Leach Camouflage

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Camouflage
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THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND

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Camouflage neal leach

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2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or
mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval)
without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142.
This book printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

[to come]
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Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Part 1
Mimesis 000
Sensuous Correspondence 000
Sympathetic Magic 000
Mimicry 000
Becoming 000
Part 2
Death 000
Narcissism 000
Identity 000
Paranoia 000
Belonging 000
Part 3
Sacrifice 000
Melancholia 000
Ecstasy 000
Conclusion: A Theory of Camouflage 000
Notes 000
Index 000
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L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S
[list to come]
viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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P R E F A C E
We human beings are governed by a chameleonlike urge to blend in with our

surroundingsto camouflage ourselves within our environment. We need to
feel at home, and to find our place in the world. This book analyzes this desire,
and its consequences for architectural design. Working within a range of over-
lapping and intersecting theoretical perspectives, the book offers a constella-
tion of different outlooks which together provide a framework for rethinking
the way we relate to the world, and for reevaluating the role of design in that
relationship.
In taking a positive approach to the role of aesthetics, Camouflage provides a
dialectical response to The Anaesthetics of Architecture, a polemical book which
criticizes contemporary architectural culture for offering an escapist, aestheti-
cized outlook on the world.1 Camouflage attempts to reveal another side to aes-
thetics, and argues that it has a positive social role to play in helping us to relate
to the world. This book, then, is intended as both a foil and a supplement to The
Anaesthetics of Architecture.
At the same time, what is offered here is a means of rethinking the question
of identification with place beyond the limitations of the discourse of dwelling
derived from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. This discourse has become a
prominent paradigm within architectural culture, and has influenced a whole
generation of texts about architectural theory.2 It is constrained, however, by a
certain outlook, which looks back to the past as though it constituted some kind
of golden age whose standards may be aspired to, but never equaled in the pres-
ent. In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their envi-
ronment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which
valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.
Camouflage also offers a more progressive outlook in political terms. It takes
its inspirations from thinkers, such as Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin,
ix PREFACE
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who were associated with the tradition of critical theory. It also seeks to draw
upon insights from psychoanalytic theory, especially the work of Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacana domain that has remained relatively underexplored within
architectural culture, but which, as this book seeks to demonstrate, offers a
range of productive insights for architectural thinking.3 Yet the book does not
claim to offer an authoritative account of either critical theory or psychoanalytic
theory. Instead, it should be read as a creative work in its own right, to be judged
according to its contribution to architectural theory in opening up new ways
of understanding how human beings relate to the world.
Camouflage is addressed, perhaps, less to architecture itself than to the sub-
jective processes by which human beings experience architecture. But it does
offer some important insights for architectural design. For if, as is argued, we
human beings have a desire to adapt to our surroundings, it is surely the task of
design to facilitate that process. However, the book does not offer any prescrip-
tive suggestions as to what form that design might take. Rather, what is sketched
out here is a certain sensibility toward design that might be articulated in dif-
ferent ways, according to specific cultural and material conditions.
The book is illustrated with some exquisitely beautiful photographs by
Francesca Woodman, many of which depict her seemingly absorbed by her en-
vironment. But the interiors shown are somewhat anonymous. Nor does the text
make many references to particular buildings. This is deliberate. The intention
is to encourage readers to think creatively about the message being conveyed,
and to interpret it in their own terms. Camouflage is intended to offer a relatively
timeless reflection about architectural design, but a reflection which none-
theless bears a particular relevance for contemporary architectural production.
x PREFACE
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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
This book has been several years in the making, and it is not easy to recall all
those who have contributed to it. Moreover, one of its central themes concerns
the unconscious way in which knowledge is often assimilated. Let me attempt,
nonetheless, to draw up a list of some of those who have supported this project,
directly or indirectly.
Let me first thank those who have provided me with my initial intellectual in-
spiration. It is perhaps not insignificant that the ideas here were first expressed
in a public arena in a Festschrift for Joseph Rykwert, with whom I published
my first book, a translation of Albertis treatise on architecture. Through his
writing, Joseph has been a continual source of inspiration for me. I should also
mention the late Catherine Cooke, whose lectures on Russian constructivism
inspired me greatly while I was a student at the University of Cambridge, and
sparked my initial interest in theoretical concerns.
I would also like to thank my academic colleagues over the years, especially
those connected with the MA in Critical Theory at the University of Notting-
ham. Here I should single out Matt Connell for his insightful advice on the work
of Sigmund Freud, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor W. Adorno. But I would also
like to thank my students, from whom I learned probably more than they ever
learned from me. Darren Deane stands out as someone who triggered some of
the initial ideas in this book, but I should also mention Yael Brosilovski, Ioana
Sandi, and Sarah Chaplin.
Yvonne Sherratt provided a vital early sounding board for ideas about mime-
sis, narcissism, and the death instinct. Other colleagues and friends have also of-
fered me important feedback over the years. Here I should also mention Susan
Marks, Jonathan Hale, Jane Rendell, Bill Hutson, Andrew Bowie, Graeme
Gilloch, David Frisby, Andrew Benjamin, Mark Cousins, Mohsen Mostafavi,
Bernard Tschumi, Xavier Costa, Rosemary Wilson, Dana Vais, Tracey Winton,
xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Elizabeth Churchill, Andrew Ballantyne, Shirin Hommann-Sadaat, Laura

Ruggeri, Ikuko Sakakibara, Henrik Reeh, Carsten Thau, Anne-Elizabeth Toft,
Berrak Belgin, Ackbar Abbas, Kris Mun, and Alfred Jacoby.
I am very grateful to all those involved in the production of this book, most
especially Roger Conover, but also Patrick Ciano and Gillian Beaumont for the
care and attention they gave to the layout and content.
I would like to thank the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the
Fine Arts for its generosity in supporting the costs of the illustrations. Finally, I
would like to thank Betty and George Woodman for allowing me to reproduce a
selection of photographs by their daughter, the late Francesca Woodman. I feel
extremely privileged to be able to reproduce her work. Not only do I find her
photographs exquisitely beautiful, but I also feel that they convey very accu-
rately the sensibility that I have been trying to articulate in this book.
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Camouflage
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
In his movie Zelig, Woody Allen depicts a character, Leonard Zelig, who quickly
assimilates to those around him, growing a beard in a matter of seconds when
surrounded by men with beards, and changing his appearance to fit in with
others. This individual is discovered in various unlikely situations, blending in
with the New York Yankees training team, assuming the identity of a gangster
at an exclusive Mafia party, and then mutating into one of the black musicians
playing the accompanying music at that party. Zelig becomes a curiosity. A detec-
tive finds him in Chinese guise, and tries in vain to pull off what he assumes to be
a mask. Zelig is taken to hospital for observation, ranting and cursing in what
sounds like authentic Chinese, but minutes later he emerges looking distinctly
Caucasian. He is examined by psychiatrists, but turns into a psychiatrist himself.
And so it goes on. Leonard Zelig is the perfect human chameleon.
Zelig develops into something of a celebrity in 1920s America. Songs are
written to celebrate the Zelig syndrome: Leonard the Lizard, Doin the Cha-
meleon, Chameleon Days, You May Be Six People, but I Love You, and
Reptile Eyes. A movie, The Changing Man, is made about Zelig, and the Chame-
leon becomes a popular dance to rival the Charleston. Leonard Zelig watches,
pens, and even dolls go onto the market, but Zelig himself cannot escape his
condition.
Eventually he is taken in hand by a psychiatrist, Dr. Eudora Fletcher, and is
cured of his disorderat least temporarily. A relapse occurs when it emerges
that he has been living many different lives, has married several times, and has
committed a range of crimes, largely as a result of his condition. He is sued for
bigamy and several other offenses but slips away before the trial, only to be dis-
covered months later in Nazi Germany. National Socialism provides Zelig with
the ultimate anonymity. Although he wanted to be loved, notes Saul Bellow in
the film, craved to be loved, there was also something in him that desired
immersion in the mass and anonymity, and fascism offered Zelig that kind of
1 INTRODUCTION
opportunity, so that he could make something anonymous of himself by belong-

ing to this vast movement.1 Zelig is finally rescued by Dr. Fletcher, whom he
himself rescues in turn in an aviation incident fleeing the Nazis. Zelig assumes
the identity of a pilot as Dr. Fletcher collapses, and completes the worlds first
ever upside-down crossing of the Atlantic. He returns to the States a hero, mar-
ries Dr. Fletcher, and lives happily ever after.
The film offers a comical, charming story of a fictional, high-profile person-
ality. But behind the somewhat sensational story line lie the very real concerns
and anxieties of an ordinary person. The reason that Zelig gives for wanting to
blend in with and adapt to those around him is a common, everyday one: he just
wants to be liked. Zelig does not want to stand out from the crowd, and his
attraction to National Socialism is not as paradoxical as it may seem, for all such
mass movements are born of the desire to be part of a larger body. It could be
argued, however, that far from actually conforming, Zelig is using the tactic of
apparent conformity as a means of concealing his true sense of identity. In other
words, Zelig is suppressing his true emotions, as a means of preserving them.
This is an example of camouflage in its most literal form.
The exaggeration in Zelig is fairly transparent, and its appeal is that it captures
a fundamental tendency that is common to every human being. There is an ele-
ment of Leonard Zelig in everyone. As Bruno Bettelheim is heard to comment in
the film, Now I myself felt that his feelings were not all that different from the
normal, maybe, what one would call the well-adjusted normal person, only car-
ried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could
really think of him as the ultimate conformist.2 Far from being a freak, Zelig
comes to represent an all-too-common phenomenon.
The compulsion to conform underpins all human behavior. We human beings
are governed by trends. We follow fashion in our clothing, our hairstyles, and
even in our mannerisms and personal behavior; we subscribe to dominant ide-
ologies of taste in all aspects of our lifestyle. For to follow fashionalthough
supposedly an act of individual expressionmight be in fact an act of collective
behavior. We are often content to erase almost all of our individuality through
subscribing to cultures of conformity, most especially in religious communities,
military groupings, sports teams, and corporate identities. Leonard Zeligthe
2 CAMOUFLAGE
perfect human chameleonis not unique. The Zelig syndrome is a common

phenomenon. We human beings are largely conformist creatures driven by a
chameleonlike urge to adapt to the behavior of those around us.
The character that Woody Allen depicts has, however, a more precise signifi-
cance. Allen is clearly commenting on a particular group. Like many of Allens
films, Zelig has a strong autobiographical dimension. It is a film about a Jewish
migr in the United States in the early twentieth century. Leonard Zelig is
intended to exemplify, no doubt, the extraordinary capacity for assimilation
among the Jewish community. For Jews, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out, are infi-
nitely mimetic beings.3 As Irving Howe is heard to comment, When I think
about it, it seems that his story reflected a lot of the Jewish experience in Amer-
icathe great urge to push in and to find ones place and then to assimilate into
the culture.4
Yet the wandering Jew, it would seem, epitomizes increasingly the arche-
typal citizen of today: rootless and mobile, constantly having to adapt to new
surroundings. Leonard Zelig emerges as the paradigmatic model for the con-
temporary urban nomad. There is, perhaps, something to be learned from the
Zelig syndrome. In a culture of fluidity and flux, the increased mobility of life
today only exacerbates the need to find alternative mechanisms of belonging. In
such a context, the capacity to assimilate quickly can be seen as a vital mode of
survival in an ever-changing world.
URBAN CAMOUFLAGE
This desire to assimilate potentially contains within it a specifically archi-

tectural concern, in that assimilation involves a process of relating to the envi-
ronment. While that environment might include the appearance and behavior
of other human beings, it might equally be constituted by the surrounding
physical environment, the urban fabric of our cities, and the landscape of our
countryside.
Yet assimilation itself is not solely a physical operation. We should not over-
look the psychological dimension to this process. Beneath the urge to assimilate
at a physical level there also lies a desire to assimilate at a mental level. We have
3 INTRODUCTION
to think ourselves into the environment. Indeed, at times this whole process of
assimilation may itself be constituted by purely mental operations.
Let us imagine ourselves in what is, no doubt, a familiar scenario. We walk
into a hotel room, which is slightly unkempt. There is something about the room
that is not very appealing. The dcor is not to our taste, and the room itself has
seen better days; paint, perhaps, is peeling from the walls; the furniture looks
shabby and worn out; and there is a musty smell. Initially we feel a sense of alien-
ation. The room is unfamiliar. We do not feel at home in it. Nevertheless, we
unpack our bags. We put our toiletries in the washroom, and hang up our clothes
in the wardrobe. Gradually, as we lay out these familiar objects, the room seems
less alienating. But what is more curious is that after a night or two spent sleep-
ing in the room, what once seemed alienating and unfamiliar gradually becomes
familiar, to the point where we begin to feel almost at homemaybe we even
become slightly fond of the room, with its shabby furniture and musty smells.
We start to feel cosy there, and develop a sense of attachment. Somehow
almost imperceptiblya shift has happened. What once appeared foreign and
alienating now appears familiar and homely.
This is, of course, a principle that operates not just in hotel rooms but in all
forms of habitable space, from apartments to palaces, and in all urban condi-
tions, from villages to cities. Indeed, it extends to regions and entire countries.
Environments which were once unfamiliar become appropriated within our
symbolic horizons, so that with time they come to appear deeply familiar.
Nothing is alienating forever. Eventually any space will become familiar.
This principle seems to manifest itself even in extreme examples, such as pris-
ons. With time prisoners often grow so attached to their prison environments
however cramped and unpleasant they may seemthat when they are released
they may find it difficult to structure their existence. It is as though they have
become so much part of that environment that their identity is somehow con-
stituted by it. The prison may come to frame their whole existence.
Consider, for example, the following remarks of a former inmate at Alcatraz,
the one-time United States penitentiary, now museumone Leon Whitey
Thompsonon his relationship to his cell:
4 CAMOUFLAGE
I knew every mark , every thing in that cell. And pretty soon that cell
became like part of me or I became a part of the cell. I couldnt visual-
ize living anywhere else in the prison than in my cell. It was like com-
ing back and greeting an old friend really, because it was part of me. 5
The inmate, it would seem, had so assimilated himself to his physical environ-
ment that, in effect, he had begun to read himself into that environment, and to
see himself reflected in that environment. This is all the more remarkable,
given that a cell in Alcatraz can hardly have been the most sympathetic environ-
ment in which to live. Yet arguably, it is precisely because of the harsh conditions
that the inmate responded in this way. It is as though the only way to survive an
environment as alienating as Alcatraz is to identify with it. The inmate becomes,
as it were, part of his cell, and his cell becomes part of him. Assimilation emerges
as a mechanism of defense.
This is not dissimilar to the case of Nelson Mandela, who, following his
release, had a bungalow built for himself that was an exact replica of the one in
which he had been held in prison in Paarl, South Africa. Mandela was in a posi-
tion to choose almost any design, and yetremarkablyopted for one asso-
ciated with the traumas of prison life. It is as though his assimilation to the
bungalow had served as a means of overcoming those traumas. As a result of this
process of assimilation, he had begun to see himself in terms of the bungalow. He
had begun to constitute his identity through it, so that, in a sense, his bungalow
had become part of him. No doubt Mandela would have derived some comfort
from this process, and found a certain security for the future from living in a
building that had effectively become part of himself.
This can be traced back to a broader characteristic of human existence. It is
as though we human beings are dominated by a compulsion to return to the
familiar, or, when there is nothing familiar to be found, to familiarize ourselves
with the unfamiliar. So it is that we start adopting routines and familiar strate-
gies. We return to the same places, the same familiar bars, restaurants, and shops,
the same holiday locations, even the same lockers in a changing room, as though
these sites have been prescribed for us within the otherwise anonymous space of
5 INTRODUCTION
the universe. Like animals returning to their traditional breeding grounds, we

mark out for ourselves our own familiar territories. So it is that particular places,
as though enchanted, are endowed with some special significance. Just as certain
special numbers, linked to our date of birth or other personal associations, come
to be invested as though with magical properties, like numbers in the lottery, so
too particular places feature within our imagination as highly charged sites of
individual meaning.
We human beings, then, seem to have the capacity gradually to grow into
our habitat, to familiarize ourselves with it, and eventually to find ourselves
at home there. We are endlessly adapting to new environments. It is as though
a constant chameleonlike urge to assimilate governs human nature. Often this
urge may be compromised by other factors. There may be some further con-
siderationan association, perhaps, such as the memory of some unpleasant
eventthat prevents us from ever feeling at home in a particular space. Yet such
factors appear merely to mitigate what seems to be an underlying drive to grow
into, to become familiar with, and eventually to identify with, our environment.
This urge to make ourselves at home is an ongoing, adaptive process which
never ceases. It is one that remains within a constant state of flux. Indeed, it is
precisely the notion of home that illustrates best the adaptability of the human
organism. For home is a floating concept which can always shift from place to
place, even though it may take time to assert itself in each new location. Moving
home is seldom easy. It might involve a deep wrench from a familiar and com-
forting world. But it is by no means an impossible process. While fond memo-
ries of previous homes persist, the human psyche has the capacity to make
itself at home in ever new locations, and eventually to perceive these locations
as home.
Clearly this is a phenomenon which does not operate solely within a visual
register. It may apply equally to smells, touch, and sounds. Indeed, home is as
much a repository of sounds and smells, such as the odor of drying raisins that
Gaston Bachelard associates with his oneiric house, as it is of visual images.6
Smell and taste can often be far more evocative than appearance. A hint of a
familiar smell or tasteas in the case of Proust and his madeleinesmay cause
us to recall whole worlds involuntarily.
6 CAMOUFLAGE
Likewise the notion of home extends to include questions of motility and

spatial practices. Home may equally be constituted by a set of familiar actions.
The way in which we may climb a staircase, for example, or perform certain daily
tasks, like cleaning our teeth or folding clothes, can be absorbed into our famil-
iar world, to the point where they take on the status of highly charged sym-
bolic rituals. Through repetition, otherwise mundane actions can come to form
part of our stable symbolic frameworks. As such, these actions take on a deeply
meaningful role, operating as a fixed horizon against which to gauge our lives.
Through experiencing not only familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but
also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a cer-
tain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium
is disturbed.
From this we can surmise that home, and operations performed at home, are
linked intimately with human identity. The process involves a two-way interac-
tion. Not only do we grow into and become part of our environment, but our
environment becomes part of us. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role
in the forging of personal identities.
CONSEQUENCES FOR ARCHITECTURE
This desire to assimilate has a number of obvious consequences for the dis-
course of architecture. First, it suggests that our engagement with the built envi-
ronment is never a given, static condition, but an ongoing process of constant
adaptation. Architectural discourse has tended to focus on the objective nature
of buildingstheir style, methods of construction, and so on. It has seldom
addressed the question of how our perceptions of buildings might be mediated
by consciousness, and how these perceptions might therefore be freighted with
all-too-subjective considerations. Yet to overlook this question is to ignore a
fundamental factor in the way we understand and appreciate buildings. The logic
of assimilation is constantly affecting our perception of buildings.7
Time therefore becomes a significant factor, and one which deserves to be
integrated more fully into mainstream architectural discourse. While books have
been written about weathering, and about the performance of the building
7 INTRODUCTION
in time, none has yet addressed the question of how our own perceptions of a
building operate within a temporal framework.8 This relates not just to the ordi-
nary buildings of our everyday existence, but alsomost especiallyto individ-
ual designer buildings, intended, no doubt, to draw attention to themselves.
Eventually, all buildingseven the most startingly novelsink into our less
immediate levels of consciousness. Anything that is strikingly different will
inevitably become somewhat familiar and quite acceptable. It must therefore
remain the perennial fate of the avant-garde to be recuperated within the main-
stream. What was once shocking is soon accepted, and then overlooked, only
to be championed again in some aesthetic afterlife as part of a subsequent
stylistic revival.
Hence there is something to be said for perceiving architecture, as Gianni
Vattimo suggests, as a form of background. Rather than subscribing to the
notion of strong thought privileged by traditional metaphysics, we ought to
understand architecture in terms of weak thought. Architecture would there-
fore constitute a form of background ornamentation, as it were. It would belong
largely to our peripheral vision. Architecture, as a manifestation of Being, would
become, in Vattimos terms, an unnoticed and marginal event.9 There is an
analogy to be made here with background music. If, then, buildings are to be
understood like some architectural version of background music which delin-
eates the backdrop for our everyday actions, they should, perhaps, be designed
precisely with this role in mind. Individually designed object buildings should
give way to marginal landscapes more readily suited to their eventual role as part
of some background horizon of consciousness.
Secondly, if with time we absorb symbolically all that is novel, this will have a
significant bearing on debates about the reception of new technologies. For
what is unfamiliar, even alienating, will not remain so forever. We might there-
fore challenge traditionalists who argue that technology is a perpetual source
of alienation, for such an outlook ignores the human potential to grow accus-
tomed to the novel and the unusual. Innovations such as satellite dishes, which
might have looked disturbingly foreign when they first appeared, soon become
absorbedlike lampposts, traffic lights, road signs, and other street furniture
before themas part of the familiar language of the street.10
8 CAMOUFLAGE
Technology is soon appropriated as an extension to our bodies, like some

prosthetic device, so thatjust as we learn to drive a car through that carour
bodies come to operate through that technology. Like the experienced motorist
who will perform various operationsbraking, accelerating, and steering
without too much self-conscious thought, we absorb technology deep within the
realms of the unconscious. We now live our lives so much through technology
that we begin to see ourselves in terms of technology. Not only have we begun to
accept technology, we have even begun to identify with it. So deeply has tech-
nology embedded itself within our modern psyche that it has become part of our
definition of ourselves.
But thirdlyand perhaps most importantly for the trajectory of this vol-
umethis process of assimilation suggests that architecture, and indeed the
whole realm of aesthetics, can play a significant role in aiding these processes of
identification. For the principle that we all have a tendency to adapt to our sur-
roundings, however alienating they might seem, does not mean that design is
unimportant. On the contrary, it suggests precisely the oppositethat design
itself can facilitate this process of assimilation. Without resorting to nostalgia or
simple physical comfort, design can offer a mechanism for engaging with the
world that overcomes feelings of alienation. In this respect, design can provide a
form of connectivity, a mediation between individuals and their environment.
Design can contribute to a sense of belonging.
The significance of this potential is increased by the erosion of traditional
structures of belonging. The family, the hometown, the local church, and so on,
no longer carry much weight in a society where factors such as divorce, social
fragmentation, and a waning of religious interest have undercut their authority.
In an age of alienation, architecture may even provide an alternative mechanism
of identification. What holds true for architecture holds true for other forms of
representation within the field of aestheticsfashion, art, cinema, and indeed
all forms of design and creativity. Far from being a source of alienation, aesthet-
ics can be interpreted as an effective realm for forging an identity.
This points toward a broader concern. For the urge to identify with our phys-
ical environment is merely a manifestation of a larger desire to establish some
connection with culture as a whole, and to overcome the threat of alienation.
9 INTRODUCTION
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So we might posit that the role of design is not to forge a link between ourselves
and our immediate environment but, rather, to allow us to feel connected with
the lifeworld in general.
CONTENTS
The first chapter, Mimesis, analyzes the process by which we identify with the
world through Walter Benjamins theory of mimesis. This linguistic theory
argues that we find meaning in the world through the discovery of similarities.
We are therefore inclined to model ourselves on the world, and make ourselves
similar to it. According to Benjamin, it is children who have the greatest capac-
ity to blend in with their environment in their games of hide-and-seek, and so on.
Perhaps, then, there is something to be learned from the behavior of children
from their openness and their powers of imaginationif we want to fully com-
prehend the mechanism by which we identify with our homes and architectural
spaces.
If we have this natural urge to assimilate to our environment, what role might
the environment play in facilitating that process? The second chapter, Sensuous
Correspondence, looks at how Theodor W. Adorno extends Benjamins concept
of mimesis from a process of passive assimilation to one of active creativity. It
explores which modes of aesthetic expression might enhance this process of
assimilation. For Adorno, the action of mimesis is akin to the effects of love. It
involves a moment of yielding. By extension, an architecture of mimesis would
be an architecture, in Adornos terms, which might encourage a certain sensu-
ous correspondence with the world. Thus, out of Benjamins linguistic theory of
mimesis, a new theory of aesthetic creativity emerges.
There is a slightly magical, shamanistic edge to this process of assimilation. It
is as though we have to cast a spell over ourselves in order to make ourselves part
of our environment. This magical dimension to the process is interrogated fur-
ther in the chapter called Sympathetic Magic, which considers how models
and all forms of modeling owe something to the logic of enchantment. If voodoo
dolls can be seen as models invested with properties of an originary person, so
that they bear some connection to that person, cannot the same principles be
10 CAMOUFLAGE
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seen to hold true for architectural models and representations? Cannot models
and other forms of architectural representation, in other words, be viewed as
being endowed with certain magical properties that allow them to exceed their
role as scaled-down versions of future buildings, to become vicarious wish-
objects which serve potentially to invoke and conjure up those buildings?
Assimilation to the environment can be compared to the principle of mim-
icry. The next chapter, Mimicry, seeks to interrogate this principle by refer-
ence to Roger Cailloiss seminal study of the behavior of insects which blend in
with their environment. It is important to recognize, however, that standing
out is the corollary to blending in, and is also part of the logic of mimicry. What
begins to emerge is a picture of creatures whoat different timeswish either
to stand out or to blend in with their environment, and whose identity is depen-
dent on that process. This can be taken as an analogy for our own human behav-
ior in relation to architectural environments. Architecture can therefore be seen
as a background horizon against which, by a process of both identification and
differentiation, we begin to establish our individual identities.
Another way to reflect on this process of assimilation is through the concept
of becoming developed by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, also partly in ref-
erence to insect life, in terms of the interaction between a certain wasp and an
orchid. Deleuze and Guattari observe how the wasp has adapted to the orchid,
and serves to transfer pollen from one orchid to another. But the orchid has
also adapted to the wasp. The wasp has become the orchid, and the orchid
has become the wasp. Becoming is a process of interaction that may be com-
pared to Benjamins and Adornos notion of mimesis, and that, like mimesis,
exceeds mere mimicry. The chapter called Becoming explores this concept,
and considers how it might inform our understanding of the relationship
between ourselves and our environment.
One of the assumptions in the identificatory moment of assimilation is that,
as animate creatures, we can somehow equate ourselves with our inanimate
architectural surroundings. This introduces a distinction between life and death,
animate and inanimate. Either we play dead, and become inanimate like our
surroundings, or we animate those surroundings, and make them like ourselves.
These processes may be interpreted through the discourse of psychoanalysis,
11 INTRODUCTION
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for which the life and death instincts remain fundamental impulses. It is the dis-
tinction between Medusa, who turned everything that met her gaze to stone,
and Daedalus, who reputedly had the capacity to bring statues to life. This theme
of petrification versus animation is one that runs through this entire volume.
The next chapter deals with the concept of Death as it emerges in the work of
Sigmund Freud, and is developed by Jacques Lacan, and considers its relevance
to the way in which we relate to our environment.
Another myth central to this volume is that of Narcissus. As Narcissus gazes
at his own reflection in a pool, in a state of existential oneness, he turns into
marble and dies, before giving life to a flower bearing his own name. Narcissus is
emblematic not only of the sacrificial moment of surrender that underpins all
aesthetic engagement, but also of the potential for the aesthetic realm to serve
as a mechanism of identification. For the principle of specularityof seeing
oneself in the otherlies at the heart of all processes of identification. The
chapter on Narcissism explores the question of identification, drawing on the
observations of Freud, Lacan, and Herbert Marcuse.
The next chapter offers a theory of Identity based on identification with
the built environment. Borrowing insights from the realm of Lacanian psycho-
analysis, the chapter describes the processes of mirroring which form the ker-
nel of identificationthe absorption of the external world within the self, and
the projection of the self onto the external world, so that the one mirrors the
other. Identity, it is argued, is grounded in an initial moment of identification,
but consolidated through separation. We must first connect with a given envi-
ronment, and then distinguish ourselves from that environment. The environ-
ment can therefore be seen to play an important role in the forging of an identity,
whether at an individual or a collective level.
Yet the mirror is seldom a simple mirror. The mirror may serve as a window
into another world, just as, in Alice in Wonderland, the looking glass serves as a por-
tal into a distorted version of Alices familiar world. The chapter on Paranoia
looks at another myth regarding aesthetic engagementthat of Daedalus bring-
ing statues to lifeand considers the case of the animating gaze. Working
through Freuds discussion of magic and animism and Lacans discussion of para-
noia and the anthropomorphizing potential of the gaze, this chapter attempts to
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elaborate a theory of animate knowledge as a further way of understanding how

we equate ourselves with our surroundings.
Another way to reflect on the process of identification is through the concept
of belonging, derived from Judith Butlers theory of performativity. This is
explored in the next chapter. Just as identity today is constituted through per-
formative gestures, so too an identification with place may be developed out of
the repetition of those gestures within a particular place. Through an accum-
ulative process of bodily re-memberings, a sense of belonging is built up, a
provisional form of attachment to place that can still accommodate ongoing
attachments elsewhere. Belonging therefore provides us with a model of identi-
fication with place which is in tune with the increasingly nomadic nature of con-
temporary existence.
Aesthetic contemplation involves a form of surrender, as the self is given
over to the other in the moment of contemplation. The next chapter, Sacrifice,
explores not only the myths of literal sacrifice that have been associated with
building construction, but also the sacrificial nature of aesthetic contemplation
itself. Sacrifice may serve as either a mechanism of vitalizationof giving a life
force to some otherwise inanimate object through the destruction of an animate
beingor as a mechanism of identification by overcoming the alienation im-
plicit in what Georges Bataille calls the productive expenditure of capitalist
society. Both amount to the same thing, in that vitalization of the environment
leads to an equating of the self to that environment, which in turn contributes to
a process of identification.
What happens, however, when this process fails, and the subject begins to feel
alienated and cut off from the world? The chapter on Melancholia explores
this condition and its relation to aesthetic practice. Melancholia, it is argued,
constitutes an internalization of psychic energies and a failure to engage with
the external world. In Julia Kristevas terms, melancholia serves as a form of
incarcerationa crypt of inexpressible affect. Aesthetic practice, even though
it is derived from a common origin as melancholia, may help to overcome this
condition. Aesthetic practice is therefore born ofbut, equally, transcends
melancholia. Here we glimpse the social potential of aesthetic practice to open
the self up to the world.
13 INTRODUCTION
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This process of engaging with the other, and of calling into question the
boundaries of the self, brings us close to the condition of ecstasy. The final
chapter, Ecstasy, explores how the aesthetic realm bears strong affinities to
both religious devotion and love. Themes of surrender, sacrifice, rebirth, revi-
talization, and identification are replicated within all three realms. Aesthetic
engagement, however, should never entail an uncritical absorption into the
other, as found in certain religious cults and obsessive conditions. It should
always involve a self-critical opening up to the other, where the boundaries of the
self are disrupted but never destroyed.
The volume concludes with a theory of camouflage, which is, in effect, a sum-
mation and distillation of the arguments put forward throughout the volume,
brought together as a comprehensive aesthetic theory. In offering a condensed
overview of the volume, the conclusion also provides a framework by which to
understand the connections between the individual chapters.
The theory of camouflage looks at the way in which the visual realm might
provide a mechanism of connectivity. It offers us a new paradigm for under-
standing how individuals identify with the world around them, and illustrates
the strategic importance of design in facilitating that process. Over and above
any negative critiques within recent cultural theory, the concept of camouflage
therefore points toward the important social role of the aesthetic domain as a
means of reinserting the individual within society.
14 CAMOUFLAGE
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1
Part
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M
M I M E S I S
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For Walter Benjamin, the bourgeois cosiness of the nineteenth-century domes-

tic interior is a kind of closeted dream-space: To live in these interiors was to
have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a
spiders web.1 Benjamin relates the experience of dwelling in these nineteenth-
century spaces to the process of fashioning a shell around the self: To dwell as
a transitive verbas in the notion of indwelt spaces; herewith an indication of
the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behavior. It has to do with fashion-
ing a shell for ourselves.2 This shell serves as an inverted mold of the self in
which we fit snugly, encased like a compass in a velvet-covered instrument case:
The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is

something age-oldperhaps eternalto be recognized here, the
image of that abode of the human being in the maternal womb; on the
other hand, this motif of primal history notwithstanding, we must
understand dwelling in its most extreme form as a condition of nine-
teenth century existence. The original form of all dwelling is exis-
tence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression
of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a
shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to
dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and
it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwellings
interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case,
where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep,
usually violet folds of velvet. What didnt the nineteenth century in-
vent some sort of casing for! Pocket watches, slippers, egg cups, ther-
mometers, playing cards and, in lieu of cases, there were jackets,
carpets, wrappers and covers.3
The problem of the twentieth century, for Benjamin, is that this sense of
dwelling has been stripped away. It has given way to the porosity and trans-
parency of modern living that is characterized by the anonymous hotel room:
The twentieth century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward
the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. . . . Today this
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world has disappeared entirely, and dwelling has diminished: for the living,
through hotel rooms; for the dead, through crematoriums.4 There has been an
important shift in cultural life. For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of
alienation. Human beings are no longer cocooned within their dwelling spaces.
Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something
has been lost.
Benjamin considers this condition problematic, because human beings need
to recognize something of themselves in their environment. This is what allows
them to relate to their environment, and find meaning in it. The capacity to
recognize similarities, he notes, is one of humankinds distinguishing features:
Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capac-
ity for producing similarities, however, is mans. 5 There is a natural urge in
human beings to seek out resemblances and invent correspondences with the
world. Every day, writes Benjamin, the urge grows stronger to get hold of an
object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.6 Moreover, as
Theodor W. Adorno adds, the urge to imitate and to look for similarities lies at
the heart of the human condition: The human is indissolubly linked with imi-
tation: a human being becomes human at all by imitating other human beings.7
What Benjamin is alluding to here is the theory of mimesis.8 For Benjamin, the
concept of mimesis allows for an identification with the external world. It facil-
itates the possibility of forging a link between self and other. It becomes a way of
empathizing with the world, and it is through empathy that human beings can
if not fully understand the otherat least come ever closer to the other, through
the discovery and creation of similarities.
Mimesis here should be understood not in the terms used, say, by Plato, to
refer to simple imitation. To reproduce something is to step beyond mere imi-
tation. Here Benjamin challenges the inherited view of mimesis as an essentially
compromised form of imitation that necessarily loses something of the original.9
For Benjamin, mimesis alludes to a constructive reinterpretation of an origi-
nal, which becomes a creative act in itself.
Mimesis in Walter Benjamins writing, as indeed in Adornos work, would
appear to be a psychoanalytic term, taken from Freud, that refers to a mode of
identifying with the external world. It is a term, as Freud himself predicted, of
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great potential significance for aesthetics: I believe that if ideational mimetics

are followed up, they may be as useful in other branches of aesthetics . . . .10
Freud writes about the term in the context of jokes. Mimesis is what allows us
to empathize with the subject of a joke. Here mimesis is clearly ideational. It
operates through the medium of the idea, and allows us to imagine ourselves as
someone else. In listening to the tale about the unfortunate individual who, for
example, slips on a banana peel, we put ourselves in the position of that individ-
ual by drawing upon corporeally embedded memories of personal experiences,
and imagine ourselves also slipping up. As Freud puts it:
When, now, I perceive a movement like this of greater or lesser size in

someone else, the securest way to an understanding (an apperception)
of it will be for me to carry it out by imitation. . . . But actually I do
not carry the imitation through, any more than I still spell words out
if I learnt to read by spelling. Instead of imitating the movement with
my muscles, I have an idea of it through the medium of my memory
traces of expenditures of similar movements. 11
What results is a form of empathy (Einfhlung) with that other person, which
constitutes a kind of emotional tie: A path leads from identification by way of
imitation to empathy, that is, to the comprehension of the mechanism by means
of which we are enabled to take up any attitude at all towards another mental
life.12 Crucially, however, there remains a critical dimension to mimesis. Indeed,
if we are to understand the joke as a joke, we must both identify with but also dis-
tinguish ourselves from the subject of the joke. We have to both empathize with
but also laugh at that individual.
To understand the meaning of mimesis in Benjamin, we must recognize its
origin in the process of modeling, of making a copy of. In essence, it refers to
an interpretive process that relates either to modeling oneself on an object, or
to making a model of that object. Likewise, mimesis may come into operation
as a third party engages with that model, and the model becomes the vehicle for
identifying with the original object. In each case the aim is to assimilate to the
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original object. Mimesis is therefore an operation that may be evoked both by

