Figure 5.1 The stair, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation. Photograph by author (2013).
It is not entirely accurate to have suggested that when Orpheus turned he caught ‘nothing but the fleeting air’.1 Ovid was to tell us that when Orpheus turned he also caught a sound. Orpheus heard Eurydice. He heard Eurydice as she ‘pronounced the last farewell, which scarcely did he catch with his ears’.2 Ovid does not tell us what the farewell of Eurydice was. We’re not told the words. The content of the farewell may not be narrated by Ovid because it matters little, or; because to recount such words is never equivalent to the expressing of them. We’re not even certain that Eurydice’s ‘last farewell’ was composed of words. The farewell may have been only a tone. A gesture. It may have been an asignifying sound in a last breath: a scream, a gasp, a sigh, a singular athleticism, a pulse of fleeting air. And even if the farewell was one that was composed of words, we cannot be certain that Orpheus heard them. The phrase ‘scarcely did he catch with his ears’ suggests both a hearing and a missing. (If the opposite of ‘to hear’ is ‘to miss’.) Orpheus may have barely heard the farewell or nearly missed it but it is not to say he didn’t feel it intensely or that it wasn’t piercingly affecting. But we are not told what the last farewell was. We didn’t hear it. And thus the farewell is left imperceptible. Forceful and imperceptible. Powerfully lost in all that could be a farewell and all that could be said in words and out of them.
One of the consequences of Michel Serres’ idea that all we access is extracted from chaos is the sense of both the immensity and the intensity of that which we do not, or cannot, perceive.3 Words that vibrate unheard. Phrases which remain unspoken or unspeakable; silent or indecipherable. Worlds that remain unseen, invisible or unfound. Thoughts prior to articulation. Serres conveys a sense of the incredible depth to the oceans that surge about the islands of order: the incredible force of the chaos that seethes at the boundaries of the chaosmos.4 We don’t have control of these forces nor do we always have names for them. These forces are however both intense and extensive. The forces of the imperceptible drift through and with organs, organisms and what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call the ‘inorganic life’ of art and the architectural endeavour.5 These forces are our ever-outside and simultaneously part of our deep and thick boundaries. They occupy our blind-spots and are also the transparent surfaces through which we perceive. They belong to that zone we occupy in acts of love and death; acts of creativity, eroticism and violence. Acts which are equally difficult to classify, contain and organize. They have intensities, though not classified and oft non-classifiable, that are as real and affecting as an unstated farewell.
It is to the question of the imperceptible that this chapter turns: to that which we can’t perceive because it sits out of sight, and; to that which we don’t perceive because of the silence and transparency through which it operates. The key question here is the intensity and immensity of the forces of the imperceptible and the manners by which such forces might be courted in art and architecture. In order to explore this question, I first turn to all that remains adrift and imperceptible and that which is afforded us. Second, to the manner of the pragmatics by which we negotiate that which is not perceived. I will then turn to one architectural moment where we are struck hard by the imperceptible: Georges-Henri Pingusson’s 1962 Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation located at the edge of an island of order, the Île de la Cité, Paris.
Organs and organization
In correlating ‘fleeting air’ with a ‘last farewell’ and the ear of Orpheus, Ovid follows the Greek philosopher and ‘first scientist’ Aristotle who aligned the element ‘air’ with the sense of hearing, of sound, and with an organ, an ear.6 Aristotle was keen to align his four elements: earth, air, fire and water; with four senses: touch, sound, smell and sight, respectively. Taste was considered a subset of touch, which is fortunate for Aristotle because there wasn’t a fifth element with which he could align the sense. Four elements, four senses and also four causes: the material, formal, efficient and final.7 Aristotle imagined a world neatly ordered, classifiable and holistically harmonious. However in the system of the order of the senses, ‘cause’ remains a complex issue for Aristotle. In On Sense and the Sensible (350 bc) he writes:
[W]e must conceive that the part of the eye immediately concerned in vision consists of water, that the part immediately concerned in the perception of sound consists of air, and that the sense of smell consists of fire. (I say the sense of smell, not the organ.) For the organ of smell is only potentially that which the sense of smell, as realized, is actually; since the object of sense is what causes the actualization of each sense, so that it (the sense) must (at the instant of actualization) be (actually) that which before (the moment of actualization) it was potentially.8
Aristotle offers an organ for a sense and a sense for an element. The world was one of correlates and access. The human was in resonance with a universe and the Earth was actualized, translated and relayed through the senses. The organ is both ‘the object of sense’ and simultaneously ‘what causes the actualization of each sense’. It was as if the senses were a replete mapping of that which is sensed and thus the sensible. As if the senses at once capture the Earth, actualize it, and were simultaneously formed or actualized by it. There is a consistency and circularity to this discourse of the relationship between the senses and what is there to be sensed. A self-fulfilling relation ‘as though nature had foreseen the result’, as Aristotle writes elsewhere of our perception of the universe.9 It is as if the Earth offered nothing beyond what the human may perceive of it and even the stars move without jarring our sensibilities.
