Multiple Horizons: Phenomenology, Cubism, Architecture

Abstract

Phenomenology is often described as a paradigm shift that calls for a re-assessment of inherited themes and concepts. One of its most important contributions is the central role given to the embodied subject as opposed to the conception of the disembodied subject that has dominated philosophy since Descartes. If perspectival painting best represents the paradigm of modern philosophy since the Renaissance, it is the multiple perspectives of Cubist painting that best represent the phenomenological paradigm. While the relationship between phenomenology and art has been widely studied, my aim in this article is to focus on the way in which Cubism represents the embodied, horizonal structure of our perception, and then to discuss the new form of contemporary art installation as an actualization of Cubist principles in the age of digital reproduction. The embodiment of the subject necessarily involves intersubjectivity, for others appear in the subject’s contextual frame of public space. While for Arendt the shift from private subjective space to public intersubjective space is effected through dialogue, I argue that it is also effected architecturally, for architecture facilitates dialogue by offering multiple perspectives on common space and shared time. I suggest, finally, that architecture’s multiperspectival strategies offer the humanities a useful model of a multidisciplinary methodology.

Notes

1. James Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood: Alterity and the Phenomenology of Obligation (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 51: “The understanding fostered by the sciences is global. Scientists all over the world share their results, collaborate, and make progress together. The universal understanding that science expresses ignores racial and political boundaries. Crossing borders without difficulty, its collective enterprise declares itself to be open to anyone independently of his or her cultural background.”

2. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 49, 50. Putnam calls this perspective “externalist realism”: “The world consists of some fixed totality of mind-independent objects. There is exactly one true and complete description of the way the world is. … I shall call this perspective the externalist perspective, because its favorite point of view is a God’s Eye point of view.” Opposed to this, Putnam vindicates the internalist point of view: “There is no God’s Eye point of view that we can know or usefully imagine; there are only the various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve.”

3. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, ed. Charles Adam et Paul Tannery, in Œuvres de Descartes (París: Vrin, 1996), vol. 6, 33: “Next, I examined attentively what I was. I saw that while I could pretend that I had no body and that there was no world and no place for me to be in, I could not for all that pretend that I did not exist. I saw on the contrary that from the mere fact that I thought of doubting the truth of other things, it followed quite evidently and certainly that I existed. … From this I knew I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing, in order to exist” (my translation).

4. Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood: “Only the ‘I’ of the ‘I think’—the ‘I’ that grasps the primary, numerable qualities of bodies—is taken into account. This is the ‘I,’ Descartes assures us, that can be considered apart from the body. The gain here is in the universality of our understanding. Since selfhood is reduced to the status of a disembodied, pure observer, each observer is substitutable for any other. Each can perform the same crucial experiments and observe the same results, since each limits himself to the selfhood that is a correlate of these abstract and measurable aspects of reality. There is, then, a double abstraction that makes possible the universality of science. We abstract from the embodiment of both the scientist and nature. The nature that is the same for everyone is the nature that is graspable in terms of universal, mathematically formulatable laws; this is the nature that has been stripped of its sensuously embodied presence. The same holds for the scientist whose observations can be universally confirmed. All the cultural and physical particularities that set this individual apart have been discounted” (52).

5. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, Gesammtausgabe 2, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 1976), 54. See also Otto Friedrich Bollnow, El hombre y el espacio, trans. Jaime López de Asiain y Martín (Barcelona: Ed. Labor, 1969), 23, 24; originally published as Mensch und Raum (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer GmbH, 1963.)

6. For the objective (or common) concept of time, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §§78–82.

7. Erwin Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica, trans. Virginia Careaga (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2008), 24; originally published as Die Perspektive als “Symbolische Form,” ed. Friz Saxl. Vorträge (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1927): “If perspective is not a factor of value, it is surely a factor of style. Indeed, it may even be characterised as (to extend Ernst Cassirer’s felicitous term to the history of art) one of those “symbolic forms” in which “spiritual meaning is attached to a concrete, material sign and intrinsically given to this sign” (this and all subsequent quotations from this book are my translations).

8. Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 64–78.

9. Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica, 39: “It is not too much to claim that a pattern of tiles used in this sense (pictorial motif that will henceforth be repeated and modified with a fanaticism only now entirely comprehensible) represents the first example of a coordinate system: for it illustrates the modern ‘systematic space’ in an artistically concrete sphere, well before it had been postulated by abstract mathematical thought.”

10. Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica, 49. “The history of perspective may be understood with equal justice as a triumph of the distancing and objectifying sense of the real, and as a triumph of the distance-denying human struggle for control; it is as much a consolidation and systematization of the external world, as an extension of the domain of the self.”

11. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 153. As Heidegger says, we are not disinterested spectators but actors committed to, and in, the world. However, what characterises a situation or perspective (our historical world) is that we can never find it in front of us, as in that case the situation would no longer be a situation, a point of view, it would become an object of knowledge, which then would not determine us anymore; on the contrary, it would be we who determine it through a pre-established method. But if we cannot exit from a situation, then we can never truly know it. As Heidegger says, what is important is not to exit this circle (hermeneutic circle), but to enter it adequately.

12. What we say about Cubism can be said of art in general, especially of painting; this is Eliane Escoubas’s claim in “Painting,” in Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, ed. Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree (Heidelberg: Springer Dordrecht, 2010), 251: “Here painting would put into work the ‘how’ (das Wie)—the eidos (aspect)—insofar as the aspect is no being, but the appearing of that which appears.” See also Tani Toru, “Appearences,” in Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics, 18.

13. This aim is also that of human science, as Mensch puts it: “What is required is a shift in our paradigms. We must move from the scientific model of understanding through observing and abstracting to one of understanding through embodying and particularizing. A corresponding shift is required in the notion of the self that understands. The observing self distinguishes itself from its object, which it regards at a distance. In Descartes’s paradigm, this self is autonomous and disembodied. It grasps its objects, not through the senses, but through the understanding that abstracts, counts and measures. The embodying self, by contrast, understands through overcoming the distance between itself and its object. Its understanding is through its own states. ... They express what is common to its sensuously embodied environment. The paradigm here is understanding through flesh. Universalization, rather than abstracting from the fact of having an embodied standpoint, takes flesh as its prior basis” (Ethics and Selfhood, 54).

14. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Band I, in Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana 3/1, ed. Karl Schuhmann (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 86–89. Husserl calls these parts, sides or foreshortenings “Abschattungen;” for a commentary, see Robert Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations: How Words Present Things (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 89–93.

15. Husserl, Ideen, §41.

16. Edmund Husserl, Studien zur Arithmetik und Geometrie, in Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana 21, ed. Ingeborg Strohmeyer (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983), 282: “The representation of the identity of the object [is] mediated. I have a sensation of unequal angles, yet I judge them as equal. The square must ‘appear’ with unequal angles [in such and such relations], when it should have equal angles. The parallelogram is the appearance of the square, and represents the square to me.”

17. Toru, “Appearences,” 18.

18. Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica, 14: “Exact perspectival construction is a systematic abstraction from the structure of this psychophysiological space. For it is not only the effect of perspectival construction, but indeed its intended purpose, to realize in the representation of space precisely that homogeneity and boundlessness foreign to the direct experience of that space. In a sense, perspective transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space. It negates the differences between front and back, between right and left, between bodies and intervening space (“empty” space), so that the sum of all parts of space and all its contents are absorbed into a single quantum continuum.”

19. Husserl, Ideen, §41, 85. Husserl differentiates between aspects or nuances (Abschattungen) of form and colour.

20. Panofsky, La perspectiva como forma simbólica, 14, 15: “[Perspective construction] forgets that we see not with a single fixed eye but with two constantly moving eyes.”

21. Arnold Gehlen, Imágenes de época. Sociología y estética de la pintura moderna, trans. J. F. Yvars and Vicente Jarque (Barcelona: Península, 1994), 139: “In this way many of the famous paradoxical novelties that were introduced by Cubism are explained, for instance, the procedure of offering several simultaneous points of view of the same thing in the same painting: precisely, the merely optical reference is not presupposed, but the thing in itself, to the essence of which belongs the quality of uncovering itself through its different facets… [Cubism] rehabilitates the very same singular object in the array of all its properties” (my translation from the Spanish). Originally published as Zeit-Bilder. Zur Soziologie und Ästhetik der modernen Malerei (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1960).

22. James Mensch, Embodiments: From the Body to the Body Politic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 25. See also Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood, 155.

23. For analyses of the perception of an object in space, see Husserl, Ideen, §§41–44; for a systematic summary of these analyses, see Sokolowski, Husserlian Meditations, 86–93.

24. Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 97.

25. Husserl, Ideen, §81, 182. The main points he had reached on immanent time were already summarized in his lessons of 1905–10 (Husserliana 10). Later, Husserl confesses his dissatisfaction with those results, and picks up the theme in the so-called Bernau Manuscripts of 1917–18 (Husserliana 33), and in the courses combined together as Analysis of Passive Synthesis from the years 1920–21, 1923, and 1925–26 (Husserliana 11).

26. Husserl, Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: aus Vorlesungs und Forschungsmanuskripten 1918–1926, in Gesammelte Werke, Husserliana 11, ed. Margot Fleischer (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), §27, 125.

27. Dalibor Vésely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 338.

28. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 214–15; originally published as “Das Kuntswerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduziertbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), vol. 1, pt. 2.

29. Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 62.

