The Walker

by Matthew Beaumont

  It seems to me that this aspirational or even spiritual dimension of the right to the city, absolutely inseparable from the material dimension, should among other things entail the right to feel at home in the built environment in which we live. Certainly, as the architect and architectural theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz once put it, ‘one gets along without feeling “at home”.’9 But why should we accept this state of permanent displacement? Why should we have to learn to live with a habitual feeling of not being at home?

  This chapter, which thinks about cities in philosophical terms but also as a pressing political problem at the present time, investigates the unhomeliness of the urban environment, for diagnostic purposes, in terms of the spectral gaze, or ‘visor effect’, that is encoded in individual buildings. It does so in the belief that belonging in the city should be a necessary corollary to being in the city.

  The intervention on architecture in Žižek’s Living in the End Times consists of a fascinating ‘interlude’ in which he develops the concept of the ‘architectural parallax’.10 The word ‘parallax’, derived from the Greek verb parallassein, meaning ‘to alternate’, is in its ordinary sense the apparent difference in an object, or the position of an object, when it is viewed from different perspectives.

  Cubist painting, to develop an example at which Žižek merely hints, could be productively characterized as a sustained and elaborate attempt to capture a ‘parallax view’ of the object. A painting like Picasso’s Violin Hanging on the Wall (1912–13), to pick one almost at random, reconstitutes the image of the instrument itself, and its relation to the wall on which it hangs, as if the painter is repeatedly shifting his perspective. It apprehends the violin not simply as a three-dimensional object but a four-dimensional one; that is, an object situated in time as well as space. The painter’s dynamic, unstable point of observation compels the shapes, planes and angles of the composition to intersect with one another as if conducting an elegant, complicated dance in time. And in addition, the parallax form of the cubist aesthetic folds the viewer herself into the dynamics of the picture, collapsing subject into object. This is not a still life so much as an unstill one.

  But Žižek, who is leaning on the Japanese philosopher Kojin Karatani’s account of the antinomies in Kant’s thought, emphasizes that, philosophically speaking, this apparent difference in an object when it is viewed from alternative perspectives is more than simply subjective; it is, in effect, objective. ‘An “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view’, he writes, ‘always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself.’11 Picasso’s violin, to return to that example, is constitutively transformed by the dynamic decomposition that is the result of the painter’s shifting perspectives.

  There is, then, something objectively as well as subjectively unsettling about this process, so to speak. The object, in the shifting perspective of the parallax, is both itself and not itself. It is non-identical with itself. The parallax view therefore renders the object uncanny. It imparts a kind of alien life to it. Think of a photograph in which, because the camera has been accidentally moved during exposure, the object or person captured is not only blurred but visible from two slightly distinct angles (Michel de Certeau refers with some elegance to ‘the way a tremulous image confuses and multiplies the photographed object’).12 This ghostly, monstrous effect registers the inscription of what Žižek calls the ‘parallax gap’, the interval or passage between changing, competing perspectives.

  How does this relate to architecture? Žižek underlines his point that, in this context, the parallax gap is ‘not just a matter of shifting perspective (from one standpoint, a building looks a certain way – if I move a bit, it looks different)’. For it also marks a radically destabilizing shift in the building’s very identity, its individuality (in the literal sense of its indivisibility). ‘Things get interesting,’ he suggests, ‘when we notice that the gap is inscribed into the “real” building itself – as if the building, in its very material existence, bears the imprint of different and mutually exclusive perspectives.’ He continues:

  When we succeed in identifying a parallax gap in a building, the gap between the two perspectives thus opens up a place for a third, virtual building. In this way, we can also define the creative moment of architecture: it concerns not merely or primarily the actual building, but the virtual space of new possibilities opened up by the actual building. Furthermore, the parallax gap in architecture means that the spatial disposition of a building cannot be understood without reference to the temporal dimension: the parallax gap is the inscription of our changing temporal experience when we approach and enter a building.13

  When we walk about the city in our everyday lives, approaching, circling, entering buildings, we relate to them as animate, alien entities. All houses, from the parallax perspective, are spectral; they haunt us.

  The virtual building invoked or provoked by these encounters with the material building in time as well as space is then, apparently, an instance of what Anthony Vidler, extrapolating from Freud, has called ‘the architectural uncanny’.14 But, if this is the case, it is an iteration of it that, significantly, is not the contingent or circumstantial property of a particular home, or even a particular style of architecture such as the postmodern, but is in fact positively structural to the built environment. For, if the urban fabric is grasped in Žižek’s terms rather than Vidler’s, the uncanny is effectively constitutive of architecture as it is encountered by pedestrians negotiating the city streets.

  Freud’s influential notion of the unheimlich, the unhomely or uncanny, which he identified as a ‘special class of the frightening’, centres on the disconcerting obtrusion of the unconscious into conscious existence. Published in 1919, his essay was an attempt to overcome the theoretical limitations of the only previous essay on the topic, by the German psychologist Ernst Jentsch, who had argued in 1906 that a sense of the uncanny is invariably generated in the subject by the sudden appearance of an alien or unexpected object.

