Politeness, Experience and use: The problem of how buildings participate in society.
Politeness or beleefdheid plays an ambivalent role in Dutch social traffic. It has become more or less synonymous with bourgeois stiffness, intransigence and even outright hypocrisy.
That is not a good start. Even so, this essay is concerned with opening up a route within the geography of its significance that might lead us to rethink the basis for the role that architecture de facto already plays in social traffic; it proposes to establish the grounds of a building’s participation in society on a pragmaticist/existentialist argument.
The origin of the Anglo-French word politeness or politesse lie with the Latin verb polire, to clean and polish; invoking a world of social refinement, an art of presentation.[1]
This aspect is beautifully explored in André Comte-Sponville’s classic essay on politeness in which he convincingly argues that politeness is the first virtue (or excellence) and the origin of all the others.
Politeness he goes on to argue does not care about morality. Politeness is an adornment and we are rightly wary of artifice. Moreover there is no difference in being polite and appearing to be so, politeness concerns appearance: what you see is all there is.
Politeness is the first virtue not because it is the most important (although there are good grounds for arguing such a position) but because it simply comes before all the others have the chance to develop.
This is the case for an interesting reason; politeness, you see, concerns itself with the acquisition of manners without having to understand their purpose.
Later, when children have grown up to be adults, the reason for the manner and the manner itself are allowed to converge and join in what we might call moral behaviour.
As such politeness is a tool for acculturation and precedes true morality. Morality is at first nothing more than politeness: rules without their basis in understanding and experience. After all children do not yet have the frame of reference to understand why it is good to behave in a certain way and as such custom precedes its value in the education of a child.
Morality slowly ripens as polite behaviour finds its justification in a modus vivendi, a culture. But this should not veil the real mechanics of a moral society: “Good manners precede and prepare the way for good deeds. (…) Just as nature imitates art, morality imitates politeness, which imitates morality.”
By imitating virtue, Comte-Sponville writes, we become virtuous. Politeness precedes morality as practice and thereby makes it possible. In other words politeness constitutes the rules that have been distilled from the experience of a community living together. But it is not itself moral, because, as we all know, politeness can disguise hypocrisy and contempt.
Nevertheless politeness, argues Comte-Sponville, rescues morality form a circular causality, without politeness we would have to be virtuous in order to become virtuous. Politeness gives us the techniques of good behaviour so as to practise them and make them our own, slowly thereby acquiring the habits of living together well. But this, in itself, does not yet make politeness into good behaviour.[2]
The Dutch word Beleefdheid also refers us to the world of social skill, and more specifically to that of lived experience: beleefdheid is derived from beleving, that is to say perceptual experience and connotes a sensitivity to experience. As such it might have conjured up a world of spatial sensibility and perceptiveness had it not become badly tainted through the vagaries of Dutch social history.
Even so, the two words politeness and beleefdheid ultimately come together in the same or at the very least a similar set of practices, namely that of behaving well in society, that is, knowing the rules and using them to show due consideration to others, either by avoiding unpleasantness or, more positively, by behaving with a sense of generosity and goodwill towards the world at large.
At this point politeness becomes embodied as a set of worthwhile practices the purpose of which is understood. At this moment politeness spills over or generates the other virtues.
Behaving well in society requires spatial experience, proprioceptive refinement, perceptiveness, sensibility and know-how. These ideas will, I hope, serve us in answering the central question of this essay to which we will come shortly. First, two very short stories.
I have recently returned from a visit to Kyoto. The Japanese, to use a well-worn cliché, are famously polite. When this observation is offered in conversation back in Europe, it invariably elicits responses ranging from wistful admiration to neutralizing cynicism and even aggressive contradiction. I am not concerned with what such judgments do or do not say about the Japanese or indeed ourselves; what interests me is that the politeness manifests itself in the way the Japanese react spatially to the dynamics of a given situation.
Politeness is a bodily practice: prescribed poise, readable gesture and movement and modulated mutterings as well as well rehearsed facial expressions to negotiate the events in public space, to either neutralise the negative or provide a climate of benevolence within a social setting.
Their bodily know-how constitutes a well-prescribed culture of public spatial practice. Their spatial awareness governs the direction of the gaze; it directs what to select and what to ignore from the tableau presented to the our perceptive mechanisms.
At the same time their politeness reflects strangely on the built fabric of the city. Houses in Kyoto are generally turned inwards, screened from the outside by blind walls, plants, labyrinthine entrances with shifting axes, religious apotropeia, bottles of ritual water fending off bad luck and all manner of grills and gates to filter away the undesirable.
Moreover, many façades in Kyoto are little more than a ready surface for attaching the technological paraphernalia of modern interior comfort, especially air-conditioning units. The street façade of the average modern Japanese house in Kyoto is a screen, a mask and most of these screens, unlike their older counterparts, appear indifferent to the street as a place even though the street is kept immaculately clean by teams of municipal and domestic cleaners.
A few houses attempt to give something to the street in the way of potted plants, but they are fighting a losing battle and know it. At the same time, curiously, the party-walls of houses are generally so thin, and spaces so cramped that people are forced to share many of the by-products of their daily lives, in the way of noises, smells and the like, with their neighbours.
The riverbanks running through Kyoto are a favourite place for aspiring musicians to practise their instruments which would otherwise put too great a strain on neighbourliness. The conclusion would seem to be that during the heyday of the shoji screen, the flimsy hardware of spatial regulation was complemented by the refined software of spatial politeness in order to make living together possible. Japanese spatial organisation and spatial behaviour are, one would imagine, co-evolutionary products.
