When the photographer John Deakin died he left his body on one bed and a box of photographs and negatives under another. Deakin died in the Old Ship Hotel on the seafront of Brighton on Thursday 25 May 1972. He had listed Francis Bacon as his next of kin.1 Bacon, thus, had to identify the body. The painter, who preferred to work from photographs rather than bodies directly, would describe this as ‘the last dirty trick’ that Deakin would play on him.2 Pretexts, the inscribable and the exscribed are themselves prone to text and script. Dedications and acknowledgements, suicide notes, wills, legal documents, engravings on headstones and labels on the back of photographs are all attempts to speak when speech is no longer an option. Deakin died of a heart attack following surgery related to lung cancer. He was recuperating at the Old Ship Hotel at Bacon’s expense at the time. Though ‘recuperating’ is, in retrospect, not the right word.
When Deakin died he left a box under his bed at 68 Berwick Street, Soho, full of black and white photographs and piles of negatives. The negatives were ‘dust covered, curling and scratched’.3 They were cut and separated and not connected to rolls of film.4 The picture editor and writer Bruce Bernard salvaged the box after Deakin died.5 Amongst the negatives were those of a naked Henrietta Moraes from the photographic sessions that had taken place ten years earlier at Apollo Place. Bernard sent some negatives to Moraes’ son, Joshua Bowler (yet another child in the dark).6 The remainder of the negatives of Moraes were, as with the other contents of the box, to form the basis of the John Deakin Archive. Establishing the archive was an act of recuperation. There are 12 negatives of Moraes in the archive: one of Moraes sitting up on her bed smiling; two invasive images where Moraes is lying on her back with her legs spread wide; four with Moraes positioned on her side or stomach posing in a manner that relates to the Bacon paintings Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (1963) and Henrietta Moraes (1966); four with Moraes lying on her back and shot from behind her head that relate to the Lying Figure paintings,7 and; one – the most odd of them all – a double exposure (Figure 8.1).
One layer of the double exposure is an image of Moraes on her bed. There’s sheets and pillows and what looks like an Indian satin cover on the bed. I assume it’s satin because of the reflectivity of the fabric. I assume it’s Indian because of the patterning; a layered diamond pattern. I imagine it is red; though it is not possible to discern a colour – black and white images tend not to betray colour. To the side of the bed there is a simple wooden bedside table. On it there is what appears to be two wine glasses. Red wine glasses; though neither contains red wine. One has a flower in it; the other what could be white wine; though I can’t be sure. There is what appears to be a glass ashtray on the edge of the bedside table, slightly overhanging. I imagine this makes it perfectly placed for reaching from the bed to stub out a cigarette. One wall is visible, though I imagine there are another three around this room. Part of the visible wall is bathed in light, which I imagine comes from a south-facing window that is also out of the frame. We can see in this image a section of skirting board and a small triangle of floor. These things, all these things, are what might constitute the ‘background’ of the image and our eyes tend to find them well after they find a body – or two.
Moraes is lying naked on the bed, on her stomach, looking back over her shoulder at Deakin’s camera. One leg is bent at the knee, the sensitive sole of one foot is prominent and though her buttocks are slightly raised there is no visible genitalia. It is nevertheless a pose of scopophilic pleasure. A pose repeated ad nauseam in pornography. It is the pose of a body poised to be entered from behind. Tentative eye contact from her. The fixated eye of a camera from him. An asymmetrical voyeuristic play between two bodies. Or at least it would be, if there weren’t a third object in this layer of this image: an objet petit a to make of this dualism a ménage à trois. This third object is a radio peeping out from behind Moraes’ pillow. It is a small, rectangular, black radio with a strap that likely makes it easy to carry.
This radio is a hole or a wound in the photograph but it is also a pleasurable surplus. There is a depth to this radio that exceeds other elements in the image and through which other elements might escape. When we notice this radio we also notice that Moraes has her hand on it. She might be adjusting a knob. Tuning into another frequency or radioing-out for assistance.