  The unheimlich was for Jentsch associated with the characteristic moment of uncertainty experienced by the human intellect as it half-reluctantly tries to assimilate an unfamiliar phenomenon to its ‘ideational sphere’, as when a wax model momentarily seems to be animate. He reassured his readers, however, that this ‘lack of orientation’ could be overcome by sheer intellectual mastery.15 Freud disputed Jentsch’s complacent rationalist assumption: he insisted that his predecessor’s interpretation was incomplete because, according to its logic, ‘the better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.’16

  Freud argued instead that it is precisely when one feels at home in an environment that one is most susceptible to the uniquely subversive influence of the uncanny. ‘The uncanny’, he stated at the outset, ‘is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’17 Freud buttressed the central claim of his article with an etymological examination of the term heimlich, which on the one hand means ‘what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’.18 The uncanny marks the moment at which, according to Freud, the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar, at the same time, comes to seem all too familiar.

  The house is for this reason the locus classicus of the uncanny, as Freud concedes when he observes that the example of ‘a haunted house’ is ‘perhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny’.19 The entity that people most take for granted, where they supposedly most feel at home, the house, is peculiarly uncanny when it is revealed to be secretly hostile to those that inhabit it. The heim is, in both an etymological and a phenomenological sense, the root of the unheimlich.

  The built environment is, then, especially susceptible to the logic of the uncanny. We presume in our everyday lives, as we traverse the pavements of the city on foot, that it is hospitable to us, because it is the produ
ct of our collective labours; but it is in fact secretly opposed to us. Buildings, as numerous horror movies have testified, watch us with suspicion. We feel ourselves observed by them and, as in the example of the ‘dread of the evil eye’, which Freud adduces as another classic instance of the uncanny, we fear ‘a secret intention of doing harm’.20 All houses, in a sense, are haunted, because they are susceptible to the dynamics of the architectural parallax. They are both themselves and not themselves.

  In his book on the architectural uncanny, Vidler reconstructs a kind of archaeology of the trope, running from early nineteenth-century Romanticism through to early twentieth-century avant-gardism, in order to understand the unhomely aspect of domestic buildings as this has impinged historically both on literature and the built environment itself. His inspiration is historically proximate, as the book’s suitably baroque opening sentence indicates:

  Intrigued by the unsettling qualities of much contemporary architecture – its fragmented neoconstructivist forms mimetic of dismembered bodies, its public representation buried in earthworks or lost in mirror reflection, its ‘seeing walls’ reciprocating the passive gaze of domestic cyborgs, its spaces surveyed by moving eyes and simulating ‘transparency,’ its historical monuments indistinguishable from glossy reproductions – I have been drawn to explore aspects of the spatial and architectural uncanny, as it has been characterized in literature, philosophy, psychology, and architecture from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.

  Vidler traces a fascination, inherited from Freud, both with ‘the hidden terrors of the house’, as an architectural space, and with what he identified as the ‘dedomesticated subject’ that inhabits it.21

  But for Vidler, as I have implied, the uncanny implicitly remains an alien fragment lodged in the familiar fabric of the building, as opposed to an irreducible, indeed ‘ontological’, dimension of its form. Žižek’s concept of the ‘virtual building’ – which is necessarily precipitated by the interaction between the individual subject, moving through space and time, and the building’s architectural form – seems to me an important development (albeit one that is ultimately susceptible to the charge of ahistoricism).

  I propose to refine it a little here, or perhaps to displace it slightly, by situating it more explicitly in relationship to the trope of the uncanny; and, specifically, by reconceptualizing the virtual building in terms of the idea of the spectral building. I intend to refine or displace it, too, by rethinking the building’s ontology in terms of what Derrida, in a neat pun of characteristically serious intent, calls ‘hauntology’.

  The concept of hauntology is Derrida’s relatively late attempt, as part of his relentless deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition, to think the ‘logic of haunting’ as opposed to the logic of being. Ontology ‘speaks only of what is present or what is absent; it cannot conceive of what is neither,’ as Warren Montag has argued.22 Hauntology speaks of the neither, and the both, that is the spectral. Here, I want to insist on the hauntology of architecture; that is, on the hauntological house, and not merely, as Vidler does, the haunted house. Derrida talks in Specters of Marx of ‘the virtual space of spectrality’, and what I am positing here, with respect to Žižek’s virtual building, is simply the obverse of that, the spectral space of virtuality.23

  Offering a kind of paranoid reading of the city, my reflections here are centred on how buildings look at us quite as much as on how we look at buildings. They focus on how buildings look at us when, approaching them on foot, we look at them; on how they look at us both when we participate in what Alberto Pérez-Gómez called architecture’s ‘space-matter’ and when we enter into their field of social, and political, relations.24 The dynamics of this force field, which is necessarily constituted and reconstituted not in the abstract but in the historical conditions of time and space, as David Harvey’s studies of ‘relational space’ have amply demonstrated, are of course extremely complicated.25

  After all, ‘architecture is rarely experienced as an isolated autonomous object’; urban space, in fact, is ‘encountered as being connected, made up by interrelations between buildings rather than the impact of buildings on their own’.26 But my specific claim, despite the risk of simplification, is that the parallax gap that, when we experience it as a pedestrian, opens up between two or more competing, interpenetrating perspectives on a particular building – when, for example, we turn a corner in a city and approach it – is, precisely, the spectral architectural point from which the building looks back at us. It is the ghostly site at which its hauntology materializes or momentarily becomes visible.