the artist who makes a work of art and by the person who experiences it.
For Benjamin, mimesis is a linguistic concept. It offers a way of finding mean-
ing in the world, through the discovery of similarities. These similarities become
absorbed and then rearticulated in language. In this way language becomes a
repository of meaning, and writing becomes an activity which extends beyond
itself, so that in the process of writing writers engage in processes of which they
may not be aware. Indeed, writing often reveals more than the writer is con-
scious of revealing. Likewise, the reader must decode the words through resort-
ing to a realm of the imagination which exceeds the logic of simple rationality.
The very process of reading implies an appropriationa claiming of the
objectand it is here, perhaps, that the parallels with hermeneutics are most
obvious.13
Thus the activity of reading also embodies the principles of mimesis, serving
as the vehicle for some revelatory moment. For Benjamin, the meaning becomes
apparent in a constellatory flash, a dialectics of seeing, in which subject and
object become fused for a brief moment: The coherence of words or sentences
is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.14 And elsewhere:
The perception of similarity is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. It
slips past, can possibly be regained, but cannot be held fast, unlike other per-
ceptions. It offers itself as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars.15
Mimesis can also be observed, according to Benjamin, in dance movements.
Here he opens up the possibility, which Adorno goes on to explore, that the prin-
ciple of mimesis can extend to all forms of aesthetic expression. So it is that
architecture and the other visual arts might be included within its range.
Mimesis constitutes a form of adaptation. We may see it at work when own-
ers take on the characteristics of their pets, and pets take on the characteristics
of their owners. We may see it at work also when a child learns to speak and adapt
to the world. In fact, it is precisely the example of the child growing into lan-
guage that best illustrates the operation of mimesis. The child absorbs an
external language by a process of imitation, then uses it creatively for its own
purposes. Similarly, within the realm of architecture we might see mimesis at
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work as architects develop their design abilities: it is this process which also
allows external forms to be absorbed and sedimented, and then rearticulated as
an individual expression. It is as though human beings are constantly absorbing
impulses from the external environment, and these impulses come to fashion
their background horizon of experience, against which all further gestures are
forged and dreams are molded. The rhythm of streetcars and carpet-beating,
notes Benjamin, rocked me in my sleep. It was the mold in which my dreams
took shape.16
Above all, mimesis involves a moment of assimilation. This is in line with
Freuds own thinking on the subject. For identification, according to Freud, is
based not on imitation as such but, rather, on an unconscious moment of psychic
assimilation: Identification, notes Freud, is not simple imitation but assimi-
lation on the basis of a similar aetiological pretension; it expresses a resemblance
and is derived from a common element which remains in the unconscious.17
Indeed, Adorno goes on to state quite explicitly that mimesis is not imitation,
but a form of assimilation: Mimetic behavior does not imitate something but
assimilates itself to that something.18
In mimesis imagination is at work, and serves to reconcile the subject with
the object. This imagination operates at the level of fantasy, which mediates
between the unconscious and the conscious, dream and reality. Here fantasy is
used as a positive term. Fantasy creates its own fictions not as a way of escaping
reality but as a way of accessing reality, a reality that is ontologically charged, not
constrained by an instrumentalized view of the world. Indeed, although mime-
sis involves a degree of organized control, and therefore operates in conjunction
with rationality, this does not mean that it is part of rationality, still less a part of
instrumental rationality. In this transcendence of the fixed boundaries of the
ego, the alienation generated by a world dominated by instrumental rationality
is suspended momentarily, and the reality principle is held in check. For an aes-
thetic engagement does not require a sense of separation from the world, as
instrumental rationality might promote, but a close affinity with it.
In terms of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, we might perceive mimesis as
constitutive not of rationality, but of myth, its magical other. Mimesis and
rationality, as Adorno observes, are irreconcilable.19 If mimesis is to be per-
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ceived as a form of correspondence with the outside world, then Enlightenment

rationality, with its effective split between subject and object, and its increas-
ing emphasis on knowledge-as-quantification over knowledge-as-sensuous-
correspondence, represents the opposite pole. In the instrumentalized view of
the Enlightenment, knowledge is ordered and categorized, valorized according
to scientific principles, and the rich potential of mimesis is overlooked. All this
entails a loss, a reduction of the world to a reified structure of subject/object
divides, as mimesis retreats even further into the mythic realm of literature and
the arts. In this sense the rich vein of mimesis that once permeated human exis-
tence, and led to a seemingly magical connection between human beings and
their universe, has withered away. The waning of mimesis is the waning of aura.
Yet the whole relation between mimesis and rationality is a complex one.
Indeed, mimesis depends on rationality. Mimesis itself contains rational ele-
ments which resist the total capitulation to nature constituted by simple mim-
icry. As Adorno notes: Mimesis only goes on living through its antithesis, which
is rational control by artworks over all that is heterogeneous to them.20
At the same time, mimesis might be seen to offer a form of dialectical foil to
the subject/object split of Enlightenment rationality that has come to dominate
contemporary life. This is most obvious in the case of language. Language
becomes the highest level of mimetic behavior, the most complete archive of
non-sensuous similarity.21 It is a medium into which the earlier powers of mi-
metic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point
where they have liquidated those of magic.22 The project of mimesis is there-
fore one of reconciliation and redemption that seeks to restore humankind to an
unalienated state of harmony with the world.
M I M E S I S A N D D E AT H
In One-Way Street, Benjamin describes a child playing a game of hide-and-seek:
Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child becomes himself

something floating and white, a ghost. The dining table under which
he is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple whose four
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pillars are the carved legs. And behind a door he is himself a door,
wears it as his heavy mask and as a shaman will bewitch all those
who unsuspectingly enter. At no cost must he be found. When he pulls
faces, he is told, the clock need only strike and he will remain so.
The element of truth in this he finds out in his hiding place. Any-
one who discovers him can petrify him as an idol under the table,
weave him forever as a ghost into the curtain, banish him for life into
the heavy door. And so, at the seekers touch he drives out with a loud
cry the demon who has transformed himindeed, without waiting
for the moment of discovery, he grabs the hunter with a shout of
self-deliverance. 23
The child has become so perfectly at one with the environment that he fears he
might never escape. Just as he might carry the burden of the face he is pulling, if
caught making the expression when the clock strikes, so he risks remaining cam-
ouflaged and absorbed into the environment. He needs to utter a shriek of self-
deliverance to free himself from the spell under which he made himself identical
to the interior landscape around him. Benjamin tells of a similar experience
when, as a child, he is trying to hunt a butterfly. He takes on characteristics of the
butterfly, while the butterfly begins to take on human attributes. But, signifi-
cantly, he needs to break out of this cycle in order to preserve his identity:
The old rules of hunting took over between us: the more my being,
down to its very fibres, adapted to my prey (the more I got butterflies
in my stomach), the more the butterfly took on in all it did (and didnt
do) the color of the human resolution, until finally it was as if captur-
ing it was the price, was the only way I would regain my humanity. 24
These tales reveal the delicate oscillation that operates in mimesis between
assimilating to the other, and not allowing ourselves to be trapped within the
other. Mimesis is no empty mode of surrender. On the contrary, it subscribes
to the logic of camouflage. It amounts to preserving the self against a certain
backdrop.
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Mimesis involves the capacity to mimic and identify not only with the ani-
mate world, but also with the inanimate. Indeed, Benjamin notes that children
may model themselves not only on animate objects, but also on inanimate ones:
The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill
and a train.25 These references to identification with the world of inanimate
objects reveal the capacity of mimesis to extend beyond language. Indeed, words
can be seen to provide access to the domain of architecture. It is through words
that one might assimilate to the inanimate. Words become the ideational
vehicles of corporeally embodied memory, a medium through which one might
imagine the world. As Benjamin notes: In time I learned to disguise myself in
words, which were actually clouds. For the gift of seeing likeness is nothing but
a weak vestige of the old compulsion to become and act like something else. But
words exercised this coercion on me. Not those that made me resemble models
of good behavior, but those that made me like dwellings, furniture, clothing.26
It is this ability to assimilate with the inanimate world which makes Benjamins
observations so relevant to the question of architecture.
These examples of the potential loss of self bring us to the question of how
mimesis, in its demands for an assimilation with the inanimate world, reveals a
link with the death instinct.27 The action of mimesis, as Miriam Hansen
observes, involves the slippage between life and death, the assimilation of life-
less material (as in the case of the chameleon) or feigning death for the sake of
survival.28 Lacoue-Labarthe also links mimesis to death: There is an unavoid-
able necessity of re-presentation . . . of death, and consequently of identification,
of mimesis.29
Hansen, however, is keen to distinguish between the positive and negative
forms of mimesisbetween a living, dynamic interaction and an uncritical form
that reifies itself in a form of living death. This is paralleled by Adornos dis-
tinction between the workings of the culture industry and the operations of art.
In the context of the culture industry, the concept of mimesis is obviously
dominated by the negative connotations of both an unreflected mimicry onto
reified and alienated conditions and the misguided aesthetic investment in imi-
tation.30 Within the culture industry, individuals compulsively mimic reified
commodity forms. Their faces freeze, and they become fixated before these
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objects. In so doing they surrender their mimetic desire to the universe of

death. Positive mimesiscritical, reflexive mimesisoperates in the oppo-
site trajectory. It seeks to counter this living death, even if, as Hansen observes,
it can never fully cure it: In the context of aesthetic theory, however, this mime-
sis onto the reified and alienated . . . world of living death, is a crucial means of
negation available to modern art . . . a pharmakon that allegorizes the symptoms
though it necessarily fails as a therapy.31
The play between the animate and the inanimate, between life and death, is
important for understanding the force of mimesis. The origins of this process lie
in the instinctual mechanisms of self-preservation. Animals, when trapped in
potentially life-threatening situations, will often freeze into seemingly lifeless
forms rather than run away. Through this action they attempt to blend with their
environment, and thereby escape the gaze of the predator. A similar trait may be
found in humans. The reflexes of stiffening and numbness, Adorno and
Horkheimer note, are archaic schemata of the urge to survive. By adaptation to
death life pays the toll of its continued existence.32 Thus, somewhat paradoxi-
cally, the feigning of death preserves life. Death is used in the service of life.
This is a tactic that represents not simply the subordination of the self to nature
but also an overcoming of nature, a defense against the dissolution of the self.
This surrendering of life in the moment of becoming one with the inanimate
world serves ultimately to reinforce life. These gestures of surrender are in fact
predicated on survival.
MIMESIS AND CHILDREN
For Benjamin, it is children who have privileged access to mimetic processes.

They have an almost magical potential to become part of their environment, and
to invest that environment with the potential to look back at them, just as Ben-
jamin describes how, in order to perceive the aura of an object, we must invest
it with the ability to look at us in return.33 As Gebauer and Wulf comment:
The child, on the one hand, approximates himself completely to the

environment, which is comparable to mimicry, and, on the other hand,
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experiences his power over spaces and objects through the mediation
of his magical interaction with them. For spaces and objects look
back , without completely subordinating the child. Or, we could say,
things gaze at the child, providing him with an experience in which to
develop self-consciousness. 34
It is precisely through childrens play, as Benjamin observes, that one can best
see the principle of mimesis at work. For Benjamin, play is the school of
mimesis: Childrens play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of behav-
ior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can imitate in
another.35 Much depends on the childs creative imagination, and it is this that
allows the child to invest these objects with a special significance. As Benjamin
observes:
[In the childs bureau] drawers must become arsenal and zoo, crime
museum and crypt. To tidy up would be to demolish an edifice full
of prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tin foil that is hoarded silver,
bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper pennies
that are shields. 36
It is as though the childs creative imaginationthe capacity for indulging in

make-believegives it a greater ability to assimilate. This, in turn, lays the foun-
dation for cultural activities in adult life. In order to understand paintings,
plays, films and novels, as Kendall Walton observes, we must look first at dolls,
hobbyhorses, toy trucks and teddy bears. The activities in which representa-
tional works of art are embedded and which give them their point are best seen
as continuous with childrens games of make-believe.37 We have to be open to
the realm of fantasy, and the fantasy of the creative genius, as Freud himself
observes, is born of the play and games of children.38 Meanwhile the fantasies
of children continue in later life through the practice of day-dreaming.39
In A Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin describes how, as a young boy, he started a col-
lection of picture postcards, many of them supplied by his maternal grand-
mother, who was an inveterate traveler. These postcards had a magnetic effect
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on the young Benjamin. They seemed to have the capacity to transport him to
the places depicted, as though by some magic carpet:
For I was therein Tabarz, Brindisi, Madonna di Campiglio, Wes-

terland, when I gazed, unable to tear myself away, at the wooded slope
of Tabarz covered with glowing red berries, the yellow-and-white-
daubed quays of Brindisi, the cupolas of Madonna di Campiglio
printed bluish on blue, and the bows of the Westerland slicing high
through the waves. 40
This seemingly throwaway commentI was there, . . . when I gazedis one

which merits further investigation. It could be said to be part of a consistent and
highly sophisticated theory of perception that adds a certain crucial gloss to
Benjamins overall aesthetic theory in general, and to his approach toward pho-
tography in particular. Nor is the observation of this phenomenon an isolated
remark by Benjamin, which should be overlooked as insignificant. In the essay
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, there is a further
enigmatic reference on a similar theme: A man who concentrates before a work
of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way that legend tells
of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting.41 This comment,
seemingly overlooked by mainstream commentators on Benjamin, is explained
by a fuller version contained in the obscure fragment Die Mummerehlen, in
Benjamins other autobiographical text of his childhood in Berlin, A Berlin
Childhood. This tells the tale of the young Benjamin being absorbed into the
world depicted on some porcelain vase:
[The story] comes from China and tells of an old painter who gave his
newest painting to friends to look at. The painting was of a park , a
narrow path along the water and through some foliage, to end at
a small door offering entry in the back to a little house. The friends
looked around for the painter, but he was gone and in the picture. He
walked along the narrow path to the door, stopped in front of it,
turned around, smiled, and disappeared through the crack. So was I,
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with my little bowls and brushes, suddenly in the picture. I became

similar to the porcelain, into which I moved with a cloud of color. 42
This charming little tale does more than just explain Benjamins enigmatic ref-
erence to the Chinese painter in The Work of Art in the Mechanical Repro-
duction. It also suggests a process by which human beings can read themselves,
as it were, into pictures and images. This process once more echoes Freuds
ideational theory. We have to imagine ourselves in the paintingeither by iden-
tifying with a character already depicted, or by projecting ourselves into its fic-
tional landscape. Both senses rely on memory traces. Either we have to imagine
the actions being taken by one of the characters and the expressions adopted,
and relate these to our own experiences, thereby identifying with that character,
or we have to read ourselves into the setting, and recall what it is like to walk
down a narrow path along the water and through some foliage, to turn round
and smile, before slipping through a half-opened door, and re-create that experi-
ence, as it were, in the space of the painting. Both gestures, however, are the
same. They both depend upon a memory that allows us to identify with a given
situation, even if that memory be a fictive memory.
This process of identification is one which occurs every time we gaze at
and are absorbed bya picture. At a certain leveleither figuratively or meta-
phoricallywe have to enter into that picture. Yet it is a process that is much
overlooked and relatively undertheorized. What is required, then, is a form of
regression to a childlike state of opennessbut it must be a controlled regres-
sion. As Laurie Schneider Adams puts it:
The artist must be able to regress to early instinctual impulses in

such a way that they are controlled and formed by the ego. This con-
trolled regression is somewhat akin to the technique of method actors,
who call on experiences from their own past as source material for
emotions required for a particular role. In 1957, Phyllis Greenacre
referred to this as access to childhood. All such descriptions of cre-
ativity assume the artists internal psychic flexibility, which permits
identification with and portrayal of a wide range of characters and
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themes. The emphasis on regression and childhood access derives

from the relatively flexible psychic structures and identifications of
children as compared to adults. 43
What is significant, however, is the manner in which we gaze at these represen-

tationsarchitectural or otherwise. The action of mimesis is dependent upon
a state of mind. We have to be receptive, and alert to the possibilities of the cre-
ative imagination. It is children who are most capable of reading themselves
into representationsinto pictures, dolls, dolls houses, and other objects
and, through them, imagining themselves in other possible worlds.44
This has obvious implications for the world of architecture. For what are
architectural drawings and models but the adult equivalent of childrens pictures
and dolls houses? Perhaps, then, there is something to be said for viewing archi-
tectural drawings and models with a certain childlike imagination. It is as though
the architectural representations act potentially as a form of window. To gaze
with a childish imagination in front of an architectural representationor,
indeed, any pictorial imageis to be, as it were, absorbed by it. It is to dream
ourselves into another place, like Benjamin as a young boy being transported
into his postcards, or like the Chinese painter disappearing into his painting
or, indeed, like Alice stepping through the looking glass.
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S E N S U O U S
S
C O R R E S P O N D E N C E
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Adorno inherits the term mimesis from Benjamin. Throughout his work it
remains an enigmatic concept that might be glimpsed fleetingly in flashes of
insight, but never completely captured within any totalizing definition. As such,
it serves as an allegory for Adornos, Aesthetic Theory, a text of kaleidoscopic con-
stellations of concepts that constitutes a weaving of unbroken, proliferating
arabesque. As Zuidervaart comments: Adornos text is a constellation of con-
cepts across which flames of resemblance flash and at whose blank center lies
the undefined notion of mimesis.1 With Adorno, mimesis becomes an aesthetic
concept which lies at the heart of all art. There appears, therefore, to be a certain
disparity between the ways in which Benjamin and Adorno use the term.
First, whereas Benjamin uses mimesis to refer largely to the philosophy of
language, Adorno uses it to refer to aesthetic theory. While for Benjamin mimesis
is sedimented in language, for Adorno art is a refuge for mimetic behavior.2 For
Adorno, mimesis belongs to the realm of art, not to that of language. Indeed, as
he observes, art is specifically nonlinguistic: The mimetic impulses that moti-
vate the work of art, that integrate it and once again disintegrate it, are fragile,
speechless expression. They only become language through their objectivation
as art. . . . Artworks become like language in the development of the bindingness
of their elements, a wordless syntax even in linguistic works.3
Art is effectively mute in terms of language: The epitome of expression is
the linguistic character of art which is totally different from language as a
medium of art. . . . In fact, the true language of art is speechless.4 Art has no
meaning in the sense of signification. The language of art is a language without
meaning, or, more precisely, a language whose meaning is severed or covered
over.5 Mimesis has nothing to do with signification or representation. As
Hansen observes: Mimesis for Adorno does not pertain to the relation between
the sign and referent; it is not a category of representation. Rather, it aims at a
mode of subjective experience, a preverbal form of cognition, which is rendered
objective in works of art, summoned up by the density of their construction.6
Literature may, of course, be the site of artistic expression, but mimesis may be
absent from certain forms of language, especially discursive language: Art is imi-
tation not of nature but of natural beauty. This aspect is entwined with the alle-
gorical intention that it displays without decoding; with meanings that never
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become objectified as they do in discursive language.7 And so, if we are to look

for the mimetic impulse within a literary domain, we will find it not in technical
manuals but in the poetic, enigmatic responses of writers such as James Joyce
and others, who, for Adorno, transcend the limitations of communicative lan-
guage to produce a genuinely mimetic language. The effort of prose writers
since Joyce, notes Adorno, might be explained as attempts to transform com-
municative language into a mimetic language.8
Secondly, whereas for Benjamin the term mimesis is a largely passive one,
which in essence constitutes a mechanism for finding meaning in the world, for
Adorno it displays a more actative, creative character. Not only does mimesis
allow for the potential to identify with the world, it also provides that vital expe-
rience that flares up in the moment of aesthetic recognition. As viewers, we
actively make ourselves assimilate to the work through what Gebauer and Wulf
describe as an active passivity, a process that is both vital and enriching. And it
is precisely the sense of vitality that reveals the erotic nature of aesthetic ges-
tures. As Gebauer and Wulf observe: In the flashes of aesthetic experience is
contained a promise of happiness, which presupposes an affinity between the
work and the recipient of it.9 Above all, however, Adorno introduces into the
discussion of mimesis the potential for the principle to be acted out in the do-
main of design. Mimesis comes to refer to art in its broadest sense. Whereas
Benjamin lays stress on the urge to find meaning by the discovery of existing sim-
ilarities, Adorno lays stress on the urge to find meaning by the creation of new
similarities through aesthetic production. He emphasizes the potential for the
artwork to serve as a vehicle for mimesis. It is precisely through art, in other
words, that we might find our place in the world.
Thirdly, Adornos understanding of mimesis would also seem to differ from
that of Benjamin in its connection with the body. For Adorno it is perceived
as a form of sensuousness, and associated with a childlike world of touching,
soothing, snuggling up, coaxing, and so on. It is specifically not conceptual. It
is, as Adorno defines it, the non-conceptual affinity of the subjectivity pro-
duced with its unposited other.10 Mimesis overcomes the alienation of con-
ceptual thought, and offers an alternative, more empathetic model of human
interaction. As Martin Jay observes:
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Conceptual thought can be understood as an act of aggression perpe-

trated by a dominating subject on a world assumed to be external to
it; it subsumes particulars under universals, violently reducing their
uniqueness to typifications or exemplars of a general or essential
principle. Mimesis, in contrast, involves a more sympathetic, compas-
sionate, and non-coercive relationship of affinity between non-
identical particulars, which do not then become reified into two poles
of a subject/object dualism. 11
By contrast, mimesis for Benjamin is a form of non-sensuous correspondence. If

sensuousness is involved, it is an ideational sensuousness. Adornos understand-
ing of mimesis therefore seems strangely at odds with Benjamins understanding
of the term. Yet it may be possible to reconcile the two, if one considers that the
nonsensuous ideational mimesis of Benjamin presupposes and prepares the way
for the nonconceptual, sensuous mimesis of Adorno. The one would therefore
be grounded in the other. Indeed, the ideational serves as a vehicle for memories
of the sensual, as is implied by Freuds early use of the term in the context of
jokes, which have to be understood through a form of empathetic memory of
physical sensations. Ideas serve as a medium through which to transmit bodily
memories. Corporeal sensations are translated into ideas by the mind, then
retranslated into corporeal sensations by the body. The logic of mimesis could
therefore be compared to that of transubstantiation.12
It is, moreover, through the purely linguistic play of words that Benjamin
claims to form an affinity with buildings, furniture and clothing. In other
words, the intelligible can forge a link with the sensible. One can access the phys-
ical world through the ideational. Ideas, in this sense, are always-already corporeal
ideas. Certainly there is more than a mere hint of the body in Benjamins con-
cept. It is, after all, through the body that the child plays at being a train or a
windmill. Moreover, dance, described by Benjamin as one of the earliest sources
of mimetic behavior, is clearly a bodily activity. Thus, although mimesis can be
understood as ideationalas a non-sensuous similarityit is fundamentally
corporeal. It opens up a sensuous access to the world.
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Mimesis, then, for Adorno, seems to refer to a vital moment of assimilation to

be found in aesthetic expression. It amounts to a form of highly sensuous affin-
ity, an openness that comes close to the notion of love. Like love, it involves a
kind of surrender, and like love, it is born not of resistance but of a sense of yield-
ing to the other. Mimesis, as Gebauer and Wulf observe, is a precondition of fel-
low feeling, compassion, sympathy, and love toward other people. It is imitation,
assimilation, surrender; it leads one to copy in experience the feelings of others,
without objectifying or becoming hardened toward them.13 As Adorno com-
ments: Love you will find only where you may show yourself weak without pro-
voking strength.14 And love, like mimesis, constitutes a form of mirroring, of
allowing the other to see him- or herself in the subject, and of the subject seeing
him- or herself in the other. The point, note Gebauer and Wulf, is now to
allow the Other the possibility of seeing himself or herself, now to see oneself in
the mirror of the Other.15 But this is not a closed-off narcissistic mirroring.
Rather, it is an open process of reciprocity and negotiation, which serves not to
reinforce the ego but to weaken it by undermining its autonomy and self-control.
Love overcomes the resistance of the ego. As Gebauer and Wulf explain:
Love thus leads the subject to exceed its capacities to control its feel-
ings and drives, to domesticate its inner nature, and to engage in the
world in ways that cede precedence to the outer, in this case, to the
Other; the goal of love is a broadening of the self, the assimilation of
the self to a counterpart. Mimesis, sympathy and love are movements
that transcend the subject, in which the principles of identification
and self-assertion lose their significance, while the nonidentical, the
unintelligible and mysterious aspects of the world and the Other come
into view. 16
There is, then, an overlap between mimesis, as an aesthetic formulation, and

the effects of love. Indeed, Adorno compares the aesthetic experience directly
with the act of love: This immanent dynamic, he notes, is, in a sense, a higher-
order element of what artworks are. If anywhere, then it is here that aesthetic
MIT Leach_02 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 38
experience resembles sexual experience, indeed its culmination. The way the
beloved image is transformed in this experience, the way rigidification is united
with what is most intensely alive, effectively makes the experience the incarnate
prototype of aesthetic experience.17 Such an understanding of mimesis extends
beyond the limitations of art as a sublimated form of eroticism, to acknowledge
the deep similarity between the two domains. Art, like love, becomes a way of
opening up to the world, and of inscribing oneself in that world.
THE MIMICKING OF MIMESIS
For Adorno, mimesis depends on a form of creative fantasy that finds its clear-
est expression in the behavior of children. The imagination on which this fan-
tasy is based is essentially childlike.18 For Adorno, the denial of the childlike
impulse is a manifestation of the taboo that society affixes to such behavior in
its urge to produce the mature adult. In a culture which expects autonomy and
responsible behavior, the intimate oneness of childhood is frowned upon,
and perceived as an embarrassing reminder of immaturity:
Those blinded by civilization experience their own tabooed mimetic

features only in certain gestures and behavior patterns which they
encounter in others and which strike them as isolated remnants, as
embarrassing rudimentary elements that survive in the rationalized
environment. What seems repellently alien is in fact all too familiar:
the infectious gestures of direct contacts suppressed by civilization,
for instance, touch, soothing, snuggling up, coaxing. 19
Yet the gestures of a child are often the gestures of someone who is at one with
the world. Significantly, these reemerge in adult behavior in the form of pet-
names and baby talk between two people in love. It is as though in the bliss of
intimacy adults return to a pre-mirror-stage union between self and other, and
the infantile language that often marks that moment provides an echo of an ear-
lier state of intimacy. To be in love is to reexperience the nonalienated existence
of the young child. As Gebauer and Wulf note: These experiences pick up on
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incidents from early childhood, that is, on such as preceded the formation of the
subject and thus the fully formed subject-object split; the child continues to have
a partial experience of the non-separation and correspondence between self,
world and Other that wholly determined its prenatal experience in the womb.20
The action of mimesis, then, constitutes an approximation to the other, a pro-
cess of becoming ever closer, but never quite incorporating the other. Mimesis
in this sense comes to echo the earlier empathy theory of Robert Vischer, whose
work is also based on a quasi-psychoanalytic dream theory, and is also centered
on the theme of repetition.21 Vischer empathizes with the need to think one-
self into the object ideationally: When I observe a stationary object, I can with-
out difficulty place myself within its inner structure, at its center of gravity. I can
think my way into it, mediate its size with my own, stretch and expand, bend and
confine myself to it.22 So, too, empathy theory would stress the capacity of the
imagination to evoke the sensations of enveloping, embracing, and caressing:
There is in imagination a prompt stimulation and pulsation (imme-

diate sensation) and a successive enveloping, embracing and caressing
of the object (responsive sensation), whereby we project ourselves all
the more intensively into the interior of the phenomenon, that is to
say, there is an immediate sensation and a responsive sensation for the
purpose of generating an empathetic sensation or empathy. 23
It would be wrong, however, to reduce mimesis to simple empathy. If true

mimesis is to operate, some critical dimension must remain. Within mimesis
there should exist a sense of reflexivity which works within a political spec-
trum. Indeed, the whole project of mimesis can be seen as a critical one, which
challenges a certain reductive instrumentalization of the world. This is most
apparent in art, where mimesis serves to counter identity thinking, and keep
alive the nonidentical in a dialectical tension that still leaves spaces for gen-
uine experience. This is what differentiates art from the culture industry. Art
retains a critical dissonance, in contrast to the uncritical harmonizing ten-
dencies of the cuture industry. Thus, on the one hand, with art, as Zuidervaart
observes, the performer and the recipient must devotedly trace the works
MIT Leach_02 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 40
internal articulations.24 On the other hand, some sense of distance must be

maintained. As Zuidervaart notes, appreciation resides within the tension
between these two moments: It is in the tension between mimetic tracing and
critical thought that the enigmatic quality of art emerges and philosophical
reflection takes wing.25
It is to the figure of the child that we need to return if we are to understand
the crucial difference between mimesis and simple empathy. There is both good
and bad to be found in childrens behavior, for children often lack the capacity
for critical reflection, and their behavior may collapse into a fascistic moment.
In the childhood tantrum we may recognize the potential violent aggression of
the dictator. As Adorno puts it: In Fascism the nightmare of childhood has
come true.26 Certainly, Adorno does not condone immature behavior. Rather,
he highlights the capacity of the childlike imagination, which, when allied with
a sense of critical reflexivity, will lay the foundation for the condition of unre-
pressed oneness that is the hallmark of good art.27
There is a important point to be made here. Mimesis should be distinguished
from what Horkheimer and Adorno call the organized control of mimesis.28 Any
evocation of mimesis by a regime grounded in authoritarian control amounts to
a mimicking of true mimesis, producing the illusion of similarity. Mimesis imi-
tates the environment, note Adorno and Horkheimer, but false projection
makes the environment like itself. For mimesis the outside world is a model
which the inner world must try to conform to: the alien must become familiar;
but false projection confuses the inner and outer world and defines the most
intimate experiences as hostile.29 This only threatens to promote fascism, the
myth of unalienated oneness where any internal contradictions are projected
outward onto some scapegoat.30 Thus anti-Semitism, for Adorno and Hork-
heimer, is based on a false projection.31 Indeed, with capitalism itselfa soci-
ety based on alienationmyths of community, that threaten to provoke
xenophobia and intolerance, reveal the potentially dark side of the mimicking
of mimesis.32
But what distinguishes these from more innocent forms of identification?
The key throughout is the framework within which this identification is forged.
Much depends on whether this framework is open or closed. True mimesis must
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remain open. By contrast, the mimicking of mimesis is often closed. In terms of

the child, the distinction to be made is that between a childlike openness and a
childish closure. If art retains something of the wonderingly open side of child-
like cognition, notes Matt Connell, then fascism is a repetition of the closed
and violent tantrum of the childish bully.33
Certainly mimesis has little affinity with totalitarian control, and when art
attempts to exert such controlas when, for example, proportions become a
totalitarian principlemimesis evaporates. At the same time, mimesis engages
with rationality, in order to maintain a self-critical dimension. While mimesis is
not aimless, it has less to do with the imposition of the self on others than with
an openness of the self to others. In the mimetic moment it is precisely the self
which is sacrificed. The subject, in effect, surrenders the self to the other, in
order that it might live on through a creative engagement with the other.
This surrender, however, is never total surrender. The subject is always aware
of his or her own position, while at the same time being open to the other. Just as
the listener to a joke is able to empathize with but also to laugh at the victim of
that joke, in the sense of ideational mimetics described by Freud, so too the sub-
ject here must be open and yet reflexive in a self-critical sense. Ultimately, it is a
distinction between mimesis and unreflexive mimicry. As Gebauer and Wulf
comment:
As long as the process concerns adaptation to dead nature, it remains

impossible to draw a distinction between mimicry and mimesis. Once,
however, this process becomes subject to conscious guidance, then a
distinction does arise between mimicry of inanimate things and
mimesis of nature. When mimesis of nature becomes intentional and
subject to organization, a doubling takes place. This form of doubling
through an intention and its realization represents a mode of rational
interaction and a corresponding optimization of nature. 34
What becomes vitally important, then, is that mimesis should remain both open
and rigorously self-critical, if it is to avoid lapsing into a potentially totalitarian
form of unreflexive bonding.
MIT Leach_02 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 42
MIMESIS AND ARCHITECTURE
Adornos discussion of mimesis takes on an architectural dimension in his essay

Functionalism Today. In one of his most incisive passages, Adorno articulates
the process by which human beings relate to their environment through the
mimetic impulse, a concept that can also yield a comprehensive theory of design:
According to Freud, symbolic intention quickly allies itself to tech-

nical forms, like the airplane, and according to contemporary Ameri-
can research in mass psychology, even to the car. Thus, purposeful
forms are the language of their own purposes. By means of the
mimetic impulse, the living being equates himself with objects in his
surroundings. 35
In this essay Adorno is primarily concerned with the architecture of postwar

German reconstruction which, he notes, fills him with a disturbing discon-
tent.36 Here he has something in common with fellow German philosopher
Ernst Bloch (18851977), who views much modernist architecture as impover-
ished. For Bloch, it has lost the caresses of the Muse.37 For Adorno the prob-
lem lies in the treatment of the concept of functionalism. The lens through
which he addresses this question is Adolf Looss seminal 1908 essay Ornament
and Crime, where Loos argues that ornamentnot just in architecture, but in
all the visual arts and in craft as wellis a form of crime. In an attack aimed at
the obsession with ornament in turn-of-the-century Vienna, Loos sees orna-
ment as an immature decadence to be compared with the status of tattoos in
contemporary society. Whereas tattoos are acceptable in the case of primitive
peoples, the modern man who tattoos himself is, for Loosquite literally
branded as a criminal.38 For Loos, ornament is a form of graffiti. It is an erotic,
degenerate mode of expression which might be expected of a child, but not of
an adult.39
Loos argues that we should distinguish the ornamental from the functional
following Kants distinction between the purpose-free and the purposive. We
should reject ornament and celebrate the functional. Ornament represents a
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redundant, purposelessness aesthetic vestige. According to Loos, ornament may

have been acceptable in primitive societies, but, like erotic or childlike behavior,
it is out of place in the sophisticated modern world. The evolution of culture,
he notes, is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian
objects.40 But ornament is not only decadent. It is also a waste of labor. Objects
of today, Loos concludes, should be honest and simple. They should be designed
to serve their purpose, and should not be encrusted with ornament.
Adorno takes Loos to task for being undialectical. As Adorno observes, there
is no object so purely functional as to be rinsed clean of all sense of art, while
many artistic activities, such as dance, have important social functions. There
is, as Adorno puts it, no chemically pure purposefulness set up as the opposite
of the purpose-free aesthetic.41 Art and function must therefore be viewed
dialectically, and all forms of the aesthetic recognized for their social func-
tion. Likewise, architecture that claims to be merely functional must also
have some aesthetic dimension. Indeed, much of what is termed functional in
architecture either incorporates functional features which are clearly not func-
tional, such as flat roofs, or borrows its aesthetic from other domains, such as
ships and grain silos, which have a functional rationale quite different to that of
architecture. What is termed functional is therefore often merely aesthetic,
and functionalism is little more than a stylistic affectation. Hence, as Adorno
remarks, our bitter suspicion is formulated: the absolute rejection of style
becomes style.42
Equally, this functionalist style, Adorno argues, is often impoverished. It is
precisely through its increasing emphasis on the mercilessly practical over the
mimetic, and the purposive over the purpose-free, that modernist art and archi-
tecture have become so diminished. Although he is broadly supportive of the
avant-garde in all fields, Adorno is conscious of its limits. Modernist art has
become dominated by the harsh strictures of Enlightenment rationality, and
therefore relinquished its utopian spirit. Under this extreme rationalism, arts
sensuousness has evaporated.43
But the main problem with Looss argument, as Adorno sees it, is his de-
termination to read art in strictly rational terms, and his consequent failure
to appreciate the mimetic role of ornament. For Loos ornament can only be
MIT Leach_02 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 44
degenerate. He seems to see in ornament, observes Adorno, the mimetic

impulse which runs contrary to rational objectification; he sees in it an expres-
sion which, even in sadness and lament, is related to the pleasure principle.44
Ornament therefore appearsin Looss somewhat puritanical configuration
as a form of decadent pleasure, and symbolism as redundant expression.
Yet the key to understanding art, according to Adorno, is to see it precisely in
terms of the mimetic impulse. It is through the mimetic impulse that human
beings absorb external forms, incorporate them symbolically into their self-
expression, and then rearticulate them in the objects they produce. Understood
in terms of the mimetic impulse, art, like all modes of design, amounts to a form
of symbolization that connects individuals with the world. There is barely a
practical form, Adorno concludes, which along with its appropriateness for
use, would not therefore also be a symbol.45 It is precisely as a symbol that art
achieves its social function. But this social function of art is inevitably linked to
given cultural conditions. Through its ornamentation, art responds to the out-
look of a particular epoch. It provides that epoch with a set of symbols. Only
with a shift from one stylistic epoch to another does that which once seemed
natural and appropriate to one epoch come to appear as some form of ornamen-
tal excess to another, vestiges of some outmoded means of production.46
What begins as a symbol, notes Adorno, becomes ornament, and finally ap-
pears superfluous.47
This extends to the use of the tattoo. Cultural expressions of all kinds oper-
ate as mechanisms of identification through which individuals mimetically
inscribe themselves into their cultural environment, and in the case of the tat-
too they do so through literally inscribing that environment into the self. Here
we might surmise that, according to Adornos argument, tattooing is not some
decadent and irrelevant excess, as Loos had maintained, but an important
social device that echoes the operations of mimesis. The tattoo is a form of
social identification that offers a symbolic link not only with ones cultural
environment but also with other members of a social group. In this sense, mod-
ern forms of tattoo play an almost identical role to the tattoo in more tradi-
tional cultures such as that of the Maoris in New Zealand, or the Papuans in
New Guinea.48
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It is to mimesis, then, that we should turn in order to understand how, for

Adorno, the living being equates himself with objects in his surroundings.49
Mimesis allows us to forge a symbolic relationship with our environment. We
read ourselves into our surroundings, without being fully conscious of doing so.
In effect, mimesis is an unconscious identification with the object. It necessar-
ily involves a creative moment on the part of the subject, who identifies with
the object, even if it is a technical objecta piece of machinery, a car, a plane, a
bridge, whateverso that it becomes invested with some symbolic significance,
and is appropriated as part of the symbolic background through which identity
itself is constituted.50 When we see our values reflected in our surroundings,
this feeds our narcissistic urge, and breaks down the subject/object divide. It is
as thoughto use Benjamins use of the term mimesisin the flash of the mi-
metic moment, the fragmentary is recognized as part of the whole, and the indi-
vidual is inserted within a harmonic totality.
Architecture, along with the other visual arts, can therefore be viewed as a
potential reservoir for the operation of mimesis. In the very design of buildings,
the architect may articulate the relational correspondence with the world that is
embodied in the concept of mimesis. These forms may be interpreted in a simi-
lar fashion by those who experience those buildings, in that the mechanism by
which we begin to feel at home in the built environment can also be seen as a
mimetic one. Through the concept of mimesis in Adorno, we might therefore
begin to understand the mechanism for inscribing ourselves into the world.
MIMETIC DESIGN
We could perhaps argue that, if human beings have the capacity to assimilate to
any environment, then the design of the environment might appear to be of little
consequence. But is this what Adorno is arguing? Precisely not. Adornos argu-
ment is, rather, a plea for good designdesign, that is, which might open up the
possibility of a sensuous engagement with the world. Designaccording to the
principles of mimesisshould serve as a form of mediation. For mimesis oper-
ates both in the design of the item and in the relationship between the user and
the item itself. It therefore follows that an item that has been designed with a
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view to a mimetic understanding of the world will lend itself to being absorbed
mimetically. It will therefore serve as a form of mediation between individuals
and the world.
Here imagination plays a crucial role. Loos celebrates pure and clean con-
struction, and denigrates imagination. Adorno, by contrast, calls for an archi-
tecture innervated by the imagination. Imagination, Adorno explains,
means to innervate this something.51 It serves both to awaken the materials
and to respond to them. But equally, the architectural imagination serves to
give purpose to space:
An interaction takes place between purpose, space and material. . . .

