criticism sought a knowledge of that meaning, a know-ledge
with its own proper claims to validity, were princi-ples
implicit across the widest divergences of thought.
But deconstruction challenges the fundamental distinct-ion
between 'literature' and 'criticism' implied by those
principles. And it also challenges the idea that criticism
provides a special kind of knowledge precisely in so far as
its texts don't ' aspire to 'literary' status.
Deconstruction
For the deconstructionist, criticism (like philosophy) is
always an activity of writing, and nowhere more rigorous
than where it knows and allows for its own 'literary'
vagaries.
To present 'deconstruction' as if it were a method, a system
or a settled body of ideas would be to falsify its nature and
lay oneself open to charges of reductive misunderstanding.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction can be seen in part as a vigilant reaction
against this tendency in structuralist thought to tame and
domesticate its own best insights.
Some of Jacques Derrida's most powerful essays are
devoted to the task of dismantling a concept of 'structure'
that serves to immobilise the play of meaning in a text and
reduce it to a manageable compass.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction, on the contrary, starts out by rigorously
suspending this assumed correspondence between mind,
meaning and the concept of method which claims to unite
them.
Deconstruction in this, its most rigorous form acts as a
constant reminder of the ways in which language deflects or
complicates the philosopher's project.
Deconstruction
Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western
metaphysics – that reason can somehow dispense with
language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or
'written' character, the signs of that struggle are there to be
read in its blind-spots of metaphor and other rhetorical
strategies.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction draws no line between the kind of close
reading appropriate to a 'literary' text and the strategies
required to draw out the subtler implications of critical
language.
Since all forms of writing run up against perplexities of
meaning for literature and a secondary, self effacing role for
the language of criticism.
Deconstruction
This amounts to a downright refusal of the system of
priorities which has traditionally governed the relation
between 'critical' and 'creative' language.
That distinction rested on the idea that literary texts
embodied an authentic or self-possessed plenitude of
meaning which criticism could only hint at by its
roundabout strategies of reading.
Deconstruction
For Derrida, this is yet another sign of the rooted Western
prejudice which tries to reduce writing - or the 'free play’ of
language - to a stable meaning equated with the character of
speech. In spoken language (so the implication runs),
meaning is 'present' to the speaker through an act of inward
self-surveillance which ensures a perfect, intuitive 'fit'
between intention and utterance.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of
categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffected.
It seeks to undo a given order of priorities and the very
system of conceptual opposition that makes that order
possible.
Thus Derrida is emphatically not trying to prove that
'writing' in its normal, restricted sense is somehow more
basic than speech.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is therefore an activity of reading which
remains closely tied to the texts it interrogates, and which
can never set up independently as a self-enclosed system of
operative concepts.
Deconstruction
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) remains for most modern
philosophers what he was for his contempo-raries: a scandal
wrapped in layers of enigma.
One reaction in recent times has been to brand him as a dire
precursor of the Nazi phenomenon, a thinker whose
supposedly 'irrationalist' outlook and megalomaniac
pretensions paved the way for Hitler and his idelogues.
Deconstruction
But alongside these writings Nietzsche also conducted a
critique of Eastern philosophy and its presuppositions which
has lost nothing of its power to provoke and disturb.
It is this aspect of Nietzsche's thought which has left its
mark on the theory and practice of deconstruction.
Deconstruction
What Nietzsche provides, on the contrary, is a style of
philosophic writing which remains intensely sceptical of all
claims to truth - its own included - and which thus opens up
the possibility of liberating thought from its age-old
conceptual limits.
More than philosopher in the Western tradition, Nietzsche
pressed up against those limits of language and thought
which Derrida attempts to define.
Deconstruction
He anticipates the style and strategy of Derrida's writing to a
point where the two seem often engaged in a kind of
uncanny reciprocal exchange.
Truth, he concludes (Nietzsche) "is a mobile marching army
of metaphors, metonymies and anthromorphism... truths are
illusion of which one has forgotten that they are illusions...
coins which have their obverse effaced and which are no
longer of value as coins but only as metal.
Deconstruction
For Nietzsche this insight led to the conclusion that all
philosophies, whatever their claim to logic or reason, rested
on a shifting texture of figurative language, the signs of
which were systematically repressed under the sovereign
order of Truth.
This bottomless relativity of meaning, and the ways in
which philosophers have disguised or occluded their ruling
metaphors, are the point of departure for Derrida's writing
like Nietzsche's before him.
Deconstruction
For Nietzsche it seemed that this tradition had been firmly
set on course by the style of dialectical argument invented
by Socrates and passed on through the texts of his student
Plato.
The dialectical method of eliciting 'truth' from a care-fully
contrived encounter of wisdom and ignorance was according to Nietzsche - no more than a rhetorical ploy.
Deconstruction
If anything, the sophist come closer to wisdom by implicitly
acknowledging what Socrates has to deny: that thinking is
always and inseparably bound to the rhetorical devices that
support it.
The texts of Jacques Derrida defy classification according to
any of the clear-cut boundaries that define modern academic
discourse.
Deconstruction
They belong to 'philosophy' in so far as they raise certain
familiar questions about thought, language, identity and
other long standing themes of philosophical debate.
Moreover, they raise those questions through a form of
critical dialogue with previous texts, many of which (from
Plato to Husserl and Heidegger) are normally assigned to
the history of philosophic thought. [...].
Deconstruction
Yet Derrida's texts are like nothing else in modern
philosophy, and indeed represent a challenge to the whole
tradition and self-understanding of that discipline.
One way of describing this challenge is to say that Derrida
refuses to grant philosophy the kind of privileged status it
has always claimed as a sovereign dispenser of reason.
Deconstruction
He argues that philosophers have been able to impose their
various systems of thought only by ignoring or suppressing,
the disruptive effects of language.
His aim is always to draw out these effects by a critical
reading which fastens on, and skilfully unpicks, the
elements of metaphor and other figurative devices at work
in the texts of philosophy.
Deconstruction
In this sense Derrida's writings seem more akin to literary
criticism than philosophy.
They rest on the assumption that modes of rhetorical
analysis, hitherto applied mainly to literary texts, are in fact
indispensable for reading any kind of discourse, philosophy
included.
Deconstruction
Literature is no longer seen as a kind of poor relation to
philosophy contenting itself with mere 'imaginary' themes
and forgoing any claim to philosophic dignity and truth.
This attitude has, of course, a long prehistory in Western
tradition.
Deconstruction
Derrida’ s work provided a whole new set of powerful
strategies which placed the literary critic, not simply on a
footing with the philosopher, but in a complex relation-ship
(or rivalry) with him, whereby philosophic claims were
open to rhetorical questioning or deconstruction.
Once alerted to the rhetorical nature of philosophic
arguments, the critic is in a strong position to reverse the
age-old prejudice against literature as a debased or merely
deceptive form of language .
Deconstruction
It now becomes possible to argue - indeed, impossible to
deny - that literary texts are less deluded than the discourse
of philosophy, precisely because they implicitly
acknowledge and exploit their own rhetorical status.
