Margherita Spiluttini. Räumlich | Spacious.
Fotohof edition Band 85, Salzburg 2007
Christiane Zintzen | transl. Steve Gander
The Trap: Body and Building
The body is encasement, trap. Is the case. In the masculine – der Körper, le corps, the body – more than ever: is the phallic case. Fall of the flesh. Temporality of corporeality. Necessary physical stronghold. Fortification of “I” to sever us from people like ourselves. Such thoughts seldom arise without need, turn to need: but in this the body refuses to be base and territory of the self: it is the item, the counterself.
Merely an object, the body means the constant humiliation of the lofty mind. The fact that we are nothing more than a mote of human matter, a bundle of particles, is deeply insulting. The philosophical thorn in the flesh remains that this body, whose matter we notionally do not penetrate, may be the absolute metaphor precisely for this reason. Torso and toes , brain and belly, turned head over heels: the body is the organisation from whose underground economy fall to us the inner signs and symbols, the currency of metaphors in the valid coins of truth of the time.
According to Sigmund Freud, it is not us who are masters in the house of our brain and heart. Far from it, the “ego” is nothing but the slave of carnal power: the body sends out the Genius as callboy to fulfil its needs, wishes and desires. Pleasure seeks the return of the same, comfort sustains itself conservatively. Pain and hurt contrariwise drag on the very existence. Radical riot in the “Ballad Of The Easy Life”. Alarm and defence, hormones, messengers, bacteriology: pain as a task force against misbegotten matter, zealous chastiser of the future.
In other cases pain springs up as a symptom: a sign of the concealed, evidence of egregious processes. The effect of a critical mass, pain commands the quest for an overlooked pattern. Tumour, abscess, metastasis: Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor”, Elaine Scarry’s “Body in Pain”, Jean Améry’s “On Torture”. The body regresses in the process of civilisation, negates the beautiful soul and tauntingly mocks “culture”. Getting ill and old, bodily reality is banal and without promise. The suffering of the flesh on the rack of time devours the images and the figures of meaning and undermines the linguistic endeavour. The person experiences the progression of obliteration directly, isolated, mute.
In the body we are an item that can be touched. We shape ourselves towards the outside as a projection form, we project, throw out images and projectiles: no throw aims more directly at the safekeeping of bodies than the building, the house, the furniture. Architecture is always body politics: it directs, regulates the public sphere and discretion, attitude and conduct of the individual and the collective. As a beautiful and fine art master-architecture disassociates itself from the “the age of crates” (Peter Weiss): the guidance and stacking systems of the world of sheds and containers are regarded as anonymous products of engineers, logisticians and dispatchers. Here it is another metaphorical body-trap that rules: it is the image of metabolism as a dynamic system for the production of “surplus” value. Animal production. Human material. Internment and death camp, assembly and refugee camp, lately “detention” or “deportation” camp: The “Century of Camps” (Joel Kotek) continues. Until today architecture has managed to keep its agendas out of these inauspicious connotations.
Nevertheless the rebuilding of the socialised body does have its place precisely in the architectonic ideal: in municipal construction and infrastructure each epoch redesigns itself. Bentham, Bauhaus, Wal-Mart: every superstructure shapes a system of bodies and incorporates the self-perception of a society. The sensibility with regard to “total institutions” (Erving Goffman), as a critique of capitalism and “the system”, may know itself to be on the safe side – like the general suspicion against human flesh factory farming and the stereotype of the removal of “contaminated” parts of the social body. We tend to play the humanistic disc and provide easy listening. Beyond the social “spiel”, of course, we remain physically vulnerable, ready at any time to get strangled in the dense net of metaphors around the nature of our matter. Codes and ciphers may change, “life sciences” may flourish and architecture may advance to the guiding art of the “Society of the Spectacle” (Guy Debord): we ourselves will continue to snare ourselves in the old metaphoric trap of the Platonic cave of the body.
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[[ Copyright Spiluttini, Gander, czz ]]