Architecture inquires: how can a certain purpose become space:
through which forms, which materials? All factors relate reciprocally
to one another. Architectonic imagination is, according to this con-
ception of it, the ability to articulate space purposefully. It permits
purposes to become space. It constructs forms according to purposes.
Conversely, space and the sense of space can become more than impov-
erished purpose only when imagination impregnates them with pur-
posefulness. Imagination breaks out of the immanent connections of
purpose, to which it owes its very existence. 52
Purpose, then, is a key component in restoring architecture to what it should be,

and sundering it from a condition that has privileged exchange value over use
value. We need to see architecture, then, as a child sees objects: as images of
a near and helpful spirit, cleansed of profit motivation.53 This will redeem
humankind from the culture of reification: Mankind would no longer suffer
from the thingly character of the world, and likewise things would come into
their own. Once redeemed from their own thingliness, things would find their
own purpose.54 Only then would we be in a situation where we could produce an
architecture worthy of human beings. Architecture worthy of human beings,
observes Adorno, thinks better of men than they actually are.55
There is, then, no aesthetic of mimesis, since mimesis transcends the limita-
tions of the merely aesthetic to become the sedimentation of a series of social
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concerns. Moreover, the aesthetic expressions in which mimesis is embodied

operate as a form of symbolization, and necessarily change from one era to the
next. Rather than attempt to describe forms of mimesis, it might therefore be
more appropriate to articulate a certain sensibility in the mind of the architect,
which could be described as a certain sensitivity, an openness, a responsiveness,
a sense of empathy, but equally an alertness to a certain critical dissonance.
Such a sensibility might produce an architecture of sensuous correspondence, an
imaginative and intuitive architecture which breaks free from the harsh stric-
tures of Enlightenment rationality, an architecture that both invigorates and
innervates.56 Such an architecture might therefore act as a lens or mechanism
through which those who experience it might inscribe themselves in the world,
and learn to live more productively.
Adorno seems to suggest that there is a fusing of the functional and the aes-
thetic within a term such as mimesis. Certainly, for Adorno, even if functional-
ism can be reduced to a mere stylistic category, design itself cannot be judged in
purely aesthetic terms without regard to its actual function. Rather, this func-
tion must itself be absorbed mimetically into the design. It is the very nature of
art to articulate function in terms of ornamentation, while ornament which has
no function cannot be true ornament. Architecture should not be free fantasy.
Nor should it be reduced to being merely purposive. Yet it should nonetheless
embody purpose. As Adorno notes:
Great architecture gains its suprafunctional language when it works

directly from its purposes, effectively announcing them mimetically
as the works content. H. B. Scharouns Philharmonic Hall in Berlin
is beautiful because, in order to create the ideal spatial conditions for
orchestral music, it assimilates itself to these conditions rather than
borrowing from them. By expressing its purpose through the building,
it transcends mere purposiveness. 57
How are we to understand this expression of function? Clearly it exceeds the

limitations of a strictly instrumental sense of function that belongs to a thingly
world. Indeed, Adornos notion of function seems to be premised on a social
MIT Leach_02 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 48
function, even if it does not necessarily incorporate an ontological function of

the beautiful explored by Hans-Georg Gadamer in the context of aesthetic the-
ory.58 Yet there is perhaps a note of caution to be introduced here over the role of
function. With Adornos notion of the functional, there is little acknowledg-
ment of actual spatial practices and programmatic uses. There is, moreover, a
further distinction to be drawn between functionality itself and an aesthetic of
functionality. What looks functional might not prove to be functional, while
what is functional might not look functional. There must therefore be a negoti-
ation, it would seem, between the functional and the aestheticbetween a rep-
resentation of functionality and functionality itself. Or, at the very least, it
should be acknowledged that a fundamental part of functionality is that an
object should appear functional.59 Is function, then, despite what Adorno claims,
little more than a category of the aesthetic?60
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S
S Y M P A T H E T I C M A G I C
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One of the first to engage substantively with the question of sympathetic magic
was James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough, a comparative anthropological
survey of the role of magic and religion in primitive society. Frazer provides a
catalog of magical practices, and offers a comprehensive theory of sympathetic
magic, carefully distinguishing its different modes of operation. For Frazer,
sympathetic magic operates by either similarity or contactthrough what he
describes as the Law of Similarity or the Law of Contact or Contagion:
If we analyze the processes of thought on which magic is based, they

will probably be found to resolve themselves into two; first, that like
produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and second, that
things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act
on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.
The former principle may be called the Law of Similarity, the latter
the Law of Contact or Contagion. From the first of these principles,
namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can pro-
duce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he
infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally
the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it
formed part of his body or not. 1
Frazer distinguishes between the two laws, using the terms homeopathic
magic or imitative magic for magic performed under the Law of Similarity,
and Contagious Magic for magic performed under the Law of Contact or Con-
tagion: Homeopathic magic is founded on the association of ideas by similarity:
contagious magic is founded on the association of ideas by contiguity.2 Homeo-
pathic or imitative magic is based on the principle that like produces like, or
that an effect resembles its cause, while contagious magic is based on the prin-
ciple of contact: once things have come into contact, they will continue to exert
an influence on one another even when they are separated, so that whatever is
done to one thing will somehow affect the other.
In practice, Frazer notes, the two branches are often combined, and both
can be understood under the general name of sympathetic magic since, as he
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puts it, both assume that things act on each other from a distance through a
secret symphony, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by
means of what we may conceive a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which
is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to ex-
plain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears
to be empty.3
Frazer goes on to cite several curious examples of both types of magic. The
most familiar example of Contagious Magic, he says, is the magical sympathy
which is supposed to exist between a man and any severed portion of his person,
as his hair or nails; so that whoever gets possession of human hair or nails may
work his will, at a distance, upon the person from whom they were cut.4 Thus
extracted teeth and navel-strings, for example, were believed to have special
properties and could influence the health of their former owners, whereas if
someone had been injured by a nail, for example, the wound would not fester but
heal, if the nail itself were well greased. Equally, to drive a nail into someones
footprint would cause that person to become lame.
It is Frazers treatment of homeopathic or imitative magic which is most
relevant to our present discussion. Homeopathic magic can be divided into two
further categoriesmalignant and benevolent. Significantly, both categories
have recourse to representations of the human figure.
Malignant forms of homeopathic magic include the classic scenario of using a
figurine as a way of inflicting an injury on a third party:
When an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a

little wooden image of his enemy and runs a needle into its head or
heart, or he shoots an arrow into it, believing that wherever the needle
pierces or the arrow strikes the image, his foe will the same instant be
seized with a sharp pain in the corresponding part of his body; but if
he intends to kill the person outright, he burns or buries the puppet,
uttering certain magic words as he does so. 5
A variation on this is the Malay practice which involves making a figurine of

beeswax, the length of a footstep:
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Then pierce the eye of the image, and your enemy is blind; pierce the
stomach, and he is sick ; pierce the head and his head aches; pierce
the breast, and his breast will suffer. If you would kill him outright,
transfix the image from the head downwards; enshroud it as you
would a corpse; pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then
bury it in the middle of a path where your victim will be sure to step
over it. 6
While doing this the person should recite an incantation, transferring responsi-
bility to the Archangel Gabriel, who, it is reasoned, is better able to deal with the
guilt of the act.
Significantly, the representation of the victim need not be a three dimen-
sional model, but could equally be a two-dimensional drawing that refers to a
three-dimensional original object: Thus the North American Indians, we are
told, believe that by drawing the figure of a person in sand, ashes, or clay, or
by considering any object of his body, and then pricking it with a sharp stick
or doing it any other injury, they inflict a corresponding injury on the person
represented.7
Examples of benevolent forms of homeopathic magic are more rare, and tend
to relate to health matters. Figures and figurines again feature prominently.
Thus among the Bataks of Sumatra, a barren woman, who would become a
mother, will make a wooden image of a child and hold it in her lap, believing that
this will lead to the fulfillment of her wish.8 Likewise in hunting, one way to
encourage prey to appear is to imitate its actions. Thus in British Columbia,
when the fish do not appear at the right season, a Nootka wizard will make an
image of a swimming fish and put it into the water in the direction from which
the fish generally appear.9 Frazer cites numerous other examples, such as the
islanders of the Torres Straits, who use models of dugong and turtles to charm
dugong and turtles to their destruction.10 The principle throughout is the use of
some form of representation. The likeness of these objects to the beings they
represent is less inportant than their symbolic properties. Through imitating
the action of their prey, they conjure up that prey.
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Finally, according to Frazer, magical practices can be divided into two further
groupings: positive practices and negative ones. The former are described as
charms, the latter as taboos. As Frazer observes: Positive magic or sorcery
says, Do this in order that so and so may happen. Negative magic or taboo says,
Do not do this, lest so and so should happen.11 Often these practices relate to
building. A common concern, for example, is that the timber used in construc-
tion may still contain a woodland spirit. Frazer lists a number of charms that
operate as positive appeasement rituals:
When a new building is ready the Toradjas of Celebes kill a goat, a

pig, or a buffalo, and smear all the woodwork with its blood. If the
building is a lobo or spirit-house, a fowl or a dog is killed on the ridge
of the roof, and its blood allowed to flow down both sides. The ruder
Tonapoo in such a case sacrifice a human being on the roof. This sac-
rifice on the roof of a lobo or temple serves the same purpose as the
smearing of blood on the woodwork of an ordinary house. 12
Likewise, also in connection with the use of timber in construction, a number

of taboos may be practiced as a negative form of magic to avoid inciting the
spirit of the woodland:
People in the Celebes and the Moluccas are much afraid of planting a
post upside down at the building of a house; for the forest-spirit, who
might still be in the timber, would very naturally resent the indignity
and visit the inmates with sickness. The Kayans of Borneo are of the
opinion that tree spirits stand very stiffly on the point of honour and
visit men with their displeasure for any injury done to them. Hence
after building a house, whereby they have been forced to ill-treat
many trees, these people observe a period of penance for a year, during
which they must abstain from many things, such as the killing of
bears, tiger-cats, and serpents. 13
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Yet Frazer is hardly supportive of either type of magic. He dismisses both as

vain and futile. In both cases the problem is a form of overintellectualization
an overinvestment in the realm of ideas: The two things are merely opposite
sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the asso-
ciation of ideas. 14 In either case, remarks George Stocking, there was a
mistaken association of ideasgood empiricist principles misappliedwhich
carried the savage into a fantasy world of superstitious custom and belief: imag-
ining that one could destroy an enemy by destroying his image, or work ones will
on someone by mumbling a spell over his severed fingernails.15
Certainly, we are left in no doubt that Frazer himself is a staunch supporter of
the scientific method. He roundly condemns these magical practices as being
the work of primitives who know no better. Nevertheless, behind Frazers man-
ifest criticisms of magical practices, we sense a latent fascination with them.
Even if Frazer is a believer in the scientific method, he belongs to a culture that
is itself indebted to an earlier culture of magic. For magic as a system was
invented to explain the world, and its legacy may be found in other systems of
thought, such as the scientific method.
M I M E S I S A N D S Y M PAT H E T I C M AG I C
Behind the concept of mimesis there seems to lurk the figure of the magician.
After all, the child hiding, in Benjamins story about the game of hide-and-seek,
thinks of himself as a shaman, who can bewitch all those who unsuspectingly
enter. It is as though he can effectively cast a spell over himself so as to make
himself invisible in his hiding placeso much so that he feels the need to
break the spell in order to release himself from his disguise, by emitting a shriek
of self-deliverance.
There are clear parallels between mimesis and magic.16 Both appear to oper-
ate within the same conceptual orbit, both establish an ideational relationship
between subject and object, and both rely on the imagination. Just as the viewer
of an architectural drawing may imagine him- or herself within that scene, so too
the primitive imagines a relationship between the voodoo doll or image and the
intended victim. We might point also to a more direct connection between
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magical practices and the domains of art and architecture. Freud himself ac-
knowledges affinities between the world of art and sympathetic magic. Citing
Reinach, who had observed that the primitive artists who left behind the carv-
ings and paintings in the French cave did not seek to please but to evoke and
conjure up, Freud traces parallels between the two:
In only a single field of civilisation has the omnipotence of thoughts

been retained, and that is in the field of art. Only in art does it still
happen that a man who is consumed by desires performs something
resembling the accomplishments of those desires and that what he does
in play produces emotional effectsthanks to artistic illusionjust
as though it were something real. People speak with justice of the
magic of art and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison
is perhaps more significant than it claims to be. There can be no doubt
that art did not begin as art for arts sake. It worked originally in the
service of impulses which are for the most part extinct today. And
among them we may suspect the presence of many magical processes. 17
Shierry Weber Nicholsen echoes these concerns in her analysis of mimesis:
We may ask about the purpose or function of imitation. This question

can lead to consideration of power and to notions of magic and ritual.
We might understand mimesis as a means of connecting with and con-
trolling, or being transformed by, the power and the order inherent in
the other. As several writers have noted recently, this kind of magical
imitation, as opposed to mere imitation, might take the form of sym-
pathetic magic, based on similarity . . . or of contagious magic. 18
Here Nicholsen would appear to be referring specifically to the work of

Michael Taussig. In Mimesis and Alterity, Taussig pursues the links between mime-
sis and magic. Following a hunch that something insightful might be learned
about mimesis, especially with regard to the question of (active) yielding, by
taking up the issue of sympathetic magic, he explores how, in Latin American
MIT Leach_03 1/25/06 9:23 AM Page 58
cultures, the copy takes on a specific magical meaning, a tradition which extends
back to primitive times.19
Taussig describes his own study as an eccentric history. It is a two-way
street which attempts to connect past with present dialectically. Taussig sees
the invention of contemporary devices of reproduction, such as the camera,
as a recharging of the mimetic faculty. His own study focuses on a certain
moment in the late nineteenth century when these devices were introduced,
before somersaulting back to the other end of the century, to the time when
Charles Darwin and his colleagues landed on the beach at Tierra del Fuego. A
connection is made between the primitives who confront Darwin, curiously
mimicking his every action, and the mimicking of the phonograph and other
more contemporary instruments. Taussig then somersaults forward to his own
personal experience in late twentieth century Reverse Contact now-time, when
the Western study of Third and Fourth World Other gives way to the unsettling
confrontation of the West with itself as portrayed in the eyes and handiwork
of its Others.20
Taussig uncovers material not dissimilar to that of Frazer. His study is based
on research on the Cuna Indians, undertaken by Baron Erland Nordenskild and
centered on the practice of making wooden figurinesnuchukanawhich were
thought to have curative powers.21 These figurines are used, as Nordenskild
describes, for a range of purposes, from exorcizing demons to curing illnesses.
When, for example, a persons head is bathed in water in which a figurine has
been placed, it is supposed to help that person to acquire new mental skills, like
learning a language.22 Strangely, these figures appear to be modeled not on Indi-
ans themselves but on Europeans, often with exaggerated features, and wearing
clothes and hats. What is striking about these figurines is that a culture which
does not believe much in superstitious magic has been appropriated by a culture
which does. The primitives failure to understand the scientific and technical
wizardry of the colonial leads them to portray the colonials as wizards.23
Taussig also refers to the Cuna practice of carving wooden models of turtles.
These serve medicinal purposes, and are not to be confused with balsawood
replica turtles used as decoys during hunting. Rather, they are used to confer
magical powers on the hunters themselves. As Nordenskild observes: They
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bathe themselves with these figures which they make themselves. A man can
own as many as a hundred small figures made of different kinds of wood which
one finds along the coast, and the bathing is carried on in order to acquire skill
in turtle hunting.24
The use of these models in primitive rituals highlights the connection
between models and the use of magic. Indeed, it seems to suggest a link with
mimesis, a concept itself based on the principle of the model. Would it be cor-
rect, however, to relate contemporary modes of mimesis to ancient forms of
sympathetic magic? Even if at one stage magic and mimesis did have something
in common, do they still do so today? Certainly, even if Freud is happy to bracket
them together, Benjamin always resists this temptation. For Benjamin, there is a
clear genealogy to art. He acknowledges that in primitive times pictures were
indeed connected with magic. The elk, he notes, portrayed by the man of
the Stone Age on the walls of his cave was an instrument of magic.25 Equally,
however, he adds that there has been a shift, as the work of art later became
recognized in its own right, and a further shift, within the age of mechanical
reproduction, when the accent on cult value has been replaced by one of ex-
hibition value, such that its status as a work of art is perhaps incidental:
With the different methods of technical reproduction of a work of art,

its fitness for exhibition increased to such an extent that the quanti-
tative shift between its two poles turned into a qualitative transfor-
mation of its nature. This is comparable to the situation of the work
of art in prehistoric times when, by the absolute emphasis on its cult
value, it was, first and foremost, an instrument of magic. Only later
did it come to be recognized as a work of art. In the same way today,
by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art
becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one
we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as
incidental. 26
But even if traces of magic can no longer be detected in cotemporary works

of art, this is not to say that the influence of mimesis itself has died away
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completely. We can find in Benjamins thought a sympathy for mimesis that

extends to new forms of representation such as photography, which distances
itself increasingly from magic but is ultimately still connected with magic. As
Susan Buck-Morss explains:
[Benjamin] holds open the possibility of a future development of mi-

metic expression, the potentialities for which are far from exhausted.
Nor are they limited to verbal language as the new technologies of
camera and film clearly demonstrate. These technologies provide
human beings with unprecedented perceptual acuity, out of which,
Benjamin believed, a less magical, more scientific form of the mimetic
faculty was developing in his own era. 27
Adorno explicitly distances art from magic. While he acknowledges a certain

affinity between the two, in that the artist, like the magician, exerts a form of
organized control that has parallels in the conjurer plotting a trick, he argues
that art does not follow the same project as magic. Although both are grounded
in the human imagination, art does not lay claim to some truth in the same way
as magic. While art operates in the domain of the as if, magic claims to operate
within the domain of the actual. Art, says Adorno, is magic delivered from the
lie of being truth.28 Although it may have its origins in the sympathetic magic of
primitive society, mimesis, for Adorno, should be clearly distinguished from the
superstitious belief in the ability to have a direct impact on things.29 Rather,
art engages in myths dialectical opposite, rationality:
Arts disavowal of magical practicesits antecedentsimplies par-

ticipation in rationality. . . . To speak of the magic of art is trite
because art is allergic to any relapses into magic. Art is a stage in the
process of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of the world,
and it is entwined with rationalization. . . . Art is rationality that
criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it. 30
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Gebauer and Wulf explain this seemingly curious link between mimesis and
rationality as a form of organized control that may be compared to operations
of magicians and shamans:
While in the the early phases of human development, adaptation to

nature is comprised largely of physical imitation of external nature,
in the magical phase there develops as organized control of mimesis.
To the extent that we designate the employment of appropriate means
in the realization of a goal as rationality, the organized control of
mimesis contains a form of rationality, of which magicians and
shamans make use in their interactions with nature and mimesis. 31
Art, then, is caught within a tension between magic and thinglike rationality.
Its role is to provide some form of reconciliation:
The aporia of art, pulled between regression to literal magic or sur-

render of the mimetic impulse to thinglike rationality, dictates its law
of motion; the aporia cannot be eliminated. The depth of the process,
which every artwork is, is excavated by the unreconcilability of these
elements; it must be imported into the idea of art as an image of
reconciliation. 32
In distancing itself from the illusionistic claims of magic, mimesis surpasses

magic, while nonetheless remaining within its conceptual orbit. Art, in Adornos
terms, secularizes magic.33 Mimesis today is nonmagical; nonetheless it retains
something of its origins in sympathetic magic through its emphasis on the power
of intuitionover conceptualizationin aesthetic experience.
The ramifications of viewing mimesis in terms of its origins in sympathetic
magic are quite startling for the realm of art. Sculptural forms, according to such
logic, would not represent so much as invoke. The same would apply to two-
dimensional works of art. Meanwhile, architectural drawings and models could
be seen in the same light as mimetic representations of an actual buildings,
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which might, as it were, conjure up those buildings for the beholder. Drawings
and models could therefore be seen as charged with the potential to open up a
world. Thus, although the mimetic impulse should not be equated with sym-
pathetic magic, in the context of architectural representation drawings and
models would appear to stand in a not dissimilar relation to the architecture they
describe as the figurine does to the originary object in sympathetic magic.
Through the process of mimesisan imaginary identification with a repre-
sentation of an objectthe original object may be invoked. The drawing or
model would therefore play out its role as an object of wish-fulfillment. It is as
though we might entertain the wish of entering another world through the
medium of the architectural drawing or model. Such processes exceed the
simple principle of replicating or copying. The very principle of modeling must
be seen as invocatory.
This principle extends beyond architectural drawings and models to build-
ings themselves. Indeed, the entire history of architecture can be redefined as a
history of mimesis. For when we consider the genealogy of architectural forms,
we can trace certain attempts to invoke some ancient tradition. Thus the geneal-
ogy of the classical, for example, seems to be based on an invocatory logic. By
replicating certain forms from antiquity Renaissance architects were transcend-
ing a classical tradition, but also citingand thereby invokingthat tradition.
The use of a classical architectural languagelike the use of classical literature
for family mottoes, and so ontherefore becomes a way of summoning up the
authority of the past. In this way the history of architecture is invested with a
citational logic that is akin to the invocatory logic of sympathetic magic.
The principle of invocation can be seen to extend to all aspects of existence.
The role of any uniform or insignia, for example, is to invest the wearer with a
certain status. This would apply not only to military personnel, but also to any
professional who subscribes to a certain dress code, be they doctor, lawyer, archi-
tect, or whatever. It would extend also to the domain of advertising and brand-
ing, where those who purchase any product endorsed by some iconic figurea
film star, sports personality, musician, and so onare seen somehow to have
conferred upon them the qualities of that figure. They themselves also become
endorsed. Nor is the principle limited to the domains of advertising and brand-
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ing. Simulation and representation, in other words, should not be dismissed as

some idle domain that is somehow removed from reality. Rather, we should
recognize that it is through simulation and representationthe logic of mime-
sisthat culture itself operates. For culture is always representational, and it is
through the principle of representationthrough a process of modelingthat
forms of cultural expression are propagated. In a culture of role modeling and
theming, the seemingly magical invocatory logic of mimesis is constantly
coming into play. The model is always somehow enchanted.
M Y T H TO DAY
The talismanic potential of these forms causes us to reflect on the iconographic

nature of all forms of contemporary expressions, especially supposedly secular
expressions. Taussig himself is concerned to build a bridge between past and
present. In an age when the fetishization of the commodity has something in
common with primitive animism, he sees postmodern forms of mimesis as
linked to earlier traditions of sympathetic magic. Although Taussig does not
wish to reduce contemporary representation to primitive forms of magic, he
detects a similar principle at work in both. This leads him to conclude that the
writerly representation of the ethnographer has something in common with
the Cuna Indians use of figurines:
Just as the shaman captures and creates power by making a model of

the gringo spirit-ship and its crew, so here the ethnographer is making
her model. If I am correct in making this analogy with what I take
to be the magicians art of reproduction, then the model, if it works,
gains through its sensuous fidelity something of the power and per-
sonality of that of which it is a model. Whether we want to call this
magic or not does not much matter. My point is not to assimilate this
writerly practice to magic. Rather I want to estrange writing itself,
writing of any sort, and puzzle over the capacity of the imagination to
be lifted through representational media, such as marks on a page,
into other worlds. 34
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This is where Taussigs provocative insights reveal potential connections

between a magical, shamanistic past and a contemporary reenchanted world.
Whether or not we can detect a reawakening of mimetic powers in contempo-
rary culture, there seems to be a strong connection, through the figure of the
fetish, between early animistic religion and advanced capitalism. Marx himself
had observed the spectral quality of the commodity. Moreover, the commodity,
as reified object, comes to represent social relations, in a way that parallels the
use of fetishistic figurines and symbols in primitive society. As Taussig com-
ments: For him such fetishization resulted from the curious effect of the mar-
ket on human life and imagination, an effect which displaced contact between
people onto that between commodities, thereby intensifying to the point of
spectrality the commodity as an autonomous entity with a will of its own.35
Moreover, in a condition of commodity consumption, art itself must be
viewed in a new light. What is curious about the primitive figurines and models
described by Frazer and Taussig is that fidelity to the original is seemingly not
important. It is as though these objects serve as ideograms which summon
up the spirit of the original rather than replicate its exact forms. In other words,
like some magical incantation, they rely less on their capacity to represent than
on their powers to invoke. In their reduced, often stylized forms, and in their
emphasis on content over verisimilitude, these forms offer a curious precursor
to the preoccupations of modern art. Moreover, in the fetish quality of objects
in which something is invested, they offer an interesting foil to the condition
of the commodified art form. They reveal the double potential of the fetish
that which is reified, especially under capitalistic modes of production, but,
equally, that which is enchanted. Here we might recognize not only the attraction
of primitive figurines and emblems to an art market in an age of abstraction, but
also a certain complicity between the two realms. It is not simply that primitive
artifacts can be absorbed and consumed within the art market. Rather, modern
artworks themselves can be tinged with an aura of the fetishistic qualities of
primitive artifacts.
Yet there is another, more fundamental concern that needs to be brought into
consideration: the status of mythical or magical thinking in the world today.
Capitalism, wrote Walter Benjamin, was a natural phenomenon with which a
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new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of
mythic forces.36 Nor is it simply that capitalism has become a new religiona
new opium of the peoplepropped up by a culture of advertisinga culture
of wish-fulfillment. For that dream-filled sleep has permeated the deep
recesses of the realm of technology, a realm that is commonly supposed
mistakenlyto be antithetical to the logic of magical thinking. Indeed, our
scientifico-technological culture is infused with traces of magic in ways that are
not often acknowledged:
The very abstraction and refinement of our technological world,

where technology seeks to hide itself in ever more sophistication,
burying itself deep within our subconscious with its streamlined,
minimalist, low profiles, such that we have lost any sense of its hege-
mony, presupposes, in dialectical fashion, an invitation to even
greater mythologization. Like the conjurers trick , where the magi-
cian conceals the true devices at work , so as to fool the audience into
attributing them to magic, so technology, in effacing itself, encourages
us to believe in its magical potential. Just as rationality spawns myth,
so hyperrationality spawns hypermyth. The more rational our society
becomesthe more sophisticated its technologythe more it will
encourage the mythic. 37
It is as though our very belief in technology betrays something of its oppo-

site, so that, for example, the supposedly objective, scientific doctor of today is
viewed by many in a way not dissimilar to witch-doctors in primitive societies of
the past. How dissimilar, we might ask, is our own faith in technologya faith
that is seldom grounded in a deep understanding of technologyfrom the won-
der shown by the Cuna Indians at the scientific and technical wizardry of their
colonial masters?
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M
M I M I C R Y
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Roger Cailloiss seminal essay on the behavior of mimetic insects, Mimicry and
Legendary Psychasthenia, has proved highly influential, and has had a profound
impact on a number of theorists, including Jacques Lacan.1 Here Caillois re-
thinks, at a fundamental level, the relationship between an organism and its sur-
roundings, takes a fresh look at many of the received views on mimicry, and
offers a theoretical reappraisal of the principle of mimicry as it presents itself
through animaland especially insectlife. He challenges both the positivis-
tic, biological accounts inspired by Darwinism, and the more moralistic, theo-
logical accounts which see the phenomenon as yet further evidence of Gods
providence. Caillois also challenges the popular assumption that mimicry in ani-
mal life is a survival mechanism. We do not need to look for some sophistic
argument to overturn the hypothesis that mimicry is about defense. Animals
hunt as often by smell as they do by sight, and visual camouflage is seldom a
very effective form of defense. Predators, Caillois observes, are not fooled by
homomorphy or homochrony. . . . Generally speaking, one finds many remains
of mimetic insects in the stomachs of predators.2
For Caillois, there are two basic categories of mimicry. First, animals may
mimic other animals. An inoffensive animal may take on the appearance of a
more offensive one, or indeed, vice versa, the offensive may mimic the inoffen-
sivelike a wolf in sheeps clothingas a decoy strategy. Within this first cate-
gory Caillois lists several examples, including that of the harmless butterfly, the
Caligo, which mimics the owl in its appearance.3 Secondly, animals may mimic
the environment itself, as though by some form of camouflage. Within this cat-
egory Caillois lists various animals and insects which, like the chameleon, may
adapt to their surroundings. Crabs can resemble pebbles. The fish Phyllopteryx
resembles seaweed. The leaf insect Phyllium looks exactly like a leaf, and so on.
It is the second category of mimicry that interests Caillois. But how is one to
explain this urge to mimic the environment? Caillois remains unconvinced by
previous explanations. On the one hand, he rejects arguments based on pre-
adaptation as insufficient.4 On the other, he argues, there must be some
underlying cause; he therefore rejects arguments based on pure chance.
Cunot, for example, had claimed that the camouflage of the Kallima butterfly
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consisted of an accumulation of properties that could equally be found in non-

mimetic species, and was therefore purely accidental.
Caillois himself is more attracted by the hypothesis of Le Dantec, who
supposed that there once existed a set of cutaneous organs permitting the
simulation of the imperfections of leaves, the imitating mechanism having dis-
appeared once the morphological character was acquired. 5 Caillois incorpo-
rates this into his theory and surmisestopically, perhaps, for an age fascinated
by the potential of photographythat mimicry is a form of three-dimensional
teleplasty: Morphological mimicry could then be, after the fashion of chro-
matic mimicry, an actual photography on the level of the object and not on that
of the image, a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids:
sculpture-photography or better teleplasty, if one strips the word of any meta-
physical content. 6
Caillois describes how the principle of mimicry operates through a form of
sympathetic magic, which is ideational in nature. He notes the earlier compar-
isons of Tylor, Frazer, Hubert, and Mauss between the principles of magic and
the association of ideas: To the law of magicthings that have once been in contact
remain unitedcorresponds quite precisely association by contiguity, just as
association by resemblance corresponds quite precisely to the attractio similium
of magic: like produces like. 7 From the primitive onward there is an overwhelm-
ing tendency to imitate, a tendency which survives in modern man, but can also
be detected in animal life while organs remain plastic enough to transform
themselves. This leads Caillois to conclude: Mimicry would thus be accurately
defined as an incantation fixed at its culminating point and having caught the sor-
cerer in his own trap. 8 Caillois defines this incantation as prestigious magic or
fascination. This search for the similar is an intermediate stage in a process
whose ultimate objective is assimilation to the surroundings.
Caillois compares this to the magical hold of darkness, which likewise blurs
the boundaries between the organism and its milieu. There is a comfort, as
Eugne Minkowski observes, in dark space: Dark space envelops me on all sides
and penetrates me much deeper than light space, the distinction between inside
and outside and consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are
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designed for external perception, here play only a totally modest role.9 The very
seduction of darkness is echoed in the ecstasy of losing oneself in ones sur-
roundings through mimicry. For Caillois, then, mimicry is nothing but a form of
temptation by space.
This condition becomes problematic when it leads to a collapse of spatial
awareness: It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since
the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the co-ordinates, but
one point amongst others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer
knows where to place itself.10 This confusion is a characteristic of abstract and gen-
eralized representational space, which threatens the very foundations of ones
personality, and may even prompt a sense of schizophreniaI know where I
am, but I do not feel as though I am at the spot where I find myself. 11 This inabil-
ity to distinguish oneself from the environmentthis boundary failureleads
to a condition of crisis:
To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space

pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis.
It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from
thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies
the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point
whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space, dark space where
things cannot be put. He is similar, not similar to something, but just
similar. 12
The condition is problematic because identity depends on an organisms

ability to distinguish itself from its surroundings. From whatever side one
approaches things, says Caillois, the ultimate problem turns out in the final
analysis to be that of distinction: distinctions between the real and the imaginary,
between waking and sleeping, between ignorance and knowledge, etc.all of
them, in short, distinctions in which valid consideration must demonstrate a
keen awareness and the demand for resolution. Among distinctions, there
is assuredly none more clear-cut than that between the organism and its
surroundings.13
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Without this ability to distinguish ourselves from the environment, we

descend into a condition that Caillois describes as legendary psychasthenia:
The feeling of personality, considered as the organisms feeling of

distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between con-
sciousness and a particular point in space, cannot fail under these
conditions to be seriously undermined; one then enters into the psy-
chology of psychasthenia, and more specifically of legendary psych-
asthenia, if we agree to use this name for the disturbance in the above
relations between personality and space. 14
Psychasthenia could be defined as a weakening of the sense of self, brought

about by an erosion of the distinction between the self and the environment.
Caillois illustrates this through Gustave Flauberts The Temptation of Saint
Anthony. Here Saint Anthony himself succumbs to the mimicry present in na-
ture, where plants are no longer distinguished from animals. . . . Insects iden-
tical with rose petals adorn a bush. . . . And then plants are confused with
stones.15 As a result, Saint Anthony finds himself dissolving into space.
Caillois refers to this process as a descent into hell.16
Importantly, then, Caillois locates assimilation to our physical environment
at the root of problems of psychic identity. For assimilation is precisely an over-
coming of the distinction between the self and the environment. The net result of
this assimilation is a form of depersonalization, akin to a schizophrenic step-
ping out from the self. Assimilation is therefore about a loss of self. It is accom-
panied, as Caillois puts it, by a decline in the feeling of personality and life.17
This leads him to reappraise the traditional assumption that the purpose of
mimicry is self-preservation. For it seems to him that mimicry is about exactly
the oppositea relinquishing of our life force, and a surrendering of our sense of
self. Alongside the instinct for self-preservation, Caillois therefore sees a corre-
sponding instinct for renunciationa loss of lan vitalat the heart of mim-
icry.18 Through mimicry, observes Caillois, life takes a step backwards.19
Here we begin to discern the true significance of Cailloiss work. He is not
really concerned with the behavior of insects. Nor does he care so much about
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the concept of mimicry as such. Essentially, he is addressing the question of

human behavior. Cailloiss quest is to interrogate how humans relate to their
habitat, and, by extension, to understand how identity itself operates. What
concerns Caillois is not failure to identify with our surroundings, but failure to
distinguish ourselves from them. This may prove even more dangerous than the
alienation that might result from the opposite condition. For failure to distin-
guish the self may lead either, at the level of the individual, to a psychotic condi-
tion, psychastheniaa descent into hellor, at a collective level, to something
altogether more sinisterpotentially uncontrollable mass movements. It is per-
haps no coincidence that Caillois wrote his article in a Europe that was about to
be engulfed by fascism.
If, however, there is a flaw in Cailloiss argument, it is his failure to address the
dialectical nature of this relationship. For Caillois, there is a primary urge to dis-
tinguish the self. Yet mimicry, it could be argued, does not constitute a dissolu-
tion of the self so much as a reinforcement of the self. The purpose of mimicry,
as Lacan reminds us, is not to blend in with but to remain distinct from the back-
ground: Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be
called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly
technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but,
against a mottled background, of becoming mottledexactly like the technique
of camouflage practised in human warfare.20 Furthermore, in order to respond
to the urge for distinction, we need to have a sense of its opposite: connection.
Without an initial connection there can be no distinction, just as without dis-
tinction there can be no connection. The one, as Georg Simmel observes, is
always a presupposition of the other.
Only to humanity, in contrast to nature, has the right to connect and

separate been granted, and in the distinctive manner that one of
these activities is always the presupposition of the other. By choosing
two items from the undisturbed store of natural things in order to
designate them as separate, we have already related them to one
another in our consciousness, we have emphasized these two together
against whatever lies between them. And, conversely, we can only
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sense those things to be related which we have previously somehow

isolated from one another; things must first be separated from one
another in order to be together. Practically as well as logically, it
would be meaningless to connect that which was not separated, and
indeed that which also remains separated in some sense. . . . In the
immediate as well as the symbolic sense, in the physical as well as the
intellectual sense, we are at any moment those who separate the con-
nected or connect the separate. 21
Identity, then, can be secured only by first having established a relation with our
surroundings. Yet, equally, identity also depends on the ability to distinguish our-
selves from those surroundings. With Lacan, for example, identity is set within
a dialectic of distinction and assimilation. In order to distinguish ourselves from
the world around us, we need the capacity to relate to it, and in order to relate to
it we need the capacity to distinguish ourselves from it. Identity, as Lacan goes
on to say, is based on separation, but separation presupposes and generates the
capacity for further identification.22 We should therefore question Cailloiss
somewhat negative stance toward the question of assimilation. For assimilation,
it would seem, is also that which helps to establish an identity.
THE MASK OF MEDUSA
In The Mask of Medusa, Caillois further elaborates his theory of mimicry.23