When I moved to Holland many years ago, the country my parents had left, I had to learn to perform in Dutch culture. I had to learn what to do and how to behave in specific, spatially determined situations. The ride was not as smooth as it might have been expected to be.
Having been brought up with the spatial practices of the English, I found the Dutch often worryingly direct, a characteristic I initially interpreted as rudeness; they did not, and do not queue, or stand to the right on escalators allowing the hurried free passage, smiles are not used in exactly the same way as in England, table manners differ and there is a delightful anarchism which happily complements a fixation with rules.
As with my experience of the Japanese, Dutch spatial behaviour does not, to me at least, translate intuitively into their built environment. There is a relationship, no doubt, but it is not easy to describe. Girded by a plethora of planning and building regulations, Dutch cities generally have well-organized public spaces: unostentatious, sober facades regulating the border between private and public with large open windows inviting the street into the house and the house into the street.
During the long winter evenings when rooms are ablaze with light and mysterious moving shadows, the streets become delightful theatres of domesticity.
These stories are mere observations, no doubt naïve, generalising and wrong however sincere I was in writing them down. That is their point. I hope they can be allowed to stand as I move on to the central question of this essay, namely: How do buildings participate in society? Can they be said to behave the way humans do? Should we be concerned about the way buildings behave in public space? Is there an architectural politeness possible and, if it is possible, is it also desirable?[3]
Description
Aesthetics concerns itself with the reasoning through of notions of fitting, coherence and consistency, with harmonies. So, in a modified pragmaticist tradition, aesthetics is a discipline that should also concern itself with the adequate description of desirable and undesirable qualities that fit with their context, their situation, their purpose etc.[4]
A quality is a relationship described or judged upon by the person undergoing that quality. The effort to make qualities communicable and realisable through careful generalisations demands a framework of judgment in which the continuity of experience and the constant critique of human action takes pride of place.
But this is where problems start to appear. In order to describe qualities so as to determine their desirableness we need something akin to politeness, which, for lack of a better word, I want to call prejudice.
We need a starting position that gives us purchase ont eh matter in hand; that is, we need a body of ready convictions, or habituated practices to serve as a sounding board against which that which comes our way in the form of the new or indeed the well-known, can be positioned and measured so as to help us define a position. In short we need a taste made up of values and norms.
These convictions and habits form a landscape in which a number of things come together, they include things learnt from others, accepted on authority, heard and found attractive, things reasoned through; in short a body of ideas, or as Gilles Deleuze might have put it, a body without organs, a set of abstractions which have been provisionally organised and thought through.
As soon as we know them for what they are, a loosely assembled body of prejudices and habits of thought, we need to test and if necessary overcome them. In other words we need to become well versed in the art of description and as well versed in the art of criticising those very descriptions to be able to formulate a well considered stand within this super-rich world of possibilities.
Critique does not happen by itself. A host of small problems present themselves; simple, unsolvable dilemmas appear: do we, for instance, want honest and sincere descriptions, accurate descriptions, or do we want imaginative or otherwise compelling descriptions?
All are potentially useful. But all have their limitations. Honest and sincere descriptions tell us how somebody would, within the limits of their ability and experience, describe their experience accurately. It tells us perhaps more about them than about what they are describing.
Accurate descriptions do not fare much better. Accurate descriptions measure the world carefully against current paradigms and axioms of explanation. They tell us more about what our current paradigms and axioms are than what it is we are describing.
The thing we are describing, das ding an sich, remains elusive and is only accessible through its behaviour relative to us and how we code that behaviour into colours, sounds, textures, smells and what not.
Imaginative descriptions give us the ability and means to explore new ways of experiencing things; that would be useful, were it not for the fact that this unbridled creativity often leads nowhere.
In reality all three types of descriptions work best when they are made to take account of each other and are forced to negotiate a reasonable ground for discussion.
Our complete frame of reference, and our working theory of the world as well as our skill in its application to daily life, determines our ability to undergo things well.
The dialectics between life and art, between experience and the artifices and fictions necessary to interpret them help to form culture and the quality of its experience.
Use
When things (units wrested from the continuity of the world and treated as entities, such as pens, buildings, bricks, nuts and bolts, large blunt objects, brooms etc) acquire the potential for meaning, they are being prepared for use.
That potential is conditioned in the widest sense by the limitations and possibilities of the human body in its environment. For a thing to acquire meaning is for that thing to be drawn into a culture of use and usage.
I have not been able to find an exception to this rule, which no doubt qualifies my definition of the word use.
Human being (in this essay mostly used as an infinitive) engages the environment through selection and territorialisation of the environment in use, with which I mean responding to situations by adapting behaviour for whatever aim is being pursued or whatever contingency presents itself.
The useful and the useless are criteria for the selection and subsequent composition of experience into what I call portraits of significance with centres and peripheries.
Portraits are more than just relational maps; they very specifically establish perspective, a view point, which centres a particular concern and allows the relations described to be determined by an ordered set of values.
In this way the word useless does not so much describe a category of neutral non-use, but rather a kind of negative usefulness. Some things are useful in being useless, in that they allow us to reject them and as such allow an ordering of values.
The useless is perversely useful in helping to centre and offset the useful.
To put it simply, the useless is useful in helping to articulate the useful by forming its background and its negative.
As soon as something is drawn into use in whatever way, it acquires a place in culture; it becomes part of the magic system of desire, norm and value.
I use the word magic here with some confidence. Magic as Collingwood defined it, is the power to affect the behaviour of other things without the use of contiguous force but by words and observation, attitude and belief, coded communication across distance i.e. without the necessity of touching that which is affected.[5]
Things touched with the magic of significance are thus drawn into use by way of magic.