Exposed either over or under this image is another. This second layer is only ‘second’ in the sense that we tend to see it after we see Moraes’ body. This second layer is a little harder to discern. It appears to be an image of a young man asleep on a bed. The photographer, Deakin, doesn’t capture his whole body. Just his head, shoulders and upper torso. This lying figure is not naked, but wearing a shirt buttoned high. You can clearly make out the buttons. His eyes are closed and his eyelids are dark. The young man lies peacefully on one side and there is nothing poised about the position. He seems to be asleep diagonally and the corner of a bed is visible and defined, like the demarcation of ‘place’ in a Bacon painting. It appears to be the same bed that Moraes is photographed on. The cover seems to have the same reflectivity and diamond patterning and there is the sense that the light is entering the space in a similar manner – shining through an unseen window in an invisible wall. The sleeping head of this young man is superimposed over Moraes’ buttocks and feet, which makes him strangely identifiable. The light that falls upon Moraes’ body allows this superimposed face to be discerned. The positioning of the two images gives the impression that this young man is indulging in a most joyous daydream. I thought this sleeping face might belong to Moraes’ son Joshua, now a psychoanalyst. He knew better – and suggested that it was likely Moraes’ boyfriend of the time, Joe Lloyd. ‘And there would be no reason why he wouldn’t be passed out in the middle of the afternoon’, Joshua wrote, ‘he was a fully fledged drug addict’.8 A double exposure often leads to overexposure.
Roland Barthes says of the ‘good’ photograph: ‘[t]he object speaks, it induces us, vaguely, to think’.9 It is a quality of even a bad negative, a double exposure. This dusty, curling and scratched object from a box under a bed, and now part of an archive, captures the world in a moulded kind of way. It forms a negative imprint. A deep indexical footprint of now immobile souls. There is a certain vague ‘thinking’ to this negative. In one sense the negative is a type of incursion in memory that prompts thought. In another, perhaps more fundamental sense, the negative is a form of thinking that occurs well outside the bodies depicted and beyond the voyeuristic eye of the spectator. It is this form of thinking that may leak into a speaking: ‘the object speaks’. Even a bad negative can whisper from under one bed about the top of another. It speaks on its own once speech is not possible: after the photographer’s recuperation fails; when the model’s liver collapses, and; when the addict cannot be woken. It is a speaking that is, thus, in excess of the selves involved. In excess of speech. This chapter will turn to the idea of speaking beyond speech and to one particular object that induces us to think, vaguely. I turn to the objet petit architecture of the Berlin-based international collective Raumlabor. Their sauna project for Göteborg, Sweden, is a spatial oddity that landed on an inner harbour of the river Göta älv in 2015. It is an architecture that speaks of the passing of selves as it recuperates and exposes a very deep interior.
In many ways the gift of losing the self is in the handing over of logics to that which thinks for you. Jacques Derrida suggests as much in his text of 1992, The Gift of Death.10 When the photographer, the painter and the author fail to speak; when the architect blends with the crowd, flees, leaves or takes flight, the prejudices of authority tied to authorship fade. In many ways this is the handing back of logics to that which was already expressing itself. Bacon’s Pope was always screaming. But this Pope screams even louder since Bacon’s heart stopped. It is louder because we listen more carefully once the artist or the author is silent. The stories that artists and authors tell of their work is, as Derrida might call it, a ‘provisional’ interiority and exterior to the body there is much that speaks, intensely.11 When the logic of a work of art is given back to the work itself there is a spilling over of something intensely deep. Incursive. Entoptic. There were things in Deakin’s box under his bed in London that didn’t die on a bed in Brighton. There is music that a radio plays that exceeds the life of any musician.
The idea of giving (our)selves over to that which we think of as ‘exterior’ is not a new one. Previous chapters of this book sought to dissolve the boundaries between selves and identities (the impersonal), selves and worlds (the indiscernible) and selves and shadows (the imperceptible), to allow ourselves and our architectures to reconnect with the intensities of others and outsides; with the Real and the Earth. Dissolving such boundaries makes exterior of the body. Making selves objects among objects. This making exterior of the self tends to involve a certain violence to the interior, to interiority. When Bacon rubs away at a face to reveal a head it is not that the flesh and bone were not already there – they were just quieter when under the skin. An autopsy or a self-mutilating cut, like much art, allows a making visible of the invisible. A making exterior of insides and intensities. If interiority is constituted by what one thinks they are, then there is a necessary violence against that interior in order for one to be otherwise (or whatever).