He divides mimicry into three distinct categories: disguise, camouflage, and
intimidation:
Disguise is essentially imitation, that is to say the taking on of a def-

inite, deceptive appearance, one that not only can be identified but
will also put the creature seeing it on the wrong track. Camouflage is
a disappearance, an artificial loss of identity; it makes the creature
fade into its background so that the observer can no longer mark it
down. Intimidation is an appearance or action tending to produce an
exaggerated fright, one with no real basis, by means of sight, sound,
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rhythmic movements, smells etc., which allows the weak to escape the
strong and the voracious to transfix their prey. 24
Each of these categories can be divided into various subcategories. Disguise

may operate within one family, within an order (such as a butterfly of one family
imitating one of another), or across orders (such as a butterfly imitating a wasp).
Camouflage may operate by covering the body with foreign objects, such as sand
or sea anenomes, or by taking on the color of a background, or by relying on pat-
terns of contrasting colors which break up a shape, or by producing a perfect imi-
tation of the environment in terms of both colors and forms. Intimidation may
operate through hypnotic visual patterning, or by horns and other protuber-
ances, or by some frightening mask.
Caillois is at pains to point out that these three modes of mimicry are as much
part of human behavior as they are part of insect or animal behavior: Man may
well try, by means of disguise, to pass himself off as another individual or another
living creature, or he may wish to hide himself or some object, or, by means of a
mask, he may try to spread around himself an aura of terror half consented to and
half an uncontrollable urge.25 Mimicry, then, fits within Cailloiss overall belief
in the universality of natural instincts.
This allows Caillois to make direct comparisons between the operations of
animals and insects and those of human beings. Disguise, he maintains, has little
to do with survival, and has more in common with fascination with the Other. It
might therefore be compared more profitably to the human concept of fash-
ion, even if the visual development of an insect might take thousands of gen-
erations to evolve, unlike the relatively rapid convulsions of human fashion.
Meanwhile, camouflage in animal life could also be compared to a tendency in
humankind, the desire for a deceptive invisibility. From military tactics to
romantic literature, where the hero remains inconspicuousoften through
some cloak or cap of invisibilitythe aim is to avoid suspicion until the dra-
matic moment comes when one has to reveal oneself. Surprise, Caillois notes,
is added to terror. The adversary is paralysed and defeated in advance.26 Finally,
intimidation in animal life could be compared to the use of optical devicesthe
evil eye on the prow of a ship, and so onin human life. The Gorgons head
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and other recurrent myths throughout history point to the desire to stupefy
and overcome the enemy. But the logic of such stories, according to Caillois, is
simply that of the mask. It is about initiation and entering into a higher order. In
other words, it is as though, for Caillois, intimidatory patterns, protuberances,
and so on in animal life hold a similar status to military insignia and badges of
rank in human life.
There are, of course, differences between the behavior of human beings and
that of animals or insects, in that with humans this mimicry is often perpetrated
through vicarious means. The variations which human beings achieve through
different forms of clothing, make-up, and camouflage techniques, which may be
changed at will, are far more extensive than the potential variations in the but-
terfly, for example, whose coloration is a permanent, given condition. And while
certain animals do indulge in forms of protective or intimidating camouflage,
coating their bodies with various substances in order to conceal themselves, the
masks and prostheses of humans are infinitely more varied than the expressions
and features which are a natural part of the bodily features of an insect or animal.
Caillois is, of course, only too aware of the danger that, in making compar-
isons between human behavior and that of insects or animals, he may be accused
of anthropomorphismof collapsing the difference between the two realms
so that they read as one. Cailloiss analyses of the three different categories
disguise, camouflage, and intimidationbetray his own anthropomorphizing
tendency. It is as though he is capable of grasping animal behavior only through
the lens of human behavior.
Certainly, Caillois admits that he often attempts to understand human life
through other forms of life. He acknowledges that his study of the sexual habits
of the female mantis, for example, was a lens through which to reflect upon
human experiences, tales in which a woman possessed by the devil swallows,
kills or mutilates her lover at the very moment of union. 27 He is also aware of the
obvious differences between the two realms: between the instinctual, mechani-
cal, and inevitable responses to circumstances on the part of insects, and the
freedom of the imagination on the part of humans. Yet this is not necessarily a
problem. Caillois is an anthropologist, not a biologist. What makes his studies so
interesting is not what they have to say about insect life but, rather, what they
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have to say about human life. For Caillois, insects become a mirror through
which to understand the human.
Significantly, Caillois recognizes that these three seemingly distinct cate-
gories of mimicrydisguise, camouflage, and intimidationmay be related
more than might at first appear. While he maintains his view that disguise is
often futile, and seldom a very effective protection mechanism, he acknowl-
edges that disguise, taken to an extreme, may constitute camouflage, which it-
self has various defensive and offensive potentials:
One way or the other, useful or not, the plasticity of living organisms
which makes mimicry possible is clearly demonstrated by the wings or
polymorphic female butterflies. It affects the entire body of the insect
when the creature passes itself off as a wasp or ant, which in truth, it
is very far from being. The metamorphosis, the adaptation, can be
more complete still, yet more ambitious, leading to a perfect imitation
of a leaf, a twig, a thorn, bark , moss or a stone. These things seem to
absorb the creature into the environment where it lives and to hide
it from sight. This is then no longer a question of disguise, but of
camouflage. 28
Often, therefore, disguise may fold into camouflage. But so, too, camouflage
may prepare the ground for intimidation. Human beings have adopted this tac-
tic of disguise from insects and animals, and put it to use within a military con-
text: Man has invented no better methods of camouflage to conceal himself, his
machines and his installations than those of snakes and stick insects, namely
contrasting colours and the use of foliage. Cloths painted with broad patches of
contrasting colours break up an outline and make it disappear. At other times
leafy branches are used as cover.29 And invariably this camouflage is not used as
a defense in itself but, rather, to hide weapons of aggression:
Masked by their feigned insignificance, or completely masked, they

are above suspicion until the moment comes to reveal themselves.
Then surprise is added to terror. The adversary is paralysed and
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defeated in advance. Insects do the same thing: with them also camou-
flage prepares the way for intimidation and the invisibility is only
there to secure the success of a frightening and sudden appearance. 30
The principle which Caillois has begun to recognize is that all three manifes-
tations of mimicry seem potentially to lead to an overcoming of the other. This
work therefore comes across as a qualification of Cailloiss earlier views: he had
dismissed outright the idea that mimicry was premised on survival. While dis-
guise and camouflageblending into nature and becoming one with naturein
the first instance allow an organism seemingly to disappear and fade defensively
into the background, their ultimate purpose is often to prepare the ground for
intimidation. This is based not so much on the principle that attack is the best
form of defense but, rather, its opposite: that defense is the best form of attack.
THE CHAMELEON
A further way to reflect on mimicry is through the behavior of the chameleon.

Much myth surrounds this curious lizard that has long been an object of fascina-
tion. Its ability to remain motionless, and to last for long periods without food,
led the Ancients to suppose that it lived on air. But the characteristic of the
chameleon which has prompted the greatest fascination is its capacity to change
color. Popular myth has it that this is a defensive mechanism which serves as a
form of camouflage. By mimicking the environment, the chameleon hopes to
conceal itself and evade the gaze of the predator.
Recent research, however, has shown that the reason why the chameleon
changes color is often as much to stand out from the environment as to blend in
with it. In a state of passivity the chameleon will remain in its original, some-
what dull, colors, which often match its habitat, so that it appears as though it
is camouflaged. When it is angry, however, the chameleon will take on bright,
vibrant colorsyellows and orangesas it releases melanin into the surface of
its skin.31 Finally they open their mouths, notes James Martin, exposing the
contrasting colors of their mucous membranes, often accompanied by a chore-
ography of swaying and bobbing punctuated by soft hisses.32 And when two
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chameleons are in conflict, this display can become a contest, as each cha-
meleon attempts to outperform its opponent. The contest is decided when one
party concedes aesthetic defeat, reverts to its original color, and slinks away.
Meanwhile, during courtship a variety of techniques are employed to impress
the female. As Martin explains:
After catching sight of a female, the diminutive nasutus chameleon

abandons his usual brown coloration for purple banded with light
blue. His eyelids become yellow and a patch of green appears behind
each eye. The male brevicornis, also usually predominantly brown,
adds a deep red or maroon to his occipital lobes and rostral appendix.
His eyelids turn orange or yellow and dark patterns mask his flanks.
The giant Parsons merely intensifies its normal dull green, adding a
light green patch behind the eye. All these species accompany court-
ship color change with lateral flattening and head jerks. 33
In either situationwhether in conflict or in some courtship ritualthe

chameleon will therefore attempt to stand out from the environment in a tactic
that is the very opposite of camouflage.
No clear explanation exists for what triggers this change in coloration from a
biological perspective, although it would appear to be controlled by a central
nervous system. More importantly, scientific research fails to shed any light on
why the chameleon should wish to change color from a psychic point of view.
There are several questions about the behavior of the chameleon that still need
to be addressed.
Nor should we suppose, as Martin seems to infer, that the primary purpose
of color change is to stand out rather than blend in. For how might we explain
the chameleons obvious ability to disguise itself in its environment, when it
needs to? There may indeed be some occasions when color changes have no
bearing on the question of self-defense, but equally there may be other occa-
sions when they do. Rather than standing out and showing off its magnificent
colors, the chameleon may sometimes wish to slink away and disappear into the
background. In other words, there may be some truth, after all, in the age-old
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myth of the defensive nature of the chameleons color changes.34 Indeed, the
corollary of to stand out is to blend in, and the chameleons very change in
color when it is aroused or angry implies that its normal coloration serves as a
successful form of camouflage. The urge to stand out therefore presupposes the
urge to blend in, and vice versa. Clearly the changes in coloration are tactical, and
governed by the chameleons mood.
The chameleon is a creature that privileges the visual. It can neither smell
nor hear with any great efficiency. Unlike snakes, which retain a Jacobsons or-
gan in the roof of their mouth to enhance their sense of smell, the chameleons
version of this sensory apparatus has all but atrophied. Moreover, its hearing
system is underdeveloped.35 It soon becomes clear that the chameleon must
compensate for its inadequacies in other sensory domains through a height-
ened sense of vision. For not only does the chameleon possess a third eye, called
a pineal or parietal eye, which is used to sense heat and light, but the other
two eyes are also highly sophisticated. These eyes contain more cells than
human eyes, and may operate independently, covering 180 degrees. The chame-
leon is the only animal to have both three-dimensional vision and the ability to
see to the side and behind. Given its highly sophisticated visual abilities, it is
hardly surprising that the chameleon should operate primarily within the visual
register.36
All in all, we have a picture of a creature which, at different moments, seeks
either to blend in with its environment or to stand out, and relies predominantly
on a visual register to survive and prosper. It therefore serves as an emblem for
our own human obsession with appearances. The chameleon is a creature of
fashion, using visual techniques to articulate its identity. And even if the popular
assumption that the chameleon changes color as a defense mechanism is indeed
a myth, it nonetheless remains a potent analogy for human behavior. We human
beings tend to adapt not just to our environment, but also to the behavior,
appearance, and characteristics of those around us. We are creatures of fashion.
We follow trends. We copy and mimic others. Moreover, the dialectic of bend-
ing in with and standing out from our surroundings, each urge being conditioned
by the mood of the moment, applies as much to us humans as it does to cha-
meleons. Homo sapiens is above all Homo chamaeleanus.
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The important observation to be made here, however, is that this chameleon-

like tendency within human beings operates not only at a physical level, but also
at a psychic one. In other words, while we may point to dress, hairstyles, and
aspects of personal affects as a domain in which human beings adapt their
appearances to those around them, there is also a psychological register at play.
For assimilation involves a shift in perceptions. It is not simply a question of
blending in, or camouflaging the self at a physical level. It is necessary to absorb
visual material within a psychic framework, and to invest it with symbolic sig-
nificance in order to identify with it. This process of adaptation, then, operates
beyond the level of surface effects. And the same applies to the oppositethe
process of differentiation. For the urge to identify with or stand out from our
surroundings in terms of appearance is only the epiphenomenon of a deeper
psychological urge to assimilate or differentiate ourselves from our surround-
ings, an urge which is grounded in questions of personal identity.
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Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari provide an evocative commentary on in-

sects relation to their habitat in their description of a wasp settling on an orchid,
and the interaction between the two. Here they appear to be referring to the
digger wasp (Gorytes mystaceus and Gorytes campestris) and the fly orchid (Ophrys
insectifera).
What is remarkable about the fly orchid is its physical resemblance to the dig-
ger wasp. The fly orchid both looks and smells like the female digger wasp. As
a result, the male wasp is seemingly duped into thinking that the fly orchid is a
female wasp. Whether the wasp is deceived, or knowingly plays along with this
ruse, it allows itself to be seduced by the orchid. Once it has landed on the
orchid, the wasp acts in an excited manner, rubbing its abdomen against the vel-
vety surface of the labellum, and fluttering its wings. Friedrich Barth describes
this process as a form of pseudocopulation.1 The frenetic activity causes pollen
to be deposited on the wasp. Eventually the wasp tires, and tries its luck on
another orchid. The wasp is thereby lured into serving as a surrogate sexual part-
ner for the orchid, helping to transfer pollen from one plant to the next.
The relationship between wasp and orchid is a complex one. The orchid has
developed attributes that attract the wasp, but equally, the wasp has developed
a pattern of behavior that serves the orchid. As Deleuze and Guattari observe,
wasp and orchid enter into a mutual reciprocity, such that the wasp has adapted
to the orchid, no less than the orchid has adapted to the wasp. This is a form of
modeling that exceeds mere imitation:
It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its
image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this
is true only on the level of the strata a parallelism between two
strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal
organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is
going on: not imitation at all, but a capture of code, surplus value of
code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp
of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp. 2
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The logic, then, is one of becoming. It is not a question of imitating some

entity, so much as entering into its logic. It is a matter not of representation, but
of affect. Deleuze and Guattari further illustrate this process with the famous
case of Freuds patient Little Hans, who was known for his horselike activities.
They observe that it is precisely when Little Hans is engaged in human activities,
such as playing music, that he reveals the extent of his becoming-horse:
Little Hanss horse is not representative but affective. It is not a

member of a species but an element or individual in a machinic
assemblage: draft horseomnibusstreet. It is defined by a list of
active and passive affects in the context of the individuated assem-
blage it is part of: having eyes blocked by blinders, having a bit and a
bridle, being proud, having a big peepee-maker, pulling heavy loads,
being whipped, falling, making a din with its legs, biting, etc. These
affects circulate and are transformed within the assemblage: what a
horse can do. . . . It is not a question of imitating a horse, playing
horse, identifying with one, or even experiencing feelings of pity or
sympathy. Neither does it have to do with an objective analogy
between assemblages. The question is whether Little Hans can endow
his own elements with the relations of movement and rest, the affects,
that would make it become horse, forms and subjects aside. 3
The term becoming captures the dynamic interaction between wasp and
orchid. Becomingbecoming animal, becoming female, becoming molecular,
becoming imperceptible, becoming otheris a key concept for Deleuze and
Guattari. All forms of becoming are essentially about becoming other, and in-
volve a creative engagement with the other on the part of the subject. As Tamsin
Lorraine comments: Becomings are encounters that engage the subject at
the limits of corporeal and conceptual logics already formed and so bring on the
destabilization of conscious awareness that forces the subject to a genuinely
creative response.4 At the same time, a state of becoming is not constituted
by any particular entity. It concerns the space between various entities, and
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constitutes a line of flight between them: A becoming is neither one nor two,
nor the relation of the two; it is the in-between, the border of line of flight.5
Becoming is clearly an interactive process. It can never be limited to one indi-
vidual entity becoming another. Becoming always involves a reciprocity, a
mutual interaction. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as a bloc of becoming:
It is not one term which becomes the other, but each encounters the
other, a single becoming which is not common to the two, since they
have nothing to do with one another, but which is between the two,
which has its own direction, a bloc of becoming, an a-parallel evolu-
tion. This is a double capture, the wasp AND the orchid: not even
something that would be in the one, or something which would be in
the other, even if it had to be exchanged, be mingled, but something
which is between the two, outside the two, and which flows in another
direction. 6
It is clear that for Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is not the same as imita-
tion. Yet imitation cannot be overlooked. The process of becoming-animal
clearly entails a degree of imitation, but at the same time it exceeds the scope of
imitation:
We are not, however, overlooking the importance of imitation, or mo-

ments of imitation. . . . All we are saying is that these indissociable
aspects of becoming-woman must first be understood as a function of
something else: not imitating or assuming the female form, but emit-
ting particles that enter the relation of movement and rest, or the zone
of proximity, or a microfeminity, in other words, that produce in us a
molecular woman, create the molecular woman. 7
The question therefore arises as to whether it is possible to compare the notion

of mimesis, as it appears in the work of Benjamin and Adorno, with the concept
of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari.8 Indeed, Michael Taussig describes
mimesis as the art of becoming, of becoming other.9 On the face of it any sim-
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ilarity is unlikely. Deleuze and Guattari are highly critical of any form of mimicry.
Indeed, they dismiss mimicry because it relies on binary principles. Mimicry,
they decree, is a very bad concept, since it relies on binary logic to describe
phenomena of an entirely different nature. The crocodile does not reproduce
the tree trunk, more than the chameleon reproduces the colors of its surround-
ings.10 Moreover, Deleuze distinguishes becoming from mimesis: To become
is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, mimesis) but to find the zone of
proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be dis-
tinguished from a woman, an animal, or a moleculeneither imprecise nor gen-
eral, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of a population rather
then determined in a form.11 He cites the example of Ahab and Moby-Dick to
illustrate the point: It is no longer a question of mimesis, but of becoming. Ahab
does not imitate the whale, he becomes Moby-Dick, he enters into the zone of
proximity where he can no longer be distinguished from Moby-Dick, and strikes
himself in striking the whale. Moby-Dick is the wall, shoved near with which
he merges.12
Yet there are many forms of mimesis, and it is clear that for Benjamin and
Adorno, mimesis is no mere mimicry. It is a far more complex term that goes
far beyond imitation. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida observes, true mimesis is
actually a condemnation of imitation.13 Moreover, true mimesis operates
between two producing subjects and not through two produced things.14 In
this senselike becomingit is inherently actative: it is a process. We might
therefore surmise that, at the very least, there are certain overlaps between the
two terms.
MACHINIC ASSEMBLAGES
In order to become an animal, we have to develop a form of symbolic relation-

ship with that animal. We have to enter into a machinic assemblage with it.
Philip Goodchild defines the machine in Deleuze as an assemblage of parts
that works and produces.15 The machine is anything that operates, and is
conditioned by material flows. The machine therefore extends beyond any
earlier distinction between the mechanical and the organic, to include both
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domains. In other words, human beings could be described as desiring

machines. The assemblage, meanwhile, could be defined as a loose affiliation
of individual components that have come together to form a single bodybut a
body which is never stable or unified. The assemblage functions, as Ansell
Pearson observes, as an acentred multiplicity that is subjected to continuous
movement and variation.16 One such assemblage would be the wasp and the
orchid, which should be understood as a multiplicityas multiple wasps and
multiple orchids.17
Deleuze and Guattari describe becoming as a form of machinic assem-
blage in terms of molecularas opposed to molaractivity: Do not imitate a
dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such
a way that the particles emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine
as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity,
into which they enter.18 The model that Deleuze and Guattari offera form of
molecular affiliationappears somewhat mechanistic at first sight. Moreover, if
one organism can enter into a composition with another by emitting particles,
it seems to challenge the notion of boundary. What Deleuze and Guattari seem
to be addressing is a form of attunement or correspondence that amounts to
a kind of contagion:
You become-animal only if, by whatever means or elements, you emit

corpuscles that enter the relation of movement and rest of the animal
particles, or, what amounts to the same thing, they enter the zone of
proximity of the animal molecule. You can become animal only molec-
ularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is
done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you
emit a molecular dog. 19
Yet science itself depends on the spread of influence from one body to
another.20 For how else could we explain the spread of disease? Contagionthe
influence of one organism on anotheris an important factor in biological life.
As Pearson comments, following Richard Dawkins: Evolution cannot be re-
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stricted to individual organisms since at the molecular level one is dealing with
populations of genetic material the movements of which are not governed or
fixed by organismic boundaries. This is the only way to understand how evolu-
tion can become contagious and epidemic.21
Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the treelike structure of traditional evolu-
tionary schemas need to be abandoned, in order to accommodate this rhi-
zomatic form of contagion: Under certain conditions, a virus can connect to
germ cells and transmit itself as the cellular gene of a complex species: moreover,
it can take flight, move into the cells of an entirely different species, but not
without bringing with it genetic information from the first host.22 Dawkins
himself goes on to describe a horizontal transmission of genes in a form of
virus that offers an analogy to the longitudinal transmission of genes down the
generations. For this ambiguous category Dawkins coins the term meme:
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene
pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate them-
selves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the
broad sense, can be called imitation.23
Susan Blackmore has developed a whole theory of memes in order to
describe various sociological patterns of behavior which spread like viruses:
Everything that is passed from person to person in this way is a meme. This
includes the songs you sing and the rules you obey.24 Blackmore goes on to
mount the contentious claim that ideas are the result not of individual cre-
ativity, but of contagious memes: To start to think memetically we have to
make a giant flip in our minds just as biologists had to do when taking on the
idea of the selfish gene. Instead of thinking of our ideas as our own creations,
and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes,
working only to get themselves copied.25 The meme is based on the prin-
ciple of copying. Blackmore is no doubt correct to observe that the meme
therefore has little in common with mimesis (at least in the sense used by
Benjamin and Adorno) in that, unlike mimesis, the meme operates through
strict imitation.26
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D E T E R R I T O R I A L I Z AT I O N
Through this process of becoming, a form of deterritorialization is effected.

Deterritorialization might be described in terms of nomadology as an urge to
resist stratification, a compulsion to be continually mobile and unconstrained by
structured systems of control. This is one of the areas where Deleuzian theory
seems to chime with contemporary cultural theory. Indeed, it is tempting to read
the deterritorialized nomad as a figure of thought that comes to stand for the
fluidity and flux that increasingly characterizes advanced capitalist society,
where everything appears mobile, and is released from its origins and conditions
of production.27 It seems as though becoming cannot be reconciled with any
notion of territorialization. Yet we need to recognize that any given territory or
enclosure of a thing enjoys vectors of deterritorialization and is, in fact, consti-
tuted by them as a territory.28 Deterritorialization folds into reterritorializa-
tion, and vice versa:
How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reter-

ritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one
another? The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing
of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is
nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece of the orchids repro-
ductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting
its pollen. 29
Becoming enters into the process of reciprocal presupposition that lies at

the very heart of the concept of deterritorialization: Each of these becom-
ings, as Ansell Pearson observes, brings about the deterritorialization of one
term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and
form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever
further.30
Deterritorialization may itself encourage lines of flight that in themselves
constitute a plane of consistency, or, as Pearson puts it, a non-dialectical syn-
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thesis of heterogeneous and disparate elements.31 We might view deterritorial-

ization in Lacanian terms (for the concept would appear to derive from Lacanian
thinking ) as a freeing up of the libido from its preestablished objects, and as
facilitating a more fluid and dynamic dispersal of energies.32 Moreover, Freuds
hydraulic model of the mind helps to explain the fluid displacement of deter-
ritorialization, and so too its reciprocal dependency on a corresponding re-
territorialization. Furthermore, if we understand the hydraulic model as a
self-regulating system, we might begin to grasp the fundamental urge for har-
mony and equilibrium in Deleuzes own thought.
Deleuze is primarily a thinker of connections. At the heart of this is the
principle of reciprocal presupposition, where opposite termssuch as deterri-
torialization and reterritorializationfold into one another. The concept of
connection is inextricably linked to separation. For, as Simmel argues, noth-
ing can be thought separate unless a connection has first been made, and
nothing can be thought connected until its original state of separation has been
acknowleged.33 To be a thinker of connections is therefore also to be a thinker of
disjunctions. As Rajchman comments: Deleuzes philosophy is about connec-
tions; in some sense, it is the art of multiple things held together by disjunctive
synthesis, by logical conjunctions prior and irreducible to predication or identi-
fication.34 His philosophy is replete with terms like assemblages, rhizomes,
passages, circuits, networks, and so on. These connections are never total-
izing in themselves, but it is precisely because society is forever subject to lines
of flight, indeterminacy, and leakages that such connections can be made.
Moreover, to make such connections is, for Deleuze, an affirmative act: For to
connect is to affirm, and to affirm, to connect.35
Yet these connections are rhizomatic, and remain in constant flux. They must
never subscribe to any totalizing system. They must always be incomplete,
always open-ended, always in a state of becoming. What results is a dynamic,
rhizomatic system, which remains stable but never fixed. For the interaction
between wasps and orchids produces a single, rhizomatic body, which, while
always open to external influences, maintains its own harmony, a form of coin-
cidentia oppositorum.
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RHIZOME
Another way to describe the process of becoming is through the concept of the
rhizome: Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. . . .
There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only the explosion of two heteroge-
neous series on the line of flight compose by a common rhizome that can no
longer be attributed to or substituted by anything signifying.36 The concept of
the rhizome is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy. As John Marks
describes it, the rhizome is a figure borrowed from biology, opposed to the prin-
ciple of foundation and origin which is embodied in the figure of the tree. The
model of the tree is hierarchical and centralised, whereas the rhizome if prolif-
erating and serial, functioning by means of the principles of connection and het-
erogeneity. . . . The rhizome is a multiplicity, and as such seeks to move away
from the binary subject/object structure of Western thought.37
Moreover, rhizomatic behavior extends to all aspects of the inanimate world:
The wisdom of plants: even when they have roots, there is always an outside
where they form a rhizome with something elsewith the wind, an animal,
human beings (and there is also an aspect under which animals themselves form
rhizomes, as do people, etc.).38 Here the rhizome has to be understood as dif-
ferent to the organism, which always threatens to become totalizing, molar, and
stratified in its organization. Instead of the organism, Deleuze and Guattari cel-
ebrate what they call the body without organs. As Ansell Pearson describes the
term, in a way that echoes Julia Kristevas understanding of chora: The body
without organs refers to the body of the energies and becomings of the earth
that gets permeated by matters which are highly unformed and instable, charac-
terized by free-moving flows, free intensities and nomadic singularities.39
The problem of bodies with organs are not the organs as such so much as their
organization within an organism.
The rhizome achieves a sense of becoming. It effects a form of correspon-
dence between the self and the other. But it should be stressed that the rhizome
is not a form of representation. The rhizome steps beyond the limits of repre-
sentation. Writing, for example, does not represent the world. It forms a rhi-
zome with it:
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The same applies to the book and the world: contrary to a deeply
rooted belief, the book is not an image of the world. It forms a rhizome
with the world, there is an aparallel evolution of the book and the
world; the book assures the deterritorialization of the world, and
the world assures the reterritorialization of the book , which in turn
deterritorializes itself in the world (if it is capable, if it can). 40
The concept of the rhizome depends upon the mode of being active. Indeed,
Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy could be described as a vitalistic one. It is
ultimately a quasi-Darwinian exploration of the vitalism that informs, and
thereby molds, the universe. Yet the processes to which it alludes are complex
ones, born of subtle evolutionary and involutionary shifts. As John Marks ex-
plains: Vitalism is a way of connecting with, of being in the presence of, this
pre-individual world of flux and becoming. Deleuzes vitalism is expressed in
his preference for verbs, particularly in the infinitive form, over nouns.41 Focus-
ing less on the problematic notion of Thanatos, and more on the creative poten-
tial change in itselfbecoming, deterritorialization, and so onDeleuze and
Guattari open up the possibility of a constantly evolving form of critical prac-
tice. Deterritorialization, after all, may fold into its opposite. It is only the
underlying imperative to seek to deterritorializeto keep alive the principle of
resistancethat gives the concept its underlying logic. This call constantly to
move onto resist stratificationreveals the actative side to Deleuze and
Guattaris project.
SPACE
Another way to reflect on the rhizome is through the concept of space.

Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the two conditions of spacestriated and
smooththat respectively come to stand for the stratification of systems of
control and resistance to that stratification, or sedentary space and nomad
space. Striated space is the space of territorialization. Smooth space is the space
of deterritorialization.
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Deleuze and Guattari describe this distinction by way of analogy. Fabric

would stand for striated space, whereas felt would stand for smooth space. In
contrast to fabric, felt contains a multiplicity of fibers matted together, but none
of them connected into any overarching structure. Fabric follows a regular pat-
tern, and is precisely delineated, whereas felt is a supple solid product that pro-
ceeds altogether differently, as an anti-fabric. It implies no separation of threads,
no intertwining, only an entanglement of fibers obtained by fulling. 42 Yet they
are fundamentally related, and the patchwork quilt offers an example of the way
they tend to fold into one another: It is as though smooth space emanated,
sprang from a striated space, but not without a correlation between the two, a
recapitulation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other. 43
Deleuze and Guattari offer further modelsthe musical, the narrative (the
sea is smooth space par excellence),44 the mathematical, and the physical
but it is their aesthetic model that comes closest to the domain of architecture.
Here Deleuze and Guattari distinguish close-range vision from long-range
vision, and haptic space from optical space. The smooth they associate with
close-range vision and haptic space, the striated with long-range vision and opti-
cal space. The first aspect of the haptic, smooth space of close vision is that its
orientations, landmarks, and linkages are in continuous variation; it operates
step by step. Examples are the desert, steppe, ice, and sea, local spaces of pure
connection.45 Striated space is quite different. Striated space, on the contrary,
is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orienta-
tion, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of refer-
ence, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central
perspective.46
Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari give two architectural examples of space
in which the absolute is challenged, and folds into the nomadic absolute. Eskimo
space is one such example, where earth and sky blur into one another. Another
example is Arab architecture:
In a totally different way, in a totally different context, Arab archi-

tecture constitutes a space that begins very near and low, placing the
light and the airy below and the solid and heavy above. The reversal
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of the laws of gravity turns lack of direction and negation of volume

into constructive forces. There exists a nomadic absolute, as a local
integration moving from part to part and constituting smooth space in
an infinite succession of linkages and changes in direction. It is an
absolute that is one with becoming itself, with process. 47
And it is the Gothic linealthough they might equally have been referring to
the arabesquethat they draw from Wrringer as the first evidence of the
abstract haptic, smooth line: This streaming, spiraling, zigzagging, snaking,
feverish line of variation liberates a power of life that human beings had rectified
and organisms had confined, and which matters now expresses as the trait, flow,
or impulse traversing it.48
Architecture, it would seem, can even embody the distinction between
smooth and striated space. The key to this approach is already to be found in
Deleuze and Guattaris own brief references to architecture. It is as though the
whole history of architecture can be divided into two contrasting yet recip-
rocally related outlooks. One would be a broadly aesthetic outlook that tends
to impose form on building materials, according to some preordained tem-
plate. (Here one immediately thinks of the role of proportions and other
systems of visual ordering.) The other would be a broadly structural outlook
that tends to allow forms to emerge according to certain programmatic
requirements.
Deleuze and Guattari describe the first as the Romanesque. The term
seems somewhat restrictive, in that the principle covers a range of approaches
which broadly come under the umbrella of the Classical. This would include
not only the Classical as suchthe Roman and Greek styles which mutated
through the Romanesque, into the Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, and Neo-
classicalbut also any outlook which focuses on appearance rather than
performance.
The second could be broadly defined as the Gothic, which is configured not
as a style, as it was in the nineteenth century, but as a method. It is a way of
designing that privileges process over appearance. Form emerges with time,
much as the Gothic vault evolved over the centuries, becoming ever more
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refined in its structural efficiency, until it reached such intricacies as fan vault-
ing. Within such an outlook, architecture becomes the result of competing
forces, a programmatic process that registers the impulses of human habitation,
and adapts to those impulses. Deleuze and Guattari analyze the distinction be-
tween the Gothic spirit and the Romanesque as a qualitative distinction
between a static and a dynamic model of understanding architecture.49
Rather than describing these two different outlooks in terms of style,
Deleuze and Guattari refer to them in terms of different sciences. One is a
science of intensive thinking that perceives the world in terms of forces, flows,
and process.50 The other is a science of extensive thinking that seeks to under-
stand the world in terms of laws, fixity, and representation. In other words, the
one is a smooth science, the other striated. Deleuze and Guattari also describe
this opposition as that between a nomad, war-machine science and a royal, state
science. The latter is a science of fixed rules and given forms, a hierarchical sys-
tem imposed from above.51 By contrast, the nomad war-machine science is a
bottom-up model that responds in each individual instance to the particularities
of the moment.52
We must, of course, be wary of reducing architecture to a discourse of process
over representation. For process and representation, in Deleuzian terms, always
fold into one another. The two terms depend upon one another, but, at the same
time, they also destabilize one another. Architecture is based on both process
and representation. It is an amalgam of intensive and extensive thinking, minor
sciences and major ones. At certain moments, however, there may be a strategic
necessity to privilege one term over the other. An emphasis on process, for
example, would be a way of responding to an overly scenographic approach, but
it must always be borne in mind that the two are mutually dependent. Perhaps
it is a question, then, of viewing process in terms of representation, and rep-
resentation in terms of process. As for Deleuze and Guattaris distinction
between the Gothic and the Romanesque, between structure and ornamenta-
tion, it is a question of treating structure ornamentally and ornament struc-
turally. For architecture has only ever consisted of the ornamentalization of
structure and the structuration of ornament.
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ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
The question that arises, however, is whether Deleuze and Guattaris philosophy
can be appropriated to suggest a language of architectural form. It should be
stressed from the outset that Deleuze and Guattari are concerned primarily with
processes of thought, not with a language of forms. Confusingly, there is much in
their work that is highly suggestive of architectural form, not least when they
refer to the fold.53 We must, however, avoid the temptation to read their work
too literally.
Instead, the starting point for grasping the relevance of Deleuze and Guat-
taris discourse for architectural design could be, perhaps, to focus on the reci-
procity inherent in the concept of becoming: the becoming-building of the
inhabitant, and the becoming-inhabitant of the building. But how, we might ask,
might a building enter a process of becoming? The term becoming is generally
used in connection with other animate objectsdog, horse, woman, orchid, and
so on. In other words, becoming relates primarily to objects that have their own
agency, and can themselves enter into a process of becoming.
For a building to enter into such a logic, it must be understood as part of that
reciprocal process. Here we might refer to the way a building might be modi-
fied through use as a space for programmatic activity, registering the impulses
of human habitation. Becoming in the latter sense might entail the mutation
of form over time to absorb and respond to shifts in programmatic activity. For
the orchids adaptation to the wasp is an evolutionary and involutionary process
of assimilation. Likewise the process of gradual refinementof marginal
improvements and incremental adaptationis one that operates in the design
process in both functional and aesthetic realms, two overlapping but hardly
homologous regimes.
The task for designers, then, would be to fast-forward this process, and to
imagine how forms would have evolved in order to be totally adapted to their
colonization patterns. It is an architecture, then, of the future perfect tense,
which attempts to predict, by exhaustive analyses, the activities that will have
happened in order to facilitate those processes through connectivities, and so
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on. Thus a building could be perceived as an ever-evolving fabric of occupation

