Towards a Theory of Cavernous Porosity

Abstract

This paper explores the metaphor of the cave as an attempt to scrutinize the normative notion of theory as a vertical and skyward construction. By highlighting the Enlightenment’s legacy of normalizing theory’s relationship to natural light and incorporating geological time into its construction, it explores the contrary mode of the cavernous theory and its capacity to think beyond monumental time as a unit of architectural duration.

Keywords:

• Antigone
• Walter Benjamin
• Cave
• Plato’s cave
• Luce Irigaray
• theory

Notes

¹ Sigmund Freud, “Beyond The Pleasure Principle,” in On Metapsychology – The Theory of Psychoanalysis: ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, ‘Ego and the Id’ and Other Works (London: Penguin, 1991), 275–338.

² Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: re.press, 2008).

³ Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 2007), 253–264.

⁴ Ibid., 262–3.

⁵ Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

⁶ Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.

⁷ Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (New York: Cornell University Press, 1985).

⁸ Ibid., 320, 244.

⁹ Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 187.

¹⁰ Giorgio Agamben, “The Prince and The Frog: The Question of Method in Adorno and Benjamin,” in Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (London: Verso, 2007), 117–137.

¹¹ Ben Woodard, On an Ungrounded Earth: Towards a New Geophilosophy (New York: Punctum, 2013), 52.

¹² Reza Negarestani, “Undercover Softness,” in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development, Vol. VI, ed. Robin Mackay (Farnham: Urbanomic, 2012), 402.

¹³ Ibid., 403.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art Volumes I and II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).

¹⁶ Ibid., 653.

¹⁷ Ibid., 649.

¹⁸ Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1996), 347–363.