Philosophy comes to seem, in de Man's work, 'an endless
reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature'.
Deconstruction
Derrida's attentions are therefore divided between 'literary’
and 'philosophical' texts, a distinction which in practice he
constantly breaks down and whose to be based on a deep
but untenable prejudice.
Derrida has no desire to establish a rigid demarcation of
zones between literary language and critical discourse by a
motivating impulse which runs so deep in Western thought
that it respects none of the conventional boundaries.
• Deconstruction
Criticism, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, the whole
modern gamut of 'human sciences' - all are at some point
subjected to Derrida's relentless critique.
This is the most important point to gaps about deconstruction.
There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can
effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its
own prehistory an ruling metaphysic.
Deconstruction: Writing and Speech
For Derrida, this is yet another sign of the rooted Western
prejudice which tries to reduce writing - or the 'free play’ of
language - to a stable meaning equated with the character of
speech.
In spoken language (so the implication runs), meaning is
'present' to the speaker through an act of inward selfsurveillance which ensures a perfect, intuitive 'fit' between
intention and utterance.
Deconstruction
Literary texts have been accorded the status of a selfauthenticated meaning and truth, a privilege deriving (in
Derrida’s view) from the deep mistrust of textuality which
pervades Western attitudes to language.
This mystique of origins and presence can best be
challenged by annulling the imaginary boundaries of
discourse, the various territorial imperatives which mark off
'literature' from 'criticism', or 'philosophy' from everything
that stands outside its traditional domain.
Deconstruction
The argument turns on Saussure's attitude to the relative
priority of spoken as opposed to written language, a dualism
Derrida locates at the heart of western philosophic tradition.
He cites a number of passages, from Saussure in which
writing is treated as a merely derivative or secondary form
of linguistic notation, always dependent on the primary
reality of speech and the sense of a speaker's 'presence'
behind his words.
Deconstruction
For Derrida, there is a fundamental blindness involved in
the Saussurian text, a failure to think through the problems
engendered by its own mode of discourse.
What is repressed there, along with 'writing' in its common
or restricted sense, is the idea of language as a signifying
system which exceeds all the bounds of individual 'presence'
and speech.
Deconstruction
Derrida sees a whole metaphysics at work behind the
privilege granted to speech in Saussure's methodology.
Voice becomes a metaphor of truth and authenticity, a
source of self-present 'living' speech as opposed to the
secondary lifeless emanations of writing. In speaking one is
able to experience (supposedly) an intimate link between
sound and sense, an inward and immediate realization of
meaning which yields itself up without reserve to perfect,
transparent understanding.
Deconstruction
Writing, on the contrary, destroys this ideal of pure selfpresence. It obtrudes an alien; personalized medium,
between utterance and understanding.
 It occupies a promiscuous public realm where authority is
sacrificed to the vagaries and whims of textual
'dissemination'.
Writing, in short, is a threat to the deeply traditional view
that associates truth with self-presence and the 'antioral’
language wherein it finds expression.
Deconstruction
Against this tradition Derrida argues what at first must seem
an extraordinary case: that writing is in fact the precondition
of language and must be conceived as prior to speech.
Writing is the endless displacement of meaning which both
governs language and places it for ever beyond the reach of
a stable, self-authenticating knowledge.
Deconstruction
Writing of writing lies deep in Saussure's proposed
methodology.
It shows in his refusal to consider any form of linguistic
notation outside the phonetic-alphabetical script of Western
culture.
As opposed, that is, to the non-phonetic varieties which
Derrida often discusses: hieroglyphs, algebraic notions,
formalized languages of different kinds.
Deconstruction
This 'phonocentric' bias is closely allied, in Derrida's view,
to the underlying structure of assumptions which links
Saussure's project to western metaphysics.
Where Derrida breaks new ground, and where the science of
grammatology takes its cue, is in the extent to which 'differ'
shades into 'defer‘.
 This involves the idea that meaning is always deferred,
perhaps to the point of an endless supplementarity, by the
play of signification.
Deconstruction
Difference not only designates this theme but offers in its
own unstable meaning a graphic example of the process at
work.
Derrida deploys a whole rhetoric of similar terms as a
means of preventing the conceptual closure - or reduction to
an ultimate meaning - which might otherwise threaten its
texts.
Deconstruction
Among them is the notion of 'supplement', itself bound up
in a supplementarity of meaning which defies semantic
reduction.
To see how it is put to work we can turn to Derrida's essays
on Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss, where the theme is that of
writing in the context of anthropology and the cultural
'sciences of man'.
Deconstruction
In this sense Derrida's writings seem more akin to literary
criticism than philosophy.
They rest on the assumption that modes of rhetorical
analysis, hitherto applied mainly to literary texts, are in fact
indispensable for reading any kind of discourse, philosophy
included.
Deconstruction
Literature is no longer seen as a kind of poor relation to
philosophy contenting itself with mere 'imaginary' themes
and forgoing any claim to philosophic dignity and truth.
This attitude has, of course, a long prehistory in Western
tradition.
Deconstruction
[Derrida]’ work provided a whole new set of powerful
strategies which placed the literary critic, not simply on a
footing with the philosopher, but in a complex relationship
(or rivalry) with him, whereby philosophic claims were
open to rhetorical questioning or decons-truction.
Once alerted to the rhetorical nature of philosophic
arguments, the critic is in a strong position to reverse the
age-old prejudice against literature as a debased or merely
deceptive form of language .
Deconstruction
It now becomes possible to argue - indeed, impossible to
deny – that literary texts are less deluded than the discourse
of philosophy, precisely because they implicitly
acknowledge and exploit their own rhetorical status.
Philosophy comes to seem, in de Man's work, 'an endless
reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature'.
Deconstruction
Derrida's attentions are therefore divided between 'literary'
and 'philosophical' texts, a distinction which in practice he
constantly breaks down and whose to be based on a deep
but untenable prejudice.
Derrida has no desire to establish a rigid demarcation of
zones between literary language and critical discourse by a
motivating impulse which runs so deep in Western thought
that it respects none of the conventional boundaries.
Deconstruction
Criticism, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, the whole
modern gamut of 'human sciences' - all are at some point
subjected to Derrida's relentless critique.
This is the most important point to gaps about
deconstruction.
There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can
effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its
own prehistory an ruling metaphysic.
Deconstruction
Literary texts have been accorded the status of a selfauthenticated meaning and truth, a privilege deriving (in
Derrida’s view) from the deep mistrust of textuality which
pervades Western attitudes to language.
This mystique of origins and presence can best be
challenged by annulling the imaginary boundaries of
discourse, the various territorial imperatives which mark off
'literature' from 'criticism', or 'philosophy' from everything
that stands outside its traditional domain.
Deconstruction
Derrida’s redistribution of discourse implies some very
drastic shifts in our habits of reading.
For one thing, it means that critical texts must be read in a
radically different way, not so much for their interpretative
'insights' as for the symptoms of 'blindness' which mark their
conceptual limits.