This story of the conjunction of the violence to, or the death of, selves and the passing of interiority is also well rehearsed. Georges Bataille’s ‘L’Anus Solaire’ of 1927 is perhaps a recuperation of the story that Plato’s Phaedrus had told of a second Orpheus.12 Bataille would invoke a man, a man just called ‘he’, who ‘suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms’.13 For Bataille, in order that one might access others and the ‘celestial fertility’ of the cosmos, the interior that cries out ‘I’ must necessarily be forsaken.14 The eminent prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan would problematize interiority at a very different scale. In 1964 Leroi-Gourhan would write that ‘[t]he whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside’ and would note the means to do so comes from both the ‘“freeing” of tools’ and the ‘freeing of the word and our unique ability to transfer our memory to a social organism outside ourselves’.15 In this sense, art and architecture, as social organisms, are as much a sign of the liberation of memory as the passing of the self, or at least the self as we know it. Also in 1964, as the coveted notion of the ‘individual’ gave way to the concept of individuation, Gilbert Simondon told us ‘interiority and exteriority are everywhere’.16 In announcing the death of the author a few years later Barthes spoke of the ‘pure superstition’ of interiority.17 The author may have died but the interior continued to rise from graves. In 1972 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would deploy schizoanalysis against what they identify as ‘the interior colony’ of psychoanalysis and its capacity to generate ‘internal suffering’.18 Jean-François Lyotard would conduct an autopsy with dress-maker’s scissors in 1974 to introduce us to what he refers to as the ‘alleged interior’.19 In 1977 Deleuze told of a ‘secret link which resides in the critique of negation, the cultivation of joy, the hatred of interiority, the exteriority of forces and relations, the denunciation of power, etc.’.20 It was a link that predated Bataille and the linguistic turn and that was shared by Lucretius, Hume, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In 1994 the bandit philosopher Bernard Stiegler would draw upon the work of Leroi-Gourhan and Simondon and attempt to file the coroner’s report on interiority stating ‘interiority is nothing outside of its exteriorisation – but that of an originary complex in which the two terms, far from being opposed, compose with one another’.21 The ‘curtain of objects’ beyond our bodies, that Derrida had described as ‘supplementary’ would, according to Stiegler, be the essential tools by which the human came into being.22 ‘Epiphylogenesis’ was the word Stiegler used for the manners by which that which is outside the body speak and cause us vaguely to think.23
In 1980 Deleuze and Guattari would again challenge the dualism of the exterior and the ‘so-called interior’, but they would do so in an act that was more eros than thanatos. More love than death:24
The distinction to be made is not at all between exterior and interior, which are always relative, changing, and reversible, but between different types of multiplicities that coexist, interpenetrate, and change places – machines, cogs, motors, and elements that are set in motion at a given moment, forming an assemblage productive of statements: ‘I love you’ (or whatever).25
Deleuze and Guattari remind us that the death of the interior is not merely a destructive act. In turning to the expression of love, the philosopher and the psychoanalyst engage Bataille’s ‘L’Anus Solaire’ formula: ‘[c]oitus is the parody of crime’.26 It is the link between a violence to self and an erotics that makes ‘L’Anus Solaire’ a recuperation of the second Orpheus. Each is dedicated as much to the idea of love as to the idea of death.27 Bataille’s eulogy to the death of interiority, or at least the interior self, is joyfully erotic. Bataille suggests that it is not possible to connect to others and the outside when shouting your own name or screaming the word ‘I’. For the act of exteriorization, indiscernibility is as necessary as distinction. Forgetting as necessary as remembering. Bataille would ‘rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens’.28 Bataille reminds us that we don’t look into a lover’s eyes to see the reflection of ourselves and to remember who we are. We don’t make love in order to please the self. Connection to the other, to ‘compose with one another’, always involves a giving over, an exteriorization, of the self. A small death in every orgasm (la petite mort). I imagine this is why Bataille would suggest that when one gives up on the shout of ‘I’, ‘love then screams in my throat’.29
Deleuze would suggest that ‘only art gives us what we vainly sought from a friend, what we would have vainly expected from a beloved’.30 The statement ‘I love you’ is liberated from lovers once it becomes the subject of paint and pencils, notebooks, beds and boxes, condoms and coitus, throats and thighs, dedications and acknowledgements, suicide notes, wills, legal documents, engravings on headstones and labels on the back of photographs. Losing the self is never loss but connection with that which is beyond you. Other. Outside. So that dualism of interiority and exteriority; of finding the self and losing the self; that simultaneity with which this book has concerned itself, is indeed one movement: connection. Connection to the here and now and to the other and outside. Intense and immediate. Intense and extensive.