Use, more specifically the potential for use, determines the composition of our portrait of the world, and thereby forces its unity.
You can see that I here use the widest possible meaning of the word use. Indeed I cannot help doing so. In order to understand the meaning of a word, said Wittgenstein, one must understand the way it is used.
Well, use is our most generic word, more basic even than being, doing and having, all of which are qualifications of it. Use is, I would suggest, a kind of primeval word, the word that forms the foundation of all our spatio-temporal relations.
Does it thereby become less useful? After all is it not the task of philosophy to describe the world precisely and do away with the generic? No. We need such a word to allow the fundamental realisation of the continuity of experience. We can become specific by developing a typology of use and usage, showing how each differentiates itself but also how it connects with its family tree.
In fact this already exists in the form of any dictionary where the world of use in the form of relationship, quality and significance is classed alphabetically and described.
But such a specified differentiation of use and uses cannot begin to deny that all these words at their root unite and make relation possible in use.
Use is what binds our experience of art to our experience of daily life. If the continuity of experience were not to be tolerated by disqualifying the usefulness of the word use because of its overly generic nature, daily life could no longer become the subject of art and that would be absurd.
We use aspects of daily life to reflect upon in art. We use art to reflect upon life in whatever way.
A thing, event or quality, shifts its place in our portrait of being and may lose its centrality if, for example, it is after all rejected as useless or it gradually becomes silent through familiarity and routine.
That does not in itself mean it has become less useful, it means that the nature of its usefulness has altered temporarily relative to the person who has built that particular portrait of the world.
When something extremely useful falls silent in our awareness of it, it also shifts its position within the portrait but does so by simply being taken for granted, like the floor of a building might be.
There are many ways that the useful changes the nature of its usefulness and withdraws to the periphery of a portrait and is even turned away from. Its usefulness then consists in being in that particular part of the portrait of significance.
Meaning then, is a use-condition. Meaning with reference to use determines culture. A culture could legitimately be described as a climate of meaning: that is a climate of uses and taboos, a morality of habit, a code of practices: best practices, worst practices and forbidden practices.
Buildings, as part of that culture of significance, in which they are used for all sorts of purposes and contingencies of which shelter and representation are only the most obvious, come to embody the meaning produced by the person with which they form a spatiotemporal and qualitative assemblage within a specific situation.
Buildings are in this sense both the product and the condition of spatial behaviour in that they are simultaneously consumed as part of spatial experience in order to produce social space as the space where our spatial practices, our thinking about space and the information held by space come together.
That reciprocity is the basis for a building’s participation in society, in a culture. So, that they participate in culture, even though that is obvious enough has now been given a basis in the concept of use.
But this is not enough. For buildings do not only participate in culture because they are useful and thus part of the ordering of values and significance, they do more. They are heterotopic, they are harbingers of ourselves, they are the other that reflect life.
After all use speaks both of the used and the user about use. How do buildings participate in the life of human being?
Analogy and judgment, the art of decision
The argument both for and against the idea that buildings possess enough of life to be said to have character and so to have the capacity to behave socially as part of culture has generally stranded upon the uncertain merit of analogy.
The psychologist might explain the mechanism of analogy by invoking man’s supposed anthropomorphism. We are, after all, very clever at finding patterns and the most basic anthropomorphic analogy is where the façade becomes a face, as in Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle where the garden front of the villa becomes an animated face when mum and dad move about the room and their growing and shrinking shadows make the villa appear to look around to see what is happening.
There are many more examples of such literalism, some even designed by architects who should know better.
Analogy cannot however explain the ground upon which buildings participate in society. It only explains some of the meanings we decide upon when we have decided that they do participate in society.
To give analogy the power to explain the ground upon which buildings participate in society is to mistake the symptom for the cause.
Analogies are powerful tools as they note similarities along a specific axis of comparison. However, by themselves, they do no more than that.[6]
The fact that we often use analogies to tie a judgment to an appearance in order to decide on an action, is irrelevant, as they do not, by themselves, constitute a relation beyond similarity.
Analogies hint at possibilities. For an affective relation to be established, a relation that prompts a judgment to be coupled to the appearance of a situation, an emotionally grounded decision has to be made, either by conscious deliberation measured against one or more authoritative paradigms or within the sphere of habituated practice, belief and acculturated norm.
Whatever its ground, the person making the judgment decides by applying the weight of emotion to cut into the stream of logical deliberation, thereby shaping and determining its outcome so that a given similarity or dissimilarity is made to matter.
This is an existential activity.
For analogies to help in this process, they must first be made to matter. For this to happen a person must experience whatever is in focus, whatever takes centre stage at that moment, as in some way useful/significant, so as to act on that experience.[7]
In deciding, a person takes matters into his own hands and takes responsibility for his decision. He may choose to invest his responsibility in an analogy, but he must decide to do that.
Any decision is weighted by emotion as it cuts through the fabric of logic. A decision is an answer and makes the person making the decision answerable for that decision.
It is always possible that he would decide differently on the basis of different experience, however hefted he is within his culture.[8]
Even so, a decision is intensely personal and its personal nature cannot be abrogated. He may believe he is giving his responsibility for a decision to a well-founded belief in some system or other, some scientific paradigm perhaps, or some authoritative person, but he is still responsible for offering his responsibility up in that way. He will never escape from what we might call the existential prison of circularity. He is, in a very real sense, doomed to freedom here. His belief is his responsibility.