which is molded by human activities, in much the same way as bed sheets are
rearranged by the bodys movement during sleep. In its most advanced mode it
would be an architecture that is open to those processes themselves, an adaptive,
responsive environment that does not crystallize into a single, inflexible form
but is able to reconfigure itself over time, and adjust to the multiple permuta-
tions of programmatic use that might be expected of it. The becoming-
inhabitant of the building might therefore be compared to the becoming-wasp
of the orchid.
We might therefore associate becoming with a process of adaptation and
assimilation which is related to formation rather than form, but nonetheless
operates through form. In such a context we might understand design as that
rhizomatic interaction between human beings and their environment. It func-
tions actatively as an interaction with the world that facilitates a condition of
becoming. Neither static nor restrictive, such a configuration of design sees it
as a way of forging a state of oneness with the world, a connection that remains
always incomplete. It facilitates an almost ecstatic mode of becoming impercep-
tible, of broadening ones horizon, of resisting the stratification of the self.
In this sense, design facilitates a double sense of becomingthe becoming
imperceptible of the praxis of design and the becoming that potentially
results from an engagement with the products of that design. For artistic expres-
sionespecially writingalso constitutes a state of becoming. As Deleuze
observes:
Writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the

midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or
lived experience. It is a process, that is, a passage of Life that tra-
verses both the livable and the lived. Writing is inseparable from
becoming; in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or veg-
etable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible. 54
This principle may be extended further. For Deleuze and Guattari it is precisely
through art, writing, philosophy, and other cultural activities that one breaks
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down the barriers between the self and the other, and becomes imperceptible.
As Lorraine comments: Doing philosophy, doing science, doing art allow a sub-
ject with a biography to engage in becoming-imperceptible in a specific context.
The creations that emerge from such becomingsthe concepts of philosophy
or the affects and percepts of artcan then be used to survey forms of life and
introduce new possibilities.55 To this list we should perhaps add the practice of
architecture. To design a building is, to some extent, to become imperceptible;
likewise, to relate to a building is to enter into a state of becoming-building,
like the wasp becoming orchid.
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D
D E A T H
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The theme of death is fundamental to Freud, especially in his late work as the
metapsychological Freud. His late theory is centered around the conflict
between Eros and Thanatos, between the urge for life and the urge for death
between life instincts or life drives, and death instincts or death drives. 1
Thanatos, the death instinct, is the urge which seeks resolution and quiet.
It wants to sever any complicated connections. It assumes that everything has
evolved from some inanimate condition, and must eventually return to that con-
dition. It therefore wishes to dissolve differences, and return every living thing
to the inorganic state out of which it emerged. The death instincts, remark
Laplanche and Pontalis, tend towards the destruction of vital unities, the
absolute equalization of tensions and a return to the hypothesiszed inorganic
state of complete repose.2
Eros, as the life instinct, serves to counter the tendency toward Thanatos,
and acts as a force to complicate life and to maintain differences. Freud describes
Eros as that which by bringing about a more and more far-reaching combina-
tion of the particles into which living substance is dispersed, aims at complicat-
ing life and at the same time, of course, preserving it.3 It continually counteracts
and delays the death instinct. In so doing, it also acts as a force of revitalization.
The life instincts, note Laplanche and Pontalis, tend not only to preserve
existing vital unities but also to constitute, on the basis of these, new and more
inclusive ones.4
Eros is therefore set in opposition to Thanatos. The two instincts delineate,
for Freud, a spectrum of impulses that govern human behavior. But they seldom
operate as discrete entities. Indeed, Freud himself observed that what we are
concerned with are scarcely ever pure instinctual impulses but mixtures in vari-
ous proportions of the two groups of instincts.5 It is through their dynamic
interaction that Freud can offer a richer and more responsive model of psychic
life than Jungs instinctual monism. As Freud comments: Only by the concur-
rent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instinctsEros and the
death-instinctnever by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multi-
plicity of the phenomena of life.6
The death instinct has proved one of the most controversial aspects of
Freuds thought. Some point out that, although it appears as a quasi-biological
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term, the notion that everything is governed by the death instinct runs contrary
to all biological principles.7 Even Freud himself acknowledges that there is no
way of proving the existence of the death instinct.8 It was rejected by most of his
followers, with the notable exception of Melanie Klein, for whom it plays an
important rolenot only in its orientation toward external objects, but also
internally in inducing anxiety about disintegration and nihiliszation. None-
theless, the concept is pivotal to Freuds own thinking. Although it was first
introduced as a speculative concept, it becomes for Freud one of the fundamen-
tal impulses within human behavior.9 Moreover, it allows him to account for the
problem of aggression in human behavior. If we understand aggression as being
based on an internal system, destruction can be perceived as self-destruction,
and human aggression as neither self-defense nor brutish behavior, but a result
of internal conflict. It is also productive, as Julia Kristeva goes on to observe, in
analyzing various forms of psychosis, such as melancholia and depression.10
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
The death instinct in Freud can be seen to emanate from the moment of birth
itself. Birth is perceived as a violent trauma which upsets the pleasure of the time
in the womb. For Freud, the time in the womb relates to the development of the
id, the id being the faculty that absorbs and enjoys pleasurable sensations. The id
is instinctual, and operates within the domain of the unconscious. It is a reser-
voir of libidinal energies, but has no way of controlling those energies. As Freud
comments: It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no
organization, produces no collective will.11 Herbert Marcuse defines the id as
follows:
The id is free from the forms and principles which constitute the
conscious, social individual. It is neither affected by time nor
troubled by contradictions: it knows no values, no good and evil, no
morality. It does not aim at self-preservation: all it strives for is sat-
isfaction of its instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure
principle. 12
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The womb provides the id with a refuge, a state of placid protection and con-
stant gratification. With birth this freedom from disturbance is lost forever. Yet
the memory of this period in the womb remains, and subsequent life is governed
by a desire to regain this lost quietude, this lost paradise. Life is dominated by a
regressive compulsion, a desire to return to the womb. This striving for integral
gratification dominates all subsequent life. Thus for Freud the drive toward
equilibrium that results is none other than a continuous descent toward death,
where death finally provides that longed-for resolution and quiet.13 According to
Marcuse: The death instinct is destructiveness not for its own sake, but for the
relief of tension. The descent toward death is an unconscious flight from pain
and want. It is an eternal struggle against suffering and repression.14 From this
drive toward equilibrium Freud develops the Nirvana principlethe urge to
return to the Nirvana of the wombwhich becomes the dominating ten-
dency of mental life, and perhaps nervous life in general. Nirvana here can be
understood through its origins in Buddhist philosophy as a quest for quietude
and bliss. It is about union, but not between an individual and its other.
Rather, Nirvana is premised on an undifferentiated state of fusion with ones
surroundings.
Related to the Nirvana principle is the pleasure principle, which is in
effect one expression of the Nirvana principle. The pleasure principle is seem-
ingly paradoxical in that it is premised not on acquiring something but on dis-
charging it, where discharge might be defined as the evacuation into the
external world of the energy brought into this apparatus by excitations of either
internal or external origin.15 What is unpleasurable is tension. Pleasure, for
Freud, is the capacity to find something through which to discharge that ten-
sion, in order to return to a homeostatic condition: the effort to reduce, to keep
constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the Nirvana principle. . . )
finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of this fact is one
of the strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.16
The pleasure principle in Freud is also a problematic concept. It translates
a qualitative conditionpleasureinto a quantitive measurementthe re-
duction of tension. Furthermore, we might question whether there may not be
certain pleasurable tensions. Moreover, the principle appears to encourage
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automatic, instinctual behavior, as though what is being desired is not pleasure

in the future, but the removal of unpleasure in the present. It is perhaps not
insignificant that Freud himself had originally thought of calling the concept
the unpleasurable principle.
Indeed, Freud was acutely aware that the distinction between pleasure and
unpleasure could be blurred, for there is a certain pleasure to be found in
repeating unpleasurable experiences. In other words, what might be experienced
as unpleasure by one psychic agency could be experienced as pleasure by
another. Freud calls this the compulsion to repeat:
It is clear that the greater part of what is re-experienced under the

compulsion to repeat must cause the ego unpleasure, since it brings to
light activities of repressed instinctual impulses. That, however, is
unpleasure of a kind we have already considered and does not contra-
dict the pleasure principle: unpleasure for one system and simulta-
neously satisfaction for the other. But we come now to a new and
remarkable fact, namely that the compulsion to repeat also recalls
from the past experiences which include no possibility of pleasure,
and which can never, even long ago, have brought satisfaction even to
instinctual impulses which have since been repressed. 17
A further logic that can come into play here is that of repetition as a mecha-
nism of normalization and consequent familiarization which therefore serves to
reduce the impact of instances previously experienced as traumatic. Freud illus-
trates this with the famous example of a child seeking to overcome the anxiety
of being abandoned by the mother as she leaves the room by miming the process
of departure and return in various games involving throwing away and retrieving
a spool attached to a piece of string. Repetition of certain traumas can lead to a
kind of overcoming of those traumas.18
Nonetheless, the pleasure principle helps us to understand the economic oper-
ations of the psyche. Because it manifests itself in unconscious impulses, it can
explain the symptoms of the seemingly paradoxical repetition of trauma, such as
the constant repetition of traumatic dreams and memories in war veterans, or
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the curious blurring of pain and pleasure in masochistic behavior. Freuds

hydraulic theory of the psychic apparatus offers a homeostatic system that seeks
an equilibrium of all psychic energies.
To repeat experiences that are traumatic at a conscious level may offer a cer-
tain satisfaction or pleasure at an unconscious level. Hence the basic homeo-
static condition of the psyche is maintained through rather than in spite of the
repetition of traumatic experiences. The death instinct is linked to repetition,
and, along with the life instinct, may account for the different registers of plea-
sure and unpleasure to explain the apparent pleasure of certain individuals in
repeating trauma. As Freud says:
If we take into consideration the total picture made up by the phe-

nomena of masochism immanent in so many people, the negative ther-
apeutic reaction and the sense of guilt found in so many neurotics, we
shall no longer be able to adhere to the belief that mental events are
exclusively governed by the desire for pleasure. These phenomena are
unmistakable indications of the presence of a power in mental life
which we call the instinct of aggression or of destruction according
to its aims, and which we trace back to the original death instinct of
living matter. 19
L AC A N A N D D E AT H
Lacan takes up the theme of death once more with some alacrity with his famous
return to Freud. For Lacan, the death instinct cannot be ignored: To ignore
the death instinct in [Freuds] doctrine, he insists, is to misunderstand that
doctrine completely.20 The death instinct and the life instinct lie at the very
heart of Freudian thinking: When we get to the root of this life, behind the
drama of the passage into existence, we find nothing besides life conjoined to
death. That is where the Freudian dialectic leads us.21 And it is fundamental
because it explains the basic topography of id, ego, and superego:
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle . . . is the work of Freud that most of

those who authorize themselves with the title of psychoanalyst dont
hesitate to reject as a superfluous, even chance, speculation . . . inso-
far as the supreme antinomy which results from it, the death instinct,
becomes unthinkable for them. It is difficult, however, to take it as a
mere sideshow, still less a mistake, of the Freudian doctrine, the work
of which is precisely the prelude to the new topography represented by
the terms ego, id, and super-ego that has become as prevalent in its
theoretical usage as in its popular diffusion. 22
Lacans understanding of the death instinct, however, differs significantly

from that of Freud. Lacan is careful to interpret Todestrieb as death drive.
Indeed, he is highly critical of Strachey for obliterating the distinction
between instinct and drive by mistranslating Trieb as instinct in his seminal
English translation of Freuds work. Instinct describes a biological urge,
whereas drive relates to a mythical prelinguistic need. The death drive for
Lacan operates within culture rather than nature. Moreover, an instinct merely
returns to some state of equilibrium, but the drive must go beyond this. The
drive can never be satisfied. As Lacan observes: The drive as such, insofar as it
is then a destruction drive, has to be beyond the instinct to return to the state of
equilibrium of the inanimate sphere. What can it be if it is not a direct will to
destruction . . . ?23
Lacans early description of the death drive, as the urge to return to the pre-
Oedipal moment of oneness with the mothers breast, echoes in some way
Freuds understanding of it as a return to the Nirvana of the womb. But the most
significant departure is that Lacan resists the temptation to separate the death
drive from the sexual drives. He sees the death drive as an integral part of every
drive. Hence, notes Dylan Evans, Lacan writes that every drive is virtually a
death drive, because (i) every drive pursues its own extinction, (ii) every drive
involves the subject in repetition, and (iii) every drive is an attempt to go
beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess jouissance where enjoy-
ment is experienced as suffering.24 The death drive, it would seem, is inherently
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contradictory, if even the life drive is a form of death drive. How can life itself be
premised on death?
This leads us to question whether, if Eros is born of Thanatos, Thanatos
might not equally be born of Eros. Freud admits that any instinct seems to be
derived ultimately from Eros: Over and over again we find, when we are able to
trace instinctual impulses back, that they reveal themselves as derivatives of
Eros.25 Moreover, as Freud also concedes, most deaths can be understood only
as representations of death that leave life intensely intact: It is indeed impos-
sible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can per-
ceive that we are in fact still present as spectators . . . . In the realm of fiction . . .
we die with the hero with whom we have identified ourselves; yet we survive him
and are ready to die again just as safely with another hero.26
Such a view is supported by Georges Bataille. It is not simply that death is
linked to life more closely than most people would acknowledge, in that the sub-
stances where, as Bataille observes, the eggs, germs and maggots swarm not
only make our hearts sink, but also turn our stomachs, are the very unstable,
fetid and lukewarm substances where life ferments.27 Rather, death is a neces-
sary corollary to life. For Bataille, it is a law of nature which most people choose
to ignore: According to this law, life is effusion; it is contrary to equilibrium, to
stability. It is the tumultuous movement that bursts forth and consumes itself.
Its perpetual explosion is possible on one condition: that the spent organisms
give way to new ones, which enter the dance with new forces.28
Death, therefore, anticipates and depends upon the vital force of life, the one
presupposing the other. Not only that: an appreciation of the imminence of
death naturally heightens our awareness of life. This applies not only to those
who are approaching the end of their years, or face a terminal illness, but also to
those whovoluntarilyseek the thrill of danger. For what is this thrill but
a flirtation with death? Death itself may become eroticized. Death, in this
sense, would appear to be locked into a dialectical relationship with life. If Eros
works inexorably toward the little deathla petit morte, as Lacan has called
itof sexual orgasm, so death may provoke its own transcendence, and release a
form of life. Just as any driveincluding Erosis premised on its own extinc-
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tion, so life is based on death, as the unfolding pattern of the seasons demon-
strate every year.
At the heart of the Lacanian death drive, then, there is a paradox. The death
drive is not the mark of human finitude, as Slavoj Zizek observes, but its oppo-
site, the name for the eternal (spectral) life, the index of a dimension of human
existence that persists forever, beyond our physical death, and of which we
cannot rid ourselves.29 Indeed, as Zizek says, for Lacan the death drive always
threatens to invert into its opposite:
for Lacan the death drive is precisely the ultimate Freudian name for
the dimension traditional metaphysics designated as that of immor-
talityfor a drive, a thrust, which persists beyond the (biological)
cycle of generation and corruption, beyond the way of all flesh. In
other words, in the death drive, the concept dead functions in ex-
actly the same way as heimlich in the Freudian unheimlich, as co-
inciding with its negation: the death drive designates the dimension
of what horror fiction calls the undead, a strange, immortal, inde-
structible life that persists beyond death. 30
Joan Copjec provides a further gloss on this question. For Copjec, the prin-
ciple that underpins the death drive is that it servesparadoxicallyto inhibit
its own aim, by effectively sublimating that aim:
The paradoxical Freudian claim that the death drive is a speculative

concept designed to help explain why life aims at death, in fact, tells
only half the story; the other half is given in a second paradox: the
death drive achieves its satisfaction by not achieving its aim. Fur-
ther, the inhibition that prevents the drive from achieving its aim is
not understood within Freudian theory to be due to an extrinsic or
exterior obstacle, but rather to be part of the very activity of the drive
itself. The full paradox of the death drive, then, is this: while the aim
(Ziel) of the death drive is death, the proper and positive activity of
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the drive is to inhibit the attainment of its aim; the drive, as such, is
zielgehemmt, that is, it is inhibited as to its aim, or: sublimated, the
satisfaction of the drive through the inhibition of its aim being the
very definition of sublimation. 31
Indeed, it is precisely the question of sublimation that lies at the heart of the
links between the death drive, the life drive, and art. According to Freud, subli-
mation is what facilitates artistic creativity, and it does so by redirecting the sex-
ual impulses of libidinal energy onto a more socially acceptable plane, the
apparently nonsexual sphere of artistic creation and intellectual work. Accord-
ing to classical psychoanalytic drive theory, observes Laurie Schneider Adams,
a sublimated instinct is one that is redirected away from its sexual aim and
object on to a higher cultural level, such as art, science, sports, and other
socially valued pursuits. The sublimatory activity is thus a transformation of an
instinctual activity. For example, the babys instinct to play with feces might
be sublimated into making mud pies, molding clay, kneading dough, finger-
painting, and eventually creating art.32 The ego comes into play to mediate
between instinctual concerns and the expectations of society. It desexualizes the
force of the libido, and converts it into cultural expressions.
It is not just the life drive but also the death drive which may be sublimated.
Crucially, the sublimated death drive may also be associated with creativity, and
it is this that might lead us to the seemingly paradoxical assumption that the
death drive may lie behind all creativity. This, in fact, was the conclusion reached
by Salvador Dal, himself no stranger to either Freudian or Lacanian theory.
Indeed, Dal says in his autobiography that he had embarked at one stage on The
Tower of Babel, a treatise on art theory whose fundamental assumption was that
all art was born of death. The bases of my Tower of Babel, he notes, began with
the exposition of the phenomenon of death, which was to be found, according to
my view, at the inception of every imaginative construction.33 Unfortunately,
death itselfthrough the death of his own mothercut short Dals own work
on death, and prevented him from completing his treatise.
For Lacan, art is also linked to the death drive. In his early work, Lacan asso-
ciates the death drive with alienation, as part of the imaginary structuration of
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the mirror stage. For the imaginary is itself a form of alienation, and therefore
linked to death: This image of the master, which is what [man] sees in the form
of the specular image, becomes confused in him with the image of death.34
Later, however, Lacan links the death drive with the symbolic order as a ten-
dency to produce repetition. As Dylan Evans observes:
While Lacan follows Freud in linking sublimation with creativity

and art, he complicates this by also linking it with the death drive.
Several reasons can be adduced to explain this. Firstly, the concept of
the death drive is itself seen as a product of Freuds own sublimation.
Secondly, the death drive is not only a destruction force, but also a
will to create from zero. Thirdly, the sublime object, through being
elevated to the dignity of the Thing, exerts a power of fascination
which leads ultimately to death and destruction. 35
Once we are in this world of the imaginary and the sublime, the connections
between art and the death drive become increasingly obvious. Whether through
sublimation or its transcendence, the death drive lies at the heart of all art.
What begins to emerge is a complex picture of the drives which structure
creativity. In being linked to the death drive, creativity is also connected to rep-
etition. Hence we might be able to explain why even the most creative of indi-
viduals often have a life structured by monotonous routine and repetition. For
rhythm itself is based on repetition. Designers may find the perfect background
for their own creativity in this reassuringly familiar lifestyle, which sinks into the
subconscious so that is hardly noticeable. All gestures need to be grounded in
their opposite, and repetition can be the perfect foil for creativity.
T H A N AT O S A N D T H E E N V I R O N M E N T
The discourse of Thanatos, as it develops on from the death instinct in Freud

into the discourse of the death drive in Lacans work, is a complex story of subli-
mations, inhibitions, and dialectical reversals. Despite its complexity, however,
Thanatos has clear ramifications for any architectural inquiry. Both Thanatos
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and Eros can be seen to structure creativity. Moreover, they seem to offer a the-
oretical model of the ways in which human beings relate to their environment.
The death instinct, for Freud, seeks to discharge tensions and to resolve any
conflict between the organism and its surroundings, whereas the life instinct
seeks to maintain those differences. As Laplanche and Pontalis point out: The
life instinct, for its part, is defined by the opposite trend: the establishment and
maintenance of more differentiated, more organized forms, constancy of the
energy level and even the widening of differences in it as between the organism and
its surroundings.36 It is therefore important to recognize that the life instinct is
founded on a union with the other, whereas the death instinct seeks to sever
that union. Freud describes the distinction as follows: The aim of [Eros] is to
establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thusin short to bind
together; the aim of [the destructive instinct] is, on the contrary, to undo con-
nections and so to destroy things.37
Thanatos, it would seem, relates most closely to a sense of undifferentiated
oneness with the environment, a relinquishing of any tensions, and a dissolving
of any conflict between the self and the environment. This evokes (somewhat
paradoxically, it might seem, in that life is associated with death) memories of
the Nirvana of the womb. The comfort of the home therefore echoes the com-
fort of the womb. Indeed, Freud himself explicitly connects the dwelling with
the mothers womb, the first lodging, as a site of comfort and security: Writ-
ing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling-house was a
substitute for the mothers womb, the first lodging, for which in all likelihood
man still longs, and in which he was safe and felt at ease.38 This is a comforting,
but also potentially cloying state of union, and it would appear that the desire
for this state of union is activated by experience of the opposite statealien-
ation. For it is in the context of extreme alienation that the subject longs for
this compensatory sense of oneness.
Eros, by contrast, relates most closely to a sense of differentiation from the
environment, a maintaining of any tension and a preservation of a sense of dis-
tinction between the self and the other. The subject can therefore forge a rela-
tionship with the environment, but it is one of alterity. As with Thanatos, desire
for this state is evoked by experience of the opposite statein this case, same-
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ness. Thus Eros is prompted precisely when the organism is threatened by a stul-
tifying, undifferentiated state of sameness. It is motivated by the desire to open
up and broaden horizons. Eros therefore concerns the potentially erotic dimen-
sion of an encounter with the other, of which the environment forms a key
component. It should not be forgotten, however, that while Eros respects and
maintains otherness, it is also fundamentally concerned with a relation with
the other.
Eros and Thanatos therefore delineate the spectrum within which human
existence operates. They are compensatory impulses that prescribe the often
complex range of relations between human beings and their environment that
may vary from attraction to repulsion. Thus if Thanatos represents the desire to
return to the protection of the womb, Eros represents the urge to flee the nest.
We might even go so far as to read the two impulses in straightforward architec-
tural terms. Thanatos, we might surmise, would provide an engagement with the
environment which would not see the environment as other an engagement, in
other words, of complete oneness. Eros, by contrast, would provide an engage-
ment which would not see the environment as the samean engagement, there-
fore, of complete otherness. Thus an architecture of Thanatos would be one of
harmony and repose, while an architecture of Eros would be one of stimulation
and excitement. Even here, however, we must be alert to the folding of each
impulse into its oppositethe innervation that might be invoked through a
state of harmony, and the eventual extinguishing of any state of excitement.
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Herbert Marcuse offers a further interpretation of the interplay of Eros and

Thanatos in the moment of aesthetic contemplation. He argues that the dis-
tinction between Eros and Thanatos is not fully resolved by Freud, suggesting
that these two seemingly opposite drives have a common origin, and may there-
fore be reconciled, even though for Freud this is not possible. To do so,
observes Freud, would be to presuppose that living substance was once a unity
which had later been torn apart and was now striving towards re-union.1 Yet
Julia Kristeva would appear to agree with Marcuse; she locates their reconcilia-
tion within the realm of aesthetic expression. I think that the aesthetic process,
which for psychoanalysis is a process of sublimation, consists in finding a certain
harmony of the most violent drives, the life drive and the death drive.2 For Mar-
cuse, the crucial images that bring Eros and Thanatos together are Narcissus
and Orpheus.
Narcissus is the beautiful youth of classical antiquity, with whom the nymph
Echo falls in love. Echo is scorned by Narcissus, and she retreats into the woods,
fading away to nothing as she nurses her broken heart: Yet still her love re-
mained firmly rooted in her heart, writes Ovid, and was increased by the pain
of having been rejected. Her anxious thoughts kept her awake, and made her
pitifully thin. She became wrinkled and wasted; all the freshness of her beauty
withered into the air. Only her voice and her bones were left, till finally her voice
alone remained; for her bones, they say, were turned into stone.3
Nemesis punishes Narcissus for spurning the advances of Echo and other
admirers. As Narcissus leans out over a pool for a drink following a hard days
hunting, he is captivated by his own image, mistaking the reflection for reality
itself. While he sought to quench his thirst, writes Ovid, another thirst grew
in him, and as he drank, he was enchanted by the beautiful reflection that he saw.
He fell in love with an insubstantial hope, mistaking a mere shadow for a real
body. Spellbound by his own self, he remained there motionless, with fixed gaze,
like a statue carved of Parian marble.4 He tries in vain to reach out and grasp the
image, which also appears to reach out for him, but eventually, lying there with-
out food or sleep, he wastes away in his own self-love, and dies. When they come
to bury him, they discover that his body is nowhere to be seen, but that a flower
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with white petals and a yellow center has blossomed. To this day this flower still
bears his name, Narcissus.
Orpheus is likewise a beautiful young man who is punished for scorning the
advances of others. A poet who played so beautifully on his lyre that he was able
to hold even wild animals spellbound, and could draw the woods and rocks to fol-
low him, Orpheus is attacked by a group of Ciconian women whom he has
spurned in his love for young boys. Neither his singing nor the forces of nature
can protect him, and the women rip him apart. Bacchus, however, punishes the
women for killing his favorite poet by turning them into trees, and making them
take root where they stand.
In each story there is a curious tension between life and death, animate and
inanimate. For loveand unrequited loveleads to death, yet this death, as in
the case of the flower, only leads to life. Meanwhile, just as Orpheus has the
power to make the inanimate world come alive and follow him, so too Bacchus
punishes the women who kill Orpheus by making them part of that inanimate
world, rooting them to the earth. Likewise, not only do Echos bones turn to
stone, but Narcissus himself metamorphoses into a piece of inanimate marble as
he gazes at his reflection. The animate inverts into the inanimate. But equally,
the inanimate spawns the animate. As Narcissus dies, he animates the blossom-
ing of a flower.
Marcuse picks up on these two emblems of Narcissus and Orpheus. For him,
they represent a reconciliation between Eros and Thanatos:
They recall the experience of a world that is not to be mastered and

controlled but to be liberated a freedom that will release the powers
of Eros now bound to the petrified forms of man and nature. These
powers are conceived not as destruction but as peace, not as terror but
as beauty. It is sufficient to enumerate the assembled images in order
to circumscribe the dimension to which they are committed: the
redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death;
silence, sleep, night, paradisethe Nirvana principle not as death
but as life. 5
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Unlike Orpheus, who worked with song, Narcissus was obsessed with contem-
plation and aesthetic beauty, and therefore relates more to the realm of the
visual. Moreover, the moment when Narcissus himself seemingly turns into
marble, as he contemplates his own image, lends his myth a specifically archi-
tectural dimension. It would therefore seem to make sense to focus here on
Narcissus rather than Orpheus.
Marcuse reworks the myth of Narcissus, observing that Narcissus is indeed in
love with an othereven if he is deceived in this, mistaking himself for that
otherand that his death is linked to a form of life:
His silence is not that of dead rigidity; and when he is contemptuous

of the love of hunters and nymphs he rejects one Eros for another. He
lives by an Eros of his own, and he does not love only himself. (He does
not know that the image he admires is his own.) If his erotic attitude
is akin to death and brings death, then rest and sleep and death are not
painfully separated and distinguished: the Nirvana principle rules
throughout all these stages. And when he dies he continues to live as
the flower that bears his name. 6
In the narcissistic realm, Marcuse sees a reconciliation between Eros and

Thanatos. In this sense he goes beyond Freud to offer a vision in which art plays
a creative role, and is no longer merely a reflection of the state of things. It is
a world which embodies the principles of both Eros and Thanatosa static
world, a world at rest, but a fundamentally poetic world. It is a world where
static triumphs over dynamic; but it is a static that moves in its own fullness
a productivity that is sensuousness, play and song.7
We might further develop Marcuses thesis on the relationship between Eros
and Thanatos. It is not simply that these two drives are reconciled in the aes-
thetic moment. While it is clear that they do collude in some fashion, there
would appear to be a reciprocal relation between the two moments, in that the
moment of Thanatos seems to prepare the ground for that of Eros. The tran-
scendence of Thanatos, as the death instinct is resolved, leads to the release of
Eros. In other words, Thanatos appears to invite Eros, just as with time Eros
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invites Thanatos, since all drives are premised on their own extinction, like fire-
works whose spectacular display is destined to fade away into nothing. The rec-
onciliation between Eros and Thanatos can therefore be seen to be a differential
one. Thanatos comes first. Thanatos leads to Eros. And here we might recognize
the sacrificial moment that underpins all aesthetic questions. In its structure,
aesthetic contemplation is sacrificial.
This gives us a further clue to the underlying meaning of death in the death
drive. Death is not death as finality, as absence of life. The death drive calls for
a death which is not death, a death which transcends death, a death which is put
in the service of life. This death is akin to the death of Christ on the Crossa
death that gives others life. Likewise, it is akin to the death of Narcissusthe
ecstasy of narcissistic absorption into the selfa death that results in the birth
of a flower. It is in the resurrection from the Cross, and in the blossoming of the
flower, that the death instinct is realized, and death itself is transcended. Life
rises phoenixlike from the ashes of the past.
Narcissus can therefore be interpreted as the quintessential emblem of aes-
thetic contemplation. Gazing at his own reflection, he identifies with the image,
surrendering himself to it. In trying to grasp the beauty of that image, he drowns,
only to give life to a flower. He thereby enacts the sacrificethe surrendering
to the otherwhich remains a precondition of aesthetic experience. As in the
myth of Narcissus, sacrifice transcends death. It leads not to death but to life,
not to closure but to openness. In the shock of aesthetic recognition, the sub-
ject is forced open and exposed to a meaningful relationship with the object.
The subject is decentered and broadened. The subject identifies with the ob-
ject, and in the forging of new identities during the dynamic process of assimila-
tion, death itself is resisted and overcome.
The aesthetic gratification that results from this momentthe recognition
of the self in the other, the self as part of, at one with, the wholeinduces the
Nirvana principle. The narcissistic gratification of the self reflected back in
this stimulating engagement with the environment re-creates the sensuous one-
ness of the womb, the integral gratification of the womb. The memory of the
Nirvana of the womb is recognized, and a state of pleasurable bliss is attained. All
conflicts are resolved, as the death instinct is both realized and transcended. The
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vital experience that flares up in this sensuous engagement evokes the blossom-
ing of the flower on the death of Narcissus. And in the pleasurable ecstasy of this
intensely poetic moment, paradise is regained.
FREUD AND NARCISSISM
The myth of Narcissus has provided psychoanalysis with one of its most pro-
ductive conceptsone that, as developed by Lacan, offers a comprehensive
framework for understanding the mechanism of identification. The origins are
to be found in the work of Freud, who posits two alternative modes of narcis-
sism: primary and secondary. Although both serve the same end of blurring the
boundary between self and other, there is an important distinction to be made
between the two.
Primary narcissism relates to an early stage before any object relation has
been established. It is based on the unalienated experience of the Nirvana of the
womb, where the infant swims in a sea of oceanic bliss, unable to distinguish
itself from its surroundings. This primitive stage, observe Laplanche and Pon-
talis, now called primary narcissism, is supposed to be characterized by the total
absence of any relationship to the outside world, and by a lack of differentiation
between ego and id; intra-uterine existence is taken to be its prototypical form,
while sleep is deemed a more or less successful imitation of that ideal model.8
Primary narcissism occurs when the infant is unaware of any separation from its
mother. The child therefore misreads its dependence upon the mother as the
source of its own omnipotence.
Secondary narcissism, by contrast, occurs in later life, once the child has
learned to distinguish itself from the objects around it. It comes into play with
what Lacan calls the mirror stage, as an individual begins to identify with others,
causing the libido to flow into the ego.9 As Charles Rycroft explains:
Classical theory distinguishes between primary narcissism, the love

of self which precedes loving others, and secondary narcissism, love of
self which results from introjecting and identifying with an object.
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The latter is either a defensive activity or an attitude, since it enables

the subject to deny that he has lost the introjected object, or part of the
development process. 10
Secondary narcissism is therefore potentially the more dangerous, since primary

narcissism is a stage that can be left behind, albeit never totally forgotten. Sec-
ondary narcissism serves to annul the pain when the omnipotence which had
been expected is not realized in later life. But this may lead to a form of aggres-
sivity, since the wholeness of the specular image may prove threatening, and
thereby provoke rivalry.
In the context of secondary narcissism, the myth of Narcissus informs one of
the two models of object-love: anaclitic and narcissistic. Anaclitic love (or
attachment love, as Freud also calls it) is based on object-choice formulated in
infants when they meet their first sexual object on the basis of their nutritional
instincts. The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions, observes Freud, are expe-
rienced in connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-
preservation.11 Their subsequent object-choices are based on substitution for
the mothers breast. A person may love, writes Freud, according to the ana-
clitic (attachment) type: a. the woman who feeds him, b. the man who protects
him, and the succession of substitutes who take their place.12 Narcissistic love,
by contrast, focuses not on the mother but on the self: We have discovered,
notes Freud, especially clearly in people whose libidinal development has suf-
fered some disturbance, such as perverts and homosexuals, that in their later
choice of love-objects they have taken as a model not their mother but their own
selves. They are plainly seeking themselves as a love-object, and are exhibiting a
type of object-choice which must be termed narcissistic.13
These two forms of object-lovenarcissistic and anacliticmay take on a
variety of manifestations. According to Freud, narcissistic love can take four
forms. A person may love:
1. What he himself is.

2. What he himself was.
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3. What he himself would like to be.

4. Someone who was once part of himself.
Anaclitic love, by comparison, may be directed toward:
1. The woman who feeds him.