 Derrida, Phonocentrism and Writing
 Différance
 Differ
Defer

 To disagree with
To divert
Derrida, Phonocentrism and Writing
Pharmakon
Medicine
Poison
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979)
The object of this study is the condition of knowledge in the
most highly developed societies.
I will use the term modern to designate any science that
legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this
kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,
such as the dialectics of Spirit, the herme-neutics of
meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working
subject, or the creation of wealth.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. [...].
To the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of
legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of
metaphysical philosophy and of the university
institution which in the past relied on it.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
What is new in all of this is that the old poles of attraction
represented by nation-states, parties, professions,
institutions, and historical traditions are losing their
attraction.
This breaking up of the grand Narratives leads to what
some authors analyze in terms of the dissolution of the
social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates
into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of
Brownian motion.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
 Delegitimation
The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of
what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is
a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation.
The classical dividing lines between the various fields of
science are thus called into question - disciplines
disappear, overlappings occur at the borders between
sciences, and from these new territories are born.
Lyotard and the Status of Knowledge
The old "faculties" splinter into institutes and foundat-ions
of all kinds, and the universities lose their function of
speculative legitimation.
The State and/or company must abandon the idealist and
humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the
new goal; in the discourse of today's financial backers of
research, the only credible goal is power.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
Education and its Legitimation through Performativity for in
addition to its professionalist function, the Univer-sity is
beginning, or should begin, to play a new role in improving
the system's performance - that of job retraining and
continuing education.
Outside the universities, departments, or institutions with a
professional orientation, knowledge will no longer be
transmitted en bloc, once and for all.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
Knowledge will be served ”à la carte" to adults who need
new skills and chances of promotion, but also to help them
acquire information, languages, and language games
allowing them both to widen their occupational horizons
and to articulate their technical and ethical experience.
The application of new technologies to this stock may have
a considerable impact on the medium of communication.
Lyotard and the End of Master Narratives
It does not seem absolutely necessary that the medium be a
lecture delivered in person by a teacher in front of silent
students, with questions reserved for sections or "practical
work" session run by an assistant.
To the extent that learning is translatable into computer
language and the traditional teacher is replaceable by
memory banks, didactics, can be entrusted to machines
linking traditional memory banks (libraries, etc.) and
computer data banks to intelligent terminals placed at
the student's disposal.
Lyotard and the Status of Knowledge
Seen in this light, what we are approaching is not the end
of knowledge - quite the contrary.
Data banks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow.
They transcend the capacity of each of their users.
They are "nature" for postmodern man.
Félix Deleuze y Gilles Guattari and the
Rhizomatic Non-Binary Thinking
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Literature is an assemblage.
It has nothing to do with ideology.
There is no ideology and never has been.
The binary logic of dichotomy has simply been replaced by
biunivocal relationships between successive circles.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
A rhizome as subterranean stern is absolutely different from
roots and radicles. Bulbs and tubers are rhizomes.
Plants with roots or radicles may be rhizomorphic in other
respects altogether: the question is whether plant life in its
specificity is not entirely rhizomatic. even some animals are,
in their pack form (ants).
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Rats are rhizomes.
Burrows are too, in all their functions of shelter, supply,
movement, evasion, and breakout.
1 and 2 Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any
point of a rhizome can be connected to anything to anything
other, and must be.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
3 Principle of multiplicity: it is only when the multiple is
effectively treated as a substantive, "multiplicity," that it
ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object,
natural or spiritual reality, image and world.
Puppet strings, as a rhizome or multiplicity, are tied not to
the supposed will of an artist or puppeteer but to a
multiplicity of nerve fibers, which form another puppet in
other dimensions connected to the first: "Call the strings or
rods that move the puppet the weave.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
It might be objected that its multiplicity resides in the
person of the actor, who projects it into the text.
An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions
of multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it
expands its connections.
4 Principle of asignifying rupture: against the oversignify
ing breaks separating structures or cutting across a single
structure.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it
will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.
You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal
rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has
been destroyed.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Every rhizome contains lines of segmentary according to
which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified,
attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down
which it constantly flees.
There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines
explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of
the rhizome.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes
of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected,
caught up in one another?
The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing
of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an
exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight
composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be
attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying.
The rhizome is an antigenealogy.
The crocodile does not reproduce a tree trunk, any morethan
the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surroundings.
Félix Deleuzeand Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
5 and 6. Principle of cartography and decalcomania – a
rhizome is not amenable to any structural or generative
model.
It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari
Tree
Amsterdam
• Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari : Mexico City
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
A genetic axis is like an objective pivotal unity upon which
successive stage are organized; a deep structure is more like
a base sequence that can be broken down into immediate
constituents, while the unity of the product passes into
another, transformational and subjective, dimension.
The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing.
Make a map, not a tracing.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it
forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome.
What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is
entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with
the real.
The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon
itself; it constructs the unconscious.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
It fosters connections between fields, the removal of
blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening
of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is
itself a part of the rhizome.
The map is open and connectable in all of its dimens-ions; it
is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant
modification.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mount-ing,
reworked by an individual, group, or social formation.
Perhaps one of the most important characteristics of the
rhizome is that it always has multiple entryways: in this
sense, the burrow is an animal rhizome, and sometimes
maintains a clear distinction between the line of flight as
passageway and storage or living strata (cf. the muskrat: rat;
lives in the water; glossy brown fur, odor).
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing,
which always comes back "to the same." (because is a
copy).
The tracing has already translated the map into an image; it
has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
It has organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities
according to the axes of signifiance and subjectification
belonging to it.
It has generated, structuralized the rhizome, and when it
thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only
reproducing itself.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over,
no desire stirs; for its always by rhizome that desire moves
and produces.
To be rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that
seem to be roots, or better andet ?connect with them by
penetrating the trunk, but put them to strange uses.
We're tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots,
and radicles. They've made us suffer too much.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
All of arborescent culture is founded on them, from biology
to linguistics.
Amsterdam, a city entirely without roots, a rhizome-city
with its stem-canals, where utility connects with the greatest
folly in relation to a commercial war machine.
Amsterdam
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or
ramified matter.
What are wrongly called "dendrites" (a branched part of a
nerve cell that carries impulses toward the cell body) do not
assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, (that
part of a nerve cell through which impulses turn away from
the cell body) the functioning of the synapses (the point of
contact between adjacent neurons, when nerve impulses are
transmitted from one to the other) the existence of synaptic
microfissures, the leap each message makes across these
fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane
of consistency...
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome:
unlike tress or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to
any other point, and its traits are not necessary linked to
traits of the same nature; it brings into play every different
regimes of signs, and even nonsign states.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the
multiple.
It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle
(milieu) from which it grows and which it overspills.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having
neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane
of consistency.
The rhizome is an antigenealogy. It is a short-term memory,
or antimemory.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
The rhizome operates variation, expansion, conquest, unlike
tracing, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be
produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable,
connectable, reversible,modifiable, and has multiple
entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.
We call a "plateau" any multiplicity connected to other
multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a
way as to form or extend a rhizome.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of
plateaus.
