Naming and fictionalizing work together. Arguably, they might be the same process. At a minimum, both are part and parcel of conscious experience, or at least everything we humans are prone to dignify with that mysterious modifier. Fictionalizing and conscious experiencing might, in fact, be interchangeable verbs. Why this might be so might not be immediately apparent.
This chain of mights needs to be clarified or the remainder will make little sense.
Conscious experience is not passive. Seeing is not “forgetting the name of the thing one sees” because the environments in which we live or that we will create are not simple objective facts. Environments and their perception as familiar or unfamiliar, or known/unknown, ordered/disordered, etc., are subjective in the sense that the categorizations differ depending on age, culture, temperament, hunger, and a host of other contingencies. Better said, environments as opposed to the matter of physical science are relative to a ground of preconceptions, expectations, and prior bodies of knowledge with which we (singular or collectively) encounter them. That much, I suspect, is pretty well accepted. The perceptual categories through which the environment appears to consciousness, however, are always already shared. As Ernst Gombrich said, “the innocent eye sees nothing,” and extrapolated elsewhere, “there is no reality without interpretation; just as there is no innocent eye, there is no innocent ear.”[i] We name the world or read onto it names we’ve been educated to understand.
There are a series of implicit mights in the paragraph above, but they are trustworthy.
We navigate a named world. When pieces of the environment appear as paths, barriers, margins, steps, slopes, roofs, walls, doors, thresholds, tools, clothing, shelters, etc, overly simplistic objective-subjective dichotomies break down. This is because it is impossible to state categorically that these nameable things are really there or not there – or that they are more ‘out there’ than ‘in here’ (pointing to my head). They exist in triadic perceptual relations of observers in an environment – that is, between me, you, and the environmental feature so named. Environments communicate, insofar as an unobstructed horizontal surface has characteristics we think of as a path; when that “path” is obstructed, a “barrier” exists.
More mights, but firmer. The above isn’t one way. The world isn’t telling us something that we passively accept. Nor are we forcing classifications onto things willy-nilly. We both read into and read from the world when we experience. One human mind can see paths, barriers, margins, steps, slopes, roofs, walls, doors, thresholds, tools, clothing, shelters, etc. where another sees a field, dirt, cliffs, uneven terrain, caves or strange objects for which they have no name or use. As novelist Marilynne Robinson suggested, “High-order thinking is not so readily forced into preexisting categories.”[ii] And yet, without the categories, it is difficult to imagine thinking or experiencing at all. “Intelligibility always precedes itself and justifies itself.”[iii]
This series of mights are important as this is the realm in which architects work and the methods by which everyone appreciates (or doesn’t) the buildings architects make. Architecture suggests names. It comes loaded with humanity’s categories. It is up to the designer to challenge or enhance the fictionalizing process that is human experience. As novelist Milan Kundera said: “Art isn’t there to be some great mirror registering all of History’s ups and downs, variations, endless repetitions. Art is not a village band marching dutifully along at History’s heels. It is there to create its own history.”[iv]
[i] E.H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art, (New York: Phaidon, 1985), and Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 2000), respectively.
[ii] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 35.
[iii] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 28.
[iv] Kundera, The Curtain, 27.
Architecture is Fiction 