"No matter how hard you'll try to ignore the obvious fact that our consciousness has a periphery (and for us, the Romanians, the periphery is very large, and there, I think, lies most of our famous humor) you won't succed refraining from noticing it."
M. Preda, The Most Beloved of the Earthlings
From the start there is an ambiguity: the periphery appears to be in the same time a mental space and a cultural space. We've met this situation in Heidegger's mythological/ explanatory construct of the culture concept 1: the way the man inhabits the earth/ the world is explained through the way the culture/ cultural space is built/ functions; to the human quality of cultivator corresponds a certain type of space - the cultivated space.It functions through a de-limitation from nature (which remains ex-terior/ out-side 2). This boundry is con-structed/ errichten/ erected; in order to en-dure (as a limit of an ex-closure/ an in-terior), this structure must be kept orderly/ maintained/ cultivated. "This foundation act is the copy of the primordial creation act, and the new fortress becomes implicitly an imago mundi. The enclosure separates what is from what is not yet, or is only in an approximate way, or is hostile" 3 beacause "a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." 1
A tension is created; the limit functions through this tension and this tension is what must be maintained/ cultivated.
This (not-seen) tension acts by tying/ binding together the different elements of the con-struction; the cons-struction performs (there are rules for it use) and exists by receiving/ having a purpose/ a meaning/ a sense. 4 (Again here appears to be a concrete sense and a speculative-abstract one.) The meaning of the romanian word "rost" embraces both realities: "rost- ul " is the gap between the bricks (filled with mortar - the one who binds) and, on the other hand, "rost" means sense/ meaning/ purpose. 5 So, "construction is the art of making meaningful whole out of many parts." Beacause, "buildings are artificial constructions. They consists of single-parts wich must be joined togheter. To a large degree, the quality of the finished object is determined by the quality of the joins.[...] Every touch, every joint is there in order to reinforce the idea of the quiet presence of the work." 6
"Our investigation is ... a grammatical one;" 7 the structure of a proposition is analoguos to the structure of a building. (Heidegger see this structure as the primordial factor that gives the norm.8) This under-standing through grammar (or rather through the rules of the grammar) as the way functions a con-struct is different from a comprehension/ verstehen/ perception of the form/ surface of the object. Under this surface lies the space/ the interval/ the (repressed) tension that links the elements: "What this mutual encroaching indicates is that Inside and Outside never cover the entire space: there is always an excess of a third space which gets lost in the division into Outside and Inside. In human dwellings, there is an inter-mediate space which is disavowed: we all know it exists, but we do not really accept its existence – it remains ignored and (mostly) unsayable/ ne-rostit. The main content of this invisible space is excrement (canalization), but also the complex network of electricity, digital links, etc. – all this is contained in narrow spaces between walls or floors. We of course know well how excrements leave the house, but our immediate phenomenological relation to it is a more radical one: it is as if shit disappears into some netherworld, out of our sight and out of our world. (This is why one of the most unpleasant experiences is to observe the shit coming back from the hole in the toilet bowl – it is something like the return of the living dead…) What I am talking about here is similar to how we relate to another person’s body: we know very well that he or she sweats, defecates and urinates, etc., but we abstract from it in our daily relations – these features are not part of the image of our fellow-man. We rely on this space, but ignore it – no wonder that, in science-fiction, horror films and techno-thrillers, this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk (from spying machines to monsters or contagious animals like cockroaches and rats). Recall also, in science-fiction architecture, the mysterious topic of an additional floor or room which is not in the building’s plan (and where, of course, terrifying things dwell…)." 9
This third space/ whith-in-closure, that stands at the basis of the founding act/ defining/ building/ begründen/ rost-ire of any identity/ con-struct, hides something that remains un-spoken/ ne-rostit, ingnored, (kept) secret/ geheim/ that cannot be seen 10 : the abject. "It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. […] The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine.[…] The abject has only one quality of the object – that of being opposed to I.[…] What is abject is radically ex-cluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. It lies out-side and does not seem to agree to the latter’s rules of the game." 11
What is this "otherness"/ strangeness/ weirdness that cannot be entirely assimilated or excluded, that lies there,"quite close", at (as) the foundation/begründen of the con-struct? The main content, the ex-crement, that which is thrown out-side, is the very reason that permits the in-side to exist: "These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel, "I" is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you-it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint." 11
This fall/ cadere of the corpse/ cadaver permits the structure to be erected and to endure, to be stable/ begründen. This stability is directly related to the concept of quality, the way the structure functions/ performs; the meaning/ the purpose/ rost-ul of one object is linked to its reliability.8
