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Vignettes of death: architecture and the death drive

2007; Wiley; Volume: 49; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1467-8705.2007.00786.x

1467-8705

Lorens Holm,

Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

What would an architect submitting a paper to a special issue of Critical Quarterly called Medicine, Ritual, and the Contemporary Deathbed write about? Answer: The Ritual. This paper explores the relation between architecture and death. It is a response to John Tercier's The Contemporary Deathbed: The Ultimate Rush, which is about the reception in popular culture of death and medical practice. It will examine the psychoanalytic concept of the death drive. Rather than produce the master narrative of death and architecture, it consists of architectural vignettes of death, including the zombie, the Vitruvian man, the Steadicam man of TV-vérité, the Parthenon, the empty house. A word on methodology: this paper is not a survey, but a montage. The standard for montage is not truth, but cohesion or intelligibility. The vignettes were chosen because they could be joined up to make a picture of the death drive. Montage is thematic in my paper; indeed, Lacan argues that the drive is a montage. I am an architect: the logic behind the selection of vignettes has the whiff of the bricoleur about it – the make-do engineer, the opportunist, the cobbler who selects things because they fit.1 I am not concerned here with cemeteries, graveyards, graves, tombstones, tombs, caves, sepulchres, museums, ossuaries, coffins, caskets (open or closed), hospices, ICUs (intensive care units), crematoria, funerary urns, funerary chapels, funerals, crypts, catacombs, martyria, tumuli, megaliths, mausolea, morgues, mortuaries, necropolises, lands of the dead, floodplains, pyramids, styli, executions, sacrifices, infernos, towering infernos, haunted houses. Why? A tomb is just like my kitchen, except it is decorated differently and not as well serviced. Does it remind me of death? A bas-relief of an upside-down torch? A half-buried temple? Vaguely. Death lies elsewhere than in those architectures designed to house it. I shift the focus from architecture to architectural practice, and ask how practice has the potential to engage death.2 Toward the end of his life, in Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argues that civilisation, of which architecture is a material constituent, is a defence against our most fundamental instincts or drives; in particular, the death drive.3 The death drive is not a metaphysical principle, it is simply an observation. This, at least, is its most minimal claim. Freud took a brief look around him in 1930, and saw an awful lot of death, destruction, and dissemination of lies and hatred. He was looking mainly at the violence that we do to each other, but today we can add the violence we inflict on the environment. It is axiomatic in psychoanalysis that we would not do B if we were not driven to it by desire (in analysis, you take responsibility for all your thoughts and actions). We kill each other because we like it. Either that or killing is a knock-on effect of the lifestyles we construct in the pursuit of what we like. In which case its seemingly accidental nature belies – no, confirms – its inevitability. Ten years earlier, in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud had argued that all endeavour could be classed under two opposing drives, Eros and death, but that death was more archaic. Eros produces a picture – a vignette – that ultimately reflects the figure of its author. Beyond the narcissistic architecture of our carefully constructed lifestyles and personalities, and beyond all other manifestations of the drive toward the consolidation of life, identity, culture, lies the destruction that unravels this picture: destruction accidental and inevitable. In their commentary, Laplanche and Pontalis remark that the death drive is ‘the most fundamental principle or psychical function; and in so far as it is “the essence of the instinctual”, it binds every wish, whether aggressive or sexual, to the wish for death’.4 One of the aims of this paper will be to rehabilitate drive theory, which has always represented the speculative outer reaches of psychoanalytic theory. It is where psychoanalytic theory presses up against the very limits of intelligibility and subjective experience, where subjectivity becomes biology. Drive theory defines the subject at its most fundamental level, as a symbol machine. Instead of (Greek) pneuma, incessant breath: the incessant substitution of signifiers. This paper will show, by the ‘worked example’ of the life and death of Le Corbusier, that the drive is a viable model for understanding discourse as a representational practice, in other words, as a practice whose work can be understood as an attempt to symbolise or otherwise represent its object. This is, indeed, what Tercier asks of medicine.5 First contact, 1911: ‘The Parthenon, a terrible machine, grinds and dominates …’12 ‘To see the Acropolis is a dream … Yet why must I, like so many others, name the Parthenon the undeniable Master, as it looms up from its stone base, and yield, even with anger, to its supremacy?’13 He spent seven weeks sketching: ‘… the melancholy of my soliloquies amid ruins – and my chilling dialogues with heavy stones … burdened by a heavy premonition …’14 Last comment, 1965: ‘I am 20 years old and I cannot answer …’15 (He drowned 27 August 1965, tired, ailing, cantankerous, perhaps