Ghosts (7 page)

The unbuilt is characteristic of those arts whose realization requires
the remunerated work of many people, the purchase of materials, the use of
expensive equipment, etc. Cinema is the paradigmatic case: anyone can have an
idea for a film, but then you need expertise, finance, personnel, and these
obstacles mean that ninety-nine times out of a hundred the film
doesn’t get made. Which might make you wonder if the prodigious bother of it
all—which technological advances have exacerbated if
anything—isn’t actually an essential part of cinema’s charm, since,
paradoxically, it gives everyone access to movie-making, in the form
of pure daydreaming. It’s the same in the other arts, to a greater or lesser
extent. And yet it is possible to imagine an art in which the limitations of
reality would be minimized, in which the made and the unmade would be
indistinct, an art that would be instantaneously real, without ghosts. And
perhaps that art exists, under the name of literature.

In this sense all the arts have a literary basis, built into their
history and their myths. Architecture is no exception. In advanced, or at least
sedentary, civilizations, building requires the collaboration of various kinds
of tradesmen: bricklayers, carpenters, painters, then electricians, plumbers,
glaziers, and so on. In nomadic cultures, dwellings are made by a single person,
almost always a woman. Architecture is still symbolic, of course, but its social
significations are manifest in the arrangement of dwellings within the camp. The
same thing happens in literature: in the composition of some works, the author
becomes a whole society, by means of a kind of symbolic condensation, writing
with the real or virtual collaboration of all the culture’s specialists, while
others works are made by an individual, working alone like the nomadic woman, in
which case society is signified by the arrangement of the writer’s books in
relation to the books of others, their periodic appearance, and so on.

But in Patri’s dream the architectural analogy was developed a little
further. In Africa there is a curious race of pygmies, the Mbutu, nomadic
hunters without a chief or social hierarchies. They look after themselves, and
everybody else, without dramas. Their communities are relatively small: twenty
or thirty families. When they decide to set up camp, they choose a clearing in
the jungle and the dwellings are arranged in a “ring,” which, according to the
anthropologists, is typical of egalitarian societies. The huts form a circle
with an empty center. But anthropologists are dreamers too, sometimes. How could
this ring be visible except from a plane? Needless to say, the Mbutu pygmies
don’t fly; if they were meant to fly, they would have been born with wings. Also
it’s debatable whether or not the center is empty, since it’s occupied by the
space that makes it a center. “Whoever speaks in the center is heard by all,”
say the anthropologists, alluding involuntarily to dream ventriloquism. The huts
are isotopic shells, in which an opening can be made anywhere. The Mbutu make
just one: a door, facing the neighbors they like best. Say the lady of the house
is cross with her neighbor for some reason or other. No problem; they block up
the door and open another one, facing the neighbors on the other side. The
researchers who have observed this system fail to draw the logical conclusion:
the house of a truly sociable Mbutu would be all doors, and so not a house at
all; conversely, a finished and complete construction presupposes hostility.

A contrasting example: the Bushmen. They too are nomadic and their
camps are arranged in a “ring”. Except that there is something in the middle of
their ring. They place their little houses around a tree; under the tree the
chief of the group builds his hut; at the door of the hut the chief lights a
fire. What was lacking from the Mbutu camp was not a center, but its symbol.
Providing a symbol engages a process of symbolic accumulation: the tree, the
chief, the fire.... Why not a rose, a stuffed giraffe, a sunken
boat, a mosquito that happened to alight on the earlobe of a Nazi spy, a
downpour, or a replica of the Victory of Samothrace?