In more contemporary times phenomenology is tasked with finding forms of truth in perception and of relegating that which the human doesn’t sense as having lesser consequence. As if all that the Earth offered beyond what the human may perceive of it was either not there or inconsequential. As if that which remains unsaid was without force. It is a position that the architectural phenomenologists indulge and that remains difficult to critique; for who would question an account of what one experiences, feels, sees, hears, tastes and smells? For all this self-evident consistency and self-resonating harmony there are however small moments in phenomenology too where the senses aren’t about correlation and access, where the senses are not about a comfortable embodying of the world. They are moments that Luce Irigaray might call ‘ruptures’.10 Moments where phenomenology suggests an escape from the human and his [sic] Earth. Moments where phenomenology escapes itself. In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early work The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) there is one such moment of rupture where Merleau-Ponty suggests an exterior to human perception, an Earth beyond what is touched. Oddly enough, Merleau-Ponty alludes to this moment in the touching of one hand by another. Merleau-Ponty writes:
If I touch with my left hand my right hand while it touches an object, the right hand object is not the right hand touching: the first is an intertwining of bones, muscles and flesh bearing down on a point in space, the second traverses space as a rocket in order to discover the exterior object in its place.11
When Merleau-Ponty’s left hand touches his right both are at once feeling and felt. In this simple act of one hand touching another lies much of the architectural complexity of the indiscernible. This zone is what we enter when we touch and simultaneously are touched. Mould and modulate. It is (on the one hand) the entwining of the grain of our fingerprints and the materials that lie beneath them. In this sense all the surfaces we touch are deep. They all have their own depth and activate ours. Texture is the contour of depth. It is the changing of depths and intensities in depth. All surfaces have texture. In architecture we tend to speak of texture in terms of material composition, morphology, smoothness, tone, gravity and weight. We speak of texture when we talk of the positioning of materials at all scales. We also talk of it as the treatment of materials and the manner by which materials touch us, hold us. In this moment of one hand touching another Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is not about subjects and objects. It is not about the human as the subject (the one that touches) and its exterior as object (that which is touched); but rather the rich ‘intertwining’ of the two. In a last unfinished chapter of his last unfinished book, The Visible and Invisible (1964), Merleau-Ponty was to describe an object of sense and a sense proper, ‘as though it were in a relation of pre-established harmony with them, as though it knew them before knowing them’.12 The phrases resonate with the Aristotelian account. When I place my hand on Alvar Aalto’s leather-wrapped handrail at Finlandia Hall I am gifted a moment of exchange, of connection. It’s an exchange and connection in which I am implicated, implicit. The handrail is made for a hand much like mine. It seems incomplete until I grasp for it. Just as my hand seems empty until I hold it. The oils in the hands of all that have moved up or down this stair condition that leather just as the leather conditions my skin. I am held as I hold. I am touched as I touch. I have, at these moments, a sense that there would be no leather handrail but for my hand, and; no music, no Sibelius, if not for my ear.
