The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture, Amnesia, and the Emergent Archaic
Here, according to Lévinas, in the passage from the interdiction of
the said to the exposure of saying, in the vacillation between the abstraction
of the law and the unplanned event, exists the insistence of ethics where the
prescriptive is rendered accountable. 16 But what does that mean: no planning,
no architecture until the unplanned can be recuperated and the ethical
installed? As that event can never occur, is the plan forever frozen in
anticipation of the future? Is architecture now reduced to repair work,
patching up the urban environment, indulging in localized experimentation,
while waiting for a new mandate? Certainly it, too, has suffered the critique
of its previous aspirations, a critique that in insisting on the “beyond”
or supplement of totality renders irretrievable that previous project. Anthony
Vidler notes:
Here the city, as existing, stands as the object and generator of so
many possible futures, each calculated according to the nature of its
opposition to those futures. The architectural project, while crystallizing
one or more of those futures, is then presented to the city,
so to speak, as a whole, not as a replacement or substitute, as in the
utopian urbanism of modernism, but as material to be submitted
to the life and consuming power of the context. Apparently totalizing
“types” will thereby inevitably be fragmented by the counterforce
of the site. 17
Cities, urban life, architecture, like our everyday gendered, ethnic,
national, and local selves, however much they may be prescribed by disciplinary
regimes and the law, are ultimately dependent on the performative
event of being, on historical articulation and an ethics of becoming. The
truth of our being lies in that becoming, in our listening and responding to
that language. In that space, however overdetermined by the geographies of
capital and corporate control—what these days increasingly stands in for institutional
policies and politics—there exists the supplement of language,
the cultural and poetic excess that resides in the house of being and that is
irreducible to the calculating rationalism and logic of those intent on overseeing
our futures. This supplement interrupts and interrogates the political
desire for conclusion, universal comprehension, and a rationalist
domestication of the world. Such desire is dispersed in the space between
buildings, in the gap between measured words, in the silence that data fail
to encode. Ultimately energies spill out in a border country of uncertainties
where historical bodies and voices—moving in a mutable, here “primitive”
there “cyborg,” state—conjoin technology and being in a mutual interrogation;
and the beguiling transparency of information and its cartographies of