Derrida
Richard Coyne on Derrida
Derrida's philosophy is skeptical about foundations, absolutes and certainties to knowledge, be they laws of nature, moral principles, standards of beauty, ideals, transcendence or even common sense.
To understand Derrida it is necessary to grasp what is meant by Structuralism.
Saussure departed from the orthodoxy of this day by proposing that the synchronic (time independent or parallel) dimension to language is more revealing than its diachronic dimension. The diachronic, or historical, study of language focuses in the way languages change in time and how languages are derived from each other. To study the synchronicity of language is to look at the structures within any particular language, the relationships within the language, at a point in its evolution and compare it with the structures of other languages. So different languages have structural similarities that seem to transcend the particularities of individual sound patterns and local grammatical differences. For Saussure, we learn more by examining the current state of all languages, a slice through the world's languages, or rather similarities and differences in the multiplicity of the world's languages at any moment (such as at the present moment), than by looking at the derivations of languages.
The relationship between the signifier and the signified is often referred to as the 'sign situation', which is already a departure from the common view that language consists of signs that refer to things. Needles to say, Derrida is heir to the Structuralist skepticism towards the concept the language operates by making reference to an independent reality outside of language, the correspondence theory of language.
Like the postal service, language is a king of circulation system that keeps things in play and leaves in its wake a multiplicity of connections and referents. Language can only function and always has, through the concept of trace. “there always remains, around the final meaning, a halo of virtualities where other possible meaning are floating”
For McLuhan , the invention of writing asserted priority to the eye and the capability of vision. Under the sway of written texts, humankind sees things written down, and at a distance, and so derives notions of objectivity and the methods of science. But before the cataclysmic invention of writing, human communities were permeated by speech and chatter and, of course, listening, the culture of the ear. Drawing loosely from anthropological studies. McLuhan's mythic construction of this epochal transition characterizes aural culture as altogether more engaged, absorbed and undifferentiated than the subsequent civilizing influence of visual culture.
“It will atrophy people's memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make things they have learned dissapear from their mind. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence . Because your students will be widely read, though without contact with teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant” Plato
Ideas only form as we speak in conversation, speaking and listening connect directly with who we are, utterances are of the authentic moment, provisional, contextual, open to refinement and adjustment. Derrida disagrees precisely with this common perception.
One of the main outcomes of Structuralism and Post structuralism for architecture is to reassert, or at least to wrestle with, architectures materiality over its ideologies, to treat architecture and to theorize architecture by considering its groundedness, its textures, plumbing, specificity and its everydayness in social and urban contexts: its potions, poisons, paints and parasites.
Chora L
Under Derrida's reading, chora constitutes a third space between (!) the realm of ideas, that distant but invisible solid realm in which reside the eternal and unchanging forms and ideals, and (ii) the sensible world that we occupy in the here and now: the imperfect world of human experience that contains only so much imperfect copies of the ideas. Chora, as a third, contradictory entity of containment, precedes the other two and is irreducible to them.
There is tendency here in the emergence of such literary and publication convictions to make explicit the reader's complicity in developing sense from the text, and in a way contributing to the role of the reader: the author and reader as bricoleur. In the case of Chora L Works, the perforations interrupt the text and the reader has to infer what is missing by attending to the immediate context of the surrounding words, arguably a further exercise in making explicit the character of all reading.
According to Plato – there are two forms of reality: the intelligible and unchanging model, and the changing copy of it, able to be apprehended by senses (Plato). There are thus two spaces, places, models, realms: the Intelligible and the Sensible. This is the underlying opposition of Platonic thought. Later in Timaeus Plato deploys the Greek word chora (space) to designate it. Plato maintains that this 'third form' is complex and obscure. It is 'the nurse of all becoming and change'
Chora is all of these spatial constructs (the sublime, the uncanny, non-place, heteretopias, other places) by a different name. Derrida has provided a service to the authors of these otherwise marginal and ambiguous constructions of space by demonstrating the presence of such spaces at the heart of reasoned and relational spatiality.
The effort required to identify and justify chora is more rewarding than representing it.
Derrida expects from Deconstruction in architecture to tackle four assumed foundations of architecture. 1 – primary importance accorded in the architectural tradition to home, dwelling and hearth. 2 – nostalgia within modern architecture for an origin, a set of primary principles, an ordering, including deference to the sacred origins of architecture. 3 – notion that architecture is heading somewhere, to betterment, improvement and the service of humankind. 4 – an adherence to concepts of the fine arts, i.e. The pursuit of beauty, harmony and completeness.
These foundations are not exclusive to architecture, but architecture gives them the most obvious and tangible expression, through its monumental materiality and the persistence of buildings, through which these cultural foundations are preserved, transferred and resist deconstruction.
Within intellectual landscape, radical intellectualism is not the exclusive preserve of Derrida. To it we can add Lacan, Deleuze, Serres and others who have influenced architecture.