The emotive weights upon which logic operates its pulleys, switches and levers, give shape to the particular game-rules that make a culture. These weights in the form of norms and values are established on the basis of our experience of being in the world, they are inculcated through upbringing, learning, exploration and practise.[9]
The topological relationship between judgment, behaviour and experience is, as such, dynamic and complex. Both adults and children have to learn to gauge a situation and to learn to judge well and practise that judgment as well as the effective behaviour that complements it.[10]
What does all this mean for our argument? Well it means something disappointingly straightforward: It means that we decide for ourselves how things participate in our life.
That decision makes use of whatever comes our way in the form of significance. This, in turn means that any decision is a litmus test placing us as people within the spectrum ranging from one extreme of madness to the other, with normality finding the balance between them somehow. This needs working out.
The literal anthropomorphism of the face/façade becomes more refined and polished, and, it has to be said, more interesting when we start ascribing character to a space or a façade.
When we ascribe character to a person, we read signs in the contortions, folds and etchings of a face, in the body’s movements, postures, gestures and its attributes such as clothing and other possessions.
However, we do no different when undergoing a building; in fact we read character in everything we come across in our search for the useful, knowing that search to be helped by linear and lateral thinking, by serendipity and analogy and rewarded by use.
We only stop to think about doing so when our judgment is in some way challenged and our behaviour is shown to be in some way inappropriate.
Character pertains not to the object to which a character is ascribed, but to the use relationship between the object and the viewing subject.
Character is thus the product of communication; it is an aspect of meaning and makes appropriate and intelligent response possible.
In the ascription of character we look for signs in the assemblage of partial objects (i.e. those parts and surfaces of objects that are engaged in the perceptive process) of which the significance is rooted within our experiential context.
The signs contained in the tableau that is presented to our senses bear, or come to bear significance on the basis of experience, discourse, practise and desired or contingent usage.
While sensing the character of a space we are looking into a mirror and see, heterotopically, not ourselves as images, not mere analogies, but ourselves as composers, arrangers and musicians of our experience of the world.[11]
We see us in the shape of the work of art that is our personally built experience of things. It is us in that what we give significance is given that significance on the basis of our frame of reference.
Buildings show signs of use and thus of age which can, through the building of experience, be interpreted as to probable cause and possible consequence; buildings are interpreted as behaving in the sense that their appearance and organisational forces hold consequences for human being, they answer to codes of dress and spatial etiquette, they frequently help in maintaining our dignity by providing screens and calculated frames for our daily activities, and lastly they communicate about social and economic standing.
Through their work as instances of spatial organisations they lay the conditions for human movement and our behaviour. The idea of the façade being a face need not be taken literally for a building to acquire character; it already has that character simply by being involved in society. That aspect is crucial to the argument.
We tend to forget about the mirror bit, the fact that the life of buildings is a reflected life of disconsolate echoes and narcissistic reflections.
Before we know it we are busy ascribing specific qualities and character to the inert buildings themselves, rather than to their reflection of a more fundamental activity which is our ability to find. That is being too generous to the inert in my view. Let’s not become mystical: we are the artists of our experience; organised matter is just that: organised matter, part of the environment onto which we offload much of the work of memory, imagination and possibility, in a word significance.[12]
We organise that environment, or rather we organize our environment, the environment that is peculiarly ours in that it carries significance for us, which we may or may not communicate. The environment participates in our life but we are the active agents in that process of participation, we make it work for us by our ability to read significance.
It might be useful and efficient human behaviour to ascribe a quality to the object of our experience, it might save time and contorted sentences, and its usefulness may legitimise such practice to a certain extent, but philosophically it is crude. The argument presented here is that a philosophically more cogent view, in which reciprocity plays an important role, can help us in a practical way.
A quality or character can never be said to reside in the thing.[13] Quality and character, the proper subject for aesthetics to define, is what describes a relationship, the relationship between a person and a building in a situation, so that a relationship could be defined as the meaning that evolves in a person’s engagement with his environment.
It is the relationship that holds a building poised in bodily experience; the relationship is the aesthetic quality in the form of a feeling that we, for the sake of convenience perhaps, attribute to buildings. Rather than speaking of a quality belonging to a thing, it would be more accurate to use the metaphor of the echo.
A quality is the echo which is received by the person calling into the space around him. The building presents itself in its fullness, but its significance for man is determined by what the individual brings to it and takes from it, or to put it in a word, uses in the widest sense of that word.
The operational significance of the building will depend on the situation somewhat deictically, on the experience and skills of the undergoer as well as the object as shaped into possible significance by cultural practice.
But how is this difference useful to us? The difference between normal parlance where we attribute qualities and character to the object and this finer distinction is crucial because it devolves all of the responsibility for being what the object is purported to be from the thing itself and invests that responsibility instead in our ability to experience things.
Such a distinction encourages us to take our skill at undergoing and finding in hand and practise it critically. It also has immediate consequences for Nietzsche’s dual nature of aesthetics. He divided the study of aesthetics into an aesthetics of reception and an aesthetics of facture.[14] On the basis of the model presented here, the role of design and intentionality in design becomes certainly no more important than the ability to experience or receive the product. Both design and description become equally creative counterparts of each other; both of them are acts of creation able to change the world of experience. Intended meaning, that is, meaning or character designed, is, as we know, extremely sensitive to misunderstanding and the deictic contingencies of a situation. It tends to become hopelessly fragmented and corrupted by all but the most initiated receivers. On top of that there is the decided risk that initiation to intended meaning entails a closing of the mind to other possibilities, making interpretation academic, elitist and catechistic.
