“The reality we experience is given in the sense that it is, for our purposes, lawful, allowing hypothesis and prediction, or available at least to being construed retrospectively in terms of cause and effect. It is given in a deeper sense in the fact that it is emergent.”
Marilynne Robinson, Givenness[i]
Positive or negative, curiosity or anxiety converts encounters with chaos or the unknown into events. That is the line of argument continued from the preceding section. To be meaningful, however, it is useful to think a bit more about what an event is.
We know intuitively that an event is bound up with the fuzzy notion of experience itself. We are almost as intuitively certain that experience begins impressionistically. And, allowing for some debate over the appropriate conceptual language, these impressions slowly form into a narrative whole we might record in retrospect as an event. But how does the reality we accord events jive with the psychological fact that impressions are neither complete nor unbiased? There are gaps in what we notice, and even bigger gaps in what gets stored in memory, that aren’t always exactly correlated with importance (Did she say the meeting with the lawyer starts at 9 or 10? Did he shave or change his hairstyle?). This is getting fuzzier.
We could try to gain concreteness by limiting the discussion for the moment to the constituent components of an event: its who, where, and when. In other words, the perceiving subject and the space and time in which the experience takes place. These, too, are components that seem essential to any intuitive notion of events. These too are fuzzy and fail us in understanding the nature of an event.
First, intuition suggests that space is something like a container filled by stuff and time is a conveyor belt filled with happenings. Since at least Heidegger in philosophy, and assuredly since Einstein in physics, any intuitive notion of space and time should immediately be suspect. “The metaphor of filling is wrong,” says Gibson. “Time and space are … simply the ghosts of events and surfaces.”[ii] (Personally, I think the word “ghosts” is misleading. Time and space are fictions drawn from events and surfaces, but this is jumping too far ahead).
Second, the notion of an individual perceiving subject being the locus, if not the author of events is misleading. Events do not occur to people who are not at least potentially part of a larger social construct. “Your individual spatial knowledge is the consequence of your being part of a joint constellation, not the other way around. The joint constellation contains the regress.”[iii] The wild child, isolated from their cave clan since infancy, does not experience events – nor space or time for that matter. Any intuition that privileges the individual over the social blinds us to these important insights.
Third, the triadic constellation of subject, space, and time leaves out a fundamental aspect of any event. Any experience we might be said to share with others, experiences subject to mutual agreement about things in social space, begin with “*that” – in the parlance of perceptual common knowledge.[iv] Without a “*that” or a Heideggerian “for-the-sake-of-which” it is difficult to imagine that an event could take place. Perhaps an event is simply a “that happened.” Architecturally speaking, perhaps an event is …
[i] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 90.
[ii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 93.
[iii] Seeman, The Shared World, 79.
[iv] Seeman, Ibid.
Architecture is Fiction 