Ever posthumous
Maurice Blanchot knew of the necessity of the passing of the self in connecting to a life beyond. In 1944 the author was taken outside a large house, a château, and was placed in front of a Nazi firing squad.31 When the squad were distracted Blanchot would escape and flee to a forest, Bois des Bruyères, where ‘he rediscovered a sense of the real’.32 This near miss (if ‘to miss’ is the opposite of ‘to hit’) had a profound effect on Blanchot. In 1994, Blanchot wrote to Derrida, ‘[f]ifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death’.33 The dual sensation, the double exposure, of finding and losing oneself is not banal. It is hard, deep and intense. Intensive. It is an intensity that is not of the interior though. Lives pass through châteaus as bullets fly through lives. Bodies flee to the chaos of nearby forests and this exterior becomes shelter. There is, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, a coexistence, an interpenetration and a changing of places between interiors and exteriors. In a very real sense the hit and the miss are more products of proximity than interiority. Blanchot would write of the proximities of his experience to suggest ‘this unanalyzable feeling changed what there remained for him of existence. As if the death outside of him could only henceforth collide with the death in him.’34 Even the self becomes proximate in Blanchot’s story of his near miss. He would use the word ‘him’ to speak of himself. In 2003 Derrida would offer a eulogy at Blanchot’s funeral. Blanchot would, however, consider all his writing to have been, to already have been, posthumous. Indeed he would consider all writing since the Holocaust to be posthumous.35
Death operates in the work of Blanchot as a freeing and opening. ‘[F]reed from life? the infinite opening up?’ Blanchot writes.36 Much of this freeing and opening is to forests, to clouds and to stars and sky. To the air and the sea. To the ‘sense of the real’. He was engaged in this task prior to his own near miss. In Blanchot’s first published novel, Thomas the Obscure of 1941, the eponymous character, Thomas, dived and swam and ‘his limbs gave him the same sense of foreignness as the water in which they were tossed’.37 That is, his body came to be as other as the exterior. Thomas dived and swam into a deeper outside than his inside. Blanchot writes of Thomas that ‘[t]he intoxication of leaving himself, of slipping into the void, of dispersing himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort’.38
Despite the brevity of the text, it is not quite possible to summarize Thomas the Obscure in simple ways. I’ve tried. Every simplification seems to generate contradiction. However, for the sake of communication it might be said that the novel is inostensibly concerned with a man, Thomas, and the death of the woman he loved, Anne. It might also be said that Thomas operates much like a second Orpheus in the manner by which he connects with that which he has lost. This reconnection, or collapsing of the dualisms of the corporeal and incorporeal, involves less the retrieval of Anne than the disposal of Thomas. In Blanchot’s novel this process of connecting with that which was lost occurs as a process of exteriorization; undertaken in imperceptibly fine increments. Though ‘increments’ is not the right word. The process is more a slide of a kind. It’s a slide that starts with a leak. The water in which Thomas swims becomes ‘the thought of water’. The inside, thought itself, leaks slowly into the liquid exterior. When Blanchot complicates the relation between the thought of something – ‘the thought of water’ for example – and the object that was the focus of that thought – ‘water’ in this case – he is complicating the divisions of interior and exterior, intensity and extensity. The signifier and signified also swirl together in such a linguistic construct. Blanchot’s language continues to slide in this direction in then exteriorizing the self directly in text: in exscription. That is, Blanchot takes Thomas out of himself via inscription and then deals with the exscripted in connection to objects beyond the self. Blanchot writes of Thomas:
He was reading. He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention. In relation to every symbol, he was in the position of the male praying mantis about to be devoured by the female. They looked at each other. The words, coming forth from the book which was taking on the power of life and death, exercised a gentle and peaceful attraction over the glance which played over them. Each of them, like a half-closed eye, admitted the excessively keen glance which in other circumstances it would not have tolerated. And so Thomas slipped toward these corridors, approaching them defencelessly until the moment he was perceived by the very quick of the word.39