Experience, in the sense of undergoing, is a question of learning and practise, of athleticism versus laziness, of attention and care versus indifference. The world might present a tableau of perceivable facts but we compose their significance, modulate their message and centre the important and marginalise the unimportant. In a very literal way we portray the world given us for our use. This means that changing things can, crucially, also be a matter of changing our experience of things. We not only have to design and build well, but also have to undergo well for a building to reach its full potential. It means that, the experience of buildings is dynamic and changeable, fickle and whimsical, subject to temperament and at the mercy of our imaginative and empathic ability.[15]
At best these two ways of investing buildings with the possibility of heightened experience, that is, practised undergoing and intentional design, can bring each other to new heights through discourse and even rivalry, but the one no more deserves primacy than the other. Both are, by definition, equally creative and equally important, in a word emancipated.
We measure the world and study its behaviour against that which we know. When we say we know something, it is that we know the likely behaviour of something in a particular situation. A thing’s appearance is really no more than the way something behaves relative to our senses picking up on its presence in a certain way. It has been shown, for example that colour does not inhere in a structure, but that the structure is so structured that light behaves in a certain way when it touches the structure. Things don’t possess a colour, they colour when subject to the tectonics of behaviour. Behaviour whether as form or movement is all we ever really know. On top of that, form has its consequences with regard to our use. Shapes have implications. In this way it is hardly world news that we allow the magic of analogy to guide us in reading our buildings. We invest analogy with authority. We decide that this is a good idea. We know our bodies reasonably well; we know how to write our face and to read the faces of others best of all, for they tend to be extremely absorbing and informative, often relevant to our situation. Buildings are formed and organised with our abilities, experience and knowledge of the world, which in turn are powerfully conditioned by the spatial organization of the body and the body’s capacity to practise and become good at space.
At the same time buildings are also undergone with the help of that experience and knowledge. Nevertheless, the role of analogy in all this is precisely delimited. Buildings are the product and condition of human being used to house and organise human being. Human being moulds the building and the building moulds human being, which is a saying of Churchill’s.
Buildings live and behave in the way all inert matter lives and behaves when it is being organised and used by living beings: buildings live by proxy, much like a limb lives; they live exclusively in our use and experience of them. But this does not make their behaviour less important than our own. They participate fully in our lives. We are the ones looking for significance and this, together with the physical limitations of our bodies which govern the selection of what we can and cannot experience, conditions what we see and find useful and significant. Only through learning, practise and discourse can this significance be shared and made communicable.
Human beings are the composers, conductors, musicians and audience of their experience, using what is at hand, what is given in their environment to make something akin to music of their experience, which engages the whole assemblage of the body-in-its-environment.
The environment is given in its entirety, but a person selects that which is accessible and useful to him through practise and learning, centring that which is useful and desirable and pushing to the periphery or turning their back on the rest. In this way they recompose their environment and their place in it, for their own use and desire. Buildings are organised matter and organised in that way only with reference to us. They bear the imprint of people because that is what happens in the production and use of buildings. Their organisation with the work of the designer and builder as its operational agent ensures the life of that which has become organised, but only within the experience of human being. And because they are organised relative to our use, buildings can be said to live as reflections, as organised matter lives in the time we devote to them in our care and concern and in our discourse about them. They become invested with life as organisations.
Organisation
Their liveliness is not due to analogy. Analogy merely makes things interesting. Their liveliness is possible due to their participation in our organisational activities on the basis of our decision to make them participate. We decide to allow them to participate, because we find it in some way useful to us. It is useful to see the facade of a building as a sign for something. Organisation, that is the creation of significant and working assemblages, is what life is and everything that is affected by organisation participates in the life from which proceeds that organisation.[16]
If organisational activity by an agent is what could invest the inert with a life that can be measured by its consequences, then buildings have that agent in the form of us human beings, and as a result become an active part in our behaviour as a society, and always have. In this they are not just context, they are part of an assemblage, a special collection, subject to metabolism with the larger collection of the environment as a whole, in which human being forms a centre, constantly absorbing and exchanging bits of itself in order to maintain that being.
Buildings form part of the assemblage that is our being-in-the-world. Even so, their forms behave just as our behaviour manifests itself in form, in movements, gestures and the like. Buildings are a condition of our behaviour; they help set the stage and impose conditions by the behaviour of their form: they are ontologically co-extant: our being conditions and is conditioned by their being. These conditions range from the physical to the social and psychological and there is no clear border between them. That is because the links are furnished by the magical reach of analogy where literally everything can be brought into relationship with everything else through the observance of even the most naïve similarities. Use as a fundamental requirement of human being does not respect categories of any sort unless they are useful and only for as long as they are useful.
Madness and responsibility
This frighteningly arbitrary relationship between appearance and judgment, between opinion and action, an arbitrariness which aesthetics, architectural theory and criticism have fought against throughout their history, is basic to human being as intentional use. It cannot be changed: we can choose to act on anything. We can decide anything on the basis of anything, there is no necessity to be found there, except the necessity of that truth.
Madness in all its forms and guises is just around the corner. Sanity will not be brought into aesthetics by denying the arbitrary and whimsical nature of such relationships, a fact which Hume had made the basis for his empiricism. This arbitrariness will have to be argued through to the end. The means used to make buildings mean something in society may in many cases be helped by analogy but not the fact that they participate in society in the first place. That is down to our decision to make them participate, a decision that is our responsibility.
Responsibility as it is used here, focuses on the ability to respond. As we are able to respond to buildings, we decide to do so. It is useful to us as it give us information we find helpful in preparing ourselves in social space. Nor is the fact that buildings participate in human society down to organisational involvement by itself, even though that goes a very long way to explain the way they become involved. As I said, the fact that buildings participate comes down to straightforward existential decisiveness and use. We decide that they participate, and we decide the manner of their participation, the way we use them based on whatever crazy or sensible ideas we have about the world around us, as long as we find them compelling and/or useful in whatever way. We find it extremely useful for buildings to participate in society, to be signs, systems and supports of our society. It makes society more communicative and allows us to respond with greater sophistication to our environment.