However (on the other hand), this moment in the work of Merleau-Ponty suggests not so closed a system. Not so complete and circular an arrangement between selves and worlds, between organs and the organizations of the world. Indeed we have here an image not unlike that of Deleuze’s ‘spasm’.13 A rupture at that moment of the simultaneous pinning down and drifting of the self. The simultaneous sense of intensity and immensity. And here lies much of the architectural complexity of the imperceptible. For Merleau-Ponty does not only suggest the intermeshing, the ‘intertwining’ of flesh and ‘a point in space’. He also sends a ‘rocket’ to an exterior object ‘in its place’. One imagines that the idea of ‘in its place’ is to refer to an exterior world. An objective exterior. A real world beyond human touch. A world beyond human perception. A ‘mutant universe’ as Guattari might call it.14 In architecture we tend to speak of this hard-to-classify reality beyond ourselves in terms of the ‘spirit of place’ or ‘genius loci’. But such descriptors are problematic for their odd parochial, postcolonial or nationalistic (blood and soil) implications. Often the term used is ‘sense of place’ or sometimes just ‘sense’. The sense of an architecture is usually thought of in terms of atmosphere, feeling, affect, speed, density and gravitas. We speak of sense when we talk of the dynamisms, sensations and sensitivities of a place. We also talk of it in terms of the qualities that pass through us upon entering into proximities. Sometimes gentle, sometimes hard and harsh. In the moment of one hand touching another Merleau-Ponty reminds us that perception is also about the force of the imperceptible. When I place my hand on Aalto’s leather-wrapped handrail I have a sense of those who have also touched it but are no longer there. I have a sense of the life of the handrail, all the ‘more alive for being inorganic’.15 A sense of a music that plays of its own accord in empty spaces. A sense of unheard sounds. The leather handrail and the stair cause you to think. Sibelius is still playing in the theatre when I descend Aalto’s stair. There is a chill in the air and the sound fails to reach my ear, but I can still feel it. James Joyce aptly describes this sense in a necessarily ungrammatical manner in Finnegans Wake: ‘What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for’.16
The questioning of the efficacies of the human senses and the concomitant rupturing of the idea of the human as the dual receptor and formulator of the Earth is also an ongoing project in the biological sciences. From the period of the conjoining of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian mutationism, the German biologist Jacob von Uexküll takes up the case of the perceptions of other animals as organizers of the world. His small book, A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds (1934) focuses on the spatio-temporal subjectivities (Umwelt) of non-human animals.17 The worlds of other animals are ‘invisible’ only in the sense that we can’t see them – that is, they are imperceptible to us – and not in the sense that they cannot be seen or that they are necessarily out of our proximity. Uexküll’s paper concentrates on the transmissions between territory and the perceptual and expressive possibility of an animal; that which he suggests is formative in generating meaning. Uexküll asks his reader to enter a pre-Bourdieu habitus and a proto-Slöterdijk bubble. He asks that you ‘first blow, in fancy, a soap bubble around each creature to represent its own world, filled with the perceptions which it alone knows’; and proposes that, ‘[w]hen we ourselves then step into one of these bubbles, the familiar meadow is transformed. Many of its colorful features disappear, others no longer belong together but appear in new relationships. A new world comes into being.’18
The outcome of Uexküll’s thinking is a phenomenology of other animals. Our human perceptions and capacities come to be only one relative organization of the world. Indeed, only one world among many. Uexküll speaks of ‘a new world’ in the sense that the world of other animals bears little perceptible relation to the world we inhabit. The world of a bird is a radically different world from ours and that of its prey. There are few common denominators. It is not that the bird sees and hears, smells and tastes anything less rich or less varied than we do. It is just different. They see things I don’t; they hear things I never will. Their world includes spectra we can’t perceive, polarized light and magnetic fields. Many birds can perceive the flicker of a fluorescent bulb. They hear a lesser range of frequencies but are highly sensitive to pitch, tone and rhythm. Some have echolocation much like a bat, imaging their world in pulses of high-frequency sound. The sensations that the bird accesses aren’t translatable. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull was a fraud. Daffy Duck a dangerous delusion. There is nothing particularly auspicious about the world of the bird. The world of a bird is a world of its own with its own codings and counterpoints. Just as the prey of the bird also occupies its own world. Deleuze and Guattari draw on the work of Uexküll and come to speak of the components of a relation in the natural world, such as the relation between wasp and the orchid; snapdragon and bumblebee, and; spider and fly ‘as melodies in counterpoint, the one serving as the motif for the other: Nature as music’.19
When we consider the immensity of ‘the worlds of animals’ we can appreciate the strained and tight limits of the world to which we have access; the particular ‘music’ which is afforded us. Deleuze and Guattari invoke the eighteenth-century French naturalist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in suggesting ‘the human in them [in us] is only a straitjacket for inhuman forms and substances’.20 What is in, or out, of the human bubble, this world, that straitjacket, is at times a matter of perception, at times a matter of proximity and at times a matter of action. Together perception, proximity and action are described by Uexküll as ‘subjective reality’.21 From where I sit at this moment, my subjective reality is particularly tight. I have access to four walls though I have to turn to see any more than two at a time; a desk; a computer; an empty coffee glass; two framed photographs, one colour and one black and white; three precariously high piles of books organized according to size rather than content or colour or frequency of use; an Ikea lamp and a Regency convex mirror both bought by you – the beautiful woman in the framed photographs. There’s the lingering bitterness of coffee in my throat and the faintest smell of rotting flowers. There’s a window seat to my left and from where I sit I can glance over my shoulder to see the wind blowing gently through new leaves on old trees. I can’t feel the wind; the window is shut. I can see a little of a street and very occasionally a car, but only for an instant and only if I turn. I’m listening to music, to Ludovico Einaudi’s Le Onde (1996) based, I’m told, on Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves (1931). Occasionally a solitary bird I cannot see squawks and I hear it through the music. All these things are things I perceive and are within proximity. You will have your own bubble at this moment. That which you can see, that which you can hear and touch and feel and taste. This book, that seat, and the lingering taste of coffee. It’s part of your world. It’s in your bubble.