Thomas’ concentration made him, himself, a point of fixation. ‘To look’ becomes ‘to be looked at’ in the manner of Jacques Lacan’s objet petit a. Incorporeal words take on ‘the power of life and death’. There is here what Leroi-Gourhan might describe as a ‘freeing of the word’, a liberation of words from interiors that allow words to reconnect to a ‘social organism outside ourselves’.40 Thomas and text come to be described as ‘each’, and each a Body without Organs, a ‘half-closed eye’. One imagines that a half-closed eye is a half-closed ‘I’. Deleuze would describe the movement Blanchot makes from the interiority of ‘I’ to the intensity of the exterior:
Blanchot starts from the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, overtakes them toward ‘he’, overtakes the ‘he’ toward an irreducible ‘he’. [… In] Blanchot’s case, there is what I would call the language, a processing of the language which is subjected to a tension, I would almost say, to use a term of physics, a superficial tension, a surface tension. A superficial tension which carries it away to its periphery and which tends toward this mysterious ‘he’, this ‘he’ that is of no person anymore.41
When the subject is exteriorized as ‘no person anymore’ the exterior (the city, architecture and landscape) becomes very intense indeed. Architecture speaks post speech. In the work of Blanchot such a speaking is not a demarcating nail which pins a subject down, but a nail through which it passes; transformed. In Thomas the Obscure, Blanchot generates an exterior that is urban; urban yet oddly unpopulated. He writes of ‘cities made of emptiness and thousands of stones piled on one another’,42 ‘prodigious cities, ruined fortresses’,43 ‘immense unbuilt cities’,44 and ‘[t]he city which spoke to itself’.45 Blanchot also gives us an architecture that is impersonal and intense. He writes of ‘insurmountable walls’,46 ‘uninhabitable rooms’,47 ‘nomads in their homes, living nowhere’.48 Labyrinths, doors and windows are reoccurring images in Blanchot’s work. The work is also populated with stairs, upstairs and downstairs, tombs and graves, and corridors: ‘Thomas slipped toward these corridors’.49 In the work of Blanchot the city, architecture and its elements are particular exterior conditions into which selves bleed. But these exteriors tend not to reconstitute interiors. Blanchot finds in the city neither community nor civilization. He finds in architecture neither home, habit, protection nor shelter. He finds in architectural elements neither stability nor functionality. In the work of Blanchot, cities, architectures and architectural elements are impersonal, indiscernible and ultimately imperceptible. Blanchot engages architectures and cities not as backdrops or backgrounds but as wayfaring devices. The cities, architectures and architectural elements all slide with subjectivities.
Blanchot would lament others, other authors, who ‘neglect even to construct the burrow, for fear that by protecting them this shelter will protect in them that which they must surrender’.50 When Blanchot surrenders the interior of the subject to architecture, it is to an equally raw and bare architecture. An architecture of discomforts and whispers. Rooftops lifted, doors which are ajar and windows half-open. Architectures that also slip toward that to which the subject must slip. Michel Foucault, ever fixated with the outside, was to write:
No doubt, this is the role that houses, hallways, doors, and rooms play in almost all of Blanchot’s narratives: placeless places, beckoning thresholds, closed, forbidden spaces that are nevertheless exposed to the winds, hallways fanned by doors that open rooms for unbearable encounters and create gulfs between them, across which voices cannot carry and that even muffle cries; corridors leading to more corridors where the night resounds, beyond sleep with the smothered voices of those who speak, with the cough of the sick, with the death rattle of the dying with the suspended breath of those who ceaselessly cease living; a long and narrow room, like a tunnel, in which approach and distance – the approach of forgetting, the distance of the wait – draw near to one another and unendingly move apart.51
The happiness of death that is naked in Blanchot’s writing is a joy that also tears through architecture. Derrida would speak of the dual necessity and impossibility of speaking in the work of Blanchot as ‘where the sense of fiction begins to tremble’.52 Though the body is implicated, this tremble isn’t a trembling self. Blanchot has emptied the self; the work is of ‘no person any more’, as Deleuze suggests. Though architecture is implicated, this trembling isn’t a trembling of cities, rooms and corridors. Corridors speak, cough, rattle and breathe when we cannot, but not as we do. What is at stake here is not merely the death of the self in order to give over that life to the exterior posthumously, but; to poignantly concede to the exterior that intensity that is habitually located within.53 That is, to allow the exterior the intensive dimension it is denied when the interior remains closed.