As ridiculous as it sounds, we can choose not to read the signs, abuse the system and subvert the supports. There is no necessary relationship between the sign and its referent, between the system and its working parts or between the support and the supported. All that is decided upon; it is decided by people, for themselves, on the basis of cultural norm perhaps, experience or some other ground and it is helped by pattern finding mechanisms such as analogy.
We may wish there to be a necessary connection; and we often pretend there is. But there isn’t. For the sign, system or support to work we need to find their working to be compelling in some way, which means we simply need to find it useful; but who says it needs to work? We do. This gives us huge scope for seeking out our responsibility in making our environment significant. So what is the role of analogy?
Analogy furnishes one of the means for the connection between signs and their possible meanings, it is a highly imaginative art where connections depend on resourcefulness but thereby can help to make experience infinitely varied and rich. Analogy does not provide the motive for drawing buildings into society and social behaviour and the culture of judgment that entails; it merely furnishes a means of forming judgments when buildings are already part of society.
So what happens now that the participation of buildings in society comes down to a simple decision? Behaviour, as we posited earlier requires practise and know-how, experience and perceptivity. This is why Winston Churchill’s slogan about us forming our buildings and them forming us is so compelling. It shows how the body and its environment together form the assemblage in which behaviour activates society and becomes effective, even though situational response is complex and stochastic, rarely fully predictable.
The body is never without its environment and in order to understand the body, you need to understand the fully braided world of which the body is an intricate part and to which it has a specific and unique relation through its senses, and its cognitive history.
Behaviour with its reward of social ease and even social success can be refined, sharpened to the cultural spheres one is part of. With practise you can become good at undergoing or, to use Henri Lefebvre’s much more compelling concept, producing social space, you can become athletic and refined at producing space, not just proprioceptively, but experientially.[17]
Undergoing is a form of production, just as consumption is, in fact, a form of production in an endless process where any thing is what Heidegger calls, a mere bestand, a particle in the metabolism of the universe.[18]
If we are perceptive and take the development of our skills at undergoing space seriously, its potential significance reaches a manifold. When we undergo a building, it becomes charged with meaning relative to what we decide to find significant.
Athletic undergoers undergo athletically and have a gigantic range of significance composing their high resolution experience; slothful, unskilled or indeed unpractised undergoers on the other hand, do not, their experience pixelates into blunt and oppositional categories, is more quickly held back by (sub)cultural threshold.
Analogy is an art of description by which the world is prepared for use. We differentiate the world with reference to our use. If I say: “This building is selfish” I might ascribe to it qualities that are analogous to human selfishness, I will describe it as selfish no doubt because in its organisational behaviour and in the behaviour it elicits from us, it acts in some way analogous to a human selfishness. Nevertheless it is my decision to describe the building this way, to find it selfish and draw it into society in the way it will be at the mercy of whatever outcome that judgment has in the way of further action or accumulated experience.
My decision to judge it activates it as a member of society. It is as simple as that. It does not need to live in any other sense than by proxy, through my judgment of it, through my drawing it in as part of society. The “I” that is the self-circuit whereby the relationships between my body and my environments are coordinated, order the building to be (seen as) selfish and as such set it up as a coordinate in further discussion. If others do not see it as selfish, they are disobeying my order and then an interesting situation arises. Discussion will follow, even perhaps aggression and the problem will resolve itself in whatever way. But however we decide to act on the building, the building’s supposed selfishness is not the buildings’ selfishness, it is the quality that I find when undergoing it. I accuse the building of selfishness and I do so because it helps me in some way position myself with regard to it and the world we are both part of.
This has wide consequences. Because the person using that building by owning it, occupying it or being the designer of it might not be able to avoid taking account of what I feel: he might be a friend and as a result of that, upset at my harsh judgment of the building, or he might concur and cause the building to be pulled down, neglected, repaired, whatever…
My finding is where the quality of selfishness resides and my finding is an act of cashing in experience for an emotive judgment. It is the finding of the quality, the formulating of an opinion that is important and becomes more so when someone, my friend for example, takes up the challenge and either agrees or disagrees with me.
The building is forced into quality in relation to me. And whoever has the care for the building and feels the need to respond to my judgment, may or may not alter the building in some way or (which is the same thing in terms of the logic of this game) choose to preserve it in exactly the state it was found in, which is in itself only a special kind of alteration. In short, any building is forced to participate in society by proxy. It lives through us and we live through it. It becomes part of our organised sphere. Our DNA organises our body relative to the conditions of the environment the body develops in and we organise the environment for the purposes of making our body safe and comfortable.
An accusation in the form of a judgment such as this building is selfish (but any adverb, adjective and even substantive constitutes an accusations or a imperative to be so) draws the building into human discourse and becomes a point around which our finding assembles feelings, opinions and intentions that can lead to action or affect.
A building’s selfishness when described can be qualified, denied or affirmed, and action can then be undertaken to either alter that quality by altering the building or the experience of it. Do not make the mistake of believing that this participation by proxy is in some way less real than the participation of humans in society. You can of course, and that will affect your attitude and as a result your actions with regard to certain situations, but by virtue of that very fact you have silently undermined your nicely hierarchical sense of reality. Life by proxy, although it would take too long to prove here, has the annoying property of being really rather hard to distinguish from life itself and soon gets lost in a maddening witch-hunt for false categories and divisions. Everything imaginable has its share of reality, by being what it is in use and effect. There are no good tests for the real.