The boundaries of the bubble are not only external. All boundaries are thick and many boundaries pass deep through the body. Taste tends to occupy a depth like touch, which may be why Aristotle aligned the two. Sound too plays itself right through the body. In his text The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (1985) Serres suggests that much of this boundary building, what he terms ‘softening’, occurs in and through the organs associated with the senses and the languages in which we circulate.22 For Serres our ears are a ‘labyrinth’ for the negotiation of sound and the entire body is implicated in hearing.23 Serres’ version of the labyrinth is much like that which Jorge Luis Borges described: a complex architecture that is open and allows access but which, despite its openness, also excludes.24 And for Serres the image of the bubble also becomes more stridently architectural. A box. Boxes within boxes:
Every possible kind of audible finds sites of hearing and regulation.
It is as though the body were constructed like a box, a series of boxes, through which these cycles pass. As though the collective forms itself into a box or boxes through which these flows circulate. And as though knowledge, a world crying out for more attentive hearing, constructs the largest white box of all.25
The bubbles and boxes are our possibilities for action, in this place, at this time. What is inside or out of such bubbles and boxes affords us possibilities in action and simultaneously conditions us. The boundary traditionally associated with the self is comprised of a depth of boundaries that at once configure and extend us; that are simultaneously within and without. It is not possible to speak of what we hear as purely external. Einaudi’s piano rocks and raises me gently before throwing me down like a wave. In the throbbing beat of a rave we find ourselves, our bodies, pulsing like a sailor drawn to a Siren or banged like the taut skin of a drum. ‘Sensation has the same status as music’, says Serres.26 Orpheus’ song touches me deeply. In silence too we note the depths of bubbles and boxes. The North American composer John Cage once went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University.27 He was to ask an engineer why ‘if the room was so silent, … [he] had heard two sounds one high and one low’. The engineer told him ‘[t]he high one was your nervous system in operation. The low one was your blood in circulation’.28 We find a ritournelle deep in the intensity of silence. A sonorous thread murmuring in a labyrinth in a box in a labyrinth in a box.
I’m unconvinced by Serres’ assertion that ‘[e]very possible kind of audible finds sites of hearing and regulation’. I like to imagine an escape for sound itself: a reservoir of the unheard and unhearable. If sound is a mechanical wave, a wavelength and an oscillation of pressure then the linear possibilities of that wavelength and the possible range of frequencies of oscillation are immense. Immense, but not infinite. For even sound has a boundary: a sound barrier. Yet from the immensity of possible sound, our ear allows us to access, to hear, only a fragment of all that could be heard. A tiny fragment of the wavelengths and frequencies that exist and that are possible. Our voices too can only produce a minute fraction of all the sound that might be produced, of all the sounds that could be sung. There is much song above the lyric coloratura soprano and below the basso profondo. Above, below and beyond the world of human perception is the rich immensity of the imperceptible. If we are to imagine the immensity of all sound, and; then the subset of that which animals might hear, and; then the subset of that which the human ear hears, and; then the subset of that which you hear at this moment in time, we may appreciate what Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he spoke of ‘the wretched glass capsule of the human individual’.29
Beyond what we can or cannot perceive there remains something arbitrary about what is in or out of our bubble. What is in or out of the straitjacket and the wretched glass capsule. What we hear and what we miss. (If the opposite of ‘to hear’ is ‘to miss’.) The arbitrary nature of the transparent and imperceptible bubble can be felt if we consider that which we access, that which we have, and that which we feel we don’t. When I turn to my desk, computer, empty coffee glass and the three precariously high piles of books, I can no longer see the window seat to my left. I can no longer see the landscape, the old trees with new leaves, fragments of other houses, and the street with the occasional car. Yet I imagine that they are still there. Even though I can’t see them. I imagine that the room in which I sit still has four walls when I can only see two at a time. I rarely look at the ceiling but I imagine it’s still there too. I imagine that my legs are still connected even when I fail to see or feel them below my desk. And I imagine that the beautiful woman in the photographs – you – are still there. Here. Yet the music that I currently hear, I imagine has gone when I no longer hear it. Much of this constructing of presence and absence is just that: construction. It is a matter of odd equations relating with and without to inside and out to hearing and missing. There’s no adequate phenomenology or empiricism to account for the imperceptible. It is a matter of normalized inclusions and exclusions, near arbitrary formulations, political biases and cultural fabulations. The composer, Cage, was to write that ‘[t]he Native Americans long ago knew that music was going on permanently, and that hearing it was like looking out of a window at a landscape which didn’t stop when one turned away’.30 I like to imagine that at this very moment in time there is a radio in a tent in an abandoned field in Finland, tuned into an obscure frequency, that is banging out the piano notes of Cage’s lost work ‘Lidice’ (1943). The tent and the song are out there. Real and intense. I just don’t have access to them at the moment. Instead I’m alone at my desk listening to Einaudi and the squawk of a solitary bird.