2. The man who protects him.14
Freud favors anaclitic love. It is preferable, because it respects otherness. By

contrast, Freud sees narcissism as a negative mechanismas a regressive, child-
ish delusion that, in effect, prevents us from recognizing the other in the other.
Narcissism, for Freud, is solipsistic. It causes us constantly to see ourselves in the
other, and to fail to fully grasp the alterity of the other. Narcissism leads to
an investment of libido in the ego, rather than in external objects. As a result,
instead of opening up to some intersubjective realm, relationships become
internalized and the libido is dammed up. Although there may be a healthy
narcissism that helps to maintain a sense of self-respect, Freud himself is, on the
whole, somewhat negative toward the condition.
MARCUSE AND NARCISSISM
It is possible, however, to read Freud against Freud, and adopt a more sympa-
thetic approach to narcissism. For, as Marcuse points out, narcissism in Freud
refers to a mechanism for potential engagement with the other, even though
the other may in fact be the self. Subjects read themselves into the other,
see themselves reflected in the other. But there is something positive in this.
For, as Marcuse observes, the figure of Narcissus is emblematic of a mode of
engaging withidentifying withthe other. In other words, narcissism be-
comes a means by which the subject can identify with the object. Narcissus
stands for the refusal to accept separation from the libidinous object.15
Here Marcuse picks up on Freuds own comments on the subject of narcis-
sism: Freud describes the ideational content of the surviving primary ego-
feeling as limitless extension and oneness with the universe (oceanic feeling ).
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And, later in the same chapter, he suggests that the oceanic feeling seeks to rein-
state limitless narcissism.16 He therefore establishes a connection between
narcissism and an oceanic feeling of oneness with the universe. Moreover, as
Marcuse notes, Freud goes on to distinguish the early stages of the formation
of the ego, which constitutes a form of existential oneness, from the later
detached nature of the ego: Originally the ego includes everything, later it
detaches itself from the external world. The ego-feeling we are aware of now is
thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feelinga feeling which
embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with
the external world.17 This suggests that primary narcissism is a richer, more
encompassing form of narcissism, which provides a comprehensive mode of
engagement with the environment. Primary narcissism, says Marcuse, is more
than autoeroticism; it engulfs the environment integrating the narcissistic ego
with the objective world.18
This early stage in the development of the ego is not forgotten. It survives as
a neurotic symptom, and also as a constitutive element in the construction of
reality which coexists with the mature reality ego. Seen in this light, narcis-
sism can be reinterpreted in a more positive way as a constitutive part of our
early identity that can be reevoked in later life. As Marcuse explains:
The striking paradox that narcissism, usually understood as egotistic

withdrawal from reality, here is connected with oneness with the uni-
verse, reveals the new depth of the conception: beyond all immature
autoeroticism, narcissism denotes a fundamental relatedness to real-
ity which may generate a comprehensive existential order. 19
Narcissus, for Marcuse, offers a model of a non-repressive order, in which the

subjective and objective world, man and nature are harmonized.20 The model
suggests a way of overcoming the opposition between man and nature, subject
and object. Narcissism can be read not as indulgent self-gratification, but as a
way of integrating the self with nature: Being is experienced as gratification,
which unites man and nature so that the fulfillment of man at the same time the
fulfillment, without violence, of nature.21
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Marcuses underlying concern is to overcome the repressiveness of the reality

principle which can lead to inhuman, coercive, and destructive forms of behav-
ior. One way to do this is to release previously suppressed childhood fantasies,
and somehow to access that earlier state of oneness. For Marcuse, this cannot be
dismissed as simply regressive: The reactivation of prehistoric and childhood
wishes and attitudes is not necessarily regression; it may well be the opposite
proximity to a happiness that has always been the repressed promise of a better
future. In one of his most advanced formulations, Freud once defined happiness
as the subsequent fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. That is why wealth brings so
little happiness: money was not a wish in childhood.22
Narcissus therefore stands for this release of repression. In this respect, nar-
cissism retains a sense of the childishness which Freud associates with it, in
that the dissolution of the self into the other parallels the underdeveloped
subject/object split of the child. The model of Narcissus gazing at his own reflec-
tion without recognizing it would therefore parallel the period preceding the
mirror stage, as defined by Lacan, in which the child has yet to recognize its
own reflection. In this context, however, narcissism should be seen not as an im-
mature regression into a childish state but as a potentially positive development
that broadens the subject and overcomes the divide between self and other.
N A R C I S S I S T I C C R E AT I V I T Y
The myth of Narcissus offers us an insight into the way in which human beings
relate to the world, and serves to illustrate how aesthetic recognition operates.
It also offers us an insight into human creativity. For it is not simply that repeti-
tion can be seen as a creative act. Rather, creativity itself may be understood as a
gesture predicated on a form of repetition that is narcissistic in its structuration.
It is as though the very misunderstanding or mconnaissance, that underpins
the identificatory moment of the mirror stage becomes a constitutive moment
in creativity itself, such that creativity can be construed as a kind of creative
misunderstanding, to use a term coined by Harold Bloom.
In the process of sublimation of erotic impulses that informs all artistic cre-
ation, the ego, which is responsible for this process, is invested with certain sub-
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limated energies that are consistent with the egos own narcissism. As Laurie
Schneider Adams explains: In this function, the ego is the unifying life force of
libido and the egos narcissism can be seen as reflected in the creative prod-
uct.23 Robert Vischer also notes that this mirroring creates a sense of harmony,
which Marcuse observes in the context of the myth of Narcissus:
It is truly the essence of artistic ideality not to be conceptually aware

of itself but to mirror itself in an individual object. Far from obscur-
ing the objects special character it simply forces the impulse of form
to take those characteristics as its primordial idea and to model itself
on them. To this end it harmonizes the object, not from an abstract,
universal canon but from a subjective, concrete principle that is part
of the human psychophysical self. Thus every work of art reveals itself
to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object,
or as humanity objectifying itself in harmonious forms. 24
Here we might posit two distinct yet related operations: the potential for
human beings to see themselves in terms of buildings, and the tendency to see
buildings in terms of the self. The first operation could be exemplified by the
tendency of human beings to respond to the built environment as though it were
a reflection of the selfthe tendency, for example, to stand up straight in front
of a vertical building, and so on. Here it must be recognized that a building need
not be a literal reflection of the self, in the sense that it does not need to reflect
our actual image. Rather, we have the capacity to see ourselves in the expressions
of others, so that we adjust our behavior according to their approving or disap-
proving glances, just as we adjust our clothes or hair in front of an actual mirror.
We might also talk about the potential for human beings to register the prop-
erties of the othereven an expressionless, mute otherand see them-
selves in terms of those properties. A blank wall may therefore serve as a form of
mirror, in that we might register its straightness, hardness, verticality, and so
on, and replicate these characteristics in our own behavior.
The second operation would be the capacity for human beings to see build-
ings as the self. Human beings have always been prone to re-create the world in
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their own image, so that their gods are inevitably fashioned on themselves, and
their buildings are born of characteristics traceable to the human form. Hence
we findin the drawings of Francesco di Giorgio, for exampletelltale signs
of the inscription of human figures in the plans and elevations of buildings,
born, no doubt, of the urge to fashion buildings according to the principles of
human proportions. As Samuel Butler comments: Every mans work, whether
it be literature or music or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait
of himself.25
There are, moreover, numerous examples of architects posing as their build-
ings, which provide an obvious corollary to the notion that buildings are a reflec-
tion of their architects.26 This serves to illustrate the potentially narcissistic
dimension to design. In their designs, architects re-create themselves at a sym-
bolic level. Design is an articulation of ones aesthetic values, and those values
are absorbed and then projected out to form a narcissistic reflection of the self.
Yet this reflection need not be a literal reflection. Indeed, the building does not
have to look like the architect. It merely has to reflect the architects aesthetic
values.
This points toward a potential comfort to be derived out of the creative
act. It is as though the principle of repetition as a means of overcoming alien-
ation can be turned toward the design process. To perceive ones aesthetic val-
ues articulated in the external world through design is, in a sense, to engage in a
narcissistic reinforcement of the self.
THE AESTHETIC COCOON
Marcuses contribution to the debate is important, because it signals a redemp-

tive social role for narcissism. This is significant, since it potentially redeems
certain aspects of contemporary culture which have often been criticized.
According to some commentators, the predominant disposition within our
contemporary age is characterized by a form of narcissistic introversion. In The
Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch identifies a growing culture of narcis-
sism within contemporary society.27 Our society is dominated by a form of self-
absorption, leading to an erosion of any awareness of deeper social concerns.
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This generates a culture of untrammeled individualism, further bolstered by

various new forms of therapy, notably analysis and continual medical self-
examination, which create a culture of self-surveillance which privileges health,
good looks, and youthful vitality. Not surprisingly, this culture of narcissism is
fed by technological advances in the machinery of cultural reproduction. We
live in a swirl of images and echoes, observes Lasch, that arrest experience and
play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe
experience, but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an
enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors.28
Against such an irredeemably negative view of contemporary culture, it is
perhaps necessary to note the more sympathetic understanding of narcissism
that emerges from Marcuses alternative perspective. By appreciating the exis-
tential oneness that can be engendered by a narcissistic world-view, one can
recognize its positive potential as a mechanism for overcoming alienation. Fur-
thermore, since narcissism necessarily contains an aesthetic moment, one might
begin to recognize the important role of aesthetics in combating that sense of
alienation. In other words, the highly aestheticized outlook of contemporary
culture can be seen to operate as a defensive strategy. Narcissism and aestheti-
cization may therefore be seen as survival mechanisms within an increasingly
alienated, fragmented society. They emerge as the source of our problems rather
than some of its symptoms.
Hence we might recognize a social role for the proliferation of designer
spacesaesthetic cocoonswithin contemporary culture. These cocoons
could be understood as an extension of the mirror in the original myth of
Narcissus. They would constitute three-dimensional versions of the two-
dimensional reflective pool, and would operate as an all-encompassing envi-
ronment. To be cocooned would therefore be quite literally to be engulfed by
an environment that would reflect ones aesthetic predilection, providing one
with a sense of gratification and stimulation. These cocoons would offer a state
of oceanic bliss that echoes the Nirvana of the womb itself, a sanctuary from
an often alienating world. The essential motor behind such developments
would be the sense of reassurance and well-being that would be evoked by
being surrounded by such a cocoon.
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There is something to be said, then, for reappraising narcissism and acknowl-

edging the positive role it plays as a mechanism of identification. Much depends,
however, on how we construe this moment of narcissistic identification. The key
here is to realize that if identification is to be enriching, it must be perceived as
an identification not with the self, but with the other. It has to be innervating. It
is perhaps through the mirror that we might recognize this distinction. Perseus,
after all, used the mirror to kill Medusa, by forcing her to gaze at her own image;
while Alice discovers an enchanted, animated version of her world on the other
side of the looking glass. The mirror has the power both to animate and to make
inanimate. It is precisely the difference between opening up and closing down.
A literal reflection of the self would establish a closedand ultimately nihil-
isticsystem of self-replication, a doubling up that could descend into some
introverted spiral of melancholia. For identification must never lead to some in-
ternalized sense of closure. Rather, identification must be understood as a con-
tinual process of broadening ones horizons and opening up to the otherof
identifying with the nonidentical. It is a question, moreover, of identifying in a
manner that remains continuously open. Identification, in this sense, leads not
to a reification of the self, but to a form of self-transcendence.
The myth of Narcissus is a myth not about sameness but about difference, not
about stratification but about transformation. Ovid, after all, records the story
in his collection of tales about metamorphosis. Narcissus first turns to marble
and dies. After his death, his body vanishes and a flower springs up where he died.
Like the caterpillar cocooned within its chrysalis, only to reemerge as a butter-
fly, Narcissus is trapped within his own aesthetic realm, only to metamorphose
into a flower. In these moments of identification, then, the mirror has to serve
as a vehicle for a form of metamorphosis. Rather than reflecting the given, it
has to reconfigure the given. The mirror must operate as a form of window into
a new version of the oldas though what exists on the other side is a meta-
morphosis of what exists on this side. We might therefore return to the example
of Alice stepping through the looking glass. It is in this moment of stepping
into some enchanted realm beyond that we might glimpse the mirrors poten-
tial to act as a portal into another world, to reveal, in an inverted fashion, the
potentialities of our own.
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I D E N T I T Y
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Lacans own discussion of narcissism is linked explicitly with the myth of Nar-
cissus. He follows the early Freud, with his emphasis on primary narcissism as
self-love rather than objectless self-absorption or self-sufficiency, as stressed
in Freuds later work. But Lacans treatment of the term is no simple repetition
of Freud.
First, Lacan stresses the danger implicit in narcissism which may lead to a
form of self-destruction. As Malcolm Bowie observes: For Lacan the tragic
story of Narcissus does not speak of delusional self-admiration alone, for the
hero is held in thrall by the peculiar potency of a reflecting surface, and is infat-
uated with his reflected image to the point of self-destruction. 1 Lacan locates
the origin of this self-destruction in the very processes of identification. Bowie
again: The original act of identification is the original narcissistic declaration
too; into the very constitution of the ego its destruction is already woven; the
only escape from alienation is an aggravation of the alienated state.2
This supports the original myth of Narcissus. The cause of Narcissuss self-
destruction, after all, lies in his obsession with his self-image. Identification with
that image leads to his death. So too with the mirror stage, the subject develops
a form of envy toward its own reflection, in that this reflection seems more com-
plete than the subjects own self-perception. This induces a form of crisis in the
subject that may prove highly destructive. As Evans notes:
Lacan thus defines narcissism as the erotic attraction to the specular

image; this erotic relation underlies the primary identification by
which the ego is formed in the mirror stage. Narcissism has both an
erotic character and an aggressive character. It is erotic, as the myth
of Narcissus shows, since the subject is strongly attracted to the ge-
stalt that is his image. It is aggressive, since the wholeness of the spec-
ular image contrasts with the uncoordinated disunity of the subjects
real body, and thus seems to threaten the subject with disintegration. 3
Secondly, Lacan also resolves several problematic areas in Freuds approach

to narcissism. The conflict that Freuds notion of narcissism sets up arises from
his contention that the ego becomes an object of love within his concept of
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self-love, out of which his theory of narcissism develops. The problem here is
that the ego as an object of love has the same status as the object of its love.
Thus, notes Borch-Jacobsen, the love object would actually be a narcissistic
object, as it is, for example, in homosexuality (where the ego loves a counter-
part) or in passionate love (where the man loves himself in a narcissistic
woman).4 In this context, love of another is reduced to love of another as the
self, and the whole basis of sociality is reduced to a form of narcissistic self-
love.5 Freuds thinking here is caught in a double bind, because the only way to
resolve the problem (identification) is through the very mechanism that gave
rise to it (identification).
What Lacan needs to exorcize from this neat dialectical reversal is the notion
of the dialectic itself. Whereas Freud would emphasize the dialectical relation-
ship, Lacan would emphasize the distinction between the two. He therefore
differentiates between two conflicting identifications by associating them
respectively with the superego and the ego-ideal. These are the two faces
of identificationthe one resisting that identification, the other desiring it.
As Borch-Jacobsen explains:
On one side is the unconscious superego, prohibiting identification

(Do not be like me) and thereby repressing the biologically inade-
quate object that desires first maturation proposes to desire. On the
other side is the conscious ego-ideal, which says, Be like me, and
which through imaginary identification . . . will orient the choice
toward the biologically adequate object of pubescent maturation. . . .
In short, the other who I must be (the ego-ideal) is not the same as the
one who I must not be (the superego); or the other with whom I iden-
tify must be other than the other-me. 6
Identification is therefore no longer a question of overcoming a double

bind, and its resolution is easy enough to understand. For Lacan, it is simply a
question of distinguishing the ego-ideal from the superego. As Borch Jacob-
sen comments: Whereas Freud . . . went stubbornly on butting up against the
paradox of an identification that was normative and neurotic, socializing and
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desocializing, Lacan no less stubbornly sought to resolve it: by cutting through

Freuds ambiguity between the ego-ideal and the superego; by separating the
good, normalizing identification from the bad, rivalrous identification.7 Seen in
this light, identification is no longer compromised, but may offer a positive role
in the context of a society of alienation.
Lacans key contribution to the discussion of narcissism, however, is to recog-
nize that, out of Freuds own theory of narcissism, a comprehensive theory of
identification might be drawn. He does this by developing a theory of identity
based on specular identification, through his observations of the mirror stage.
T H E M I R R O R S TAG E
Lacan uses the mirror as a device to make sense of Freuds somewhat confused
discussion of narcissism. In his essay on the mirror stage, Lacan famously
describes the moment when a child recognizes the reflection of its own image:8
This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from the
age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the
startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet
to walk , or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support,
human or artificial . . . he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubi-
lant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude
in a slightly leaning forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze,
brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. 9
This stage marks an important development in the subjectivity of the indi-

vidual.10 It describes the formation of the ego by a process of an imaginary iden-
tification with the specular image, which is later supplemented by symbolic
identification, accessed through language.11 Until this moment, the child has
been informed affectively through interaction with the mother. Now it comes
to recognize itself in visual terms through its specular image.12 The child begins
to model itself on that image, and identify with it. In so doing, the child achieves
a degree of autonomy. It is no longer lost within an undifferentiated sea of sen-
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sations, but perceives itself for the first time as a separate beingas an object
in a world of objects.
Beyond this, the mirror stage marks the moment when the subject can begin
to identify constructively with the world. Although it constitutes a form of pri-
mary identificationan alienating identification, in that the subject now
identifies with itself objectively as an imagoit sets the scene for potential sec-
ondary identifications.13 For without the initial alienation of the mirror stage,
there can be no secondary identifications. These secondary identifications are
significantly different from primary identifications. Whereas with primary
identifications the subject has yet to distinguish its identity from that of other
objects, with secondary identifications the subject is able to identify with
another object as a separate entity. Secondary identifications can therefore act
as a defense mechanism in overcoming the distance between self and other.14
Their role is to camouflage and protect.15
Implicit within this model is a tension between early childhood and adult life.
Secondary identification constitutes the urge to return to a childlike state of
oneness. Adult life, by contrast, is premised on individuationon separation
from the outside. This dynamic remains at play throughout subsequent life, so
that in moments of creative identificationin viewing representations of any
kind: photographs, models, drawings, and so onwe need to adopt a childlike
mode of engagement in order, as it were, to transport ourselves into the original.
This is the principle of regression that can be used creatively to temporarily
restore a childlike oneness with the world. As Freud himself comments: The
primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest
sense of the word, imperishable.16
This alienating identification, in which the child is forced to accept its own
autonomy, allows the child to develop a distinctif not necessarily coherent
sense of identity, and a degree of motility, by recognizing itself as a coordinated
entity. As Dylan Evans observes:
The baby sees its own image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image
produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body,
which is experienced as a fragmented body; this contrast is first felt
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by the infant as a rivalry with its own image, because the wholeness of
the image threatens the subject with fragmentation, and the mirror
stage thereby gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject
and the image. In order to resolve this aggressive tension the sub-
ject identifies with its own image; this primary identification with
the counterpart is what forms the ego. 17
It also allows the child to identify with other objects in its world, thus inaugu-
rating the possibility of seeing itself reflected in its surroundings. It is through
this process that the child begins to constitute its identityan identity that
remains forever in process, and subject to continual renegotiation.
Lacan refers to this identification with ones own image as a moment of
homeomorphic identification, and relates it to the manner in which various
animals develop behavioral patterns by viewing others of their own species.18 It
is significant that he also refers to heteromorphic identification, drawing upon
Roger Cailloiss earlier essay on Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia:19
But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as

cases of heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the
problem of signification of space for the living organismpsycho-
logical concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on
these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the sup-
posedly supreme law of adaptation. We have only to recall how Roger
Caillois . . . illuminated the subject by using the term legendary
psychasthenia to classify morphological mimicry as an obsession
with space in its derealizing effect. 20
This reference to heteromorphic identification implies an identification

with something that is other, and points to Cailloiss interest in the principle
of distinction. For Cailloiss concern is not identification, but the horror of
nondifferentiation between the self and the environment. This condition is
problematic because identity depends on an organisms ability to distinguish
itself from its surroundings. Without this ability to distinguish oneself from
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the environment, one descends into a condition that Caillois describes as

legendary psychasthenia.21
Lacan hereby introduces a vital dynamic into the formation of identity. For he
recognizes that identity is constituted as much through distinction as through
connection. Identity is born of an interaction between self and other, as a con-
tinual process of attraction and repulsion. Kristeva describes identification as an
open-ended, fluid process, a transference between the body and its ever-
evolving psychic apparatus with an other.22 Identification therefore remains a
compromised activity, doomed to failure, yet posited in opposition to attempts
to remain autonomous that will never succeed. As Kristeva describes it: If I
concede that I am never ideally One under the Law of the Other, my entire
psychic experience consists of failed identifications as well as my impossible
attempts to be an autonomous being, attempts that circumscribe narcissism,
perversion, and alienation.23
Lacan also introduces the role of the environment into the formation of an
identity. For identity is forged against a background, and the physical environ-
ment may serve as part of that background. It involves connecting with a given
environment, butimportantlyalso distinguishing oneself from that envi-
ronment. These processes, moreover, appear to be related. One can only connect
what is separated, and separate what is connected.24 We might therefore surmise
that identity can be understood in terms of gestalt as a figure/ground relation-
ship to ones environment, a sense of separation that cannot be enacted without
first establishing a sense of connection, and a sense of connection that cannot be
enacted without first establishing a sense of separation.
C I N E M AT I C I D E N T I F I C AT I O N S
The visible world, notes Malcolm Bowie, is the egos mirror, and reflected in
it are the egos dreams of identity.25 Lacans model of identification is clearly a
visual one, but he does not extend its application into the visual arts. Yet the
potential to do so is obvious. It is also an architectural one in that, by definition,
it implies a spatialized relationship to a world of objects. Architectural theory,
however, has yet to develop a framework for exploring its consequences. It is
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therefore to film theory that we might turn in order to understand the mecha-
nism by which identification with the environment takes place.
Lacans model seems to suggest that identification is always specular. It is
always a question of recognizingor misrecognizingoneself in the other.
Christian Metz outlines a series of mirrorings that occur within the cinema, for
the cinema offers a model very close to Lacans mirror. The cinema does not
represent the imaginary, it is the imaginary from the start, the imaginary that
constitutes it as a signifier.26 Thus film is like a mirror, and the screen, as site of
the imaginary, replicates the real as a form of mirror. But at the same time it is
different from the primordial mirror in that it never reflects the viewers own
body. On certain occasions, then, the mirror turns into a transparent window. It
may therefore be contrasted with Lacans notion of the mirror stage. Yet viewing
a film depends upon the mirror stage. The spectator must have recognized him-
or herself already as an object within a world of objects, and can therefore accept
his or her absence from the actual screen.
This produces a series of identifications with the characters or actors in the
film, and so too with the camera itself. In the former case, by being absent from
the screen the spectator does not identify with him- or herself as an object but,
rather, with objects which are there without him.27 Here the screen patently
does not serve as a mirror. But from the perspective of the spectator as viewing
subject, there is indeed a form of mirroring in that the perceived-imaginary
material is deposited in the viewer as if onto a second screen: In other words,
the spectator identifies with himself, with himself as a pure act of perception (as
wakefulness, alertness): as the condition of possibility of the perceived and
hence as a kind of transcendental subject, which comes before every there is.28 In
the latter case, the identification is with the camera, since the spectator identi-
fies with him- or herself as viewing subject, the spectator can do no other than
identify with the camera, too, which has looked before before him at what he is
now looking at. . . .29 More precisely, perhaps, there is an identification be-
tween the movement of the spectators head and the movement of the camera.
What we encounter here is the double movement of visionits projec-
tive and introjective nature. As one casts ones eye (in a projective fashion), one
receives and absorbs (in an introjective fashion) what has been illuminated,
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as it were. Consciousness therefore serves, in Metzs terminology, as a record-

ing surface:
There are two cones in the auditorium: one ending on the screen and
starting both in the projection box and in the spectators vision inso-
far as it is projective, and one starting from the screen and deposited
in the spectators perception insofar as it is introjective (on the retina,
a second screen). When I say that I see the film, I mean thereby a
unique mixture of two contrary currents: the film is what I receive,
and it is also what I release. . . . Releasing it, I am the projector,
receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the
camera, which points and yet records. 30
The spectator is both screen and projector. Likewise the spectator is both
absent from the screen as perceived, but also present there as perceiver. At
every moment, Metz notes, I am in the film by my looks caress.31 What hap-
pens, then, in the process of viewing is a series of mirror-effects. And through
these mirroringsthe recognition of the self in the other, the recognition of the
other in the selfa sense of identification emerges. In other words, a series of
specular identifications takes place in viewing a film, identifications that are
connected with the mirror as the original site of primary identification. What
we have in the case of the cinema, however, is a combination of what Metz
calls primary cinematic identifications with ones own look (as distinct from
primary identifications as such, which they cannot be, for identification
with ones own look is secondary with respect to the mirror), and secondary
or tertiary cinematic identifications with characters.32
A R C H I T E C T U R A L I D E N T I F I C AT I O N S
We might attempt to develop Metzs theory for an architectural discourse by

looking for equivalent processes of mirrorings that take place within a specific
architectural environment. These processes would themselves be dependent on
the introjection of the external world into the self, and the projection of
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the self onto the external world, such that there is an equivalencethe one
reflects the otherand identification may take place.
The sense of introjection, of the absorption of the external world,
described by Metz is echoed within an architectural context in the work of
Walter Benjamin, who presents the mind as a kind of camera obscura, a photosen-
sitive plate onto which certain interiors are etched in moments of illumina-
tion. Benjamin, however, adds a crucial gloss to these processes of introjection
and projection:
Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by per-

ception or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be
understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before
a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to con-
templation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished
not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit
determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too,
occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in
incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with ref-
erence to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical
value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at
the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that
is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit,
under the guidance of tactile appropriation. 33
In Benjamins terms, buildings are appropriated. They are introjected

absorbed within the psychenot just through vision, but also through touch.
We should perhaps extend this to include the full register of senses. Moreover,
for Benjamin, these appropriations are reinforced by habit. Here memory
plays a crucial role. Over a period of time the sensory impulses leave their mark,
traces of their reception. These traces are themselves not forgotten, but con-
stitute a type of archive of memorized sensory experiences. Indeed, we can see
that life itself is conditioned by these impulses, in that they constitute our
background horizon of experience. In this sense, identification might be under-
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stood as an ontological condition consolidated through memory. We could

therefore reflect upon the model of the oneiric house proposed by Gaston
Bachelard in The Poetics of Space.34 It is precisely the odor of drying raisins
paralleling Lefebvres equally evocative description of the sound of singing echo-
ing through the cloistersthat points to the very Proustian way in which the
oneiric house is itself a type of introjection of previous experiences.35
The second part of Metzs double movement of vision is the projective one.
This remains a crucial aspect of the process of identification which involves a
twofold mechanism of grafting symbolic meaning onto an object and then read-
ing oneself into that object, and seeing ones values reflected in it. The environ-
ment must therefore serve as a kind of screen onto which we would project our
own meaning, and into which we would read ourselves. We need to project
something of ourselves onto the other in order to recognizeor misrecognize
ourselves in the other. This was recognized by Robert Vischer in the context of
empathy theory:
At this point, however, our feeling rises up and takes the intellect at
its word: yes, we miss red-blooded life, and precisely because we miss
it, we imagine the dead form as living. We have seen how the percep-
tion of a pleasing form evokes a pleasurable sensation and how such an
image symbolically relates to the idea of our own bodies or con-
versely, how the imagination seeks to experience itself through the
image. We thus have the wonderful ability to project and incorporate
our own physical form into an objective form, in much the same way
as wild fowlers gain access to their quarry by concealing themselves
in a blind. What can that form be other than the form of a content
identical with itself? It is therefore our own personality that we
project into it. 36
This reveals the subtlety of a psychoanalytic account of identity, in which the

mechanisms of projection and introjection work in tandem in a model that
replicates the operations of the cinema, in which we become the projectors
and the environment the screen.
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This projection of personality or intentionality onto an object is one that is

overlooked by much mainstream architectural commentary. The investment of
meaning not only explains the creative potential of seeing the self in the other in
moments of identification, but also illuminates the problematic foundation of
any discourse of architecture and politics that, as it were, attempts to project
a range of political values onto an edifice as though they were a property of that
edifice. 37 This would further extend to the question of memorials, and serve to
undermine the naive claims that buildings can be, in and of themselves, sites of
memory. Buildings, monuments, or indeed any form of memorial, it could be
claimed, are essentially inert. As Fredric Jameson observes, they do not have
any inherent meaning. They need to be invested with meaning.38 They have to
be inscribed within an allegorical narrative that gives them their meaning. This
meaning is simply projected onto them.
Identification with a particular place could therefore be perceived as a mir-
roring between the subject and the environment over time. Here we might
understand the subject, in Metzs terms, as both screen and projector. For in
moments of identification, we in effect see ourselves in objects with which we
have become familiar. At the same time, we have introjected them into ourselves.
The registering of impulses as a kind of introjection leads to one type of reflec-
tionthe recognition of the other in the self. Meanwhile, the projection of the
self onto the external world leads to a second type of reflectionthe recogni-
tion of the self in the other. The recognition of the other in the self or the self
in the other arein effecttwo sides of the same coin. In either case, what
results is a form of mirroring.
By this two-way process, a fusing between self and other is achieved. And here
we can recognize a second order of mirrorings. For mirrorings occur not only in
the engagement between the self and the environment, but also between that
engagement and memories of previous engagements. There is an originary ex-
perience that is repeated in all similar experiences. And in that process of repe-
tition there is a reinforcement of the original moment of identification. In this
sense, habitas a ritualistic replication of certain experiencesis, as Benjamin
observes, precisely that which consolidates the process of identification.39
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The built environment may therefore serve as a form of background with

which we might identify. Like Metzs primary filmic identifications, these are
primary architectural identifications, which likewise operate within the over-
all realm of secondary identification. In this way, architectural identifications
may prove to temporary, strategic identifications. This is what allows us, for
example, to transfer the notion of home from one architectural environment
to another.
This process of identification may also operate at a group level, spreading like
a virus as individuals identify with other individuals and replicate their behavior,
in so doing forging a collective identity. At the same time, collective identities
will always remain contested identitieshybrid, fractured, conflictual. A
mediation will therefore operate between the individual and the group behavior,
so that the individual may either buy into or reject the dominant trends. An
obvious example of a collective sense of identity would be national identity. We
might therefore ask what role the built environment comes to play in forging a
sense of national identity.
N AT I O N A L I D E N T I T Y
Lacanian psychoanalytic theory would hold that national identity is based on

more than just symbolic identification. National identity is born of a relation-
ship to a Thingtoward an incarnation of Enjoyment, which is structured
through fantasy.40 In common everyday terms, this Thing might be under-
stood as a way of life, a somewhat mysterious practice that remains accessible
only to a certain group, and is consequently always under threat from those who
do not belong to that group, and do not subscribe to the same way of thinking.
It may be circumscribed by the various rituals and practices that hold that com-
munity together. It emerges out of a common commitment to a way of life, and
therefore shares certain properties with religion itself, in that its only real base
is a belief in or commitment to certain shared values that are themselves no
more than beliefs. Like religion, national identity amounts to a belief in a
belief. As Slavoj Zizek observes:
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The national Thing exists as long as members of the community

believe in it; it is literally an effect of this belief in itself. The struc-
ture here is the same as that of the Holy Spirit in Christianity. The
Holy Spirit is the community of believers in which Christ lives after
his death; to believe in him is to believe in belief itselfto believe
that I am not alone, that Im a member of the community of believers.
I do not need any external proof or confirmation of the truth of my
belief: by the mere act of my belief in others belief, the Holy Spirit is
here. In other words, the whole meaning of the Thing consists in the
fact that it means something to people. 41
What role, therefore, might architecture play in such a setup? How might the
very material condition of architecture relate to what amounts to little more
than an immaterial belief system? The answer, it would seem, lies in understand-
ing how that material world is itself inscribed within an immaterial belief system.
National identity is essentially a fantasy structure. National identityin
Lacanian termscannot be symbolized. It can be perceived only through an
alternative symbolic structure, and for this purpose it relies upon the fantasy
structure of the homeland, which becomes, as it were, a vicarious vehicle of
identification. To quote Renata Salecl:
In the fantasy structure of the homeland, the nation (in the sense of
national identification) is the element that cannot be symbolized.
The nation is an element within us that is more than ourselves,
something that defines us but is at the same time indefinable; we
cannot specify what it means, nor can we erase it. . . . It is precisely
the homeland that fills out the empty space of the nation in the sym-
bolic structure of society. The homeland is the fantasy structure, the
scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous
entity. 42
The myth of the homeland therefore becomes a mechanism by which society

perceives itself. It becomes the embodiment of that which cannot be symbol-
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ized. As Zizek puts it: The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way sub-
jects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national
myths.43 From this perspective, in order for any national identity to be per-
ceived, it must take some form of material expression. National identity is there-
fore projected onto objects. It must be embodied. Hence objects such as national
flags come to embody that identity through a process of symbolic association.
While national flags themselves have little inherent meaning, they become
physical articulations of a certain way of life. The Stars and Stripes stands less
for a register of the number of states in the union than for the way people live
within that Union. It embodies all that it is to share an American way of life.
This principle would extend beyond the American flag to all other icons associ-
ated with an American lifestylethe hamburger, the baseball cap, the shopping
mall, turkey at Thanksgiving, and so onall of which collectively signify what it
is to be American.
Buildings would fall into precisely this category. Potentially they may become
the visible embodiment of the invisible, the vehicle through which the fantasy
structure of the homeland is represented. There are obvious examples of this
when we consider the way in which certain buildings or structures have come to
symbolize a city, or even a country. But in terms of national identity it is perhaps
more likely that the common, everyday buildings, the familiar streetscapes of
our cities and villages, the farmsteads and the landscape of our countryside, will
become the embodiment of what we know as homeland.
It is here, then, that we can understand national identity as an identity which
is forged around certain objects. This highlights and exposes the necessary role
of the aesthetic in the formation of national identity. The nation, in effect, needs
to read itself into objects in the environment in order to articulate that identity.
What we have here, then, is a two-way process whereby a nation projects onto
the environment certain values, as though onto some blank screen, and then
reads itself back into that environment, and sees itself symbolically reflected in
that environment, invested as it now is with certain values. This reveals how, in a
narcissistic fashion, national identity comes to be grounded in a reflection of the
values assigned to aesthetic objects around us, in which architecture plays an
important role.
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IDENTITY AND LOSS
We should not overlook, however, the importance of loss in consolidating an

identity. Psychoanalysis tells us that the development of an individuals identity
is founded on the principle of loss and distinction, such as separation from the
mother. As Julia Kristeva puts it: Psychoanalysis identifies and relates as the in-
dispensable condition for autonomy a series of separations: birth, weaning,
separation, frustration, castration. Real, imaginary or symbolic, these processes
necessarily structure our individuation. Their nonexecution or repudiation
leads to psychotic confusion. 44 Such a process is an essential part of the devel-
opment of the subject. It is well known, Kristeva notes, that the so-called
depressive stage is essential to the childs access to the realm of symbols and
linguistic signs. Such a depressionparting sadness as a necessary condition
for the representation of any absent thingreverts to and accompanies our
symbolic activities unless its opposite, exaltation, reappropriates them.45
This suggests that loss, whether it is actual or imaginary, or experienced vi-
cariously, can serve to reduce this confusion, and reinforce an identity. To some
extent these mechanisms are replicated in conventional religion. It is the sacri-
fice of Christ, Kristeva would argue, that gives Christianity its force. The death
of Christ offers Christians a vicarious mechanism of loss. The Christian need not
experience that loss directly but, by identifying with Christs own suffering, may
empathize with that suffering, and benefit from the sense of loss it evokes. In
this respect the success of Christianity lies largely in acknowledging the neces-
sity of loss or rupture, and recognizing that this may be acted out within the
realm of the imaginary through an identification with Christ. As Kristeva notes:
On the basis of that identification, one that is admittedly too anthropological
and psychological from the point of view of a strict theology, man is nevertheless
provided with a powerful symbolic device to experience death and resurrection
even in his physical body, thanks to the strength of the imaginary identifica-
tionand of its actual effectswith the absolute Subject (Christ).46
The notion that identity is based on loss clearly extends to whole communi-
ties. In psychoanalytic theory, as Zizek has observed, even the identity of a
nation is based on the theft of its Enjoyment.47 If a nation perceives itself in
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terms of a national Thingas a community of individuals who organize their