This model of life by proxy creates a very weird world indeed, a world where form and behaviour are so intimately connected that they constitute aspects of each other. Behaviour forms and form behaves. In fact everything behaves and behaviour is the only thing that one can grasp of a thing. A thing’s form is the way it behaves in space, relative to you.
We know things by the way they behave as forms as surfaces, as textures. That behaviour is by definition a relation to the person observing or being affected by the behaviour of a form. This model means that every relationship is a determination of quality and quality is itself nothing but the determination of behaviour of an assemblage relative to the person undergoing that assemblage. The terms the relationship engages as quality are not determined a priori but limited through possibility and experience. And they are wide indeed.
The limits of possibility and experience tend to be defined by the body’s capacity and by culture as a set of practices shared and discussed by people who have, until now at least, tended to share the same place, space and time, the same climate confronting similar situations. To live situations well, that is with due reference to the body and its environment as a necessary unit must surely be seen as an act of politeness. But the concept well has the annoying quality of being claimed by a particular perspective on society, not least the one enjoying hegemony at the time when it is being qualified.
Well, just like good and beautiful are metawords, empty shells for which we need to challenge the user for further specification. Politeness has in it the power to make culture petrify, for it comes in codes and has to be learnt and accepted. It is not intrinsic to human being. It must be obvious that some forms of generosity and well-willing need to contradict the laws of politeness. The kind view of culture is that one could see it as an attempt to lay the foundations for this living well. Unfortunately, selection is a process that quite often singles out strange behaviour as successful within subcultures. So that living well becomes a relative thing. Selfishness or egoistical behaviour could theoretically be seen as desirable behaviour in a culture that promotes such behaviour, which quite a few (sub)cultures do.
Conclusion
It is important to emphasize that no specific means of forcing a building in to quality, that is, into participating in society, is intrinsically better or worse than any other. No way of experiencing or designing a building is intrinsically better than any other.
Sophisticated ways of experiencing a building or designing a building are merely that, more sophisticated, more athletic, but they, as Nietzsche rightly pointed out, only gain value with regard to use. Only through the purpose that is requisite to use and the perspective and directionality of behaviour that is requisite to use, do certain ways of participation, experience and design become better than others.
Human being cannot avoid use and it has a forgivable wish to preserve itself and its environment, to explore its will to power and fulfil itself as being subject to possibilities and limitations. Only a bleak and rather ridiculous nihilism would require us to give up on use. And what would be the use of that? The wish for a society in which human being and its environment is given a worthy place is no mean ambition. The achievement of that, just as any other aim gives us an aesthetic and ethical framework within which to judge good and bad, better and worse.
Is then an architectural politeness possible, and if it is, is it desirable? Buildings, as long as they are judged by humans within the framework of human use, will be participants of society. There is no choice there. They are as such forced into quality, forced into a dynamic relationship with us. Being forced into quality, we begin to take a stand on the quality we find in them. Being put within the framework of human use they are also judged within the framework of human possession. Human possession is the activity of claiming the privilege of use.
Possession is part of human self-technology. This is partly the reason that it is useful to read buildings as signs, because they are immediately recognised as possessed by someone and as such must somehow contain useful information. As technologies and instruments of self, they are read as signs of human behaviour and as signs of human behaviour they are themselves subject to behaviour, behaviour that we, the undergoers of their spatial experience read and make significant to ourselves. If they behave as participants of society, their politeness is possible.
To what extent is politeness desirable in human society? Are manners a good idea in general terms? This draws the debate on architecture into the more general debate on the virtues of politeness with which this essay started. Of course it is a good idea to make our world pleasant to be in, and to avoid unpleasantness as much as possible. Of course it is a good idea to behave generously and with goodwill towards others, of course it helps me and society as a whole.
With the model of society whereby we try to furnish a place for everyone in a helpful environment, regardless of their belief, ability, colour or gender, even politeness which is the activity of good behaviour regardless of intentions is always to be preferred to its direct opposite, rudeness regardless of intentions, which is just as sensitive to the charge of hypocrisy as politeness can be. Where politeness transcends the mere learning of rules to become the activity of spatial awareness and spatial consideration for others it becomes an architectural activity of well-willingness and, as such, generous in its directedness towards others so as to benefit the self. Illness helps to mellow one’s view of what is good and bad.
I have decided that I do not like the bodily chemistry of aggression and anger; I find I sleep badly when I feel the knot of revenge and I sleep well after physical exertion, hard work and the undergoing of the sublime. But that is me. What about you?
As far as politeness is concerned one needs to ask when politeness helps and when it hinders? And when it hinders, whom does it help and to what end? When does politeness, as a way of being experienced in a culture, athletic in one’s spatial awareness and concern for others within that culture become stultifying and prohibitive to change or the development of others? When does being good and skilled at playing a society, at playing public space become dangerous to the well-being and liberty of others?
If a building is experienced as selfish, it is more generically experienced as bad and unpleasant, and whatever is thought to be the cause of that badness, deserves to be challenged, either by action, that is design or, alternatively by rethinking it in ones’ experience, or indeed both. If selfish means that buildings appear indifferent to their surroundings, hindering some purpose, then we shall either have to redesign them as taking account of their surroundings, or, offer ways of rethinking their role in social space.
When discussing Japanese politeness, I am one of the wistful admirers who cannot avoid an aftertaste of cynicism. I like politeness, but I do not like what it often appears to cover. I am certainly very sceptical of any form of catechisation, whereby meaning, that is the link between judgment and appearance becomes too strongly codified to ignore a situation’s deixis. I am glad I have learnt to live in Holland, not because I think Holland is such a great country but because it posed an extraordinary challenge to my conception of the world. I have learnt to deal with directness and although it sometimes makes things rather hard and rough edged; I have learnt to cope with it. I have, probably naively, come to see it as a condition for openness and an open architecture is wonderful, but it requires confidence and occasionally even a rejection of the sensitivities of others. It requires one to sometimes claim public space as one’s own, forcing others to take account of you. It demands rules as well as a critical attitude to them.