Pragmatics
If we are to think of all that can be heard: all the sounds and all the combinations of sound. All the words of love uttered in whispers and all the sighs, cries, gasps and screams of passion and of violence. All the poems and speeches and lectures of symposia. All the phrases that may be repeated in one’s head. All the words from a parent and all our own fatherly non. All political slogans, clichés, threats and rhetoric. All tones and intonations. All accents and attenuations. All the songs and all the music in all the theatres, halls, homes, rooms and tents from all the orchestras, bands, accordionists, humming voices and lonely radios. All the claps of thunder, the patter of rain and the banging of drums and waves. All squawks and the songs of Sirens and all birds and the tinnitus of all buzzing insects. The beating of all hearts and all last farewells. If we are to think of all that can be heard – all of it and all at once – it becomes impossible to hear. It becomes impossible to speak. In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), Nietzsche was to write of such an overpowering:
Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist – how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night’.31
Whilst the world may ‘cry out for more attentive hearing’ as Serres suggests, listening to the clamour of the imperceptible is difficult. In the wondrous and creative possibilities of the imperceptible there is threat. It is the threat of becoming completely adrift or of an ‘expiring in a spasmodic unharnessing of the wings of the world’, as Nietzsche cautions.32 Of hearing Eurydice when she is not there. Of rupturing ear drums and of squawking like a bird or rubbing oneself endlessly like a leather handrail. Jean Cocteau weaning from his cocaine addiction would write that ‘the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body’.33 Thinking about the extensity of the imperceptible may easily become an argument for gods, aliens, angels and fairies. Jonathan Livingstone Seagulls and Daffy Ducks. All manner of phenomena might be out there – if only we could hear it. All of us a potential Saint Anthony of the Desert or L. Ron Hubbard of the Galactic Confederacy. All of us tuning our radios into the deep silences of the universe in order to hear aliens. Or likewise, all of us a potential schizophrenic with a radio at our ear listening to blank out the voices that are always there. A schizophrenic fighting to stop the voices that the Saint and scientologist court. An outcome to the discourse of imperceptibility is: just because we can’t hear these voices doesn’t mean they cannot be heard. But what a nauseating clamour they would make. I imagine that to hear the voices of gods and demons and the dead would be to consistently scream ‘Shut up! Shut up! Shut the fuck up!’ A constant adjusting of a radio frequency in order to confuse. The wearing of aluminium foil hats. The torment of Saint Anthony. It is little wonder that Nietzsche suggests the smashing of ears and that Antonin Artaud was ‘done’ with organs as much as with God.34 How could they fail to break suddenly?