a suicide.) A temporal instability seems to answer to the earlier felt spatial instability. The peculiar use of the present tense and (inaccurate) invocation of his youth have the effect of projecting him back to his formative moment, and eliding his career. When he stands at the end of his career gazing back at his now lost youth, and gazing forward at the still unattained Parthenon, he acknowledges that the promise of the Parthenon was unfulfilled. He is mourning the loss of something that he never had. I am amazed that so many people are troubled by her, since she is within us every second and should be accepted with resignation. How should one have such a great fear of a person with whom one cohabits, who is closely mingled with our own substance? But there it is. One has grown used to making a fable of her and to judging her from outside. Better to tell oneself that at birth one marries her and to make the best of her disposition, however deceitful it may be. For she knows how to make herself forgotten and to let us believe that she no longer inhabits the house. Each one of us houses his own death and reassures himself by what he invents about her – namely that she is an allegorical figure only appearing in the last act. … But her glory is when one ceases to be. She can go out, and she locks us in. According to Freud (‘The Instincts and their Vicissitudes’), the instinct or drive has four components: aim, object, thrust, and site.19 The aim of the drive is relief from excitation (Freud's rather bleak take on pleasure); the object is that toward which the organism is thrust, the attainment of which is its aim. Its thrust is the pressure (a measure of quantity, of urgency) with which it moves toward its object. Its site is the body (its erogenous zones). Lacan keeps Freud's quadripartite model but argues that it has the arbitrary character of montage – like the frantic DIY by which our heroes never stop securing their kitchens against zombies, or the way Le Corbusier expended a lifetime of images building his Parthenon. Freud assumed that there would eventually be a biological formulation of the drive; Lacan was sure there would never be one. This is its strength.20 It is simply the conceptual apparatus that allows us to think problems of the drive, a thinking machine as inevitable and arbitrary as language, and with no claim to necessity – biological or logical – beyond its intelligibility. Lacan argues that even in Freud's text, the drive simply describes the way language works. It simply would not be possible to make sense of our humanity if we did not understand behaviour as fundamentally motivated, that even the most seemingly aimless behaviour has an object if you dig deep enough. The drive allows us to speak about the orientation of subjectivity; it is oriented with respect to its objects. And in an absolutely extraordinary passage Lacan says, ‘Let me say that if there is anything resembling a drive, it is a montage’. A beautiful woman is never far away (a nod to pleasure, to Eros; visions of Hans Bellmer's La Poupée, Max Ernst's Hundred Headless Women, Corbusier's Parthenon): ‘the resulting image would show the workings of a dynamo connected up to a gas-tap, a peacock's feather emerges, and tickles the belly of a pretty woman, who is just lying there looking beautiful’.21 How to accommodate the drive? How, in particular, to square limits – the limit where psyche becomes biology – with language (representation, generally)? I want to trace the role of the Parthenon as the object of architectural discourse, and in particular as the figure of death in the life of Le Corbusier (which we may regard as a fragment of that discourse). This will shine light on problems relating to the position of death in medical practice, which, unlike architecture, is ostensibly about preventing death. Le Corbusier stood at the end of his career gazing at his lost youth, and at the never to be attained Parthenon. This single gesture, this seeming closeness to origins and to death, has the effect of collapsing his career. The fact that Le Corbusier could not publish the book of his formative moment until the end of his life undermines any positivist reading of his career, as a progressive accumulation of architecture, technology, wealth, and knowledge. It suggests that, with respect to the Parthenon, nothing really happened between Athens 1911 and Paris 1965; if there was work – and there was a lot of work – it amounted to a form of repetition: articulation, but no difference. It gives the lie to the apparent positivism of, say, Le Corbusier: 1910–65, an accelerated compilation album of sorts, which begins with extracts from Le Voyage, and whose last image – a full-page sketch by Le Corbusier – presents his lifework as a straight line stridently cleaving a cosmos of nature, form, and technology.22 At the end of his life, he stands before the Parthenon, as if for the first time, wondering how he will be able to make architecture. There is a sense in which he never left the Parthenon. As if his whole life was spent in the present tense, standing before its gaze –‘all of a sudden, two thousand years are obliterated, a harsh poetry seizes you’.23 The Parthenon disrupts the normal sequential time of the architectural historian, nullifying it. For Le Corbusier, looking at the Parthenon is precisely not looking at the archaic past through contemporary eyes (Giedion's formula for modernity in Space Time and Architecture24), because the concept of the temporal (duration, direction, sequence) upon