And this exterior must also leak. It leaks to an outside. The distinction between interior and exterior is very different from the distinction between interior and outside. The exterior is always in relation with an interior. The outside, on the other hand, is of a different order altogether. It’s a ‘world night’ and of the order of Eurydice. The outside pays no respect to either interiors or exteriors. The outside is perhaps most simply described as that which is beyond us. Blanchot points to where architecture as an exterior fails to speak, fades and is lost to the outside, to fields of images, much like a body might flee to a forest or drown in a sea: ‘The city which spoke to itself in a dazzling monologue of a thousand voices rested in the debris of illuminated and transparent images.’54 Fundamentally, in Blanchot, architecture too must come to pass – lest it reconstitute an interior. Lest it constitute a safe inside – a repository for the self as defined and as autonomous as the self was once considered. When all is stripped away and made bare then language itself trembles. Lars Iyer, the British novelist and philosopher, suggests of Blanchot that ‘[t]he rumbling that disturbs our rooms and corridors also threatens to tear language apart, too’.55 I imagine this tearing is from the inside out and we might exhaust the thought of an architectural language in order to slip further still.
Agalma
The Göteborg sauna slips. At the invitation of the municipal company Älvstranden Utveckling the Berlin-based collective Raumlabor were engaged to rethink the Free Port on the northern bank of the river Göta älv.56 The sauna is part of the port project which is, in turn, part of a larger redevelopment of the Jubilee Park area of Frihamnen into a bathing culture precinct. The longer-term plan for Frihamnen is for an entirely new town to be built in the area surrounding the park, that surrounds the port, that surrounds the sauna. In this sense the sauna is germinal. It is a seed that might spawn a new town. According to January Liesegang, an architect at RaumlaborBerlin, ‘[i]t is important to take people to the area before a town is built here. In this way the site will be all their own image of the area and their own ideas.’57 Whilst some architecture might be, as Deleuze suggests of literature, ‘for this people who are missing’, this sauna is for a place that is yet to come.58
Frihamnen is at the point at which the stream Kvillebäcken joins the river Göta älv.59 The river outlet is nearby. It was this access to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean that made Frihamnen, and much of Göteborg, a point of industrial condensation. Water, earth, materials and populations flowed through this place and much of the riverfront is a type of debris left behind. The approach to the Göteborg sauna is down roads that pass remnants of shipping and fishing industries. The route is lined with chainmail fences and punctuated by security gates that once secured imported materials and containers of goods awaiting export. The roads still carry occasional trucks that, in turn, carry shipping containers. There are large expanses of asphalt upon which containers once stood and there are signs everywhere. I can’t read them, but the graphic tends to indicate caution and control. The industrial buildings dotted over this area are composed of brick and metal sheet. The logic of these buildings seems to be: to contain as large a volume as possible with minimal material expended. They are designed to hold, if only temporarily, that which is more valuable than themselves. Above the asphalt and above the industrial buildings the sky is pierced by a series of cranes that mark the river’s edge. Most are still. Göteborg is no different from many industrial cities in a post-industrial age. The dream of the city as a well-organized industrial machine has been usurped by an image of the city as inhabited debris. It’s far more machinic than mechanical. Far more organon than organized.
The Göteborg sauna site is littered with a collection of containers; timber walkways; an odd structure of recycled windows; a bridge; a few aslant birch trees; and, over the water on a solid pier, the sauna proper (Figure 8.2). The site strikes you as being familiar, and yet not entirely so. It is industrial but not given to producing any particular product. It is organic but not whole. The sauna and the surrounding structures appear to be utilitarian – and yet, like the cranes on the horizon, not currently useful. The aesthetic at play thus might be described as a type of retrograde utilitarianism. That is, the aesthetic is suggestive of a type of industrial functionality, but it is a functionality that is quizzically unrelated to the current purposes of the architecture.60 The sauna looks like a remnant of a crane. Or a disused shipping lookout. Or an abandoned silo that once may have held grain. Whilst all the references to the industrial past of this site are here, there is also an odd embryology at stake. This sauna might reference a past but it gestures to a future. It is becoming something.
Walls of recycled glass bottles curve around me and tentatively hold a space in which I shower, before approaching the sauna. Adjacent to the shower area there is a series of recycled wood lockers. I place folded jeans with car keys in pockets into a locker. Volvo started in Göteborg. I dearly miss my Saab. The keys open a Volkswagen. The change-room leads to a simple timber and metal bridge with a balustrade of weathering steel and chainmail. The parts that compose the bridge are aged but the configuration appears fresh. The bridge is approximately 10 metres long. It extends from the land over the water to the heavy pier upon which the sauna stands. The bridge is approximately 1 metre wide. Bodies that pass each other pass closely over this bridge.
