How to react to Charles Jencks’s Peanuts Philosophy? First of all, by acknowledging two debts I owe him. One of these is the fact that perhaps he was the first to take my reflections on the semiotics of architecture seriously.
Perhaps I ought to clarify something for the reader’s benefit: how did it happen that, even though I am not an architect, I taught for a few years in two faculties of architecture, one in Milan and one in Florence? The fact is that my first tentative discourses on semiotics were met with great suspicion by the Italian philosophical community, and only a few architects, on catching a glimpse of the possibilities that these concepts might have for a debate on the nature and the goals of architecture, had invited me to come and teach in their departments. In those years the world of architects was very close to various philosophical positions and I have to thank Ernest Rogers, Leonardo Ricci, and Paolo Portoghesi for having desired my presence in their lecture theaters.
I shall not discuss the rigidity of Italian universities in those days, but in order to permit lectures on the semiotics of architecture, and since semiotics did not appear in the Ministry of Education’s curricula, I had to choose to teach decoration (which may perhaps have made a little sense in the nineteenth century but which had been silenced by that time). Smuggled in under this false name, semiotics made its entry into the faculties of architecture. After a few years (my time with the architects lasted from 1967 to 1970) Dean Portoghesi requested the Ministry of Education to change decoration to semiotics and the Ministry (with maximum seriousness and no sense of humor whatsoever) replied that the change could be made “as long as the content of the discipline remains unchanged.”
Having to discuss semiotics with architects I realized that the only member of the profession who had dealt with the problem (since 1964) was Giovanni Klaus Koenig, who had tackled the problem of architectural communication using the instruments of Morris’s semiotics.1 I began my courses on that basis, but I am sorry that Koenig’s work has been forgotten. He was a real pioneer.
From the relationship with Jencks there came a series of encounters with other English and American scholars, as Jencks says in his essay. I am also grateful to Jencks for the same reason that many others are in his debt, namely, that he was the first person to make a critical and theoretical study of postmodernism, right from the 1970s on.2 Jencks limited himself to architecture and only after him did postmodern become a broad-ranging term, with reference not only to literature and art in general but also to wider philosophical problems, as happened with Lyotard.
It is natural that even though we did not meet many times (luckily for our health, judging by the description that Jencks gives of one encounter) our thoughts met several times. I have little to say about his amusing paper and only one objection. This is the matter of the Salad Bowl that he considers a case of double coding. I would not agree with this. As can be seen from Brian McHale’s contribution and my reply to him, double coding occurs when it is possible to make two interpretations of a text that are not contradictory, except that one is within the reach of those with a greater cultural awareness; but even the first-level reader (who perhaps does not grasp certain intertextual ironies) can enjoy the text in question just the same. The case cited by Jencks is instead the one that elsewhere I defined as an example of “aberrant decoding”: conceived to signify a thing, a text, or an object, they are interpreted by others who refer to different codes, and the two interpretations mutually exclude each other. This was the case of the highly amusing (but true) story of the sanitation fixtures provided for the inhabitants of the Italian city of Matera, which they interpreted in a way that certainly did not correspond to the architects’ project. Even though, I observe now, the fact of using white bowls to wash grapes (or olives) seems faithful to some affordances proposed by the objects in question.
One other very small objection is that, while I was very interested by Jencks’s reconstruction of Egyptian cosmology, I believe that Amon Ra was not the only divinity who, to quote Austin, knew how to do things with words. Basically, also the God of Genesis said: “Let there be light!” And there was light . . . God said: “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water” . . . “And it was so. . .” Etcetera, etcetera. The formation of the universe through the word is a feature of many religions. Naturally, it is fine by me to admit that Amon Ra was the first to do this.
The fact that on that evening in Greenwich Village in 1996 we could not have said “we are still peanuts in the bowl” merely means that neither I nor Jencks are gods. But on this point I think we are in complete agreement.
U.E.
NOTES
1. Giovanni Klaus Koenig, Analisi del linguaggio arcitettonico (Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina), 1964.
2. Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1977).