Stephen Perrella... Hypersurface... Doors 2
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H o u s e P a r t y f o r
C y n i c a l C r a s h C u l t u r
e
In order to arrive as an architectonic of hypersurface it is necessary to throw as house party for cynics. (They include Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Mark Wigley, Jacques Derrida, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as Arthur Kroker, Tony Fry, Gianni Vattimo, Donna Harraway and Avital Ronell). But this cadre is a cynical group and with my not being a very hospitable host, I must circulate through these thinkers. At various moments, I return their unhomely thoughts to the house party. But their cynical moments are part of the patchwork that comprise the substance of hypersurface.
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Being
@Home. What is it for an architect to be asking questions regarding home, in
the context of the electronic era? Further, what is at stake for a homeless
architect to be asking such a question, homeless literally and existentially
due to an engagement and dissemination with contemporary digital media? This
existential homelessness is both liberative and debilitating and has a great
stake in questions concerning architecture.
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It
remains to be seen how certain assumptions and logics of cultural practices
that are in place will unfold as we approach the 21st Century. Such conferences
as this become critical moments in determining future considerations while we
must remember that the proliferation of new media technologies are
manifestations of Western culture's attitude toward what Heidegger has called
`productivist metaphysics', beginning with Greek culture.
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Indeed,
any position about home as it is effected by our contemporary condition
maintains a transparent attitude that is symptomatic of being determined by
technology. To truly engage the question of home is to understand that
questions are already determined by technology. The task of prescribing modes
of inhabiting the home of virtual culture must consider the uncanny convergence
of the critiques of subjectivity in Western thought from Nietzsche and
Heidegger to Deleuze and Derrida, inasmuch as that undoing is occurring
precisely because of pan-capitalist enterprises in everyday culture.
Heidegger surf-boards along on the electronic wave as triumphantly as Descartes rode the mechanical wave. Marshall McLuhan, Gutenberg Galaxy 1962.
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Theorists
like Arthur Kroker have explained that by mastering nature in our use of
technology we attempt to cover over the issue of Death. Being the site of
greatest security, the home also serves to cover over that question for there
to be a home in the sense it is normally understood. To face up to one's
mortality means to be thrown from one's home. But as architectural theorist
Mark Wigley remarks, In the end it is only the alien that dwells.
(Wigley, AD 114). One is homeless precisely through questions concerning
technology brought to bear on the issue of being @home, but on the other hand,
one is able to dwell. I will attempt to explore how it is that we may dwell,
however problematically, in technotopia.
D w e l l i n g a n d H o m e
It is the context of the questions and problematics that I present here that are my current address. This is what it means to dwell in the addressing. But the questions that I will attempt to bring Home are not those of comfort or familiarity, they are uneasy questions that effect a tear, an unheimliche as that which casts us out of the `homely,' i.e. the customary, familiar, secure. (Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 63). This presentation then will entail a double bind, a digging out, an originary strife between an attempt to dwell at Home while at the same time acknowledging it as a violent site. We cannot simply assume that the home is an object that shelters us. Wigley promises that, The alienating space of the home veils a more fundamental and primordial homelessness. To be at home in such a space is precisely to be homeless. (AD, p 98)
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On
the one hand, man is violent, violating both enclosure and structure (he who
breaks out and breaks up) in defining a home. On the other hand, there is
the `overpowering' violence of Being, which the familiar space of the home
attempts to cover over but which compels a certain panic and fear within it,
and inevitably forces man out of it. The endless conflict between these two
forms of violence is constitutional rather than simply a historical event. And
it is not that one is an act of violence by a subject while the other is an act
of violence against that subject. Rather, the conflict between them is the very
possibility of the subject's existence, indeed, the existence of any thing as
such. Man does not build a home in the same way that man does not build
a language. Rather, man is built by the home. But, equally, it must be
emphasised here, man is built by its destruction. (Wigley, AD, p111)
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It
is not the literal home that Heidegger/Wigley speak of here, but the
philosophical interior, subjectivity and the manner in which architecture
houses the subject. In the post-modem era (Kroker) we may have already been
emptied of our bodies and are currently dumping our selves into cyberspace. in
embracing the uncanny cultural condition whereby technology has invaded and
cooped our ability to dwell, to be at home.
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To
do this, I must invite home unpleasant company, those who have thought the
condition of the unheimliche. Not only as a means to argue for some new
courageous disfigured condition of being @home, but for the time being, to
pursue an argument that I am having with these individuals whereby I need their
work but also must at a certain point reject it. It is a messy and embattled
conversation that entails agreement and disagreement, departure and return.
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