Of course, there is "the famous movement of translation towards “substitution”. [...] The real substitute begins though with animal sacrifices". 3 But what is interesting is what remains hidden/ secret/ heimlich 10 even with or without this substitution: it is not "I" who is falling/ sacrificed, but the other, and this is the true substitution. It is a murder/ a violent death - it remains as an un-spoken/ ne-rostit/ truth, scary/ uncanny/ unheimlich 10. This murder, lawless and meaningless, is the very fouding that orders and gives meaning/ begründen.Without this sacrifice, the walls fall or remain fallen - the founding/ begründen/ rost-uirea/ rost-irea is the sacrifice. And this thing cannot be spoken/ rost-it or seen, and here lies the horror Zizek is speaking of - "this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk."9
The murder of the other can be read as also as an ex-clusion: the one who is not allowed to belong, to be part of the con-struct, becomes the structure itself but only in death. In The Legend Of Master Manole, it is Ana the one who is sacrifficed - Ana is the other - but as the wife of Manole ("quite close") she is his soul, the soul demanded by the “architectonic” body: "En-livening” a building by sacrificing a human being presupposes, though, the transfer of that being’s soul from their flesh body to the stone body of the building. In other words, being a sacrifice, by the ritual death, the body changes. That being doesn’t come to live in the building, but is “incarnated” in it. That’s why it was sacrificed through a “violent death,” in order to continue its life – and for much longer that it would have done in its flesh body – in a new, architectonic body." 3
Being "incarnated" into the structure, Ana gives meaning/ rost and becomes rost/ the join, the one who binds/ sustains the elements of the con-struction (and also managing this third space and its main content - the excrement 12 ); before the sacrifice, the con-struction of the wall could not endure - it returned to the initial state - it remained a “deserted and unfinished wall."
Easily we can see Ana as a metaphor for nature, the life that remains "quite close", but that cannot be entirely ex-cluded, or assimilated. 2 The natural "is often associeted with feminity."13
Ana is the wife/ the mother - who is sacrificed in order for the dream to be fulfilled.
This element - the dream is one of the key elements of the story. "For some, the dream is part of an ideology that snares and deludes.The dream is often portrayed as jingoistic. Self-determination, success, wealth/ rost, and acquisition are words often used to describe it. For some, the dream denotes a set of social and moral ideals." 14 The dream is the u-topia that through sacrifice, finds/ takes the land (in the name of an ideal/ meaning/ purpose/ rost). In the well-known legend of the Babel Tower, the dream can be built/ can become real, as long as the humanity is united in one language/ rost (meaning/ goal). ("I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you." 11) Modernity itself can be seen as a quest for the fulfilment of the dreams. 15 Unlike the premodern situations, the modern dream exists in only one version - the correct one, the other ones having no meaning, being simply abjects. With this dramatic re-writing, paradoxically, the borders are enforced - whitin these borders there is a "third world": the slums, the banlieues - the periphery. The conflict (the fight of modernity/ of the modernized center, seen as normality/ the correct narration/ rost against the ab-normal periphery, functions as the very basis/ purpose/ begründen/ rost of modernity) is not at all unimportant. 16
The periphery is par excellence de-layed, de-structured; the (common) narration/ rost-irea is missing - a post (or a non) Babel state. It is the "place where meaning collapses." 11 In mythical terms, the builders are incapable of building; without a sacrifice, the walls remains “deserted and unfinished." Without clear purposes/ goals/ rosturi, this place exists "only in an approximate way" 3 - it is a place of appearances: the builders are not builders, they only act as builders (they have no vocation 17), etc.
But the periphery parasites the center and needs a center in ordeer to exists - there is a permanent import of structure/ narration/ rost-ire from the center. The question is how this relation functions in-verse/ in the other direction? The way out, the possibility of exit is what the periphery offers. For the center, this possibility is very important - it makes the difference between an open system and a closed one (a prison): "In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates" 18 ( and what remains is the humour).
There are many famous exits; the true question is, "who dares to face the consequences of this conviction? The man with a metaphysical vocation is more rare than a monster. [...] For a Hindu prince was enough to see a cripple, an old man and a dead one to understand everything" 19 and to leave/ exit.
The border is the "place where meaning collapses." 11 , but it is also a place for regeneration - the frontier; the exit is the act of revolt, maybe the only one left. ("Permanent revolution is this putting into question of the self, of everything and nothingness." 20)
Bibiography:
1. Martin Heidegger, Bulding, Dwelling, Thinking (1951)
2. In The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt shows that although the nature/ life becames exterior, we cannot be entirely separete from it : "The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside the artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific efforts have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature."