  As we move about in their spatio-temporal orbit, all buildings look back at us from some virtual vantage point. ‘Our changing temporal experience when we approach and enter a building,’ to borrow Žižek’s words again, animates this building and imparts a kind of life to it. And that life, finally, is an alien one. The building is a Thing, in so far as it embodies the gaze of a Subject but at the same time does not subjectivize itself. In this way the individual is trapped in the logic, imprisoned in the perspective, of the Other-Thing.27

  A classic example might be Mother’s house, perched above the Bates Motel, in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which from the moment it is first seen trains its uncanny gaze on the events that take place on the concourse beneath it. And on the camera. Paradoxically, it is the antiseptic motel, and not the crumbling gothic mansion, that is the haunted house in this movie, for the simple reason that the former is haunted by the latter. Both are virtual buildings, in that they occupy the parallax gap between the competing perspectives that Hitchcock’s camera traces, but Mother’s house is also a spectral building. Psycho is a movie about a haunting house, a house that haunts, as much as a haunted one.

  But there is a fundamental historical sense in which every building is always-already haunting, as Miéville demonstrates in his persuasive attempt ‘to show that the image of the animate, alien building is explicable as an aesthetic response to the peculiar alienated relation between humanity and architecture under capitalism’.28 For the alienness, the non-humanness, of buildings is at root social and economic. It is a structural effect of alienation, of the alienated relations that prevail under capitalism; that is, a mode of production in which, as Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism in Capital (1867) indicates, producers are ruled by their products, and these products, including buildings, which are profoundly implicated in the capitalist marketplace, consequently come to seem animate, autonomous and endowed with an independent power.

  All buildings, all houses, are in this sense alien. To overstate the matter a little, we might say of the built environment, as Sartre said of the world, that it is ‘human but not anthropomorphic’.29 It remains at some fundamental level resistant to the attempt to domesticate it. And the alien life of buildings, their alien gaze, is a structural effect of this. The parallax gap is thus historically, as well as ontologically, inscribed in buildings.

  So, the commodity status of a building in capitalist society renders it intrinsically haunted, intrinsically other than itself (like Marx’s dancing table in Volume One of Capital). But there is of course an additional, rather more ordinary sense in which ‘the alienation of building from dweller is the result of the mediation of the market’; and inevitably this too is relevant.30 Most producers, as consumers, do not own the house they inhabit. Moreover, they are excluded from the vast majority of buildings, in so far as these are privately rather than publicly owned.

  For this reason, a person’s home, like the buildings that surround it, is necessarily what Marx, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, characterizes as

  a hostile dwelling, an ‘alien, restraining power which only gives itself up to him in so far as he gives up to it his blood and sweat’ – a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own home where he might at last exclaim, ‘Here I am at home,’ but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who daily lies i
n wait for him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent.31

  We live in hostile dwellings; we live surrounded by hostile buildings. If, as Freud once said, the ego is not master in its own house, then neither is – the master.

  Under capitalism, it might be said, all buildings embody an alien, restrictive power, and people are in consequence engaged in a perpetual, if largely unconscious, attempt to tame and domesticate them, to force them to surrender. On the other hand, consciously and unconsciously, people are forever trying to accommodate and assimilate themselves to the built environment. This is both a material process, as Marx implied, and a spiritual process.

  In relation to the latter, de Certeau has speculated that, at the level of the streets through which the pedestrian is impelled to walk, the city represents ‘an immense social experience of lacking a place’, one in which people are ceaselessly searching for opportunities, either real or ideal, to feel temporarily at home. The city in which, in the face of this fundamental experience of homelessness, the passer-by finds a provisional sense of security and significance, is thus what he calls ‘a network of residences temporarily appropriated by pedestrian traffic’.32

  It is as part of this ceaseless struggle between buildings and pedestrians that the former look at the latter defensively, even offensively. Frowning and leering and sneering, as Rhys puts it. In hosting us, in apparently accommodating us, buildings function as an enemy host; they are hostile. The ‘complementary relation’ that Arnold Berleant has identified ‘between building and site and between both of these and the human user’ is, at root, antagonistic too.33

  But buildings also function in ways that are ghostly – as the etymological tangle of ‘host’, ‘guest’ and ‘ghost’, all of which probably have a common root in the West Aryan word ghosti-s, suggests.34 Perhaps, then, buildings are not simply potentially but constitutively inhospitable. Perhaps, in spite of their obdurate materiality, they are not only innately alien but intrinsically ghostly. Here, again, is the house as a hauntological entity.