which past and present depend, has been called into question. The only other place we encounter such a bleak assessment of a life is in Freud's formulation of the drives in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), where he posits a death drive that lies beyond, in opposition to, a life drive; and in Lacan's commentary in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, where he concludes that life is repetition and all drives lead to death. We saw that death appears in drive theory in two ways. First, as the object of its own drive: death, killing, suicide. And, second, as a process inherent in all drives: whatever the object, all drives have the aim of returning the subject to a prior state of relaxation after stimulation. Think of the post-coital cigarette or the relief of killing someone. The drives are fundamentally conservative. They represent the reality of constancy and repetition – constancy through repetition, constant repetition – that underlies the myth of progress. Progress reduces to the endless repetition of a stimulus response cycle. The drive first appears in Freud as an interface: an instinct appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection to the body stimuli: Freud, the neurologist, begins with a consideration of stimuli and response arcs. The organism retreats from the stimulus that excites it. The drive is an internal as opposed to external stimulus, from which ‘motor flight’ is not a possible option. It is, moreover, spatial. Freud says this is the organism's first articulation of the distinction inside/outside. An internal tickle. psychical representative: clarified in subsequent papers, first in ‘Repression’ (1915) as ideational representative of the drives, both conscious and unconscious, and then in ‘The Unconscious’ (1915) as word-presentation and thing-presentation (Vorstellung). These are the conscious and unconscious words and images (roughly corresponding to Lacan's symbolic and imaginary orders) by which the subject represents to itself the ideas and things that constitute its world. Think: Le Corbusier's incredible output of books, buildings, drawings, and paintings. frontier: the drive is an edgy concept. It defines the limit between subjectivity and the animate body (=the zombie, the amoeba, the automaton, and other frighteners, they move but nobody's home). As his editors point out, Freud's text vacillates: sometimes the drive is the stimuli (somatic, i.e. of the body), sometimes it is the representatives (psychical, of the subject) that respond to the stimuli.25 But in either case, the drive walks the line between the subject of experience and the merely animate non-subject. work: the demand made upon the subject by the drive is the work of representation; the drive precipitates the subject as an interior world of representations. The work of the subject is to produce representations, what Lacan calls signifiers, in response to internal stimuli. Le Corbusier said ‘the house is a machine for living in’. We say: the subject is a house of signifiers. The consideration of stimulus response led Freud to the position that all behaviour was, at a fundamental level, the repetition of a primitive process. But Freud's drive theory has many sources. He posited it partly from a consideration of the ‘compulsion to repetition’, which he observed in the obsessional activities of neurotics, dreams, bad relationships (how many people do you know who always get involved with the same wrong lover?), and children's games, all of which confound any idea that subjectivity is organised around pleasure. Repetition at the level of behaviour thus matches repetition at the level of stimulus response. Freud was particularly taken by the fort/da game, where a child bereft of his mother, plays a game of proxy presence/absence with a spool in which the child seems to re-enact his (painful) separation from her. Fort (absent) da (present) fort/da, fort/… and so on. The compulsion to repeat is a more ancient and daemonic principle than the pleasure principle, and seems to underlie it. The drive is psychoanalytic theory at its most speculative. All endeavour is subject to the drives, whether it be love and war, the building of temples and tombs, the activities in the maternity ward and the terminal care hospice.26 Freud reformulated the theory a number of times in response to criticism and new evidence. But one thing remains unchanged: it is the flywheel of psychical processes. The drives mark the outer reaches of the psyche, where biological processes cross over and enter the subject as Vorstellungen. From the point of view of the subject, the drive forms the horizon of subjectivity beyond which is the darkness of the animate body. I use the word horizon because each subject carries it with him/her, and from his/her point of view, there is nothing beyond it. Beyond the horizon formed by the continuous circulation of media that constitutes subjectivity in its conscious and unconscious modes – Freud's word- and thing-presentations by which experiences are represented to the subject, Lacan's signifiers – there is simply the reality of the animated body, its blood, hormones, synapses and automatic circuitry. Two points to take from Freud are that representation is the stuff of subjectivity, and that the drive is indifferent to its object, before which all behaviour is simply a repetition of attempts to represent it. In his reading of Freud, Lacan insists that all drives lead to death. He quotes Heraclitus: ‘To the bow (Biós) is