The bridge extends toward an anchoring pier that was used by vessels calling at the Free Port.61 The pier is square in plan and approximately 4 metres long and wide. It is about 800 millimetres thick and sits around 1 metre above the water. The pier is many decades old and there are signs that the reinforcing within the concrete is rusting. They call this ‘concrete cancer’. There are 20 or so thick concrete legs that support this pier but none are vertical. Ten pairs of legs run down into the water at about 30 degrees akimbo. It appears as if the pier is marching through the water. On top of this pier there is a triangular metal bollard with rounded corners to which a large ship might be moored with rope. The pier is both an anchoring point and a landing site. The boats that once docked no longer anchor, but a sauna has landed upon the pier. It’s a recuperation of a kind.
The sauna that stands tentatively on the pier has an odd angular geometry (Figure 8.3). It’s not a geometry of order and stability. Nothing here is completely erect and permanent. The architecture is somewhat crumpled and decayed. It is asymmetrical and of sliding dimensions. It is clunky and awkward and rises approximately 8 metres into the sky. That which at a distance looked like a remnant of a crane; or a lookout; or a silo for grain, appears from the bridge and the platform to be a displaced organ. The huge heart of an iron man. An organ that either Ted Hughes or Titans might have scattered upon a riverbank. This affecting mixture of industrial organism and alien organ makes you wonder whether you are looking at it or if it is here to observe you. High in the structure a small square window extends over a stair and peers down the river. The cranes in the distance stand symmetrical and tall on 4 legs. This sauna stands on a marching pier of about 20 legs and then on 3 legs of its own. Four would have made it stable but stability is not the point.
The 3 legs are approximately 4 metres high and each is of different dimensions. The legs assume various functions that they do not appear to have been specifically designed to perform: structural support, holding lifebuoys, accommodating services, drainage and some lighting. The legs, as with the main body of the sauna with which they merge, are covered in corrugated steel sheet. The corrugated steel is less like a skin and more like a bandage. The sheet metal runs at an angle. The metal is rusting and has come to coat this structure from a life elsewhere. It is a bandage that once covered other wounds or secured other valuables.
An industrial metal and chainmail stair moves from the pier out over the water and around the thickest of the 3 legs upon which the sauna stands. The stair is also of weathered steel. It clunks. Landings mark the points at which you turn up this stair as you ascend the leg of the sauna. The stair sits out from the leg roughly half a metre. It’s exposing. The whole approach has been exposing. You’re soft and near naked in a metal, industrial landscape. Foucault might have been describing this sauna when he wrote of Blanchot’s ‘closed, forbidden spaces that are nevertheless exposed to the winds’.62 You are exposed above a river more disposed to fishing and shipping than recreation. More disposed to drowning than swimming. On this ‘walking staircase’ it’s just you, your towel and the semi-erect structure.63 You imagine you can hear muffled laughter carried by the wind. It’s the paranoia of exposure that sits as a counterpoint to this schizo architecture. The locals call this place ‘Svettekörka’. It translates as ‘sweat church’. It is more temple than church. And more box than temple. The sauna is an agalma – a box of questionable worth that harbours something precious, like the love Alcibiades, the statesman of Plato’s Symposium, finds in the ragged and flaccid body of Socrates. Having heard stories of love and loss, of Orpheus and Eurydice, the drunken statesman describes Socrates as ‘this wonderful monster in my arms’ and this sauna is similarly alien and intimate.64 The odd excess of form and poise of this architecture has as its corollary a surplus of meaning. There are too many disjunctive references, too many points of connection, and yet this architecture is resistant to a totalizing image. The architecture operates as Deleuze would speak of a literature ‘far from equilibrium’, where ‘disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the connections, reflexive’.65 It is the resistance to totalizing images and stabilizing equilibriums that makes the architecture more gesture than reference. More speaking than speech.
The geometry of the sauna chamfers inward at the point the stair meets the entrance. It’s a ‘beckoning threshold’ and an odd concession to function in an architecture that concedes little to any fixed use. Entering and then tentatively occupying this sauna is intense. A sensory overload like an erotic act. It is erotic in that it stimulates, it is ripe with possibilities, corporealities, encounters, sexual promise. Organs within organs. Life is made barer here. Nude. No. Naked. Blanchot would suggest of the obscure Thomas both an ‘absolute nakedness’ and a ‘naked absence’.66 One imagines the two are not commensurable. They don’t have to be. There is something incommensurable and irrational about baring ourselves. Oddly it is in nakedness that we lose ourselves. In exposures, double exposures and overexposures. We give ourselves over to that which might speak for us in order that we may be free, otherwise or whatever.