At the same time, when I visited what might legitimately be described as one of the most the most beautiful assemblages in the world, the Katsura Detached palace in Kyoto, I loved the obvious love, the attention, the care and the skill that went into the fitting together of a wooden column and the stone that acts as its foundation; I loved the desire and the wish to have it so, and for it to be so private and intimate, so full of spatial consideration and thought; I loved thinking of its admirers and imagining them seeing it as a sign of whatever sign they saw it as, but while I was admiring it, I could read it my way. Politeness in architecture is a question of beleefdheid, that is, it is a question of learning to experience well, of being spatially aware and sensitive.
Great architecture however, does not behave well or badly, it shifts the way we perceive the world and becomes a coordinate for the judgment of good and bad behaviour. Great architecture, like great thought, great science, great art, alters the paradigms of society and thus behaviour in its entirety. Architecture as with everything that lives by proxy, behaves by virtue of our decision to involve it in our lives, our allowing it in when it presses itself against our senses, our mood.
The role of the designer, if they are well-willing and generous, is to design buildings in which experience is enriched through the spatial consideration of comfort, practicality, adventure, curiosity, resonance, surface depth, surprise and wonder at the wealth of the everyday, coaxing experience to refine itself, encourage the undergoer to want to exercise his skills and perceptual fitness, to unleash his analogical and metaphorical imagination and test his organisational flexibility so as to find the extraordinary even in the ordinary. An architectural politeness must certainly not descend into ritualised catechistic behaviour in which everything and everyone is kept in their place for fear or someone’s convenience. A properly polite architecture might start, I could imagine, where the Smithsons would have the designer look, namely at the spatial morphology of the small pleasures of life.
[1] David Summers, Real Spaces, World Art History and the Rise of Western modernism, Phaidon, (London, 2003) p. 86 ff.
[2] André Comte-Sponville, (2002), A short Treatise on the Great Virtues, The uses of philosophy in everyday life, transl. Catherine Temerson, William Heinemann. Originally published in 1996, pp. 7-15.
[3] For an earlier treatment of politeness in Architecture see my The Necessity of Architecture, A study of Edward Lacy Garbett’s concept of architectural politeness, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Leiden, 1996. Also interesting is A. Trystan Edwards, Good and Bad Manners in Architecture, (Alan & Co., London, 1924) a book worryingly concerned with keeping people and institutions in their proper place. The work on character in architecture is considerable starting with Vitruvius and receiving considerable impetus in eighteenth century France with Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Le génie de l’architecture, ou L’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations, (1780) as well as English associationism.
[4] Charles Sanders Peirce, “Aesthetics”, in: Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, eds. Charles Hartshorne & Paul Weiss (Cambridge Mass., 1960) Vol. V., §122
[5] For a compelling description of magic see R.G. Collingwood, Principles of Art, (1938)
[6] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, and Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (1973) The Prose of the World, the four similitudes
[7] In this sense it is interesting that the word decision comes from the Latin decider, to cut off. In other words, in the language of Antonio Damasio, the process of logical reasoning does not itself reach closure. The process of logical reasoning has to be cut off by something that has enough emotional weight to matter and drive thought into disjuncture. In order to pre-empt any query with regard to the difference between conscious and subconscious experience I presuppose no fundamental discontinuity between the abstractions conscious and subconscious, which have become hypostatized categories. Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, Joy Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, (Harcourt, Orlando, 2003)
[8] I use the word hefted on the basis of Andrew Ballantyne’s interpretation of Deleuze’s concept of territorialisation. Andrew Ballantyne, Deleuze and Guattari for Architects, (Routledge, London, 2007) This book contains a very cleverly explained but narrower interpretation of the concept than I believe necessary for my purposes.
[9] The use of this phrase is, as far as I am concerned, sanctioned by Wittgenstein’s later work, Philosophischen Untersuchungen (1953)
[10] By giving such primacy to experience and the body I align myself to the recent phenomenological/neurological work of Varela and Mark Johnson Marc Johnson, The Meaning of the Body (Chicago Chicago Univ. Press, 2007) as well the work on phenomenology and existentialism by the circle around Hubert Dreyfus. See his latest work Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall, eds., A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, (Blackwell, Oxford, 2008) which meshes extraordinarily well with the pragmatist aesthetics of Peirce, Dewey and James.
[11] I base my use of Foucault’s concept on Foucault’s text. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967)
[12] On the relation between the environment and memory see Daniel C. Dennet Consciousness explained, (Bay Back Books, New York, 1992)
[13] Gilles Deleuze, “Hume”, in: Pure Immanence, Essays on A Life, (Zone Books, New York, 2001), pp. 35 ff.
[14] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: In Science, Nature, Society and Art. Transl. by Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale, (Random House, New York, 1968) § 811.
[15] Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893, (Getty Center, Santa Monica, 1994)
[16] The idea of organisation as fundamental to life comes from Bergson’s controversial but unfairly dismissed l’évolution creatrice, (1907)
[17] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, transl. Donald Nicholas-Smith, (Blackwell, London, 1991)
[18] Martin Heidegger, “Das Ge-Stell”, later published in a reworked version as “The question concerning technology” (1953); Brent Batstra, “Over de aard van succes en de staat van de mens” (Unpublished article, written 2008)