given the name of life (Bíos) and its work is death’.27 All drives lead to death because the drive is a function of language; and language, like all forms of symbolisation, stands in for its object, replaces it, kills it. The drive only exists because we symbolise our desire through language and its myriad forms. Unlike Freud's pseudo-biological model for desire (I call it amoebic), in which quantities of libidinal energy attach to, or cathect, an object, signifiers do not attach to anything. The subject never attains its object. How could it? Language never attains anything. You do things with words, but attaining objects is not one of them. Language is predicated on the absence of the object. If it is possible to form an image of the drive as it manifests in a life, it is in Le Corbusier's intractable struggle before the Parthenon. Not the Parthenon per se, but his struggle for it, his almost obsessive drive for it. Behold its arbitrariness, its repetitive character. He cannot possess it, he cannot tear himself away. The Parthenon is Le Corbusier's objet a; in a life such as his, which we might call a lived discourse, his projects in all their forms, are his signifiers. When I describe Le Corbusier's work as constituting an image cycle, it is this ‘return journey’ diagram that I have in mind. A life of repetition does not cleave a linear path from A to B, but is constantly returning upon itself, re-evaluating, repositioning, rediscovering new meanings in old habits. I cannot present a comprehensive survey of the Parthenon in Le Corbusier's work, but a photo-essay featuring his architecture should make clear his continual engagement with it: The emphatic frontality with which it is pictured in photographs notwithstanding, Villa Stein at Garches (1926) is effectively a Parthenon wrapped with the façade libre. The porches of the church of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp (1950), which seem to be neither wholly part of the building nor part of the landscape, have the same edgy and ambiguous quality as the Parthenon porches. The rotated massing and angled approach to the Carpenter Centre, Harvard (1961), recall the Acropolean site plan. The delineation of his projects as Parthenon details using the montage artist's arsenal of photo-cropping strategies is seen in his photographs of the capital at Chandigarh (1952–5).34 We have seen how Le Corbusier's practice is a repetition of missed encounters with an object that for him is always already lost. The problematic status of the Parthenon in Le Corbusier's oeuvre is confirmed by its edgy status in the architecture discourse of space. This failure is not accidental to Le Corbusier or to architecture. We hazard that it is constitutive of any discourse that is organised around a lost object, before which, object-fixated discourses are reduced to repetition. Death has a similarly problematic relation to experience and to medical practice. Although we speak about death as if it were an experience, it is not something that arrives in our life at its end, as if it were our last experience; it is rather the limit of experience in the sense of something that experience approximates but never arrives at.42 It may be possible to represent the death of others, but it is not possible to represent your own death, either to yourself or to others. My death is as inaccessible to me as it is to you. Death is always deferred in our experience by images of death that come from elsewhere. As Freud noted, we imagine our own death as spectators to someone else's. In, for example, Bertolucci's Dreamers (2003), the death of Isabelle (Eve Green) is represented to her as a scene in an old movie (she watches as if she were elsewhere than her own death; attending it, not suffering it). Cocteau's portrayal of Death (capital D) as a woman is not simply part of a classical tradition of personification (and a dig at the male ego); it undermines equally the gravitas and the humour of the play, it never lets the reader forget that s/he is attending a contrivance, a representation of reality, not reality. There is a similar pattern of deferral in medical practice. Death is not a treatable condition, but is where treatment stops. Preventing death amounts to an expensive and elaborate deferral strategy. Dealing with death has to do with reliving and relieving the tragedy of death when it happens, for which you have to switch to other discourses than medicine. The reality of death is the fragmentation it imposes on the lives of others. It scatters them, breaks their coherence. Dealing with it involves a form of restitution from the swirling fragments. From this position, medical practice is a Steadicam fantasy of gleaming chrome, technology, and precision; and the more Steadicam, the less restitution. Every discipline has its Parthenon and its possible pitfalls in fantasy. If you want to know your object, the Parthenon, death, you need to be able to move between disciplines (as Tercier has done), so that one discipline can shine a light on the blind spots of the other.43 John Tercier's most startling claim is that the medical protocols for resuscitation are as much about insuring the death of the subject as about insuring its revival. He points to the violence of these practices. These practices police the boundary between life and death, ensuring that no one straddles it. They do this in two ways: by defining the boundary with diagnostic procedures, and by joining to this definition protocols that will either revive the subject, or kill it. If medical