3. Mircea Eliade, Comments On The Legend Of Master Manole (1943)
4. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his philosophy lectures says: "All the rules togheter give the meaning, and these are not fixed by ostensive definition. The rules of grammar are entirely independent of one another. Two words have the same meaning if they have the same rules for their use.[...] The rules constitute the meaning, and are not responsible to it. The meaning changes when one of its rules changes." Wittgenstein Lectures 1932-35. Edited by Alice Ambrose (1979)
5. The Romanian word "rost/ rost-ire/ rost-uire" has a the following meanings:
- mouth, peak, as it is a cognate from the latin word "rostrum", having the same meaning;
- to speak, as the function of the mouth, the ability to talk, but also the ability to pronounce, to make sounds, utter;
- language, as the result of speach, but also speach;
- saw, as a mouth with teeth, related to the ability of the mouth to cut something (into pieces);
- opening, space, interval (in constructions) that separates and links the elements;
- order, and to order, as the way the elements are organized;
- sense, meaning, purpose, justification;
- to provide something;
- social status.
From Constantin Noica, The Romanian philosophical utterance. (1970)
6. Peter Zumthor, Thinking Architecture (1998)
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1958)
8. Martin Heidegger, ”The Origin of the Work of Art (1965)
9. Slavoj Zizek, Architectural Parallax. Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle (2009)
10. "Thus, while the meaning of heimlich begins with "belonging to the house", or familiar, or friendly, as it is eaborated it turns into something concealed or kept from sight, "finally becoming the negative compound unheimlich: gruesome fear... ghostly...a hounted house... thus heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich." David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000).
11. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection (1982)
12. David Morley, quoting Cara Mertes (There's No Place Like home: Women and Domestic Labour) sees the femin role (inside a house) as the manager of the dirt: "Feminity has been, at least in part, defined by how women manage dirt. The solution for the middle-class housewife, at an earlier stage, was to hire servants to do this work for her, and thus "dirty" themselves rather than her ( these servants being replaced, in the post-World War II period, by mechanical appliances) so that she was simbolically removed from the contact with dirt and thus clean for her husband. A woman who had servants to deal with dirt was perceived as "more feminine, more ladylike" while the "negative, unfeminine connotations of dirt had to be absorbed by the body of the servant" and "the good woman could be responsible for the disappearance of dirt in the home, but never had to touch it herself." in David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000).
13. "The local is often associeted with feminity and seen as natural basis of home and community, into which an implicity masculine global realm intrudes" - Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, power, place: explorations in critical anthropology (1997), quote from David Morley, Home territories:media, mobility and identity (2000). David Morley continues this idea with a quote (from Luce Irigaray): "Heidegger builds his philosophical "house" at the expense of the feminine."
14. John Roth, The American Dream (1997)
15. "The first boomerang effects of science's great triumphs have made themselves felt in a crisis within the natural sciences themselves. The trouble concerns the fact that the "truths" of the modern scientific world view, though they can be demonstrated in mathematical formulas and proved technologically, will no longer lend themselves to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these "truths" are spoken of conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be "not perhaps as meaningless as a 'triangular circle,' but much more so than a 'winged lion' " (Erwin Schrodinger). We do not yet know whether this situation is final. But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the help- less slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is." Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition (1958)
16. “What they could not risk was a life-and-death struggle, with no prospect of a compromise at the end; for, in this struggle, the less sophisticated combatant would survive.”
A.P.J. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy (1941)
17. "The original meaning of "to have a vocation" is "to be addressed by a voice/ rost." [...] Vocation, or the feeling of it, is not, however, the prerogative of great personalities: it is also appropriate to the small ones all the way down to the "midget" personalities, but as the size decreases the voice/ rost-ul becomes more and more muffled and unconscious. It is as if the voice of the daemon within were moving furthur and further off, and spoke more rarely and more indistictly. The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice/rost there is the voice/ rost of the group with its conventions, and vocation is replaced by collective necessities. But even in this unconscious social condition there are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable predjudices. "You are no different from anybody else," or, "there is no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid" and "most unseemly." For it is a "monstrous presumption to suppose anything of that sort could be of the slightest significance" - it is "purely psychological"."
C.G.Jung, The Development of Personality (1967)
18. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias (1967)
19. Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay (1949)
20. Julia Kristeva, Intimate Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis (1997)
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