If we are to think of all that can be drawn, painted and designed. All possible art and architecture. All the possible forms, materials, details, configurings, combinations, scales and all that has and has not yet been drawn, painted and designed it becomes impossible to raise a pencil. There is in such immensity always a loneliness. It is the loneliness in every blank sheet of paper, every empty canvas and the burning whiteness of an empty digital design file. The immense depth of every surface and screen. There is a question of pragmatics here – of how to negotiate the imperceptible without becoming permanently unhinged and perpetually adrift. Of how to control monsters whilst weaving sonorous threads. Art and architecture and all that deals with creating and imagination operates in this space of torment and joy. At the intersection of exhaustion and majesty, of despair and freedom, of silence and song. It is a zone of both catatonia and creativity. Francis Bacon says ‘it really comes out of an absolute feeling of it’s impossible to do these things, so I might as well just do anything. And out of anything, one sees what happens.’35
In many ways this impossibility, exhaustion, despair and silence, this catatonia, is exactly what is necessary in order to occupy the chiasm, the between, of subjects and objects; in order to raise a pencil and to act. In dealing with the imperceptible we may need to exhaust the self. To strain or tighten straitjackets and to overflow glass capsules is not to become super-human but to become a little less ourselves. Less human. To become inhuman. To blow new bubbles and open a few boxes is not to become more animal but to become organized in alternate manners. Less organized as organism. To be swept up in the life that exceeds the human, the animal and then the organism itself. Cage was to suggest that ‘[w]hen you start working, everybody is in your studio – the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas – all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave’.36 In order to tap into the forces of the imperceptible and to affirm life it may be necessary to exhaust the subsets of life: perception, the human and his [sic] privileged organs, the organism, the organic. To leave it all and ‘if you are lucky’ become imperceptible.
Hardening
Such a confluence of the intensities of the imperceptible and the erasures of selves are poignant in the monuments and memorials to the Holocaust. These spaces have powerfully populated architectural sensibilities and journals over the last fifty years and yet one wonders how it is that they can be produced at all. How it is that a pencil can be raised to the dark immensity of that particular ‘world night’. How, out of the impossibility of that violence, something can be built at all. I would argue that the most forceful of this architecture is not that which generates a humanity but rather that which flees it. I am referring to structures such as Rachel Whiteread’s cold concrete Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial (2000) in Vienna and Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2004) in Berlin. These architectures groan with the disturbing repetitions of train timetables and the inhumanity of grinding gears. These places scream with the hard repetitive rationalisms which Hannah Arendt was to label ‘banality’.37 In this respect this architecture is not a softening. That is, it is not the production of music from sound or the softening of an already tender flesh that these architectures activate. Nor do these architectures constitute the degeneration of threat into the ‘idle chatter’, of which Theodor Adorno warned.38 Rather, these architectures are a hardening. These architectures are a hardening of the world. Making it harder against the body. These architectures cut and bang and silence bodies in the world. Or, at the very least, cut and bang and silence sensibilities.
The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation by the architect, urban planner, writer and educator, Pingusson, is an early example of this hardening. An early forceful courting of the imperceptible and one particular making-imperceptible. The memorial sits deep in the eastern nose of Île de la Cité: an island of governance and religion, of state and church. An island of defensive Roman walls; populated by police, clerics and clerks, lawyers, doctors and tourists. The island is home to the most regulated of institutions and apparatus of the state: Cathédrale Notre Dame, the Palais de Justice, the Prefecture de Police, Hôtel-Dieu Hospital and the Tribunal de Commerce. The island is home to the most regulating of sounds: horns, bells, sirens and whistles; the ping of machines telling you to cross roads and monitoring the beat of hearts; the instructions read aloud to flocks of tourists; the bang of gavels and assault of hymns. Serres was to suggest that ‘[n]oise is what defines the social’.39 The Memorial however sits quietly. Quietly to the rear of, below and behind, the ornate buttressing of Notre Dame and the genteel formalities of Square Jean XXIII. This site formerly housed the silent. It was once a morgue. The site is cut from the rest of the island by the busy road Quai de l’Archevêché. The road runs south to the bridge bearing the same name. This narrow bridge is covered in thousands of padlocks bearing the names of lovers. As attempts to bind, to hold, that which drifts, the keys are thrown into the Seine.
The clamour of the street and the surface here becomes a dense and indecipherable din. Cars and bikes and tourists averse to silence all sound as one. The memorial is not obvious. Upon crossing the road there is little to suggest anything special. There’s a small park behind a cast iron fence and hedges. The park is largely gravel and there are a few orderly-placed trees and standard timber benches. From the creaky metal gate to the park you can see a concrete wall a little less than 1 metre above ground. The concrete is very light grey, almost white, and rough. It is set as if it were roughly cut by some form of adze. A black dust covers much of the concrete and seems to be the result of the slow accumulation of pollution from the street in the roughness of the concrete surface. One assumes this is the edge of the island. One assumes only the parting Seine and a view to Quai d’Orléans and Pont de la Tournelle is beyond this edge. The only hint that there is more to this edge is two small metal gates that sit either side of this wall – to the left and right (the north and south) – about 12 metres apart. Next to the gate on the right there is a placard, a sign. As you approach you note that the rough concrete wall between the gates carries an inscription: ‘1940 Deux cent mille morts dans les camps Martyrs Français de la Deportation 1945’. The letters are blood red in colour and are inscribed in a font that appears like the hard and sharp scratching of vandals.