practice attempts to stabilise the distinction between life and death by measuring death with its machines, and if architecture attempts to stabilise a parallel distinction between inside and outside by erecting walls, delineating spaces and attaching names to them, the figure of the zombie wreaks havoc with these fundamental distinctions. The zombie, who won't die and won't live – whom medical protocols cannot kill, because it is already dead, and cannot revive, because it is still alive – is the figure of death at its most rampant and meaningless. (Imagine a farce in which the ER team try ever more frantic procedures (more and more realism), all to no avail, until they realise that they've been pumping a zombie.) Architecture and medicine are, in their respective ways, attempts to control the symbolic universe, defences against the uncontrollable overdetermined meaninglessness of death, meaning run riot. The Parthenon – that ruin, that empty signifier, that always dead always resurrecting building – has such a problematic status in architecture because, like the zombie, it stymies this control. It can't keep anything in or out, not because it is broken, but because its status as an interior has always been in question. The zombie keeps coming and we keep boarding up the holes it makes in our walls with bits of scavenged architecture, floorboards, pieces of door, furniture pushed up against the walls, all in a fashion as ad hoc as the drive itself. The zombie keeps coming as fast as we barricade it out; architectural careers are as endless as they are repetitive, repetition without change. The concept of the drive re-evaluates the seemingly simple opposition between life and death. It repositions the line of division from life/death to subject/non-subject. Medical practice and most movies are situated on the life/death line (Rambo), where the solution is always death for some and life for others. But the lesson of Le Corbusier's practice is that we live with death all the time, it is in everything we do; it does not just happen at the end of life (it is not the end of life, because it is not the end of anything). The drive distinguishes the subject from the animated body that is alive but not subject to language, desire, symbolisation. Our examples of the non-dead non-subject have included zombies and amoebas (but not unconscious subjects, because the unconscious is the most important determinant of subjectivity). Slavoj Žižek (Looking Awry) sees in the figure of the zombie the paradigm of the drive.44 Here the internal stimulus of the drive is stripped of its signifiers, leaving only the animate body. The dissolution of subjectivity is not death per se, but the breakdown of the representation machine and the symbolic universe that make representation and restitution possible. The zombie follows an order of natural processes – a form of cause and effect – but it does not recognise anything that orders our world, in particular desire and the way it is symbolised. We can imagine such a dissolution if we think back to Le Corbusier's Vorstellungen, how tightly he organised them into a life and a career, and imagine how they might have been disorganised (imagine reversing the sequence of Parthenon images so that his career ends with the uncatalogued archival images of the 1911 trip with which he started; they are the most real images – uncontrived, direct, Steadicam, the least Parthenonical). How this is envisioned beyond the figures of the Parthenon and the zombie is beyond the scope of this paper, but arguably we witness it in certain forms of extreme psychosis (in Lacan's text, the foreclosure of the name of the father), and in images of extreme disfunctionality as in Waiting for Godot or King Lear. There is death in King Lear, but more significantly there is the breakdown of the structures of legitimacy: primogeniture, land title, loyalties to family and king, and the like.45 It is tempting to say that the zombie is the shell of a person, but it is the opposite. The zombie is an animate body without subjectivity; what remains is a solid shreddable body, no space at all. If not literally a solid object, then an aspatial object – an object not organised spatially – like Giedion's and Zevi's understanding of the Parthenon. It lacks the space that is the necessary condition and possibility for others to read the depth of subjectivity into it: and thereby to attribute to it intention, desire, identity, whatever. The subject is the shell. Of course this shell is the shell that language makes. Language – imagine Lacan's flow of signifiers – walls off this empty space, keeping it whole, keeping it empty. In this regard, the early attempts to biologise the drive are a linguistic sleight of hand to cover up the fact that the motivation that is constitutive of humanity/subjectivity is not biological at all, but rather the indefinable empty space that escapes language, or rather that is walled in/off/out by it.46 The lesson of Cocteau is that Death exists in our lives from the start as an absent object; it has to because it is the space that makes experience possible. If there is a lesson in here for contemporary civilisation, it should focus more on opening up life to its subjective possibilities – for representation is life – than on medicinal attempts to prevent the inevitable. At the end of our life it is not life that departs, but death, leaving us as solid as a body and bereft of our subjectivity. Beautiful Death leaves the house and locks the door. She leaves your house solid.