Dust revolutions. Dust, informe , architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille)
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/13602360701614714
ISSN1466-4410
Autores Tópico(s)Diverse academic research themes
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. ‘This is the domain of Rose Sélavy / How arid it is — how fertile it is — how joyous it is — how sad it is / View taken from an airplane by Man Ray — 1921.’ Inscription on Man Ray's photograph ‘Élevage de Poussière’ (‘Dust Breeding’) (1920) of Marcel Duchamp's ‘La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Même’ (‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’) [‘The Large Glass’] (1915–1923) [Schwarz, cat. no. 404]. The photograph is reproduced in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York, Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), cat. no. 382, p. 684. 2. On the idea of propriety in architecture see C. Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998), and in particular chapter two ‘What Is Proper to Architecture’, pp. 30–61. 3. G. Bataille, ‘Architecture’, in G. Bataille, M. Leiris, M. Griaule, R. Desnos, et al., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, ‘Critical Dictionary’ (London, Atlas Press, 1995), pp. 35–36; G. Bataille, ‘Notre Dame de Rheims’, in D. Hollier, Against Architecture. The writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 31–31; G. Bataille, ‘The Labyrinth or the constitution of beings’, in Inner Experience (Albany, SUNY Press, 1988), pp. 81–93; G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 64; G. Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 72–73. 4. G. Bataille, ‘Dust’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 42–43 and ‘Formless’, ibid., pp. 51–52. 5. Y.A. Bois, R.E. Krauss, Formless. A User's Guide (New York, Zone Books, 1997). 6. A. Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (London and New Brunswick NJ, The Athlone Press, 2000). 7. D. Lecoq, ‘Georges Bataille’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., Encyclopaedia Da Costa, Appendix III, Biographies, p. 158. 8. C. Steedman, Dust (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001). See in particular Chapter 8, ‘The story of the dust’, pp. 157–170. 9. Ibid., p. 160. 10. Ibid. Steedman continues to elaborate on this idea of circularity, to oppose Dust — the circular, the always-there characterised by ‘not-going-away-ness’ (Steedman, p. 165) — to Waste: the linear, the perishable of dissipation, although she makes no reference to either Walter Benjamin's or Georges Bataille's works on this. ‘This is what dust is about; this is what Dust is: what it means and what it is. It is not about a surplus, left over from something else: it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed.’ (Steedman, p. 164). ‘Dust — the Philosophy of Dust — speaks of the opposite of waste and dispersal; of a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away.’ (Steedman, p. 166). 11. Ibid., pp. 160–161. The quotation in Steedman's text is from Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, standard edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 17 (London, Hogarth Press, [1919] 1955), pp. 217–56. 12. Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., p. 36. 13. G. Bataille, ‘Dust’, op. cit., pp. 42–43. 14. I refer here to Man Ray's Dust Breeding (1920), a photograph of the ‘breeding’ of dust on Marcel Duchamp's Grand Verre (‘The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even’) in Duchamp's studio. The caption of the photograph reads: ‘This is the domain of Rose Sélavy / How arid it is — how fertile it is/ how joyous it is — how sad it is / View taken from an aeroplane by Man Ray — 1921’. 15. ‘Architecture refers to whatever there is in an edifice that cannot be reduced to building, whatever allows a construction to escape from purely utilitarian concerns, whatever is aesthetic about it. Now this sort of artistic supplement that, by its addition to a simple building, constitutes architecture, finds itself caught from the beginning in a process of semantic expansions that forces what is called architecture to be only the general locus or framework of representation, its ground. […] Architecture, before any other qualifications, is identical to the space of representation; it always represents something other than itself from the moment that it becomes distinguished from mere building.’ D. Hollier, Against Architecture, op. cit., pp. 30–31. 16. Bataille, op. cit., ‘Dust’. 17. Hollier, op. cit., p. 31. 18. Ibid., p. 31. See full quotation in Note 15 above. 19. Ibid., pp. 34–35. 20. Bataille continues: ‘In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ Here I have used the translation revised by Yve-Alain Bois in Y.A. Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless. A User's Guide, p. 5. See also ‘Formless’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 51–52. 21. ‘Harmony, like the project, throws time into the outside: its principle is the repetition through which “all that is possible” is made eternal. The ideal is architecture, or sculpture, immobilising harmony, guaranteeing the duration of motifs whose essence is the annulment of time.': G. Bataille, Inner Experience (Stony Brook, State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 56. This is the translation slightly modified by Yve-Alain Bois in ‘Threshole’, in Formless. A User's Guide, op. cit., pp. 186–187. Bois notes that dust is one of the inscriptions of time, ‘semiologically speaking, an index. In this it is like photography, but its trace is of duration.’, Bois, Krauss, Formless, op. cit., p. 226. 22. G. Bataille, ‘Dust’, op. cit., p. 43. 23. J. and W. Grimm, ‘Little Briar Rose’, Complete Fairy Tales (London and New York, Routledge, 2002), p. 204. 24. S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1989), p. 34 and note 58, p. 388; W. Benjamin, ‘Das Dornröschen’ (1908), in, R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser, eds, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972-), II, pp. 9–10; W. Benjamin, ‘Der Surrealismus’ (1929), in W. Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in, P. Demetz, ed., Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York, Schoken Books, 1978), pp. 177–192; W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trs., John Osborne (London, NLB, 1977). 25. W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann, ed., trs, H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge Mass., London, Belknap / Harvard University Press, 1999). 26. S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, op. cit., p. 34. 27. Ibid., p. 49. The quotation is from W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, V, p. 1033 (0°, 70). 28. S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, op. cit., p. 95. 29. Ibid., p. 221. I have proposed a reconsideration of Benjamin's historical project in relation to forms of making in contemporary architecture, through a close reading of the image and material of ‘dust’ in his work in T. Stoppani, ‘Dust Projects. On Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Werk and some contemporary dusty makings in architecture’, The Journal of Architecture, Volume 12, Number 5, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity’, A. Benjamin, C. Rice, eds (forthcoming, 2007). 30. ‘When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six foot long and three foot wide, heaped up in a rough pyramid shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. That is architecture.’ Adolf Loos, ‘Architektur’ (1910), Sämtliche Schriften, Adolf Loos, vol. 1 (Vienna and Munich, Herold Verlag, 1962), p. 302. 31. G. Bataille, ‘Architecture’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 35–36. 32. Ibid., pp. 35–36. 33. ‘[…] every Sunday the throng flows into the museum, like blood, and leaves it fresh and purified. […] it is within the crowd that the play, the flashes, the shimmerings of light technically described by the authorized critics take place.’: G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., p. 64. 34. ‘The slaughterhouse is linked to religion in so far as the temples of bygone eras […] served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing. […]’, Georges Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 72–73. 35. G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., p. 64. 36. G. Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 72–73. 37. G. Bataille, ‘Dust’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, op. cit., pp. 42–43.
Referência(s)