30. Groys, Art Power, 63.

31. Groys, Art Power, 64: “Because the distinction between original and copy is entirely topological and situational one, all the documents placed in the installation become originals.”

32. Groys, Art Power, 64, 65: “To be an original and posses and aura means the same thing as to be alive. ... The practices of art documentation and of installation... develop strategies... of inscription based ond situation and context, which make it possible to transform the artifical into something living and the repetitive into something unique.”

33. Mensch, Embodiments, 5.

34. Hannah Arendt, La condición humana, trans. Ramon Gil Novales (Barcelona: Paidós, 1993), 59; originally published as The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1958): “[The term ‘public’] means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity” (all quotations from this book are my translation from the Spanish).

35. Arendt, La condición humana, 59, 60: “For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. … The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.”

36. Arendt, La condición humana, 67: “Under the conditions of a common world, reality is not guaranteed primarily by the ‘common nature’ of all men that constitute it, but rather by the fact that, differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object. If the sameness of the object can no longer be discerned, no common nature of men, least of all the unnatural conformism of mass society, can prevent the destruction of the common world, which is usually preceded by the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to human plurality.”

37. Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 232: “The city, which is to say, the concrete space of human beings together, is the space in which we are constantly engaged in a process of negotiation of self and other, through the relatedness to one another in our corporeality, including the corporeality of speech, and that is enabled through our mutual engagement with the multiple present thing.”

38. Arendt, La condición humana, 62: “This world… is related to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands. … To live in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time.”

39. Arendt, La condición humana, 64: “Only the existence of a public realm and the world’s subsequent transformation into a community of things which gathers men together and relates them to each other depends entirely on permanence.”

40. Arendt, La condición humana, 107, 108: “Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its labouring… these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used.”

41. Arendt, La condición humana, 185.

42. Mensch, Embodiments, 82.

43. Arendt, La condición humana, 185.

44. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 228–30.

45. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 230: “If the focus in Benjamin’s work is said to be on the image, then the image can be understood either in terms of a mode of presence of the thing or its absence. Understood as the mode by which the thing is present, then the image, which is never a single image, but always multiple, can be said to allow a coming into presence of the very multiplicity that is already given in the thing. ... What the proliferation of the image can enable—whether that proliferation arises through the movement of the city-street or the cinematic projection—is a realization of the manner in which the thing always supports a multitude of images, without the necessary loss of the thing itself. Indeed, it is through that proliferation that the thing as thing is itself made available.”

46. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 231.

47. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §65. Heidegger calls temporal “ecstasies” a past, present and future, in the sense that each is outside itself in the others, forming a unity or original intertwining. Temporality is not obtained as a sum of the ecstasies, but by each being permanently dislocated in the others. Here I am following James Mensch’s paper, “Remembering and Forgetting,” presented at the World O.P.O Conference, “Reason and Life: The Responsibility of Philosophy,” Segovia, Spain, 19–23 September 2011.

48. Arendt, La condición humana, 67: “This can happen under conditions of radical isolation, where nobody can any longer agree with anybody else, as is usually the case with tyrannies. But it may also happen under conditions of mass society or mass hysteria, where we see all people suddenly behave as though they were members of one family, each multiplying and prolonging the perspectives of his neighbour. In both instances, men have become entirely private, that is, they have been deprived of seeing and hearing others, of being seen and being heard by them. They are all imprisoned in the subjectivity of their own singular experience.”

49. Arendt, La condición humana, 67.

50. Jacques Rancière, El espectador emancipado, trans. Ariel Dilon (Castellón: Ellago Ediciones, 2010), 64; originally published as Le spectateur émancipé (La Fabrique éditions, 2008).

51. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 231: “Benjamin’s project, then, is one that is directed at the constant excavation of such traces, and the recuperation of the lives of things in the life of the city.”

52. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Convolute M2, 4; originally published as Das Passagen-Werk, Band 5. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982).

53. Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, 232: “The idea of the thing that emerges here, and that is tied always to multiplicity… is actually an idea that is essentially bound to a certain conception of the public realm that is exemplified in… the specific form of the built city. The theme of transparency that one finds so prominent in Benjamin (the transparency that he takes to be an essential characteristic of modernity) is, once again, not a transparency that is to be understood in terms of a loss of self, other, or of thing, but rather in terms of the essentially embeddedness of things, their nesting, in relation to other things, of their mutual incorporation and implication. Moreover, the multiplicity of the thing is directly tied to the multiplicity of the public realm which is itself made possible through its unification in the thing as singular.”

54. Vésely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, 344.

55. Arendt, Hannah. Hombres en tiempos de oscuridad, trans. Claudia Ferrari (Barcelona: Gedisa, 1992), 159; originally published as Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968).

56. Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood, 54.

57. Mensch, Ethics and Selfhood, 54.

58. See Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 34, 35. According to Malpas all philosophical thinking is topological.