The memorial is cut from the island not only horizontally by the road and vertically by its depth but also in sound. You pass through the gate and descend into the silent depth of the memorial. The stair under your feet and the adjacent walls are solid and of the same rough concrete as the exterior wall; though the black dust of the street hasn’t settled on the walls of this sunken space (Figure 5.1). It is as if the stairway had been carved from the stone of the island. The stair is about 1 metre wide and there’s a solitary square-section black metal handrail on your left. It’s a utilitarian balustrade, not human, not warm, but banal and cold and functional. It helps you descend. It makes you think. Not as Aalto’s balustrade in Finlandia Hall fosters warm, perhaps even erotic thoughts about other hands and a form of music. Here, you think colder thoughts. Lonelier and less lyric thoughts. The clouds that pass above, between the walls either side of this stair makes those that descend more still. More deep. More alone and harder.
In Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished text, The Visible and the Invisible he would again turn to the idea of the texture of experience and the ‘reversibility’ of touching and being touched. He would remind us of the moment at which ‘the “touching subject” passes over to the rank of the touched, descends into the things, such that the touch is formed in the midst of the world and as it were in the things.’40 Merleau-Ponty moves from an idea of perception as being a completion of the body-world toward an idea of the ‘sensible sentient’ and thus the body’s ‘double belongingness to the order of the “object” and to the order of the “subject”’, and to what he refers to as the ‘quite unexpected relations between the two orders’.41 I imagine that part of this unexpected relation is the inhumanity of selves and the odd life of that which we had formerly come to think of as external, inorganic and lifeless. The stark handrail generates stark thoughts. It is a handrail that fails to record the passing of bodies. The handrail is silent and the bodies imperceptible. And yet in such absence you cannot help but hear a collective cry more powerful for its silence.
Bare
From the stair you step into a space less tight and more open to the sky. Clouds pass overhead and the very occasional bird. You are standing in a massive below grade bunker, a crypt of a kind, a bare triangular space with a rounded point at the upstream end of the island (Figure 5.2). At the base of this rounded point there is a small barred opening to the Seine. You can see the water and it’s passing. Silently. The opening is like a grate of a prison and there’s a sharp black metal sculpture above. The sculpture is elongated vertically with a series of flat and sharp spikes, like two-dimensional arrows pointing up or thrusting beyond the walls. The floor of the space is as if cut from the same concrete as the walls. The floor is inscribed with a square pattern that is oriented in such a manner that it looks as though any rainwater or other liquid residue would trickle along the grooves and splash into the Seine beyond. The space makes you particularly aware of the inorganic life that seethes, vibrates, that runs like clouds between still walls, and the river that surges and sweeps about this contained space.
There is a strong sense of having left Paris and the clamour and grit at the street level. A strong sense of having exchanged its formal architectures and institutions and its regulating sounds – for this place of passage. There is an odd ecstasy to this place. It is the sense of having left something of yourself at the street level too. You have left the articulate chatter that occupied your ears and the measured voice that occupied your mouth.
Just as you cannot see and hear, smell, touch and taste the street, the street cannot access you down here. You are less perceptible. The affect is a type of mournful ekstasis. There is a deep sense of despair down here and a powerful sense of inhumanity or a humanity lost; left elsewhere and swept away by fluid forces. The space achieves a sense of what Deleuze and Guattari would describe as:
[A] transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favour of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point. We witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter, the material power of that language. A matter more immediate, more fluid, more ardent, than bodies or words.42
Behind you, a tomb of a kind runs deep into the earth. It is oriented toward the vaults of Notre Dame. You enter this space by moving between two massive rectangular blocks of concrete (Figure 5.3). They are all the more heavy for appearing to be suspended just a few centimetres above the ground. Concrete weighs so much more when suspended, when what holds it in space is not perceptible. It is often in imperception that we ‘witness the incorporeal power of that intense matter’. The dark entrance between these two concrete masses is tight; less than a metre wide. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness you find yourself in a hexagonal vaulted chamber. The chamber has a circular bronze plaque on the floor inscribed: ‘They descended into the mouth of the earth and they did not return’. This chamber is symmetrical and connects three further spaces. To the right and to the left are small empty rooms, cells. Barred, dimly lit and despairing. Straight ahead extends a long corridor of a space that houses the Tomb of the Unknown Deportee. The tomb is located at that same end of the corridor that intersects with the hexagonal chamber in which we stand. From this end, the corridor runs about 20 metres long. The long walls contain thousands of equally spaced quartz stones that are backlit. Dimly. At the far end of this corridor is a small eternal flame. No one speaks in this space. Though, every now and again, you catch a sigh. A tone. A gesture. An asignifying sound in a shallow breath.
