We are always our own center. Both our sensory and conceptual apparatus work radially. That is not to suggest they work evenly. But while senses and concepts accrue information unevenly in ad hoc or biased ways, the slow accretion eventually forms something like a panorama around us accurate enough to provide the knowledge and confidence necessary to eat, sleep, dream, and act. This bubble constitutes the world we know.
Beyond the bubble lies an indeterminate world. We should, however, be wary of simplifying the relation of here vs. there to over-used dichotomies of known/unknown, order/chaos, or even determinate/indeterminate. The world beyond the bubble is constitutive of our understanding and valuation of the world within. And despite the temptation to reduce the world beyond to some mysterious X that is unimaginable in every way, we somehow represent it to ourselves prior to understanding and before fully incorporating it into our information panorama.[i] How we do this is a bit perplexing. That we do so is critical to who we are, and central to our ability to experience architecture.
Primary perceptual common knowledge – the foundation for shared experience and shared narratives – requires an ability to understand a that/there that is held in common with others.[ii] This legitimate requirement tends to reinforce illegitimate separations of individual observers from one another and observers from their environment. “The dualism of observer and environment is unnecessary,” as Gibson notes. “The information for the perception of ‘here’ is of the same kind as the information for the perception of ‘there,’ and a continuous layout of surfaces extends from one to the other.”[iii] I’d extend that to suggest the information necessary to perceive me is of the same kind necessary to perceive you, and as I identify ‘you’ in my environment, your environment is also mine.
Understanding this is a critical foundation to understanding the two meditations to follow.
One facile critique of this schematic gloss is I cannot perceive your environment as you do. You occupy a unique position. You are your world’s center. Even if I can perceive you as part of my environment and you can perceive me as part of yours, our environments are equally unique. We have, in short, different bubbles.
Fair enough.
Heraclitus once said a person cannot step into the same river twice, to which a friend of mine jokingly responded, “we can’t step into the same river once.” Analogously, while it is true that I cannot objectively step into your bubble, it is worth acknowledging that I cannot step into mine either as a fixed or stable state. It is always changing and partly occluded – sensually and conceptually – so much so that, by each turn of the body and change of mental perspective, aspects of my world are constantly dying and becoming. The bubble flexes and shifts. Stepping into the same river twice or occupying a world bubble that is yours or mine are all acts of fiction-making. Crossing the boundary between the determinate/known and indeterminate/unknown is similarly impossible if each is conceived as objective or stable states. But it is difficult to imagine they are.
In a remarkable essay titled, “The Smooth and the Striated,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari attempted to free us from the strictures of objective/subjective, known/unknown, determinate/indeterminate dyads – at least as fixed conditions. The essay analyzes two types of space: striated space is characterized by long distance vision/overt orientation, geometry, the counted and countable, that although measurable tends to homogenize; smooth space, on the other hand, involves close vision where space is no longer visual, where position gives way to trajectory, and the uncounted and uncountable experience is nevertheless heterogeneous.[iv] After laying out the two types of space, however, they note that attempts to capture or secure oneself in the confines of either fail. Either space observed too closely becomes its opposite. That, I suspect, is true of my bubble, yours, and notion of ‘the world beyond my bubble.’
Our movement, physically and conceptually, results in the experience of different worlds. We become narrators in our own fictions, positing stability and knowledge. Paul Ricoeur understood this explicitly. “The plot, too, presents homogeneous features and heterogeneous features, a stability and a progression, recurrences and differences. In this sense, we can say that if syntax offers its range of paradigms and transitions to the narrator, these resources are actually realized in the work of composition.”[v] The question to ask is not how do we represent the unknown to ourselves but how does an encounter with a work of composition make us more fully a narrator, thus centering fiction-making animals as protagonists?
[i] Peterson, Maps of Meaning,149.
[ii] Seeman, The Shared World, 85.
[iii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 108-109.
[iv] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 494.
[v] Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2, 73.
Architecture is Fiction 