Nowhere do we claim for our concepts the title of science.
We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are with
ideology; all we know are assemblages.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of
reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book)
and a field of subjectivity (the author).
Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between
certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so
that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one
or several authors as its subject.
Félix Deleuze and Gilles Guattari and the Rhizomatic NonBinary Thinking
A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the
middle, between things, interbeing, inter-mezzo.
The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely
alliance. The tree imposes the verb "to be," but the fabric of
the rhizome is the conjunction,"and... and...”.
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics\Philosophy
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
Borges Text:…. In that Empire, the Araft of Cartography
attained such Perfection that the map of on single Province
occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire,
The entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable
maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild
struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the
Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Philosophy
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
The following Generations, who were not so fond of the
study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that
that vast Map was Useless, and not without some
Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the
West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins, tattered Ruins of
that Map, inhabited By Animals and Beggars; in all the
Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of
Geography. Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes,
Libro IV,
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential
being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a
real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
• The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.
• Henceforth, it is the map that preceded the territory
PROCESSION OF SIMULACRA - it is the map that
engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable
today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly
rotting across the map.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist
here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those
of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
• In fact, even inverted, the fable is useless. Perhaps only
the allegory of the Empire remains.
• For it is with the same Imperialism that present-day
simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with
their simulation models.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to
representation. The latter starts from the principle that
the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this
equivalence is utopian, it is a fundamental axiom).
• Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this
principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the
sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death
sentence to every reference.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by
interpreting it as false representation, simulation
envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a
simulacrum.
• No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real
and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: rather,
genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• The real is produced from miniaturized units,
from matrices, memory banks and command
models - and with these it can be reproduced an
indefinite number of times.
• It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating
synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace
without atmosphere.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• In this passage to a space whose curvature is no longer
that of the real, nor of truth, the age of simulation thus
begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse by
the artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more
ductile material than meaning in that it lends itself to all
systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all
combinatory algebra.
• It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• It is rather a question of substituting sings of the real for
the real itself, that is, an operation to deter every real
process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides
all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its
vicissitudes.
• A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary,
and from any distinction between the real and the
imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence
of models and the simulated generation of difference.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has.
• To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't.
• One implies a presence, the other an absence.
• Thus, feigning or dissimulating leaves the reality
principle intact: the difference is always clear, it is only
masked.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to
representation.
• The latter starts from the principle that the sign and the
real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is utopian,
it is a fundamental axiom).
• Conversely, simulation starts from the utopia of this
principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of
the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death
sentence to every reference.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by
interpreting it as false representation, simulation
envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a
simulacrum.
• Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no
longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of
simulation.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• It is no longer a question of a false representation of
reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the
real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality
principle.
• Capital, which is immoral and unscrupulous, can only
function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever
regenerates this public morality (by indignation,
denunciation, etc.) spontaneously furthers the order of
capital, as did the Washington Post journalists.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Simulation is characterised by a precession of the
model, of all models around the merest fact - the models
come first, and their orbital (like the bomb) circulation
constitutes the genuine magnetic field of events.
• Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse in order to
be perpetuated in its purged form.
• Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no
longer possible.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Simulation is infinitely more dangerous, however, since
it always suggests, over and above its object, that law
and order themselves might really be nothing more than
a simulation.
• It is impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to
prove the real.
• And the automaton has no other destiny than to be
ceaselessly compared to living man, so as to be more
natural than him, of which he is the ideal figure.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• The robot no longer interrogates appearance; its only
truth is in its mechanical efficacy.
• No more resemblance or lack of resemblance, of God,
or human being, but an imminent logic of the operational principle.
• Space is no longer even linear or one-dimensional:
cellular space, indefinite generation of the same signals,
like the tics of a prisoner gone crazy with solitude and
repetition.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Such is the genetic code: an erased record, unchangeable, of which we are no more than cells-for-reading.
• All aura of sign, of significance itself is resolved in this
determination; all is resolved in the inscription and
decodage.
• The architectural graphism is that of the end of monopoly; the two W.T.C. towers. perfect parallelepipeds a –
mile high on a square base, perfectly balanced and
blind communicating vessels.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• The fact that there are two of them signifies the end of
all competition, the end of all original reference.
• For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate itself: it is the
duplication of the sign which destroys its meaning.
• This is what Andy Warhol demonstrates also; the
multiple replicas of Marilyn's face are there to show at
the same time the death of the original and the end of
representation.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• The two towers of the W.T.C. are the visible sign of the
closure of the system in a vertigo of duplication, while
the other skyscrapers are each of them the original
moment of a system constantly transcending itself in a
perpetual crisis and self challenge.
• The hyperreal represents a much more advanced phase,
in the sense that even this contradiction between the real
and the imaginary is effaced.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Before emerging in pop art and pictorial neo-realism
this tendency is at work already in the new novel.
• The project is already there to empty out the real,
extirpate all psychology, all subjectivity, to move the
real back to pure objectivity.
• In fact this objectivity is only that of the pure look objectivity at last liberated from the object, that is
nothing more than the blind relay station of the look
which sweeps over it.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• The deconstruction of the real into details - closed
paradigmatic declension of the object - flattening,
linearity and seriality of the partial objects.
• The endlessly reflected vision: all the games of duplication and reduplication of the object in detail.
• The properly serial form (Andy Warhol). Here not only
the syntagmatic dimension is abolished, but the paradigmatic as well.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Since there no longer is any formal flection or even
internal reflection, but contiguity of the same - flection
and reflection zero.
• The very definition of the real becomes that of which it
is possible to give an equivalent reproduction.
• This is contemporaneous with a science that postulates
that a process can be perfectly reproduced in a set of
given conditions.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• And also with the industrial rationality that postulates a
universal system of equivalency (classical representation is not equivalence, it is transcription, interpretation,
commentary).
• At the limit of this process of reproductibility, the real is
not only what can be reproduced, but that which is
always already reproduced: The hyperreal.
• The hyperreal transcends representation [...] only
because it is entirely in simulation.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Hyperrealism is made an integral part of a coded reality
that it perpetuates, and for which it changes nothing.
• In fact, we should turn our definition of hyperrealism
inside out: It is reality itself today that is hyperrealist.
• Surrealism's secret already was that the most banal
reality could become surreal, but only in certain
privileged moments that nevertheless are still connected
with art and the imaginary.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront,
even victoriously - it is reality itself that disappears
utterly in the game of reality - radical disenchantment,
the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of
fantasy.
• It is then that art enters into its indefinite reproduction:
all that reduplicates itself, even if it be the everyday and
banal reality, falls by the token under the sign of art, and
becomes esthetic.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jean Baudrillard and Hyperreality
• Art can become a reproducing machine (Andy Warhol),
without ceasing to be art, since the machine is only a
sign.
• And so art is dead, not only because its critical
transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely
impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its
own structure, has been confused with its own image.
• Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance
of reality.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• Foucault often uses the term genealogy to refer to the union of
erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to
establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use
of this knowledge tactically today.