Enjoyment around a certain concernas opposed to those others who fail to
appreciate that concern, and are therefore a threat to it, the very being of a
nation is based on the possession of a certain sense of Enjoyment. Or, to put
it another way, that very being of a nation is defined by the threat to its Enjoy-
ment. If the other is a threat to the collective self, the potential threat to the
Enjoyment of the collective is effectively that which articulates and constitutes
the otherthe way the other organizes its own perverse Enjoyment. As
Zizek observes:
What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession

of the national Thing. We always impute to the other an excessive
enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of
life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short,
what really bothers us about the other is the peculiar way it orga-
nizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the excess that pertains
to itthe smell of their food, their noisy songs and dances, their
strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the
other is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on
our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one
passes from reproaching the other with a refusal of work , to reproach-
ing him for the theft of work ). 48
Not surprisingly, then, a nation is defined most clearly when it is at war and its
very way of life is under threat. But this extends beyond moments of actual
conflict to periods of peace when, in order for some sense of national identity to
be preserved, a new threat has to be imagined. Thus in Eastern Europe, follow-
ing the collapse of the Cold War and the removal of the West as an effective
form of threat, a replacement threat had to be found. Inevitably, according to a
logic of the soil, or of the community, it is outsidersJews, gypsies, wanderers,
anyone not bound to the soilwho are perceived as a threat, fluid insurgents
who cannot be controlled. Jews, meanwhile, become the scapegoats in Eastern
Europe even if few Jews are to be found there any longer.49
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Nothing will therefore foster a sense of national identity more than a per-
ceived external threat, whether actual or imaginary. For a threat need not be an
actual threat. Just as communities are always imagined communities, so too
threats to those communities can be imagined threats.50 And it is around the
victims of this threatthe lost heroes and martyrsthat a kindred sense of
identity is forged. It is important to recognize that national identity depends
on opposition, and the same applies to sport. The logic of nationalism follows
closely the logic of sport. A team is forged around competition. A nation comes
together when it is under threat.
It is here that the architectural enters once again into the discourse of iden-
tity. For if identity is forged against a backdrop, such that architectural environ-
ments come to constitute a vital component in any form of national identity, a
threat to that backdrop would amount to an obvious threat to identity. On the
one hand this would help to explain the urge to destroy the built environment
buildings, bridges, and communications networksin times of war as a way of
attacking the enemy itself. For to attack an enemys possessions is not only sym-
bolically to attack the enemy itself. It is also to undermine the very Thing around
which the enemy has organized its own Enjoyment, and therefore through
which it constitutes itself as a community. To attack an enemys possessions is to
attack the very root of its self-definition as a community. On the other hand, this
would also explain how it is that, precisely when such features within the built
environment are destroyed, a sense of national identity is further consolidated.
This introduces a new dynamic into our understanding of identity. For it
begins to suggest that identity, although born of identifications, is consoli-
dated precisely when those identifications come under threat. Freuds insightful
description of identity as a graveyard of lost lives and former identifications
can be linked to Cailloiss and Lacans concern for the need for distinction from
the environment. What begins to emerge is a scenario in which the environ-
mentincluding the physical environmentplays a crucial role in the forging
of an identity. An initial identification with that environment must first be
established, but it is as that identification comes under threat that identity itself
is consolidated.
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Freud was clearly influenced by Frazer when he began his own project on the
origins of religion. He picks up on Frazers distinction between the Law of Sim-
ilarity and the Law of Contact. For Freud, the two are related. They are both
essential principles of processes of association, and suggest that magic is based
on the domination of the association of ideas. In other words, as Tylor and
Frazer had already observed, the problem lies in mistaking an ideal connection
for a real one. Freud then goes on to quote Frazer: Man mistook the order of
ideas for the order of nature, and hence imagined that the control which they
have, or seemed to have, over their thoughts, permitted them to exercise a
corresponding control over things.1
Most accounts of magic merely describe its operations, without attempting
to explain them. Freuds contribution to the debate has been to offer a psycho-
analytic interpretation of how this associative theory of magic works. He does
so by analyzing the dynamic which accounts for the misunderstanding which
leads one to replace the laws of nature by psychological ones. At the heart of
the problem, for Freud, is human volition itself. Magic works because humans
wish it to work. Primitive man, Freud thought, had an immense belief in the
power of his wishes.2 But children also operate like primitives. They are, as
Freud puts it, in an analagous psychical situation, though their motor efficiency
is still undeveloped . . . they satisfy their wishes in a hallucinatory manner, that
is, they create a satisfying situation by means of centrifugal excitations of their
sense organs.3
With the adult primitive, the will comes into play as a form of motor
impulse, which creates a sense of satisfaction by means of what Freud describes
as a motor hallucination. Eventually the means substitute for the motives,
so that the procedures involved in magic are invested with that hallucinatory
potential. This condition is reinforced by the introduction of faith as a mech-
anism to guarantee the efficacy of the magic. Unless one believes in the magic, it
will not work. This principle can extend to all psychical acts that are governed
by the will. At the heart of the problem, for Freud, is an overvaluation of men-
tal processes that leads to an omnipotence of thoughts, a condition that can
also be found in obsessional neurotics.
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The model Freud adopts is therefore a comparison between the development

of the individual and civilization as a whole. Civilization, he notes, progresses
from animism through to religion, and then to belief in scientific method. Ani-
mism here refers to the period when human beings people the world with in-
numerable spiritual beings both benevolent and malignant. They regard these
spirits and beings as the causes of natural phenomena, and they believe that not
only animals and plants, but all the inanimate objects in the world are animated
by them.4 Religious belief begins to appear once human beings come to under-
stand that a third party may be in control of the world. It is no longer human
beings who impart power to nature; God now plays this role. Finally, belief in
scientific method marks the supposed triumph of reason over superstition,
although science itself remains a belief system.
Freud compares this development of civilization as a whole to the develop-
ment of the individual, who goes through three corresponding phases: auto-
eroticism or narcissism, object-choice, and maturity. Characteristically, Freud
distinguishes these phases according to their psychosexual dynamics. The first
phase incorporates both the period of autoeroticism and that of narcissism.
The former develops into the latter, as the hitherto isolated sexual instincts
have already come together into a single whole, and have also found an ob-
ject.5 But a problem remains in that this object is not an external but an inter-
nal one, represented by the ego, which is constituted at about the same time.
The pathological fixations of this stage make the term narcissism appropri-
ate, since the subject behaves as though he were in love with himself. The
next stage occurs as the individual develops the capacity to transfer this fixa-
tion onto an external object, usually the mother. However, memories of the
earlier stage remain in later life, even though in natural development the sub-
ject should be able to cathect these desires onto an external object. The
cathexes of objects which he effects are as it were emanations of the libido that
still remains in his ego and can be drawn back into it once more.6 Thus nar-
cissism always threatens to reappear. The final stage is reached when the indi-
vidual has reached maturity, has renounced the pleasure principle, adjusted
himself to reality and turned to the external world for the object of his
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desires.7 This final stage marks the completion of the development of the
individual.
According to Freud, these three phases map onto the three phases of religious
development. Animism would therefore correspond to the autoerotic or narcis-
sistic phase, religion to the period of object-choice, and the scientific phase to
the final period of maturity. This attempt to link the development of civilization
with the development of the individual is of crucial importance, for it immedi-
ately situates our inquiry within a temporal perspective in which one historical
paradigm can be seen to differ from another. In this light, comments on the
behavior of children by Benjamin and others will have a greater relevance than
might at first be apparent, for it is to some extent through the early develop-
ment of the individual that we might attempt to read the early development
of civilization.
It is through the figure of the neurotic, however, that Freud begins to open up
the problem of animism. As he observes, both primitive and neurotic attach too
much value to psychic acts. Again this can be analyzed in psychosexual terms.
The narcissistic component ensures that the process of thinking is still relatively
sexualized. This is the origin of their belief in the omnipotence of thoughts,
their unshakable confidence in the possibilities of controlling the world and
their inaccessibility to the experience, so easily obtainable, which could teach
them mans true position in the universe.8 Neurotics, by comparison, retain
much of this outlook, but are also further sexualized by their own repression.
Both conditions, then, the autoeroticism of the primitive and the sexualization
of the neurotic, lead to the same situation: whether the libidinal hypercathexis
of thinking is an original one or has been produced by regression, they both lead
to intellectual narcissism and the omnipotence of thoughts.9
Freud is not arguing here that the primitiveand, by extension, the child
is neurotic. Rather, the behavioral characteristics of the neurotic have certain
parallels with the way in which the primitive engages with the outside world.
Freud looks to paranoia for an understanding of how the projection of inten-
tionality onto the external world on the part of the paranoiac mirrors the pro-
jection of an animating life force on the part of the primitive. Spirits and
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demons, he observes, are only projections of mans own emotional impulses.

He turns his emotional cathexes into persons, he peoples the world with them,
and meets his internal mental processes again outside himself.10
Freud notes that the problem will be exacerbated if, as is often the case, this
process offers the patient some form of relief from mental tension. The patient
projects responsibility outward. This projection, furthermore, is a mechanism
for dealing with an apparent internal conflict. Freud cites the example of some-
one mourning a loved one.11 The point here is that the emotional conflict of the
survivor mirrors the conflict faced when weor, indeed, the primitivecannot
comprehend the forces which govern the external world. Our conscious impres-
sions of the external world do not fit with our unconscious memories and asso-
ciations. As with the paranoiac, there is a conflict between perceptions and
memory, between the conscious and the unconscious. This is the key to under-
standing the primitive, since the spirit remains the property of the uncon-
scious, and is either remembered or imagined.
Animism, for Freud, is a system of thought, and is therefore comparable to
other ways of viewing the world. All human beings are governed by the compul-
sion to find systems as a way of dealing with reality. Just as in a dream, where
often fragmentary and nonsensical images thrown up by the unconscious are
reordered in our waking moments, as consciousness takes on the role of ana-
lyzing andultimatelyexplaining everything, so both the neurotic and the
primitive resort to various systems to explain the tensions in their own lives.
Likewise, primitives imbue the external world with its own spirit as a mechanism
for making that external world intelligible. The animism of the primitive there-
fore offers us some insights into the omnipotence of thoughts in the paranoid
vision of the world.
A N I M AT E K N O W L E D G E
Paranoia is viewed negatively in contemporary culture. It is seen as a mental dis-

turbance, and its victims as misfits, along with those who suffer other patho-
logical disorders. To be paranoid is to be blind to the truth of reality, and
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mistakenly to project agency and intention onto the world outside. Paranoiacs
are subject to various personality disorders. They suffer deliriums of persecu-
tion, jealousy, and so on. Often these social tensions erupt into some kind of anti-
social behavior. Lacan himself, whose doctoral thesis was on paranoid psychosis,
sees paranoia as grounded in a certain violence. The aggressive drive of the
paranoiac is itself marked with social relativity: it always has the intentionality
of a crime.12 Yet the psychic structure of the paranoiac is a complex one. Often
seemingly paradoxical in their behavior, paranoiacs may attack those they love.
According to the same logic, the aggressiveness toward the external world is also
an aggressiveness toward the self. Paranoia, as Lacan observes, can be a paranoia
of self-punishment.
Yet this animation of the external worldthis turning of mute statues into
vociferous demonscontains a logic, which deserves to be reappraised. As
Freud points out, paranoia may be a pathological disorder, but it also helps us to
understand the way ordinary mental activity operates.13 Lacan takes this further.
He recognizes that paranoia offers a way of understanding and making sense of
the world. It acts as a form of systematization. As Salvador Dal says:
Lacan threw a scientific light on the phenomenon that is obscure to

most of our contemporariesthe expression: paranoia and gave it
its true significance. Psychiatry, before Lacan, committed a vulgar
error on this account by claiming that the systematization of para-
noiac delirium developed after the fact and that this phenomenon
was to be considered as a case of reasoning madness. Lacan showed
the contrary to be true: the delirium itself is a systematization. It
is born systematic, an active element determined to orient reality
around its line of force. It is the contrary of a dream or an automatism
which remains passive in relation to the movingness of life. Paranoiac
delirium asserts itself and conquers. 14
Dal recognized this phenomenon, and appropriated it within the realm of art
to form the basis of his paranoid critical method. Combined with a process of
critical reevaluation, the paranoid critical method acted as a powerful creative
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technique for the development of art forms. The success of this technique no
doubt lay in the manner in which it replicated standard psychic processes of
interpreting the world. As Malcolm Bowie comments: Human knowledge
begins from an illusiona misapprehension, a deceit, a seduction, an inveigle-
mentand constructs an inescapable autonomous system in its wake. Psycho-
analysis is a critical interpretative system that seeks to reduplicate and
modulate the subjects original delirium.15
It could therefore be argued that paranoia lies at the root of all knowledge.
Lacan refers in his early work to knowledge as paranoid knowledge, a deliber-
ately provocative term, designed, as Borch-Jacobsen notes, to be striking:
This paranoid knowledge, observes Borch-Jacobsen, which Lacan very sug-
gestively and perspicaciously describes, is only another name for the Moderns
representational knowledge, where everything is an object (of perception,
inspection, appropriation) for a subject.16 The key here is to understand the
connection, as suggested above, between the primitive, the child, and the para-
noiac. The behavior of all three relies on a sense of identification with the other,
based on imitation. Moreover, knowledge is also paranoid, because it is identifi-
catory and imitative. The genesis of the self-punishing function, notes Lacan,
clearly reveals the concrete structure, imitative in its nature, of one of the vital
foundations of knowledge.17 But, significantly, paranoia can play a positive role
in a culture of modernity which could be characterized not only by a pervasive
sense of alienation, but also by an objectifying form of social petrification. Para-
noid knowledge can be seen as a corrective to this petrification. It strives to
counter petrification, since paranoia, like animism, imbues the external world
with life.
Importantly, there is for Lacan a primordial anthropomorphism that lies
behind knowledge, recognized as much in the child as in the primitive.18
Lacan therefore questions whether all knowledge is not originally knowledge of
a person before being knowledge of an object, and even whether the knowledge of an
object is not, for humanity, a secondary acquisition.19 Hencealthough Lacan
does not develop this connectionparanoid knowledge can be seen as that
which seeks to animate the inanimate. It therefore serves to equate the individ-
ual with his or her own surroundings. Paranoid knowledge emerges out of an
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anthropomorphizing urge that is the foundation of all knowledge. At its most

extreme, it can manifest itself in the literal anthropomorphization of building
forms, as in the paranoid critical vision of Dal, who sees the skyscrapers of
New York come alive at sunset, ready to perform the sexual act. In its more
subtle forms, however, it simply means that we can forge attachments to build-
ings as though they are human beings.
An alternative term for this anthropomorphizing urge, this desire to animate
everything and to see things as persons before they are understood as objects,
would be animate knowledge. Such a term might avoid the negative implica-
tions associated with paranoia, while retaining the animating potential of para-
noid knowledge. Animate knowledge would therefore be a concept that might
explain the desire to see the external world in terms of the animate, or actually
to animate the inanimate.
The act of making the world like the self is equivalent to the act of making the
self like the world. Both involve a play between the animate and the inanimate,
and both ultimately serve the same ends. Once the inanimate world of architec-
ture has itself been animated, identification can take place. We can therefore
understand animate knowledge as the corollary to assimilation. It marks the
capacity not to make the self like the other, but to make the other like the self.
There are hints of this within the theory of mimesisBenjamins butterfly
becomes human while he develops butterflies in his stomach. But this remains
the underdeveloped side of mimesis. Moreover, in terms of Adorno and
Horkheiners discussion of mimesis, this amounts to a form of false projection:
Mimesis imitates the environment, but false projection makes the environment
like the itself.20 Nonetheless, animate knowledge may serve the same purpose
as mimesis in equating the self with the other, and inscribing the individual in
the world.
There is, however, a shift in Lacans position. This earlier outlook, which
champions paranoid knowledge, subscribes to a viewpoint not dissimilar to
the emotional tie of which Freud had spoken. It insinuates that emotional
communication remains the fundamental mechanism of identification. It
therefore privileges those operations which are relatively underdeveloped,
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such as childhood bonding and primitive animism: We are thinking of that

emotional communication, essential to social grouping, which makes itself
known directly enough in that it is his counterpart to whom he is attached by
the indelible psychic tie that perpetuates the vital, really specific misery of his
first years.21 This model is less satisfactory for dealing with the alienation
both of a civilized society and of adult life, and, as Lacan develops his theory
of the mirror stage, the emphasis shifts toward more objectified methods of
understanding.22
For while the mirror stage offers the subject a unifying sense of wholeness, it
also introduces a sense of alienation which sets the subject apart from the world
through a process of objectifying identification. It is precisely because the sub-
ject knows itself as an object through its reflection in a mirror that the subject
can be understood as an object within a world of objects. 23 Moreover, as the
child beyond the mirror stage seeks to ratify its identity through the mother,
who comes to represent the big Other, self-identity is reinforced in a narcissistic
fashion through a reflection of the self in the approval of the gaze of the other.
Identity is specular in nature. We see ourselves in the gaze of the other, and it is
through conforming to that image in which we see ourselves thatlike adjust-
ing our clothing in front of the mirrorthe ego is formed through a process of
identification, a process that is intellectual rather than emotional.
What this moment presupposes is less a rejection of the notion of the emo-
tive and the sensational as the site of identification than a development on from
that process. For while Lacan upholds the importance of the mirror stage in the
formation of identities, he also acknowledges the pre-mirror-stage process of
identification which is based not on images, specular or otherwise, but on a form
of instinctual affiliation, an archimago that is not so developed as to take on a
coherent mental form, and does not even resort to the realm of the image. The
mirror stage is therefore preceded by what might be termed a weaning stage.
Lacan describes it as follows:
The proprioceptive sensations of sucking and grasping obviously

form the basis of the experiences ambivalence, which arises from the
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[ following ] situation: the being who is absorbing is completely

absorbed. . . . We are not speaking here, with Freud, of autoeroticism,
since the ego is not formed, nor of narcissism, since there is no ego
image. . . . A cannibalism, but a fusional, ineffable cannibalism,
both active and passive . . . we recognize in these terms the relation
with reality on which the maternal imago rests. 24
Moreover, it remains the basis of ego formation, such that the mirror stage
might be described not as foundational but as a form of intrusion of the intel-
lectual into the preexisting emotional tie. The core of identity is therefore born
in the process of weaning, for during that period the breast is, as it were, part
of the child. As Freud puts it: Children like expressing an object relation by
an identification: I am the object. Having is the later of the two; after the loss
of the object it relapses into being. 25 The mirror stage therefore marks the
separation from that union, yet the union constituted by the mother remains
the datum against which subsequent experiences are measured. Borch-Jacobsen
describes it as follows:
As Freud said of the mothers breast, I am it, I feel it, I give it life
and it is me, my life, never the ego. Only later will I run up
against that hard, frozen object that I am and am not, that I am not
at all the while I am ravished in it. So yes, I will be able to meet
myself, run into myself in mirrors, struggle with my doubles, love
myself in them while hating myself, project myself into them while
losing myself.
But then I will no longer be what I am, in the invisible and
untheorizable affect of my identification. I will be, as Lacan rightly
says, alienatedbut alienated because I will seek myself in the
objects, whereas I am no ego and no object. 26
With this we return to the question of the statue. For what is the imagethe
imagoetymologically but a form of statue? The subject becomes an object in a
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world of objects, and begins to forge its identity against and through those
objects, as though through inanimate statues. As Borch-Jacobsen puts it:
Thus is the world described by Lacan so strangely petrified and

static, a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile statues,
images of stone, and hieratic forms. The world that Lacan
describes as strictly human is simultaneously the most inhuman of
possible worlds. . . . The ego-world is a statue: as hard as stone, as
cold as ice, it is standing in front of the ego that it is petrified there
that is, in the ego-world, it both gazes at and petrifies itself. 27
Everything becomes, as Lacan puts it, a statue in which man projects

himself.28
The gaze is usually interpretedas hereas something which freezes and
fixes the object of contemplation like the shutter of a camera. As Slavoj Zizek
observes, the gaze must necessarily be frozen in order to discern an object:
In terms of its original phenomenological status, movement equals

blindness: it blurs the contours of what we perceive: in order for us to
perceive the object clearly it must be frozen, immobilizedimmobil-
ity makes a thing visible. . . . Platos ontology and the Lacanian
notion of the mirror-image which freezes motion like a jammed
cinema reel overlap here: it is only immobility that provides a firm
visible existence. 29
THE GAZE OF MEDUSA
Here we have a very architectural metaphor in that the gaze literally turns every-
thing to stone.30 In The Mirror of Medusa, Tobin Siebers highlights the fact that
the gaze of Narcissus operates like the gaze of Medusa, and serves to turn both
Narcissus himself and Echo to stone: From deep within the pool, two hypno-
tizing eyes fix Narcissus in a state of stupefaction. His blood hardening in his
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veins, he becomes petrified and turns to marble. Earlier, Echo freezes to stone
before his icy gaze. Now, Narcissus, like the basilisk, transforms himself with a
glance into a statue.31 Siebers offers a model of the gaze as one which stupefies,
turns the victim into an inanimate object. This, he claims, can be traced back to
a tradition in primitive society of masks and body markings which present an
evil eyeboth in humans, and in animal and insect life in generalthat serves
to petrify the victim or opponent. The gaze here is therefore read as the petrify-
ing gaze. Narcissus, along with primitive warriors who glare at their enemies,
and various predatory insects and animals with eyelike markings, therefore par-
takes of the same logicthe logic of the evil eyewhich informs the myth of
Medusa: Narcissism and the evil-eye superstition illuminate each other. . . .
The accusations of narcissism and the evil eye produce a terrible metamor-
phosis far beyond the greatest imaginings of Ovid. They transform the human
face into a fearsome mask. The narcissist and fascinatorcomic, virtueless,
and pernicious in the eyes of the communitybear the mask of accusation:
the stupefying Gorgoneion.32
But it is important to recognize the various manifestations which the gaze
may take. The gaze need not be read so negatively, for it can equally be under-
stood as a fundamentally creative mode of engagement. Judith Butler regards the
gaze as constitutive of human identity. 33 Adorno, moreover, describes the gaze
as that which animates the work of art: Aesthetic experience becomes living
experience only by way of its object, in that instant in which artworks them-
selves become animate under its gaze. . . . Through contemplative immersion
the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. By speaking, it becomes
something that moves in itself. Whatever in the artefact may be called the unity
of its meaning is not static but processual.34 In contrast to Siebers, we might
therefore wish to differentiate the animating gazethe creative gaze of the
artistfrom the deadening onethe petrifying gaze of Medusa.
Perseus uses the head of Medusa to change the giant Atlas into a mountain.
This myth reveals the double-sided nature of a processessentially an anthro-
pomorphic onewhich lies behind much of our understanding of the built envi-
ronment. On the one hand, human beings gradually take on the attributes of the
environment; on the other, the environment gradually takes on the attributes of
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human beings. For the myth itself might simply be a way of explaining away a
more generalized phenomenon: that mountains have often been interpreted in
terms of human attributes. Just as humans can become mountains, so moun-
tains can become human. Either human beings turn into natural phenomena, or
natural phenomenamountains, rivers, and so ontake on the appearance of
human beings. Both mechanisms have the same effect. They are two sides of the
same coin. They efface the difference between human beings and nature. And
just as the head of Medusaturning the animate into the inanimaterepre-
sents one tendency in the project of architecture, the urge to build in stone
forms which owe their originals to the human life force, so the opposite ten-
dency, to bring to life that which is inanimate, reflects the opposing urge, the
urge to give architecture a vital forceto animate the inanimate.
What we find, then, is that, as with so many other aspects of human existence,
one tendency presupposes the opposite. In the process of petrification implicit
in the story of Medusa, we might recognize the corresponding urge for ani-
mation. For what is it that springs forth from Medusa when her head is cut off
but the winged horse Pegasus, inspiration of the Muses and emblem of poetic
creativity?
We might therefore wish to read the gaze within a dialectic of mortification
and animation. The petrifying gaze should be set within the context of the
Gothic theme of moving statues or tableaux vivantsstatues which spring to life
alarmingly, or actors who strike a pose and remain uncannily immobile. Here we
find two apparently opposite models that are in fact connected: the photograph
as frozen frame of an animated continuum, and the film as animation of a series
of frozen frames. To quote Zizek :
In contrast to this notion of the statue as a frozen, immobilized body,

cinema was perceived at the beginning at the moving image, a dead
image which miraculously comes alivetherein lies its spectral qual-
ity. What lurks in the background is the dialectical paradox of the
phenomenology of our perception: the immobility of a statue is implic-
itly conceived as the state of a living being frozen into immobility . . . ;
while the moving image is a dead, immobile object which magically
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comes alivein both cases, the barrier which separates the living from
the dead is transgressed. Cinema is a moving image, the continuum
of dead images which give the impression of life by running at the
proper speed; the dead image is a still, a freeze-framethat is, a
stiffened movement. 35
It is not simply that some sculptures appear so realistic or lifelike that they lit-
erally spring into life, as was reportedly the case in the work of Daedalus or Pyg-
malion. Rather, the animate and the inanimate seem to presuppose each other.
They are held within a relation of reciprocal presupposition. What we have here,
then, are two models which are in fact dialectically related. In this context we
might understand the gaze as mortifying (in the sense espoused by Siebers), but
also caught within a logic of animation that exceeds the single snapshot of the
individual moment.
We might therefore question the notion that the gaze serves solely to petrify
or mortify the object. It is not just that the models chosen by Siebers offer a
one-sided view by focusing on the menacing evil-eye syndrome. Rather, he
fails to grasp the dialectical tension in which such a gaze is locked. The morti-
fying gaze of Narcissus, it could be argued, merely presupposes creativity. The
stillthe snapshot moment of the gazeis but a fragment within a broader
continuum. It freezes action, but the very moment of freezing assumes the
action out of which that moment has been seized.
This allows us to reconsider the alienating identification of the mirror
stage, and to question whether the objectification that such a stage represents
does not also invite the opposite. It is through the figure of the mannequin, per-
haps, that we might best understand the complex process of identification that
the mirror stage suggests. Lacan refers to the ego as an odd puppet . . . a
baroque doll . . . a trophy made of limbs.36 For it suggests that the subject sees
itself as mannequinas a statue within a world of objectified statuesbut at
the same time the subject, in identifying with that mannequin, animates it,
and projects onto it some vital life force. Thus, although the ego becomes objec-
tified in this process into what Borch-Jacobsen describes as the ceramic dogs
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of the ego, the process necessarily anticipates its opposite in that the narcis-
sistic identification resists petrification.37
As in the story of Medusas head, where Perseus, attempting to slay Medusa,
can gaze at her only through its reflection in his shieldfor to gaze directly at
the monster, so legend has it, would turn him to stoneso identification born
of reflection serves to resist petrification. For it is through a reflective identifi-
cationthrough modeling oneself on someone elsethat the subject allows
the ego to form. And it is precisely when the object being imitated is inani-
matea doll, a mannequin, and so onthat the subject needs to imbue it with
life, in order to read the self through that object. Animation becomes a projec-
tion, but a projection which is quite intentional, and one which is predicated not
on a denial of the selfa reduction of the self to an objectbut on the rein-
forcement of the self against a world of objects, by turning those objects into
subjective beings.
This echoes very precisely Robert Vischers observations in the context of
early Empathy Theory. The only true union is between subject and subject. The
question, then, is how we might transform a relationship between subject and
object into one between subject and subject:
A pure and complete union between subjective and objective imagi-

nation (intuition) can take place only when the latter involves
another human being. This is also true of any mental feeling, however
selfish it might be, provided that this selfishness is capable of compar-
ing itself with anothers selfishness. Sensation, in conjunction with
the imagination, achieves only a dubious comparison with the out-
ward, peripheral, or unthinking aspect of the phenomena. With feel-
ing, however, we cast a warmer look towards the spiritual core
without relinquishing the solidity of their bodily presence. . . . And
the harmonious relation between subject and object deepens here into
just such a relation between subject and subject. Feeling, therefore,
rests on a furtherance or a disturbance of the well-being of the entire
person: an individual vital force unique to its own kind. 38
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If we are to understand this animating urge as linked in some way to the pri-
mary anthropomorphization of paranoid knowledge, rather than necessarily
distinct from it, we might recognize that the objectified, intellectualized exis-
tence of the post-mirror stage often has recourse to the emotive tie of an earlier
stage. What is involved is a form of tactical regression to a childlike state of one-
ness. Memories of this earlier state may be deployed, in other words, to help
overcome the alienation of later life. If so, what we find may be less a distinction
between these two stages, or indeed any dialectical reversal, than a strategic
interdependency.
These two stages mark the two ends of the spectrum in which human life is
inscribedalienation and onenessbut so too the terrain in which artistic
expression operates. The difference is subtle, but fundamental. It is the differ-
ence between Medusa, the mythological figure who petrifies anyone who gazes
at her and turns them into inanimate statues, and Daedalus, the creative genius
who brings statues to life.
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B
B E L O N G I N G
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Judith Butler has elaborated a vision of identity based on the notion of perfor-
mativity. It is an approach that allows her to perceive identity in a far more fluid
and dynamic way than traditional approaches to the questionan approach,
moreover, that recognizes identity politics as a field of individual empowerment.
Butler is a theorist of genderand, more specifically, lesbianpolitics. Her
concern is to formulate a notion of identity that is not constrained by traditional
heterosexual models, and to offer a radical critique of essentializing modes of
thinking. According to Butler, it is precisely our actions and behavior that con-
stitute our identity, not our biological bodies. Gender, she argues, is not a given
ontological condition, but is performatively produced. It is a construction that
conceals its genesis, so that the tacit collective agreement to perform, produce
and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the
credibility of those productions.1
We may, in effect, rearticulate our identities and reinvent ourselves through
our performativities. Here it is important to note that identity is the effect of
performance, not vice versa. Performativity achieves its aims not through a sin-
gular performancefor performativity can never be reduced to performance
but through the accumulative iteration of certain practices. It is grounded in a
form of citationalityof invocation and replication. As Butler explains: Per-
formativity is thus not a singular act, for it is always a reiteration of a norm or
set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an actlike status in the present, it
conceals and dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition.2
Butler figures identity not as something interioran essentializing given
but, rather, as something exterior, a discursive external effect. It is born of acts,
gestures and enactments that are performative, as she puts it:
in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to
express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corpo-
real signs and other discursive means. That the gendered body is per-
formative suggests that it has no ontological status apart from the
various acts which constitute its reality. This also suggests that if that
reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority is an
effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the
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public regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body,

the gender border control that differentiates inner from outer and
institutes the integrity of the subject. 3
Importantly, this relates not just to lesbian sexuality but to all sexualities, so that
heterosexuality itself emerges as a socially transmitted construct that depends
upon a behavioral norm being acted out.
Here the connections between gender and mime begin to emerge. Indeed,
Butlers entire discourse, it would appear, depends upon mime in general and the
mimetic in particular. All behavior is based on a form of mimicry, including nor-
mative heterosexual behavior that is thereby naturalized and instantiated by
the force of repetition: All gendering is a kind of impersonation and approxi-
mation . . . the naturalistic effects of heterosexualized genders are produced
through imitative strategies; what they imitate is a phantasmatic ideal of het-
erosexual identity, one that is produced by imitation as its effect.4
Cultural practices are governed by the hegemonic. They instantiate a certain
order, and encourage acquiescence to that order. They are propagated through a
desire to conform. This is particularly evident in the case of gender practices.5
Normative gender practice is controlled by the logic of camouflage. To subscribe
to the dominant cultural norm is to avoid conflict and to follow the behavioral
systems of a naturalized, hegemonic order. And it is as a camouflage that gender
can be understood as an effective cultural praxis.
Gender, in this sense, approaches a notion of drag. It is a position that is
assumed, and played out within the logic of conformity to some accepted
norm. In making this claim, Butler destabilizes the traditional authority of het-
erosexuality: To claim that all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that
imitation is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarisms, that
drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender,
but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to
imitate its own idealizations.6
Butler is concerned to challenge the hegemony of the given, and to question
the authority of terms such as authenticity. Nothing is authentic in itself.
Everything is authorized through repetition. Yet through its own repetition it
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begins to instantiate a certain norm. It is important to recognize, however, that

any norm can be destabilized, and it is precisely the normative nature of received
views on gender that Butler seeks to undermine. For Butler, gender should be
seen not as a given state, but as a condition of becoming. Echoing Deleuze, she
sees it as a rhizomatic condition, that is, an actative process: If gender is some-
thing that one becomesbut can never bethen gender is itself a kind of
becoming or activity, and that gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a
substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and
repeated action of some sort.7
Butlers discourse is, in effect, an extension of Pierre Bourdieus debate about
habitus as a dynamic field of behavior, of position-taking, where individuals
inherit the parameters of a given situation, and modify them into a new situa-
tion.8 But what Butler brings to that debate is the possibility of political agency,
and of subverting received norms. It is through its repetitive citational nature
that performativity has the power to question and subvert that which it cites.
Whereas Bourdieu stresses the production of the subject through culture, for
Butler, social structures have themselves been performed. Hence performativ-
ity offers an obvious mode of challenging such structures. Imitation lies at the
heart of all cultural practices. It is that which reinforces them, butequally
that which potentially destabilizes them.
This is a radical reevaluation of the mechanics of cultural practice that has
ramifications for every aspect of cultural life. Without collapsing sexuality, class,
race, and ethnicity into the same category, all forms of identity can also be inter-
preted as dependent upon performative constructs.9 While each operates
within its own individual paradigms, the general framework remains similar.
Each depends upon the performative, each is citational in character, and each
is effective. This is not to overlook the significance of physical characteristics
but, rather, to challenge the notion that these characteristics are the sole deter-
minants of identity.
According to such a view, the constitution of our identities through perfor-
mativity extends beyond questions of appearance into modalities of behavior,
and modes of perception and expression. In the context of race, for example, we
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have to acknowledge how the process of racing something or being raced

might operate. For performativity also operates in modes of perception such as
the gaze which, as it were, color and frame our view of the world, but
importantlyalso constitute it. To be black is to view the world with a black
gaze.10 What applies to the gaze also applies to other modes of perception or
expression.
Importantly, Butler locates performativity at the heart of our cultural identity
today. As Marc Aug has observed, in an age increasingly colonized by fictional
worlds, where fantasy allows identities to be assumed and discarded like fash-
ion accessories, and self-realization often conforms to models drawn from
Hollywood, the concept offers a more productive alternative to traditional
understandings of the constitution of the self.11 The whole notion of identity as
some fixed and stable condition calls for reinterrogation in an age of theming,
role-playing, and identity politics, where identities must be perceived in the plu-
ral as multiple, and often seemingly contradictory, modes of personal expres-
sion. Nor is this necessarily a negative condition. Indeed, such tactics can be
analyzed as a defensive mechanism that allows the individual to survive within
contemporary cultural conditions. As Sherry Turkle has argued within the con-
text of a proliferation of screen identities as a result of the increasingly wide-
spread use of the computer, multiple personality disorder can be seen less as a
problematic symptom of an age of instability and depthlessness, and more as
a survival strategya form of cultural camouflagethat enables individuals to
operate productively in a variegated and multifaceted world.12
THE POLITICS OF MIMICRY
Performativity relies on repetition, but repetition does not necessarily imply

sameness. Edward Said raised the problem of the tension between sameness and
differencethe tension, that is, between the synchronic panoptical vision of
dominationthe demand for identity, stasisand the counter-pressure of the
diachrony of historychange, difference.13 But Homi Bhabha takes it further.
For him, repetition in the form of mimicry has a powerful political edge, since
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repetition forms the very basis of political satire. The ironic reappropriation of
a model through satirical repetition can be an effective means of reconfiguring
that model, and challenging the assumptions on which it is based.14
It is here that mimicry exerts its influence. For Bhabha, it is in the almost the
same but not quite that mimicry locates its strength: In order to be effective
mimicry must continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.15
Bhabha describes mimicry as a form of repetition which problematizes that
which it repeats: What emerges between mimesis and mimicry is a writing, a
mode of representation, that marginalizes the monumentality of history, quite
simply mocks its power to be a model, that power which supposedly makes it
imitable. Mimicry repeats rather than re-presents.16 The menace of mimicry
lies in its ambivolence. Within this configuration, mimicry represents an ironic
compromise. It is therefore precisely in the tension between the two figures of
sameness and difference that this ironic potential in mimicry has important
ramifications for colonial discourse in particular.17
Colonial mimicry, for Bhabha, is the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference which is almost the same, but not quite.18 What
emerges from this process is a disturbing rupture to the authority of colonial dis-
course, a disavowal that acts as a form of mockery: the menace of mimicry is
its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also
disrupts its authority.19 While reiterating the authority of colonial discourse, it
also mocks it. It both rearticulates and disavows, mimes and deauthorizes. Fur-
thermore, by reappropriating certain traditions and forms from the colonial
power, the subaltern culture may absorb them within its own culture. These
forms may easily be reappropriated and reinvested with fresh meanings by the
subaltern culture.20
Mimicry can be seen not as some uncritical and ultimately nihilistic accep-
tance of the given but, rather, as a mode of operation charged with a certain
political efficacy. We can therefore recognize the shortcomings of architectural
discourses that read the repetition of forms within a subaltern context, as
though it were submission to a cultural imperialism. This supposed subser-
vience is replayed within a contemporary perspective with respect to the dom-
inance of a late capitalism. Not only might we observein line with Fredric
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Jamesons thinkingthat difference, as an attempt to resist the homogen-

izing force of late capitalism, can itself be seen as a product of that which it
seeks to resist: difference as another product on the marketplace.21 Also, rep-
etition of architectural forms may even prove politically subversive.
At the same time, as Butler observes, we must remain alert to the context and
reception of parody in order to understand its subversive potential:
Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to under-

stand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively dis-
ruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated
and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony. A typology of
actions would clearly not suffice, for parodic displacement, indeed,
parodic laughter, depends on a context and reception in which sub-
versive confusions can be fostered. 22
What Butler herself adds to this debate is a further dimension to mimicry.

