Events that rise to the level of meaning alter the world. Perhaps it is clearer to say that events are graded by meaning. Walking along a particular sidewalk that traverse daily is seldom an event. Walking along that same stretch immediately after a job offer or first kiss or learning of the death of loved one is often momentous. That’s why philosophers from Heraclitus (500 BCE) to Derrida (2000 CE) have agreed that you can’t have the same (meaningful) experience twice whether we are talking about stepping into a river or reading a book or walking on a sidewalk.
It may not be immediately clear how this observation intersects issues of architecture or fiction. Architects work in the realm of relative permanence – stone and steel, wood and concrete. The dichotomy, however, of change and permanence is an inherited heirloom from the philosophic/scientific pursuit of reality. Heraclitus and his near contemporary Parmenides wrote the first serious texts arguing for change or permanence as the ultimate Truth of the Universe, respectively, and appearances that did not fit their schemas were denigrated as mere illusions. The contradiction in their conclusions resides in timescales with Heraclitus viewing the universe like a particle physicist (bits and pieces flying everywhere seemingly chaotically) and Parmenides like a cosmologist (one Hubble-like panorama of the night sky). And the contradiction disappears when the world is viewed ecologically, that is from the vantage of animals like us living in a given environment.
Thinking about animals in environments is a middle ground, and great for plowing. In particular, notice how Gibson talks about the environment’s layout. He states that a given layout exhibits “persistence under change” in the timescale of its inhabitants.[i] Restated in language appropriate to fiction and architecture, environments become settings (persistent layouts) when events (or meaningful changes) occur in the experiences of fiction-making animals.
The language of the last paragraph is actionable in a way that the one preceding it isn’t. Architecture is settings that frame and are reframed by events. We therefore have two interdependent components – settings and events; or persistence under change – that receive careful analysis over the course of “Fiction and Meaning Ecologically Considered.”
Before turning to the building blocks of environmental experience, however, it is important to note that even the language of settings and events suggest a categorical divide and overstate its clarity. New styles and forms “can change our image of the world,” as novelist Italo Calvino argues.[ii] And we respond to these novel settings attentionally, emotionally, and behaviorally.[iii] These responses are necessary in order to say that an event has occurred. But it is a mistake to think that the relationship is one of unilateral causality or that a setting is like an empty stage-set awaiting its actors. From an ecological perspective, it is just as inappropriate to imagine a setting silently awaiting the occurrence of an event as it is to imagine events happening without a setting. Animals – including their attention, emotions, and behaviors – and environments (things to attend to, react to, and act upon) are mutually dependent. In the absence of fiction-making animals, the world is simply the stuff of physics.
[i] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 8. Italics in the original.
[ii] Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 8.
[iii] Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 19.
Architecture is Fiction 