• Genealogies focus on local, discontinous, disqualified,
illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of
theory which would filter, hierarchzie and order them in the
name of some true knowledge.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• Throughout his life Foucault was interested in that
which reason excludes: madness, change,
discontinuity.
• Most of Foucault's books are really analyses of the
process of modernization. One of the characteristics of
his work is the tendency to condense a general
historical argument into a tracing of the emergence
of specific institutions via discursive practices.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• What interests him, of course, is how effects of truth
are produced within discourses which in themselves
are neither true nor false within the State Apparatus.
• An apparatus is a structure of heterogeneous
elements such as discourses, laws, institutions, in
short, the said as much as the unsaid.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• In his view the method of genealogy:
• involves a pains-taking rediscovery of struggles,
• an attack on the tyranny of what he calls 'totalizing
discourses'
• and a rediscovery of fragmented, subjugated, local
and specific knowledge.
• It is directed against great truths and grand theories.
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• Power is not an institution, a structure, or a certain
force with which certain people are endowed; it is a
name given to a complex strategic relation in a given
society.
• "I am well aware that I have never written anything
but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth
is therefore absent.”
• “It seems to me that the possibility exist for fiction to
function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce
effects of truth.” (Power Knowledge).
The New Philosophers and the End of
Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Michel Foucault and the Power of Discourse
• For Foucault power is necessary for the production of
knowledge.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jacques Lacan and Language
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• For Lacan there is no separation between self and
society.
• Human beings become social with the appropriation
of language; and it is language that constitutes us as a
subject.
• Thus, we should not dichotomize the individual and
society.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Society inhabits each individual.
• Freud made a number of biologistic assumptions.
• Lacan's view is that biology is is always interpreted by
the human subject, refracted through language; that
there is no such thing as 'the body' before language.
• It could be said that by shifting all descriptions from a
biological-anatomic level to a symbolic one he shows
how culture imposes meaning on anatomical parts.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Lacan's psychoanalitic theory is partly based upon the
discoveries of structural anthropology and
linguistics.
• One of his main beliefs is that the unconscious is a
hidden structure which resembles that of language.
• Knowledge of the world, of others and of self is
determined by language.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Language is the precondition for the act of becoming
aware of oneself as a distinct entity.
• It is the I-Thou dialectic, defining the subjects by
their mutual opposition, which founds subjectivity.
• But language is also the vehicle of a social given, a
culture, prohibitions and laws.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The young child is fashioned and will be indelibly
marked by language without being aware of it.
• Let us look at some of the main stages in Lacan's theory.
• The first articulation of the 'I' occurs in what Lacan
calls the mirror stage.
• Lacan often refers to the mirror stages it prefigures
the whole dialectic between alienation and
subjectivity.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Mirror Stage
• Self-recognition in the mirror is effected (somewhere
between the ages of six and eight months) in three
successive stages.
• At first, the child who is together with an adult in front
•
of a mirror confuses his own reflection with that of his
adult companion.
In the second phase the child acquires the notion of the
image and understands that the reflection is not a
real being.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Finally, in the third stage, he realizes not only that the
reflection is an image, but that the image is his own
and is different from the image of the other.
• And then language takes over.
• Lacan suggests that, thanks to human beings' metaphoric
ability, words convey multiple meanings and we use
them to signify something quite different from their
concrete meaning.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• This possibility of signifying something other than
what is being said determines language's autonomy
from meaning.
• Lacan insists on the autonomy of the signifier.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• Lacan's theory cannot be presented coherently
without a discussion of the function of language.
• He has a complete theory of language, which he links
with subjectivity.
• There is no subject independent of language.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• While Saussure implied that we can somehow stand
outside language, Lacan insists that we are immersed
in everyday language and cannot get out of it.
• There is no such thing as metalanguage.
• We all have to represent ourselves in language.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• In a Lacanian view of language a signifier always
signifies another signifier; no word is free from
metaphoricity (a metaphor is one signifier in the place of
another).
• Lacan talks of glissement (slippage, slide) along the
signifying chain, from signifier to signifier.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• Since any signifier can receive signification
retrospectively, after the fact, no signification is ever
closed, ever satisfied.
• From anything that is said it cannot be predicated
what is going to be said.
• Any 'sentence' can always be added to. No sentence
is ever completely saturated.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• What is it to be conscious of oneself?
• How do we recognize the self? what us the
'something' that reflects consciousness back onto
itself?
• In self-consciousness the subject and the object are
identical; but can I reflect on the self and reflect on
that reflection?
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• Can the self that is self of consciousness grasp the self
of consciousness?
• When we see ourselves we see only a look. We do not
get nearer to what we are. This is called 'the infinity
of reflection'.
• Lacan stresses the point that there is no subject except
in representation, but that no representation captures
us completely.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Self and Language
• I can neither be totally defined nor can I escape all
definition.
• There is an inherent tension, a feeling of threat,
because one's identity depends on recognition by the
other.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Freud and Lacan
• In Freud's early work the ego (the conscious part of the
subject) is connected with the reality principle, and
the unconscious is related to the pleasure principle
(the undeffirentiated sources of the organism’s
energy from which both the ego and the libido are
derived; the superego, a major sector of the psyche
that is only partly conscious and that aids in
character formation by reflection parental
conscience and the rules of society).
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Freud and Lacan
• While for Freud the unconscious has a threatening
aspect, in Lacan it is the locus of 'truth', of
authenticity.
• And yet Lacan believes that the unconscious cannot
be an object of knowledge; the ego projects itself and
then fails to recognize itself.
• Self-knowledge, the notion of the self can reflect on
itself, is not possible.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Freud and Lacan
• While Freud seems to have believed in the unconscious
as a substantive concept, for Lacan 'the unconscious is
not the real place of another discourse'.
• Lacan proclaims that the unconscious is neither
primordial nor instinctual. The unconscious is
implicit in everything we say and do.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Freud and Lacan
• However, in trying to grasp the unconscious is that
which we can never know, but this does not mean
that the effort is not worth while.
• Nature, for Lacan, is the Real which is out there but
impossible to grasp in a pure state because it is
always mediated through language.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father
• Lacan's Name-of-the-Father operates in the register
of language. The Name-of-the-father is the Law.
• The legal assignation if a father's name to a child is
meant to call a halt to uncertainty about the identity of
the father.
• The phallus is the attribute of power which neither
men nor women have.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father
• Lacan suggests that all our fantasies are symbolic
representations of the desire for wholeness.
• We tend to think that if we were the phallus or had
the other's phallus we would then, somehow, be
whole.
• In other words, the phallus is the signifier of an
original desire for a perfect union with the Other.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father
• The phallus refers to plenitude; it is the signifier of
the wholeness that we lack.
• For Lacan discourse constitutes the unconscious.
Language and desire are related.
• Self-consciousness would not be possible without an
organic lack.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Lack: The Desire of Desire
• Generally speaking, the 'I' of Desire is an emptiness
that receives a real positive content by a negating
action that satisfies Desire in destroying, transforming
and assimilating the desired non-I.