The little Bushmen are comical, but it’s the same with the extremely
serious Zulu, who are formidable hunters and warriors. Those who have had the
misfortune of facing them in battle (for example, the son of the Emperor
Napoleon III and Eugenia de Montijo) can confirm that they form a
semi-circle, “enveloping” the enemy troops before annihilating them.
This is a reproduction of the method they use for hunting. And their camps are
arranged in the same way: a semi-circle of huts. When the method is
transposed from hunting to war, there is a transition from the real to the
symbolic, without any loss of practical efficacy. It’s not that one level
replaces the other; the levels can coexist, and a Zulu might even try hunting a
tasty zebra with a technique tried and tested on the imperial prince. The
architecture of the camp, whatever its degree of realization (interpretations
and intentions must be taken into account as well as actual huts), constitutes a
return to the real, because life is real, and the Zulu have to live, as well as
hunting and making war. But they return involuntarily, as it were, without any
plan, the way dreams unfold. The centre of the village is a void elegantly
furnished with a bloody suction.

The architectural key to the built / unbuilt opposition, which
analogies fail to capture, is the flight of time toward space. And dreaming is
that flight. (So it wasn’t a pure coincidence that Patri’s dream was about
architecture). Except in fables, people sleep in houses. Even if the houses
haven’t yet been built. And therein, perhaps, lies the origin, the original
cell, of the sedentary life. While habits, whether sedentary or nomadic, are
made of time, dreams are time-free. Dreams are pure space, the species
arrayed in eternity. That exclusivity is what makes architecture an art. Beyond
this point, the timeless mental material of the unbuilt is detached from the
field of possibility, ceases to be the personal failure of an architect whose
more daring projects stalled for want of financial backing, and becomes
absolute. Even the mixture of the built and the unbuilt becomes absolute. The
construction at whose summit Patri was sleeping was a real model of that
mixture, by virtue of its incomplete state and everything the decorators were
still planning to do. It was a step away from the absolute, waiting only for
bricks, mortar and metal to expel time from its atomic matrix in a fluid
maneuver. That was the purpose of the girl’s dream.

Now if the unbuilt, or the mixture in which it participates, can be
considered as a “mental” phenomenon, like dreaming or the general play of
intentions, the mind, in turn, can be seen to depend on the phenomenon of the
unbuilt, of which architecture is the exemplary manifestation.

There are societies in which the unbuilt dominates almost entirely:
for example, among the Australian Aborigines, those “provincial spinsters” in
the words of Lévi-Strauss. Instead of building, the Australians
concentrate on thinking and dreaming the landscape in which they live, until by
multiplying their stories they transform it into a complete and significant
“construction.” The process is not as exotic as it seems. It happens every day
in the western world: it’s the same as the “mental city,” Joyce’s Dublin, for
instance. Which leads one to wonder whether unbuilt architecture might not, in
fact, be literature. In urbanized societies, city planning doubles architecture,
robbing its symbolic function. If, in nomadic societies, the arrangement of the
camp performed a function that was not performed by the construction of houses,
that is, symbolizing society, in the planning of large contemporary cities,
where the buildings require the convergence of skills and know-how
from a great range of social sectors, urban planning repeats a function already
satisfactorily performed, and ends up having no function of it own (or rather it
symbolizes the policing of society). But perhaps it would be better to say that
it leaves a “symbolic vacancy,” an energy unemployed by any current necessity.
The Nias come to mind with their twin deities, Lowalani, who represents positive
forces, and his enemy, Latura Dano, god of the negative. According to the Nias,
the world is layered, made up of nine superposed planes, on the highest of which
resides Lowanlani, sleeping with his consort, a nameless goddess (let’s call her
Patri), who is a kind of mediator. The planning of the Nia villages “represents”
this construction, horizontally of course, the high, for example, corresponding
to the right-hand side, and the low to the left, or whatever. Now the
condominiums, the skyscrapers that the Nias haven’t built (negating the negation
of the unbuilt, as it were), would represent symbolism itself. From which it
could be deduced that for every building there is a corresponding
non-building. On the same principle, the natives of Madagascar make
pretty wooden models of multi-story houses, crammed with little people
and animals, which are used as toys. If those models represent anything, it is
“the children’s house,” another form of the unbuilt.