In this weighty chamber breath reverberates and echoes. The sound generates a sense of depth that exceeds the dimensions of the space. It is a sense that is amplified as much in text as texture. The space contains lists of the names that you repeat in your head or spell out in the broken rhythms of breath. Names of some of the largest concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Struthof, Majdanek, Neuengamme, Mauthausen, Flossenburg, Aurigny, Gross-Rosen, Bergen-Belsen, Dora-Ellrich, Ravensbrück, Dachau, Oranienburg-Sachseshausen. The silence of the space is also broken in your reading of quotes: from Jean-Paul Sartre, Augustin Maydieu, Louis Aragon, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Paul Éluard and two from Robert Desnos. The words are inscribed in the concrete, cut deep. This text resonates; and the words pass over each other, intertwine, are constructed, have depth and can be held. In architecture text is a quality of both thought and matter. Texture is equally complicated. Texture is related to both perception and the meanings we construct which are not visible. That is to say, texture occurs somewhere between that which is visible and that which is invisible and conceptual. The leather of Aalto’s handrail stops short of the end of the handrail itself; just at the stair’s end. That is, the leather ends and the timber of the handrail continues. The hand reads the change from the leather to the timber at this point as an indication; as a sign. In this case texture creates meaning. The end of leather and the continuation of timber unfolds as a penultimate note in Sibelius. There is text deep in this memorial too: a set of material signs to be read. A narrative, a story, a thread of Ariadne or a song of Orpheus, cut and carved from the island. In this sense text and texture together constitute a vector that does not end at any precise point.
Inscribed in the dimly lit cell to the left is the famed ‘Dernier poème’, the ‘Last poem’ by Desnos.43 You read it silently, but the words are loud and continue to reverberate. The poem translates as:
I have dreamt so very much of you,
I have walked so much talked so much,
Loved your shadow so much,
That nothing more is left to me of you.
All that remains to me is to be the shadow among shadows
To be a hundred times more of a shadow than the shadow
To be the shadow that will come and come again into your sunny life.
Desnos had been active in the French Résistance against the Vichy government and the Nazis. He was arrested by the Gestapo on Tuesday 22 February 1944 and deported from France to Auschwitz, then Buchenwald, then Flossenburg, Flöha and, finally Terezin (Theresienstadt) concentration camp outside Prague.44 Desnos died within Terezin a few weeks following the liberation of the camp. The myth of the ‘Dernier poème’ was that it was written by Desnos on his deathbed.45 The concrete-reality is different. The poem was not Desnos’ last, but rather a rewriting of his 1926 poem ‘I Have Dreamed So Much of You’.46 This poem was written for Desnos’ lover, Youki, and yet becomes impersonal on the wall of the memorial. Impersonal but no less intense. A collective cry, louder for the silence. Raw like a shadow. Bare like concrete.
The architecture of the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Deportation reminds us of life beyond that which we are afforded. When I descended into the earth here; when I let go of that cold utilitarian handrail at the base of the stair, I let go of some minor vestige of humanity. There is a sense of being cut adrift in a world that threatens to carry us away. Our architecture perpetually confronts the space of ‘the world night’ in both fixing oneself to a point and then in casting adrift. It’s not always about making ourselves softer and more receptive but may be about allowing the organic the hardness of the inorganic. Allowing ourselves to die a little in order to amplify the forces of life that flow well beyond the human and the organic. Allowing ourselves to be more intense for being imperceptible. In this chamber, cut into the nose of this island, I couldn’t help but cry. Not audibly, but the tears may as well have run from my ears. The sadness, the sad ekstasis cannot be attributed to any one organ. Likewise, the tears are not the product of the architecture. They are not the product of any singular sensation nor sentiment. The tears are not for the martyrs deported to concentration camps, not for those that lost their lives. They are not for the shadow of Desnos. Not for myself. Not even for you – the beautiful woman in the two photographs back home upon my lonely desk. The tears pass like the clouds and the river above and about this island, ‘more immediate, more fluid, more ardent, than bodies or words’. At these moments we have a choice of either breaking suddenly or sending a rocket to a life beyond. Mourning or building monuments. Offering a last farewell or raising a song to silence.