• Desire is directed towards another Desire, another
greedy emptiness, another 'I'.
• Desire is human only if one desires not the body but the
desire of the other; that is to say, if one wants to be
'desired' or, rather, 'recognized' in one's human value.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Lack: The Desire of Desire
• All Desire is desire for a value. To desire the desire of
another is really to desire 'recognition'.
• Desire is what cannot be specified by demand.
• We can never be certain that others love us for our
unique particularity.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Lack: The Desire of Desire
• Desire arises out of the lack of satisfaction and it
pushes you to another demand.
• In other words, it is the disappointment of demand
that is the basis of the growth of desire.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Sense of Loss
• It begins with birth and then moves in turn through
the territorialization of the body, the mirror stage,
access to language and the Oedipus complex.
• Lacan situates the first loss in the history of the
subject at the moment of birth.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Sense of Loss
• The second loss suffered by the subject occurs after
birth but prior to the acquisition of language.
• The loss in question is inflected by what might be
called the 'pre-Oedipal territorialization' of the
subject's body.
• ‘maginary' is the term used by Lacan to designate
that order of the subject's experience which is
dominated by identification and duality.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Sense of Loss
• Within the Lacanian scheme (the imaginary) it not only
precedes the symbolic order, which introduces the
subject to language and Oedipal triangulation, but
continues to coexist with it afterwards.
• The imaginary order is best exemplified by the
mirror stage.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Sense of Loss
• Lacan believes that once the subject has entered the
symbolic order (language) its organic needs pass
through the 'defiles' or narrow network of signification
and are transformed in a way which makes them there
after impossible to satisfy.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father: The Phallus
• Lacan defines the paternal signifier, what he calls the
‘Name-of-the-Father’, as the all-important one both in
the history of the subject and the organization of the
larger symbolic field.
• The word 'phallus' is used by Lacan to refer to all of
those values which are opposed to lack.
• He is at pains to emphasize its discursive (rather than its
anatomical) status, but it seems to have two radically
different meanings:
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father: The Phallus
• On the one hand, the phallus is a signifier for those
things which have been partitioned off from the subject
during the various stages of its constitution and which
will never be restored to it.
• The phallus is then signifier for the organic reality or
needs which the subject relinquishes in order to achieve
meaning, in order to gain access to the symbolic register.
• It signifies that thing whose loss inaugurates desire.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Name-of-the-Father: The Phallus
• On the other hand, the phallus is a signifier for the
cultural privileges and positive values which define
male subjectivity within patriarchal society but from
which the female subject remains isolated.
• The phallus, in other words, is a signifier both for those
things which are lost during the male subject's entry into
culture and for those things which are gained.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• Lacan believes that the discourse within which the
subject finds its identity is always the discourse of the
Other-of a symbolic order which transcends the subject
and which orchestrates its entire history.
• It is clear that the Imaginary - a kind of pre-verbal
register whose logic is essentially visual- precedes the
symbolic as a stage in the development of the psyche.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• Its moments of formation has been named the 'mirror
stage'.
• At this stage there does not yet exists that ego
formation which would permit a child to distinguish
its own form from that of others.
• The Imaginary order is pre-Oedipal. The self yearns
to fuse with what is perceived as Other.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• In other words, we experience a profoundly divided
self.
• The infant wants to complete the mother, to be what
she lacks - the phallus.
• The child's relationship with the mother is fusion,
dual and immediate.
• Later, the child's desire to be its mother's desire gives
way to an identification with the father.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• It is the Oedipal crisis which marks the child's
entrance into the world of the symbolic.
• The laws of language and society come to dwell within
the child as he accepts the father's name and the
father's 'no'.
• Lacan understands the Oedipus story in terms of
language, not in terms of the body, and that there is
no such thing as the body before language.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• The Lacanian notion of the Symbolic order is an attempt
to create mediations between libidinal analysis and the
linguistic categories, to provide, in other words, a
transcoding scheme which allows us to speak of both
within a common conceptual framework.
• The Oedipus complex is transliterated by Lacan into a
linguistic phenomenon which he designates as the
discovery by the subject of the Name-of-the-father.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• Lacan feels that the apprenticeship of language is an
alienation for the psyche but he realizes that it is
impossible to return to an archaic, pre-verbal stage of
the psyche itself.
• The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• The Orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real
• The third order is the Real. The reality which we can
never know is the Real-it lies beyond language... the
reality we must assume although we can never know
it.
• This is the most problematic of the three orders of
registers since it can never be experienced immediately,
but only by way of the mediation of the other two: 'the
Real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists
symbolization absolutely'.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Lacan and Feminism
• Lacan's theory has attracted a good deal of interest
among feminists because the emphasis on the
production of gendered subjectivity via signification
(the process whereby meaning is produced at the
same time as subjects are fabricated and positioned in
social relations) implies that it is possible to escape the
subordination of women inherent in Freud's recourse
to biological difference.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
• For Lacan, the subject comes into being – that is, begins
to posture as a self-grounding signifier within language –
only on the condition of a primary repression of the
pre-individuated incestuous pleasures associated with
the (now repressed) maternal body.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•The masculine subject only appears to originate
meanings and thereby to signify.
•His seemingly self-grounded autonomy attempts to
conceal the repression which is both its ground and the
perpetual possibility of its own ungrounding.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•But further, this dependency, although denied, is also
pursued by the masculine subject, for the woman as
reassuring sign is the displaced maternal body, the vain
but persistent promise of the recovery of pre-individual
jouissance.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that
they maintain the power to reflect or represent the
“reality” of the self-grounding postures of the
masculine subject, a power which, if withdrawn, would
break up the foundational illusions of the masculine subject
position.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a “being for” a
masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment
his identity through the recognition of that “being for.”
•To be the Phallus is to be signified by the paternal law, to
be both its object and its instrument and, in
structuralist terms, the “sign” and promise of its power.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•But this “being” the Phallus is necessarily dissatisfying to
the extent that women can never fully reflect that law;
some feminists argue that it requires a renunciation of
women’s own desire.
•Which is the expropriation of that desire as the desire to
be nothing other than a reflection, a guarantor of the
pervasive necessity of the Phallus.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•On the other hand, men are said to “have” the Phallus,
yet never to “be” it, in the sense that the penis is not
equivalent to that Law and can never fully symbolize
that Law.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
•Although thee is no grammatical gender here, it seems
that Lacan is describing the position of women for
whom “lack” is characteristic and, hence, in need of
masking and who are in some unspecified sense in need of
protection.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
‘Subjectivity’ is used to refer to the conscious and
unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual,
her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her
relation to the world.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior
to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To
what extend does the body come into being in and
through the mark(s) of gender?
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
•Lacan and Feminism
Women are the “sex” which is not “one.” Within a
language pervasively masculinist, a phallocentirc language,
women constitute the unrepresentable.
In other words, women represent the sex that cannot be
thought, a linguistic absence and opacity.
The New Philosophers and the
End of Metaphysics/Philosophy
• Jacques Lacan and Language
• Lacan and Feminism
Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the
female sex constitutes the unconstrainable and
undesignatable.