But the Australians, what do the Australians do? How do they structure
their landscape? For a start they postulate a primal builder, whose work they
presume only to interpret: the mythical animal who was active in the
“dreamtime,” that is, a primal era, beyond verification, as the name
indicates.
A time of sleep. The visible landscape is an effect
of causes that are to be found in the dreamtime. For example the snake that
dragged itself over this plain creating these undulations, etc., etc. These
“intellectual dandies,” these “spinsters,” these curious Aborigines make sure
their eyes are closed while events take place, which allows them to see places
as records of events. But what they see is a kind of dream, and they wake into a
reverie, since the real story (the snake, not the hills) happened while they
were asleep.

The dreamtime, as giver of meaning or guarantor of the stability of
meanings, is the equivalent of language. But why did the Australian Aborigines
need an equivalent? Didn’t they already have languages? Maybe they also wanted a
hieroglyphic script, like the Egyptians, and they made it from the ground under
their feet.

The elements of Australian geography are as simple as they are
effective: the point and the line, that’s it. As the Aborigines proceed over
plains and through forests, the point and the line are represented by the halt
and the journey. With a line and a point, a line that passes through many points
in the course of a year, frequently changing direction, they trace out a vast
drawing, the representation of destiny. But there is something very special
going on here: via the point, the precise point in space, the nomads can pass
through to the other side, like a dressmaker’s pin or needle, through to the
side of dreaming, which changes the nature of the line: the hunting or gathering
route becomes a mythic itinerary. Which adds a third dimension to the drawing of
destiny. But the passage through the point is happening all the time, since no
point is specially privileged (not even waterholes—contrary to the
anthropologists’ initial assumptions—although they serve as models for
the points of passage, which can, by rights, be found anywhere, at any point
along the line), so the food-gathering route is always taking on a
mythical significance and vice versa. There is something dreamlike about the
points that provide a view of the other side, but they belong not so much to the
dreamtime as to dream work. The nomads enter the dreamtime not by setting off on
some extraordinary, dangerous voyage, but through their everyday, ambulatory
movement.

To symbolize the point, the Australian Aborigines have a “sacred post”
(a rough translation, of course, because it’s not sacred in the western sense),
which they carry with them and drive into the ground when they camp each night,
at a slight angle, like the tower of Pisa, to indicate the direction they will
take the next day. This post is decorated with carvings, which allude to the
mythic itinerary, and in this way it combines the two contrasting motifs of the
halt (signaled by the place where the post has been driven into the ground) and
the itinerary (doubly represented by its inclination and the carvings, since the
itinerary has two aspects, relating to food-gathering and to myth,
while the point is single in its nature—it is always a point of
passage.)

But Patri’s dream went further, higher, taking in different systems,
which were increasingly original and strange. In some cases the construction of
the landscape, common to a great variety of carefree indigenous peoples, was
simplified to the extreme. For example by certain Polynesian islanders, whose
landscape consists entirely of those specks of earth or coral emerging from the
sea, which seem to be adrift.... They have a simple fix for
this, using two lines that are not so much imaginary as utilitarian: one from
the island down to the bottom of the sea, like an anchor, the other up to a star
at the zenith, to stop the island from sinking.

And even the Polynesian system is complicated compared to some others,
especially virtual systems, which start from humanity and proceed toward
thought—an itinerary which, in turn, is doubled with dreaming.

After non-building comes its logical antecedent, building.
As a real practice, building is decoration. In architecture, decoration is
always an expansion, expanding anything and everything, until only the process
of expansion remains. In agricultural societies, the accumulation of goods and
the management of social inequalities gives building the function of creating an
“artificial world,” in which the privileged are confined by their status,
whatever it may be (even the status of pariah). At which point architecture
(paradoxically) becomes “real”; and if, until then, the world—the
landscape or the territory—had been humanity’s artistic miniature, its
little dream-lantern, now the opposite phase begins, the phase of
expansion, which gives rise to decoration, which is everything.