The interior of the sauna is lined with long near-rectangular strips of timber veneer. Thin and layered like shingles that might be laid to shift rainwater from the exterior of a building (Figure 8.4). But here it is of the interior, as much as this leaking vessel constitutes an interior. I imagine the strips of timber bend with the hot mist. I sit on one of the timber benches. The benches are on two levels and unfold around three sides of the interior. A fourth side, not that the interior is rectangular at all, is where the hot stones, over which water is poured, sit in two black metal trays.
Euclidean coordinates are inept in describing this interior. It’s simply occupied but not so simply thought or described. I sat where I sit because other spaces were occupied by other bodies. You can sit either with your feet on the ground, lie, lounge or sit higher up. The air is thicker and hotter higher up. Through one aluminium-framed window you see the motionless cranes on the bank opposite. You can also see shipping containers and the tall light-poles that keep the riverbank illuminated. The view is not clear though. The window is dripping with condensation. There is another small square window that sits higher – it is the odd eye you saw from the river bank and the disconnected artery of the organ you are now within. Through the steam and the dripping condensation you can see the sky and you think. ‘Something in the world forces us to think’, Deleuze writes:67
This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. What is encountered may be Socrates, or a temple or a demon. It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed.68
Sometimes what architecture harbours as a germinal force is the chaos of erotic encounters. Sometimes what architecture harbours is equally wild and wayward thoughts. Such thoughts are never of the inside of heads or of the interiority of architecture. When that thing that forces us to think is bare … has a bareness to it – when it is not totalizable, when it is neither symbolic nor meaningful in any fixed or preordained manner – then that bareness of sensation coincides with a bareness of thought. Deleuze would describe thought as ‘a power that has not always existed, […] born from an outside more distant than any external world, and, as power which does not yet exist, confronts an inside’.69 What Stiegler had said of the dualism of interior and exterior, is similarly true of the relation between sensation and thought, ‘far from being opposed’ they ‘compose with one another’.70 It is the composing of one with the other that generates the bare stammering voice of architectural language. This sauna is an architecture parlante, but a parlante of the post-linguistic turn. The sauna operates as Foucault speaks of literature as a ‘void language takes as its space when it articulates itself in the nakedness of “I speak”’.71 The sauna operates as Deleuze speaks of literature, as a ‘milieu that acts as the conductor of words’.72 This sauna is a composition of singularities, intensities, words and temples, a rich and complex machinery in which we too are implicated. A bare architecture generates equally bare propositions: ‘I love you’ (or whatever).
The lack of a correspondence of a fixed structure to any fixed function – this passing of function – resonates with the lack of a correspondence of any fixed meaning to any fixed sensation or desire – the passing of the subject; or at least the subject as we knew it.73 In this sauna our eyes tend to find timber, steam and condensation well after they find organs and organisms. Sweating skin, smiling lips, arms, cleavage, thighs and feet. Some legs outstretched, crossed and akimbo, others bent at knees. There’s no exposed genitalia here, but much erotic pleasure. A birch leaf sticks to the exposed sole of one foot. I want to lick it off. This architecture isn’t defined in and of itself but in assemblage with the barer and more exposed people and place it speaks for. A bare architecture holds that which we can’t continue to relegate to the inside. It’s an imperfect container. Just as an archive must deteriorate lest we keep everything always, so too our architecture must leak.
I close my eyes. I breathe deeply. The intimate muffled words from the other bench are in a language I don’t understand but in tones that I do. Such expressions are at once about the source of the sound and the space in which they are expelled and circulate. There is no reason to oppose an interior to an exterior. No reason to think of breath and air or of speaking and speech as alternate. Everything said in here is a stutter. The words are thick and hot in the air and they take me somewhere new. My own suspended breath is equally loud here. Deleuze would note a moment in poetry where ‘[t]he entire language spins and varies in order to disengage a final block of sound a single breath at the limit of the cry, JE T’AIME PASSIONNÉMENT (“I love you passionately”)’.74 We free ourselves via the freeing of the word and by the freeing of tools and architectures. We came here as one thing. We leave as another. If interiority is constituted by what one thinks they are, then there is a necessary opening of that interior in order for one to be otherwise (or whatever). We move outside ourselves by fixating on the poetry of the phrase or the soft line of a timber bench against the curvature of a wet thigh. This sauna might say I love you, not as a lover does; but as intensely as a lover might.