Post-Modern Architecture:
Fiction, Contradiction, Complexity
and
The Return to Ornament and History
Postmodernity and Architecture
Torre Velasca
Preconditions for Postmodern Architecture Circa 1960
The Torre Velasca (Milan, 1957-1960)
At the 1959 CIAM, just as a group eagerly insisting on a
renewal of modern architecture was about to enjoy
consensus after the break with the great masters of classical
modernism, two Italian
architects entered by the back door and forced the
discussion of a topic hardly ever accorded the slightest
mention since the first CIAM: new architecture in context of
the historical city. These two architects, Giancarlo de Carlo
and Ernesto Rogers.
Belgiojoso, Peresutti, Rogers
Torre Velasca
Milan, 1957-1960
Palazzo Vecchio
Florence
1299-1314
Postmodernity and Architecture
Torre Velasca
The controversy that broke out at this congress has proved
exemplary, and it has been continued in similar terms. It is
the old quarrel between the defenders of history and the
adherents of modernity, which has its forerunners in the
“Querelles” of the French Academy in the seventeenth
century. Along with several other events that occurred
around 1960, the CIAM in Otterlo was a turning point in
the history of modern architecture. The blow dealt by
Rogers in the name of his firm came in the monstrous shape
of the first high-rise building in Milan; TORRE VELASCA,
which violated the modest European standards of
Postmodernity and Architecture
Torre Velasca
permissible building size.... “This absurdity stands like a
medieval defensive tower made hospitable by copious
fenestration and blown up to a giant size in the midst of the
old city of Milan”.
Rogers: When I speak about the past and tradition, and
when I speak about the building's life being connected with
the past, it is not intended that this be an imitation of the
forms of the past. In his statement, Rogers made the
following points: The Torre Velasca, in advancing a
strikingly novel novel version of the modern skyscraper,
takes into account the historical environment in which it
Postmodernity and Architecture
Torre Velasca
is placed but does not declare its allegiance to the
historical agents of power represented by a fortified
tower. The present form contradicts the attribution of his
content. The Torre Velasca undertakes to reinforce the
identity of its surroundings, so as not to set in question by
a self-isolating modernist stance the value of the entire
environment and so as not to appeal demonstratively by
its mere presence for the exchange of all is old for that
which is new Rogers concluded with a summary statement
of his objective: [The] attitude of the fathers of modern
Postmodernity and Architecture
Torre Velasca
architecture was anti-historical. But this was an attitude
which was born of great revolution, and it was necessary
that the first premise of our culture be a new attitude to
history. But this is no longer necessary.
Aldo van Eyck
Theo Bosch
Row Apartment
Project
Zwolle, Holland
1977
Aldo van Eyck
Theo Bosch
Row Appartment
Project
Zwolle, Holland
1977
Postmodernity and Architecture
Heinrich Klotz
Louis Kahn was the leading figure of the generation that
succeeded the masters of modern architecture, and his work
was pivotal in the transition from modernism to postmodernism. Kahn’s intermediary position, so rich in the
impulses it yielded, becomes immediately a apparent when
one observes how much he emphasized the primary
Geometric figures.in the Ministerial residence. Khan’s
architecture reveals his special sense for the archaic,
mythical magnitude of larger-than-life buildings. Even
though his spatial units that surpass all previously used
dimensions have some link to superscale container
Postmodernity and Architecture
Heinrich Klotz
stage-like buildings look like a direct continuation of
Roman architecture. His complex, irregular ground plans,
with their axial breaks occurring as if by chance and with
their order alternating between symmetry and chance
grouping, recall the Villa Adriana.
Louis Kahn
Institute of Public
Administration
Ahmedabad, India
1963
Entrance to Warehouse
Ostia Antica, Italy
Postmodernity and Architecture
Heinrich Klotz
The thin-walled loggias of the Institute of Public Administration in Ahmedabad, India (1963) are good example of
this transformation. According to Kahn, the segmental
arches of the individual loggias normally would have
required thicker walls to support the side thrust of the
arches. In Entrance of warehouse (Ostia Antica, Italy),
Kahn took up an ancient construction element and gave it a
new efficiency through the proven strength of concrete.
Because he concerned himself intensely with the constitutive
process of a construction, he insisted on building walls
Postmodernity and Architecture
Heinrich Klotz
articulated in a great variety of ways. To make this
characterization of individual spaces and structures
possible, Kahn studied the most modern and the most
conventional construction methods down to the last detail.
One moment he used ancient Roman brick structures; the
next moment he used the newest discoveries of Fuller,
whose tetrahedral chain construction he developed into a
framework for a projected high-rise building.
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore: Building Places
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
Ground Plan
New Orleans
1976-1979
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia
The most telling example of postmodern architecture is
Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans - not
because the historical forms of the classic orders were
used in an almost excessive profusion, but because a
fiction was created in a direct way. The Piazza (New
Orleans, 1976-1979) was intended to become the center
of a predominantly Italian section of New Orleans where
the Italo-American Institute is located. The immediate are
in fact, the entire part of the city - was in need of renovation and was dominated by large modern edifices. There
was nothing alluring or inviting about the area little to
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
New Orleans, 1976-1979
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
New Orleans
1976-1979
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
Socales of
Tuscan Columns
New Orleans
1976-1979
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
“Doric” Water
Column
New Orleans
1976-1979
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’ Piazza d’Italia
make one linger. Moore created a totally building site
by cutting into the space intended for a projected building
(never executed). The site is circular. Groups of columns
provide a backdrop for a topographic map of Italy, which
juts out from the middle of a large arcade and reaches right
into the center of the concentric circles of the piazza, with
a fountain as the Mediterranean. (Sicily has the central
position, because most of the residents of the neighborhood
are Sicilian). The piazza wall was supposed to be the purely
decorative part of the project building, against whose
modern forms, smooth white facade, and simple square
Charles Moore
Piazza d’Italia
Showing Portrait
of Charles Moore
New Orleans
1976-1979
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’ Piazza d’Italia
windows openings its breathtakingly classical decorum
was to contrast sharply. All the classical orders are
present: Doric, Tuscan (red and square), Ionian (inside
Arch), and Corinthian (Arch, center) and
Composite (sides of Arch in yellow). Together they
provide the “boot” of Italy with a complete cultural
background and a reminiscence of the heroic columnar
orders of Italian architectural facades. However, classical
greatness in evoked here with touches of humour and
commented on with irony. There are collars of neon-light
tubing under the capitals of the central arcade. Other
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’ Piazza d’Italia
“columns” are actually curved sheets of steel,with rivulets
of water creating effect ¯ of fluting (decoration consisting
of long, rounded grooves, as in a column). The Tuscan
columns next to these Doric “columns” are made steel
and are “cut open” to reveal marble. Their metopes are
“wetopes” with tiny fountains. (an opening hole in frieze
for beam; any of the square areas, plain or decorated,
between triglyphs in a Doric frieze. On this “narrative”
plane, the classical columnar orders are reinterpreted
through the playful divestment of their monumental dignity.
Yet, at the same time, the architraves (horizontal beam
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia
between the columns and the top) are inscribed with words
of dedication and with the title Fons sancti Jesephi
(Fountain of Saint Joseph], and the architect’s face is
immortalized in a water-spouting mask in the spandrel.
The Piazza d’Italia was created solely for the purpose of
fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage of memory
do not ant to be serious, perfect architecture. Rather they
want to be the vocabulary of a narrative: architecture
between the Old World and the New, between wit and
seriousness, between perfection and fragmentation,
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia
between the columns and the top) are inscribed with words
of dedication and with the title Fons sancti Jesephi
(Fountain of saint Joseph], and the architect's face is
immortalized in a water-spouting mask in the spandrel.
The Piazza d’Italia was created solely for the purpose of
fiction. The collonade fragments of this stage of memory do
not ant to be serious, perfect architecture. Rather they want
to be the vocabulary of a narrative: architecture between
the Old World and the New, between wit and seriousness,
between perfection and fragmentation, between historical
exactness and humorous alienation. The Piazza risks making
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
the political statement “Here is Italy!” only to add
immediately, with a sad smile, “Italy is not here.” Charles
Moore (who, although he came from the Midwest and
studied at Princeton and Yale, must be considered the head
of the Californian school) is an architect who knows how to
use modest means to create complex, exciting spaces that
combine surprise with familiarity. Moore has developed the
interview with a client into an art. While carrying on an
intense dialogue, he makes little hieroglyphic sketches that
capture all the client’s wishes - the obscure as well as the
obvious ones. The summoning up and examining of
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
conscious and unconscious wishes connected to housing
and to being sheltered is the starting point for Moore’s
architectural endeavors and for his architectural theory,
both of which are focused on “making places”.
Moore has searched as no other contemporary architect
has to find architectural means of meeting the most
marginal human needs as well as the anthropologically
constant ones, and to respond with innovative as well as
with archetypal motifs to promptings which our orientation
toward securing our existence predominantly in terms of
the means-to-an-end rationality hardly ever allows for.
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
To make a house a place of shelter and personal identity is
an avowed aim to all architects. However, the need for
adequate human shelter can hardly be met with an
architectural language that is attuned more to the dictates
of geometrically perfect figurations than to the wishes of
the inhabitants. What is more important to Moore and his
Partners is “making places rather than manipulating
formal configurations,” and this statement rejects a
modernism that places its faith in the effectiveness of pure
geometric forms and holds a successful composition of such
forms to be the highest goal of architecture.
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
Moore’s own house Orinda, California, (1960-1962) is
such a place. One feels at home in an almost primordial
way in this bachelor house, a one-room, single-level
rectangular unit. Light comes in from the sides and from an
opening in the tent-like roof.
The whole thing is grasped at a glance. Some of the walls
slide open like a large barn doors, so that one can look out
on the countryside, the lawn, and the surrounding plants.
The glass surfaces extend from the floor to the ceiling.
Looking out, one has the impression of Moore’s grand
piano standing as an amusing alien object in midst
Charles Moore
House of
Charles Moore
Orinda, California
1960-1962
Charles Moore
House of
Charles Moore
Orinda, California
1960-1962
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
of the green outdoors. The co-presence and intertwining of
disparate elements is used as much as a narrative means by
Moore as the exploration of essential relationships and
basic interconnections.
The four columns in the center of the house set off the
living and dining area as a place within a place, with its
own roof and its own skylight. [...]. Since ancient times the
space marked off by four columns in a square formation
has had a profound significance; it has stood for the center
of the universe. For a person sitting inside an aedicula,
secure under the projection of a ciborium, the world
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
is concentrated in that space; if another person enters the
space, their joint presence acquires the aspect of a
ceremony. Architecture as the framework of ceremony is
Moore’s intended goal; function is a side issue. The space
seems to be an ideal prototype of space. And the fact that
the four supports of the baldachin are actual Tuscan
columns from a nineteenth-century building introduces a
temporal dimension that connects the present with the past.
For Moore, a house must always refer to something
beyond itself, and only when dreams have a chance of being
Charles Moore
House of
Charles Moore
Orinda, California
1960-1962
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
realized does a house become a place of shelter and of
identity. Moore’s living room aedicula is not an object for
use or a suitable implement of practical goals but an
element of fiction, a poetic metaphor for the center of the
world. The house at Orinda also has a second, smaller
aedicula: a monumentalized shower cabin.
For Moore the morning shower is a ceremonial pleasure,
and his shower cabin certainly reflects this; however, the
real “purpose” of the smaller aedicula is to relativize the
larger one and to humanize it with a gentle touch of irony.
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
The skylights in he ceilings of the two aediculas (placed off
center, perhaps so as not to appear too nearly perfect) also
serve to minimize the representative aspect of the form.
Charles Moore
House of
Charles Moore
Orinda, California
1960-1962
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
Moore’s little house at Orinda is permeated by a hard-todefine sense of comfort and by a “power of place” that
connects ceremony and humour. It is a place of fiction, whose
illusionistic power is much more potent than the most
compelling objective elements. Along with Robert Venturi’s
“My Mother’s House" (also completed in 1962), it
represents a turning away from the ruling notions of
the International Style. The combination of historical
columns, a saddle roof, barn doors, and floor-to-ceiling
glass walls was a fundamentally new thing and a
questioning of the progressive stance of modernism.
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
To every architect thinking in terms of modernist notions,
what Moore termed the “creation of a place” was bound
to seem a mystification of architectonic space and a lapse
from the spirit of rationalism. The aesthetic of stereometry
would have called for a simple shell as the enclosure of an
unbroken spatial unit, as in Philip Johnson’s glass house.
But Moore did not want any abstract rationalist
simplification; he was striving to present a fiction based
not on the composition of solid forms but on the idea of
home and of security. Thus, human emotions and the human
need for protection became fundamental motivational
Postmodernity and Architecture
Charles Moore
factors in the design
process. The aediculas were typological answers to
archetypal wishes. A functional analysis, such as the
calculation of the most efficient use of kitchen space,
was not capable of fulfilling such wishes. The range of the
to architecture was widened when psychological needs
that had been neglected as functionally irrelevant began
to be treated as necessary conditions requiring formal
definition.
Michael Graves
Fargo/Moorhead Cultural Centre Bridge
Fargo, USA, 1977-1978
Ponte Vecchio
Florence, Italy
Ponte Rialto, Venice
Rob Krier
Housing Block
Ritterstrasse, Berlin, 1978-1981
Robert Krier
Ritterstrasse Apartments
Berlin, 1978-1988
Ponte Rialto, Venice
Ponte Vecchio, Florencia, Italia
James Stirling and Michael Wilford
Neue Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart, 1977-1984
James Stirling and Michael Wilford
Neue Staatsgalerie
Stuttgart, 1977-1984
Colosseo, Rome - Siglo I - AD
Robert Stern
New York Coliseum
New York
1996-1998
Helmut Jahn
Bank of the
Southwest
Tower
Huston, 1981