Through its emphasis on imitation, it exposes the imitative nature of many cul-
tural practices; it effectively destabilizes the primacy of received meaning, and
questions its authority. Butler has explored this:
As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original,

they imitate the myth of originality itself. In the place of an original
identification which serves as a determining cause, gender identity
might be reconceived as a personal/cultural history of received
meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally
to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a pri-
mary and interior gendered self or parody the mechanism of that
construction. 23
THE POLITICS OF SPACE
Butlers emphasis on performativity does not undermine the underlying value of

form. Indeed, this is the main message in her seminal work, Bodies That Matter.24
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Hers is an essentially corporeal philosophy of identity. Butlers discourse also

serves, however, as a corrective to a certain positivistic theory of form that is still
pervasive. Such a theory holds that cultural identity seemingly resides in form,
and fails to engage with subjective processes of identification. Yet it is only by
understanding those processes of identification that we can perceive the cultural
relevance of form.
It is perhaps by following the notion of the nation as narrationof identity
as a kind of discourseput forward by Bhabha that we can grasp the impor-
tance of understanding form as being inscribed within a cultural discourse. For
Bhabha, the nation is enacted as a cultural elaboration. To perceive the nation
in this way in narrative terms is to highlight the discursive and contested nature
of such identities:
To study the nation through its narrative address does not merely
draw attention to its language and rhetoric; it also attempts to alter
the conceptual object itself. If the problematic closure of textuality
questions the totalization of national culture, then its positive value
lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct
the field of meanings and symbols associated with national life. 25
Of course, it would be wrong to reduce the nation to mere narration, as

though form were totally unimportant. Rather, we have to recognize the nation
as being defined within a dialectical tension. For Bhabha, this is a tension
between the object and its accompanying narrative: signifying the people as
an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed
in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory present marked in the repeti-
tion and pulsation of the national sign.26 If, then, the nation is a kind of narra-
tion, it is never an abstract narration but a contextualized narration inscribed
around certain objects. And it is precisely here, within this field of objects which
have themselves become the focus of narrative attention, that we must locate
architecture, as a language of forms not only embedded within various cultural
discourses, but also given meaning by those discourses.
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This opens up a crucial problematic within an architectural discourse that has

traditionally been premised almost solely on questions of form. It is as though
narratives of use stand largely outside architectural concerns. Yet matterin
Butlers termsdoes not exist outside discourse. As Mariam Fraser observes,
following Butler: Matter does not exist in and of itself, outside or beyond dis-
course, but is rather repeatedly produced through performativity, which brings
into being or enacts that which it names.27
Such an approach brings us close to Bhabhas and Bourdieus observations on
the ways in which culture operates, and allows us to understand architecture as a
system of objects situated within a cultural discourse, and deriving its meaning
from that discourse. Architecture, in Bourdieus terms, can be understood as a
type of objectivated cultural capital. Its value lies dormant and in a permanent
state of potential; it has to be reactivated by social practices which will, as it
were, revive it. In this respect, architecture belongs to the same category as
other cultural objects:
Although objectssuch as books or pictures can be said to be the

repositories of objectivated cultural capital, they have no value unless
they are activated strategically in the present by those seeking to
modify their incorporated cultural capital. All those objects on
which cultural value has ever been bestowed lie perpetually dormant
waiting to be revived, waiting for their old value to be used to estab-
lish new value in a new market situation. 28
In other words, what Bourdieu highlights is the need for praxis to unlock
the meaning of an object. In a sense, this comes close to the Wittgensteinian
model wherein linguistic meaning is defined by use. Just as words can be under-
stood by the manner in which they are used, so buildings can be grasped by the
manner in which they are perceivedby the narratives of use in which they
are inscribed.
This has obvious ramifications for any discourse of gender and space. Butlers
incisive comments on gendergender identity being defined not in biological
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terms, but in performative terms as an identity that is acted outcan be prof-

itably transposed to the realm of physical space. For if identity is performed,
then the space in which that performativity takes place can be seen as a stage.
After a certain number of performances, that stage set will no longer be neutral.
It will be imbued with associations of the activities that took place there, on
the part of those who witnessed those activities. If identity is a performative
constructif it is acted out, like some kind of film scriptthen architecture
could be understood as a kind of film set. But it is as a film set that it derives
its meaning from the activities that have taken place there. Memories of associ-
ated activities haunt physical space like a ghost.
It is here that Butlers thinking can be deployed as a way of cutting through
much confusion that exists on the question of the gendering of space. Too often
there has been a simplistic collapsing of a particular political ideology onto a
particular form, as though a political ideology could be conflated with an aes-
thetic ideology. This refers as much to politics in general as it does to the specific
question of gender politics. According to this logic, certain forms are in and of
themselves imbued with a certain content. Just as there are seen to be certain
democratic forms, so there are certain feminine forms.29 But there can be no
intrinsic meaning or political potential to any form. While there may indeed be
certain forms that lend themselves to democratic purposes rather than totali-
tarian ones, andequallyno doubt certain forms that embody a feminine
sensibility, it is surely a mistake to map certain activities onto certain forms,
as though those activities were a consequence of those forms.
What Butlers logic seems to suggest is that particular spaces are given mean-
ing by the practices that take place there. The gendering of a space, in other
words, depends more on the performativities articulated there than on the form
itself. A space can be gendered only by association. Certain associations are pro-
jected onto those spaces, but those associations are defined not by the material
properties of those spaces but by the activities that take place there. Moreover,
they depend upon the memory of those associations being kept alive. In this
sense, a space used for particular activities will accrue a certain character over
time, but as new activities take overand as memories of the former activities
fadethe space will take on a different character. A masculine space may
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invert into a feminine space. A fascist space may turn into a democratic
space. Often these processes are charged with a sense of strategic reappropria-
tion, and set against the memory of previous associations. At other times they
may be facilitated by conditions of amnesia or the repression of memory which
release a space from its previous associations.
I D E N T I F I C AT I O N W I T H P L AC E
Symbolic attachments may be grafted onto physical form. This opens up the
possibilitywhich Vikki Bell has exploredof a discourse of performativity
and belonging, where belonging might be perceived as an identification with
a certain place.30 It suggests a way in which communities might colonize various
territories through the literal performancesactions, ritualistic behavior, and
so onacted out within a given architectural stage and, through those perfor-
mances, achieve a certain attachment to place.
This is based on the idea that just as communities are imagined commu-
nities, so too the spaces of communitiesthe territories they have claimed
as their ownare also imagined. Imagining a community, as Anne-Marie
Fortier observes, is both that which is created as a common history, experience
or culture of a groupa groups belongingsand about how the imagined com-
munity is attached to placesthe location of culture.31 Fortier has explored
how, through ritualized repetition of symbolic acts, often conducted within an
overtly religious context and performed within specific architectural spaces,
these imagined communities can make material the belongings they purport
to describe.32
Central to this sense of belonging is the principle of ritualistic repetition.
This can be understood within the logic of psychoanalytic theory that posits
repetition as a means of miming, and thereby controlling, trauma. Repetition
leads to normalization and consequent familiarization. Acted out within a par-
ticular context, it may lead to an associative sense of belonging that effectively
materializes this process.33
Through these stylized spatial practices, these spaces are demarcated by cer-
tain groups via a kind of spatial appropriation, a visceral process of identification
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which depends upon bodily memories. Through the repetition of those rituals,
these spaces are re-membered, such that those participating reinscribe them-
selves into the space, reevoking corporeal memories of previous enactments.
The space becomes a space of projection, as memories of previous experiences
are projected onto its material form. At the same time, the body becomes the
site of introjection, as a recording surface registering those previous spatial
experiences. As a combined result of the echoing and reinforcement of these two
sets of experiencesintrojection and projectionover time, a sense of mirror-
ing and consequent identification is achieved. Identification is always specular.
The rituals are naturalized through these corporeal memory acts, and the spaces
in which they are enacted become spaces of belonging for those involved. These
spaces are appropriated through these rituals, and become communal sites of
embeddedness. As Fortier observes: Belongings refer to both possessions and
appartenance. That is, practices of group identity are about manufacturing cul-
tural and historical belongings which mark out terrains of commonality that
delineate the politics and social dynamics of fitting in.34
What is so suggestive about the concept of belonging as a product of per-
formativity is that it enables us to go beyond the limitations of simple narrative.
It exceeds Michel de Certeaus ideas for narrativizing the city through spatial
tactics that amount to forms of pedestrian speech acts, as a means of making
sense of the city, to suggest a mechanism of identification. After all, de Certeau,
although he posits a theory of overcoming alienation, does not fully articulate a
theory of identification. It also privileges the idea not of reading the environ-
ment, as though its meaning were there and simply waiting to be deciphered,
but, rather, of giving meaning to the environment by collective or individual
behavior. Belonging to a place can therefore be understood as an aspect of ter-
ritorialization, and out of that belonging a sense of identity might be forged.
The attraction of the application of performativity to place is that it resists
more static notions of dwelling, emanating from Heideggerian discourse, that
seem so ill at ease with a society of movement and travel. The increasing homog-
enization of space within a world of global capital should not lead us back to old
models of dwelling as a way of resisting this condition, as though models for-
mulated in the past will necessarily still be relevant in the present. Rather, it
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encourages us to formulate new paradigms for understanding attachment to

place that are in tune with contemporary modes of existence.
Nor should it lead us to support Marc Augs nostalgic notion of non-
place.35 For the logic of this argument is not that anywhere can be assigned as
a non-place, but, rather, that anywhere can become a placea site of belong-
ingthrough the performativities associated with that location. Indeed, it
could even be claimed that new forms of attachment are a direct result of a cos-
mopolitan culture of non-places, in that place and non-place are locked into a
dialectic of reciprocal presupposition. Just as globalization leads to regionali-
zationor even the hybrid form of glocalizationso placelessness auto-
matically invites an attachment to placeas though the blurring of spatial
boundaries leads to a corresponding increase in awareness of those bound-
aries.36 This new condition, though, must be seen as a product ofnot a resis-
tance tothe homogenizing placelessness of global capitalism. Any theoretical
formulation of new forms of attachment must address the very mechanisms
of capitalism itselfits transiency, provisionality, and ever-renegotiable field of
operationsand not fall back on models formulated in a different cultural
condition.
Equally, such understandings of belonging should be inscribed within a con-
text of non-belonging. The very notion of belonging contains within itself a
certain sense of initial alienation. The possibility of forging an attachment nec-
essarily follows hard upon the heels of the very act of detachment. We might
therefore posit belonging as a form of attachment to place that depends upon
a certain differentiation of the self from the environment, which invites a recip-
rocal sense of attachment. Yet equally, that sense of attachment encourages a
consequent sense of differentiation.
What is being proposed here is not some discourse of fixed roots but,
rather, a more transitory and fluid discourse of territorializationin the
Deleuzian sensewhich provides a complex and ever-renegotiable model of
spatial belonging. The model of belonging derived from Butlers thinking is
essentially a rhizomatic one of nomadic territorializations and deterritorializa-
tions. For territorialization belongs to the same logic as deterritorialization.
What we find, then, is that the very provisionality of such territorializations
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colludes with the ephemerality of any sense of belonging. Just as territorializa-

tions are always shifting, so too identifications remain fleeting and transitory,
while all the time leaving behind traces of their passage. As Bell comments: The
rhizome has been an important analogy here, conveying as it does an image of
movement that can come to temporary rest in new places while maintaining
ongoing connections elsewhere.37 In this sense, belonging comes close to the
rhizomatic sense of becoming described by Deleuze and Guattari. And like
becoming, belonging remains an actative process, not a given state.
It may well be that the concept of belonginga provisional, rhizomatic
model of attachment to placeoffers us a viable paradigm to replace the now
somewhat outmoded model of dwelling that once so dominated much archi-
tectural discourse. For just as identity itself is today no longer a fixed condition,
but an ever-renegotiable site of individual expression, so belonging offers an
equally flexible concept that can accommodate the transitory nature of con-
temporary existence. In a realm whose paradigmatic figures include the wan-
derer, the migrant, the refugee, and the exile, the notion of belonging
offers a more sympathetic framework for understanding contemporary modes
of identification with place.
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S
S A C R I F I C E
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In popular culture, several myths survive which associate human sacrifice with
the construction of buildings. They tell the tale of the incarceration of human
beings within the walls or foundations of buildings during the process of con-
struction. Many of these myths emanate from Central and Eastern Europe. One
of the most famous examples is The Ballad of Master Manole and the Mon-
astery of Arges.1
The ballad tells the tale of Master Manole and his nine masons, who agree to
build a high monastery, unequaled on earth for the Black Prince. If they suc-
ceed they will be given gold and turned into noblemen, but if they fail they will
be walled in alive in the foundations. The masons work away for four consecutive
days, but each night the section of wall they have built the previous day collapses.
The workmen are in despair, and the Black Prince threatens to carry out his
promise. In a dream, however, Master Manole hears a voice from the sky: All
that is built will fall at night until we decide, all of us together, to wall in the wife
or the sister who at dawn tomorrow will be the first to come bringing food to her
husband or her brother.2 Manole persuades the others to agree that whosoever
appears first at dawn the next day will be walled in. Unfortunately for Manole,
this proves to be his own wife, Ana. Manole catches sight of her from afar, and
entreats the gods to send raging winds and torrents of rain to block her route.
Although they accede to Manoles request, there is nothing he can do to prevent
her arriving.
The great masters, apprentices, and masons were glad when they saw
her. But Manole sadly embraces his sweetheart, takes her in his
arms, and climbs the scaffold. He set her on the wall and said to her,
jestingly:
Fear nothing, my dear one, for we are going to wall you in up here,
but it is only in jest.
Ana trusted him and laughed and blushed. And Manole sighed
and began to raise the wall. The wall grew and buried her, up to the
ankles, then to the calves. And shepoor thing!stopped laughing
and said:
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Manole, Manole, stop your jesting now, for the jest is not good,
Manole, Manole, Master Manole! The wall presses me too hard and
breaks my little body!
But Manole did not answer her and went on working, the wall rose
even higher, burying her, up to the ankles, up to the calves, up to the
ribs, up to the breasts. But shepoor thing!went on weeping and
speaking to him:
Manole, Manole, Master Manole, the wall presses me too hard
and crushes my breasts and breaks my child.
Manole, in a fury, worked on. And the wall rose and covered her,
up to the sides, up to the breasts, up to the lips, up to the eyes. And so
the poor thing was seen no more; but they heard her still, speaking
from the wall:
Manole, Manole, the wall presses me too hard, and my life is
failing! 3
Once Ana has been walled in, the wall stands firm, and Manole and his masons
manage to complete the monastery. But then the story takes a further twist.
The Black Prince asks the masons if they can build him another one, even more
splendid. In their pride, the workmen boast that they can build one far more
shining, and far more beautiful. The Prince listens and ponders. They had
promised to build him a monastery unequaled on earth, yet now they claim to
be able not only to equal it, but even to surpass it. In their own terms they have
clearly broken their promise. Accordingly, the Prince has the scaffold torn
down, and leaves the workmen stranded on the roof. And so the workmen, in a
bid to escape, build themselves wings in the manner of Daedalus and Icarus. But
as they leap down from the roof they crash to the ground, and are killed. And as
Manole himself leaps, he hears a voice from the wall: Manole, Manole, Master
Manole, the wall presses me too hard and crushes my weeping breast and breaks
my child and my life is failing. He too is killed by his fall, and a spring then
gushes up from the spot where he strikes the ground.
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There are numerous variations on this theme throughout Central and East-
ern Europe, especially the Balkans. Although the victim is always femaleusu-
ally the wife of one of the masonsand is always tricked into being immured or
buried in the foundations, the ballads vary in their details. In the Romanian ver-
sion it is a monastery which is being constructed, in the neo-Greek version a
bridge, and in the Serbo-Croat and Hungarian versions it is a city. In the Macedo-
Romanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian versions the woman begs to have her breast
left exposed so that she can continue to suckle her child, and in the Serbo-Croat
version she also asks for a window in front of her eyes, so that she can still see
her house. Yet, despite the differences, the central theme remains consistent: a
victim needs to be sacrificed in order to guarantee the structural stability of
a new construction.
James Frazer presents further variations on this theme in The Golden Bough.
In other cultures an animal can be sacrificed instead of a human being: In mod-
ern Greece, when the foundation of a new building is being laid, it is the custom
to kill a cock, a ram, or a lamb, and to let its blood flow on the foundation-stone,
under which the animal is afterwards buried. The object of the sacrifice is to
give strength and stability to the building.4 More enigmatically, perhaps, a
shadow can be sacrificed instead, even though the capturing of the shadow is
thought to lead to the death of the owner of the shadow, as if by some form of
sympathetic magic:
But sometimes, instead of killing an animal, the builder entices a

man to the foundation-stone, secretly measures his body, or a part of
it, or his shadow, and buries the measure under the foundation-
stone; or he lays the foundation-stone upon the mans shadow. It is
believed that the man will die within the year. The Roumanians in
Transylvania think that he whose shadow is thus immured will die
within forty days; so persons passing by a building which is in the
course of erection may hear a warning cry, Beware lest they take thy
shadow! Not long ago there were still shadow-traders whose busi-
ness it was to provide architects with the shadows necessary for
securing their walls. In these cases the measure of the shadow is
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looked on as equivalent to the shadow itself, and to bury it is to bury

the life or soul of a man, who, deprived of it, must die. Thus the cus-
tom is a substitute for the old practice of immuring a living person in
the walls, or crushing him under the foundation-stone of a new build-
ing , in order to give strength and durability to the structure, or more
definitively in order that the angry ghost may haunt the place and
guard it against the intrusion of enemies. 5
Clearly the shadow here is equated with the spirit, and the capturing of the
shadow is intended to animate the structure. These substitutions come to super-
sede the sacrifice of actual human beings. Yet, as Mircea Eliade points out, the
discovery of skeletons in the foundations of sanctuaries and palaces in the an-
cient Near East provides evidence that such sacrifices did occur.6 And there is
substantial documentary evidence to suggest that the practice was widespread,
and could be found as far afield as England.7
How, then, do we account for these strange rituals, and what is their signifi-
cance? Obviously the rituals were intended to give strength and durability to the
walls, but how was this perceived to happen? And how might we appraise them
from a theoretical perspective?
S AC R I F I C E A S A N I M AT I O N
Mircea Eliade explains these sacrificial building rites as follows:
To last, a construction (house, technical accomplishment, but also a

spiritual undertaking) must be animated, that is, must receive both
life and a soul. The transference of the soul is possible only by means
of a sacrifice; in other words, by a violent death. We may even say that
the victim continues its existence after death, no longer in its physical
body but in the new bodythe constructionwhich has been ani-
mated by its immolation; We may even speak of an architectonic
body substituted for a body of flesh. 8
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Eliade notes how traditional societies saw the human dwelling as a form of
imago mundi. And so, just as the world was founded on the primordial sacrifice
of a Divine Being, so too each construction, as an embodiment of that world,
should require the sacrifice of a victim. This sacrifice is seen as both a positive
and a creative gesture, as the victim transfers its vitality into the structure: On
the plane of construction rites the immolated being, as we have seen, acquires a
new body: the building that it has made a living, hence enduring, thing by its
violent death. In all these myths death by violence is creative.9
In their seminal study of sacrifice, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss offer a
further response to these questions. For them, the building sacrifice aims to
evoke some form of guardian spirit:
In the building sacrifice . . . one sets out to create a spirit who will be
the guardian of the house, altar, or town that one is building or wants
to build, and which will become the power within it. Thus the rites of
attribution are developed. The skull of the human victim, the cock or
the head of the owl, is walled up. Again, depending on the nature of
the building, whether it is to be a temple, a town, or a mere house, the
importance of the victim differs. According as the building is already
built or about to be built, the object of the sacrifice will be to create
the spirit or the protecting divinity, or to propitiate the spirit of the
soil which the building operations are about to harm. 10
But how exactly is that spirit evoked, and what purpose does the sacrifice serve
compared to, say, a mere offering? Hubert and Mauss observe that there are two
types of relation forged through sacrifice. On the one hand, the sacrifice may
benefit the sacrifier as subject. Hubert and Mauss define the sacrifier as follows:
We give the name sacrifier to the subject to whom the benefits of sacrifice
thus accrue, or who undergoes its effects.11 On the other hand, the benefits of
the sacrifice may be conferred on an object, which relates in some way to the sac-
rifier. So sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim,
modifies the conditions of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of
certain objects with which he is concerned.12
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In the sacrifice that takes place in the building of a house, they say, it is the
house that is affected by it, and the quality that it acquires by this means can sur-
vive longer than its owner for the time being.13 It is important to recognize,
however, that these two mechanisms of sacrifice are related, and often coexist.
So it is with the sacrifice to consecrate a house that this gesture also has an effect
on the moral standing of the person officiating, and those connected with that
person. As Hubert and Mauss observe: When the father of a family offers a sac-
rifice for the inauguration of his house, not only must the house be capable of
receiving his family, but they must be fit to enter it.14
For Hubert and Mauss, sacrifice acts as a form of intermediary mechanism
between either the sacrifier and the god, or the object of sacrifice and the god.
In the case of building rituals, both mechanisms come into operation. The prin-
ciple here is that the victim serves as a form of intermediary which acts like some
electrical resistor to weaken the force of the sacrifice, which would otherwise be
too intense.15 Hubert and Mauss explain this as follows:
If the religious forces are the very principles of the forces of life, they
are in themselves of such a nature that contact with them is a fearful
thing for the ordinary man. Above all, when they reach a certain level
of intensity, they cannot be concentrated in a profane object without
destroying it. However much he has need of them, the sacrifier cannot
approach them save with the utmost prudence. That is why between
these powers and himself he interposes intermediaries, of whom the
principal is the victim. 16
And again: The rites of exit . . . weaken the force of the consecration. But by
themselves they could not weaken it sufficiently if it had been too intense. It is
therefore important that the sacrifier or the object of sacrifice receive the con-
secration only when its force has been blunted, that is to say, indirectly. This is
the purpose of the intermediary.17
This is where we can begin to recognize the real significance of sacrifice in
building rituals. For the whole thrust of sacrifice appears to be to endow the
object with a certain vital force, whose nature might be understood by analogy
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with electrical current. Indeed, Hubert and Mauss even use the term current
to refer to the flow of energies at that moment.18 The victim therefore acts like a
lightning conductoras a form of conduit to the divine spirit, an intermediary
mechanism which offers a vicarious communion with the godhead. All sacrifices
entail a process of redemption. Here the victim is redeemed on behalf of others.
In the moment of the sacrifice the otherwise profane victim is purified and con-
secrated, and through that process of consecration the sacrifier and those asso-
ciated with that person, along with the building as object of sacrifice, enjoy the
benefits of this act.
Sacrifice has a vitalizing power. It is through the example of Christian com-
munion that we might best recognize this. The non-death of the soul is assured
by the ritualistic repetition of the sacrifice of Christ. Above all, sacrifice must be
seen as a social act. Through sacrifice, individuals, with no small degree of self-
interest, invest their possessions with powers which belong to society at large.
As Hubert and Mauss put it, They confer upon each other, upon themselves,
and upon those things they hold dear, the whole strength of society. . . . They
surround, as if with a protective sanctity, the fields they have ploughed and the
houses they have built.19
Such a view would be in keeping with Eliades conclusion that sacrifice facili-
tates the transference of the soul of the victim. The violence of the sacrifice
ensures this, and although the victim dies in one sense, it lives on in another
through its new bodythe building-as-bodyanimated as it now is by the
immolation.20 The sacrifice of the victim is a creative death.
S AC R I F I C E A S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N
We find an alternative approach to sacrifice in the work of the French anthro-

pologist Claude Lvi-Strauss. Lvi-Strauss places less emphasis on the vitalizing
power of sacrifice than on the action of sacrifice as a mechanism of identifica-
tion. For the object of sacrifice precisely is to establish a relation, he notes,
not of resemblance but of contiguity, by means of a series of successive identi-
fications.21 He discusses sacrifice in the context of totemism, which he regards
as a logical and coherent system. While he supports the concept of totemism,
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Lvi-Strauss dismisses the practice of sacrifice: The system of sacrifice repre-

sents a private system having no good sense.22 Yet although Lvi-Strauss may
be somewhat antagonistic in his stance toward sacrifice, he nonetheless recog-
nizes its purpose. Whereas totemism is based on a postulation of homology
between two parallel series, in sacrifice, the series of natural species . . . plays
the part of an intermediary between two polar terms, the sacrificer and the
deity, between which there is essentially no homology nor even any sort of rela-
tion.23 Sacrifice must therefore attempt to match this homology which already
exists in totemism.
It is this sense of sacrifice as a mechanism of identification which serves to
overcome the abstract alienation of contemporary society that lies at the basis
of Georges Batailles lengthy engagement with the topic. Sacrifice is a key theme
in Batailles oeuvre, and it is through the practice of the Aztecs that Bataille
explores this theme.24 From the perspective of our present inquiry, the architec-
tural features of these practicespyramids, zigurrats, towers, steps, and so on
are less significant than the social issues. Architecture remains, as always for
Bataille, the embodiment of social practices. But it is the social practices them-
selves which deserve attention when we address the question of identification.
Bataille describes in elaborate detail the rituals on which Aztec sacrifices
were based. He recounts, for example, the story of a beautiful youth who would
be selected a year in advance from prisoners of war. The youth would be given
special privileges, and treated as though he were himself a god: He went
through the whole town very well dressed, with flowers in his hands and accom-
panied by certain personalities. He would bow graciously to all whom he met,
and they all knew he was the image of Tezcatlipoca [one of the greatest gods]
and prostrated themselves before him, worshipping him wherever they met
him.25 The youth was allowed access to the temple on top of the pyramid of
Quauchxicalco, where he would play the flute, day and night, whenever he
wished. Just before the ceremony, he received even more special treatment:
Twenty days previous to the festival they gave this youth four maid-
ens, well prepared and educated for this purpose. During those twenty
days he had carnal intercourse with these maidens. The four girls
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they gave him as wives and who had been reared with special care for
that purpose were given names of four goddesses. . . . Five days before
he was to die they gave festivities for him, banquets held in cool and
gay places, and many chieftains and prominent people accompanied
him. On the day of the festival when he was to die they took him to an
oratory, which they called Tlacuchcalco. Before reaching it, at a place
called Tlapitouaian, the women stepped aside and left him. As he got
to the place where he was to be killed, he mounted the steps by himself
and on each of these he broke one of the flutes which he had played
during the year. 26
But the end would be vicious and swift, the aim being to tear out his heart
while it was still beating, and offer it as a sacrificial gift to the sun:
He was awaited at the top by the satraps or priests who were to kill
him, and these now grabbed him and threw him onto the stone block ,
and, holding him by feet, hands and head, thrown on his back , the priest
who had the stone knife buried it with a mighty thrust in the victims
breast and, after drawing it out, thrust one hand into the opening and
tore out the heart, which he at once offered to the sun. 27
It is true that Bataille is by no means offering a eulogy of sacrifice. He

acknowledges throughout that while some victims would go willingly, many
would be reluctant, screaming and crying as they made their way up the steps to
the altar. All would be coerced into being victims. None would volunteer. Yet
although they would be treated humanely up until the moment of sacrificethe
victims would be encouraged to stay up the night before, singing and dancing in
ecstasy, or would be given a concubinenot everyone would be given the same
respect afterwards:
Ordinary victims were thrown down the steps to the bottom. The
greatest violence was habitual. The dead person was flayed and the
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priest then clothed himself in the bloody skin. Men were thrown into
a furnace and pulled out with a hook to be placed on the executioners
block while still alive. More often than not the flesh consecrated by
the immolation was eaten. The festivals followed one another without
interruption and every year the divine service called for countless
sacrifices: Twenty thousand is given as the number. 28
THE NECESSITY OF SACRIFICE
Why, then, is Bataille so interested in sacrifice? For him, the principle of sacri-
fice exposes the limitations of productive expenditure. In his discussion of
sacrifice, Bataille distinguishes between what he terms productive expendi-
ture and non-productive expenditure. Productive expenditure provides the
principle on which Western economy is based, a utilitarian project aimed at sup-
porting the propagation of a species. Hence whatever might be geared toward
profit and gain falls into the category of productive expenditure. Against this is
set the category of nonproductive expenditure, which is premised on the notion
of loss. This project embraces all that is denied by productive expenditure
death, horror, and so on. It remains an essential part of Western culture, but is
often disguised in different forms. As John Lechte puts it: Within western bour-
geois society, the full realization of nonproductive expenditure is often veiled
behind other kinds of activitiesthose, for instance, of living in luxury, mourn-
ing, war, sports, arts, perverse sexual activity, etc. Unproductive expenditure
gives full rein to the pleasure principle, is governed by a logic of destruction and
is, according to Bataille, the basis of true poetry.29
Within the profane world of productive expenditure, the subject has become
reifiedhas been turned into a thing. Sacrifice challenges the very abstraction
and ontological reduction of this world of things: Sacrifice restores to the sacred
world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane. Servile use has
made a thing (an object) of that which, in a deep sense, is of the same nature as
the subject, is in a relation of intimate participation with the subject.30 Sacri-
fice, in other words, challenges the object relations within utilitarian society, and
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celebrates subjectivity. The aim here is to reestablish some form of communion.

What has to be destroyed are not plants and animals as such. Rather, as Bataille
puts it, they must be destroyed insofar as they have become things.31
Physical destruction itself is not necessary, although destruction of the real
order is the most favorable to the symbolic order. Indeed, the purpose of sac-
rifice is not necessarily to kill but, rather, to surrender and give up. Certainly a
straitened, profane form of utilitarian destruction will hardly have the full
effect: The victim of a sacrifice cannot be consumed in the same way that a
motor uses fuel. What the ritual has the virtue of rediscovering is the intimate
participation of the sacrificer and the victim, to which a servile use had put an
end.32 Bataille describes this intimacy, this immanence between subject and
object, in terms of the intimacy in which the wife is known in the consummation
of the sexual act. In Batailles context, the sacrificer exclaims in the act of sac-
rifice: Intimately, I belong to the sovereign world of god and myths, to the
world of violent and uncalculated generosity, just as my wife belongs to my
desires. I withdraw you, victim, from the world in which you were and could
only be reduced to the condition of a thing, having a meaning that was foreign
to your intimate nature. I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of
the profound immanence of all that is.33
The question of thingness, or reification, gives Batailles thought an obvious
Marxist slant. Once a slave has been treated as an instrument working for the
master, the slave has become an object that could even be sold. The slave has
been rendered a commodity, and any relation between master and slave has been
lost. While slavery itself has been abolished, capitalism, Bataille observes, main-
tains the object relation of the order of things. Sacrifice, however, challenges
this logic by subscribing to nonproductive expenditure, so antithetical to capi-
talist accumulation. It seeks to replace the real orderthe order of things
with the divine order, not by restoring the consecrated object to the real order,
but by liberating it. Sacrifice destroys an objects real ties of subordination, as
Bataille puts it; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to
that of intelligible caprice.34
Even within a slave economy, however, there is a problem with sacrifice in that
a slave will always be treated in part as an object. The sacrifice of a slave will
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therefore be compromised, and will tend toward the violence wrought in war,
where the enemy is always treated as a thing. The key difference between inter-
nal sacrifice and external war is that sacrifice is always controlled and limited,
not least because the victim cannot fight back. From this perspective, the ideal
sacrifice, for Bataille, would be that not of a slave or prisoner of warthose
from the lowest echelons of societybut of a prince or king, the very highest
members of society:
Intense consumption requires victims at the top who are not only the
useful wealth of the people, but this people itself; or at least, elements
that signify it and that will be destined for sacrifice, this time not
owing to an alienation from the external world a fallbut, quite
the contrary, owing to an exceptional proximity, such as the sovereign
or the children (whose killing finally realizes the performance of the
sacrifice twice over). 35
Moreover, if sacrifice in its highest form involves the sacrifice of some deity, then
the sacrifice of a sovereign will always be correspondingly more significant than
that of a slave.
The principle behind sacrifice is that the subject should always feel the need
for recourse to the order of things, so as to subordinate the self to that order.
Sacrifice reverses this:
The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he
can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly,
and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share,
destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from
the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now
radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings. 36
The point here is that death discloses the imposture of reality which has
sought to suppress the force of intimate life so as to protect the order of things.
Intimacy poses a risk to this order, as it threatens to release its infinite violence.
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Intimacy is perceived as violent here, because it disrupts the autonomy of the

individual. The real order, notes Bataille, does not so much reject the negation
of life that is death as it rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose measure-
less violence is a danger to the stability of things, an affirmation which is fully
revealed only in death. The real order must annulneutralizethat intimate
life and replace it with the thing that the individual is in the society of labor.37 It
is only in death that what has been hidden is revealed: The power of death sig-
nifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that lifes intimacy
does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment life gives out.38
Furthermore, although death is normally accompanied by sorrow, for Bataille
sorrow is not so far from its supposed opposite, joy. Sorrow is expressed by tears,
yet tears represent a keen awareness of shared life grasped in its intimacy, and
it is through absence that this awareness is brought most sharply into focus.39
Hence we find the common expression I never knew how close I was to them,
until they were gone. And if familiarity over time somehow neutralizes the emo-
tions, so too the abrupt denial of this condition uncovers a ground of things that
is dazzlingly bright.40 Death therefore reveals the exquisite intimacy of things
in their mythical order.
In a sacrifice, the victim operates as a vicarious object of identification. The
victim is offered up on behalf of others, as a controlled mechanism that grants
violence its due expression. By expiating violence, sacrifice serves to contain vio-
lence. As Bataille observes: It is always the purpose of sacrifice to give destruc-
tion its due, to save the rest from the mortal danger of contagion.41
SACRIFICE AS COMMUNION
These two approachessacrifice as a form of vitalization and sacrifice as a form

of identificationcan be understood as variations on a similar theme. Their
purpose is essentially the same. Within the context of sacrificial building rites,
the animation of the building through sacrifice serves, as it were, to equate the
builder with the building. By animating the building, sacrifice confers on the
structure the same status as that of the builder. Moreover, the principle of coun-
tering the reification of objects relations that lies behind Batailles approach
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leadsin the case of building sacrificesif not to an animation of the building,

then at least to an opening up to a more dynamic engagement with that building
on the part of those involved in the sacrifice.42 The two mechanisms would
appear to be two different sides of the same coin. Either the object is animated
to become like the subject, or the subject is released from the restrictions of
object relations to enjoy a more intimate engagement with that object.
In both cases a shift is inaugurated toward a more intuitive relationship with
the building, one that is no longer static or objectified, but dynamic and ani-
mated. For Bataille, like Hubert and Mauss, sees sacrifice as being premised on
the notion not of death but of lifea life which has a greater intimacy, and
escapes the alienation of object relations. If for Hubert and Mauss sacrifice
serves as a conduit to animate the inanimate, and to endow it with a certain life
force, so for Bataille the death of sacrifice serves as a form of release from the
constraints of the productive economy which themselves constitute a form of
living death. Just as for Hubert and Mauss this life force will not only protect
the building like some form of tutelary deity, but will also give it literal strength,
so for Bataille sacrifice comes to stand not for death, but for life.
In either model, sacrifice can therefore be seen as a mechanism of commu-
nion. In the ecstatic moment of sacrifice, the distinction between self and other
is dissolved. In the narcissistic intimacy of identification, the individual enters a
moment of pure subjectivity. But, more than this, sacrifice breaks down the
abstraction of object relations, and creates a bond between sacrifier and object
of sacrifice. The sacrifice therefore serves as a way of inscribing the self in the
building. In surrendering the victim, the sacrifier lives on through the object of
sacrifice. In sacrificing the human beingor surrogate human beingin the
foundations, the builder not only guarantees the stability of the building, but
also identifies with that building. The builder gives himself over to the building.
At a symbolic level, he becomes part of the building. In the ecstatic moment
of sacrifice, he steps out of the alienation of object relations and enters into a
communion with that building.
Hence we might recognize the sacrifice that lies at the basis of all architec-
ture. In this way, myths of sacrifice which have filtered into architectural folk-
lore might be understood within the framework of questions of identity. It is as
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though the sacrifice of a human life is required not only in order to animate the
inanimate stone, but also to establish an intimate relationship with the building.
And, beyond this, we might recognize this sacrifice as being replicated in the
sacrifice of the self within the ecstatic moment of aesthetic experience.
In contemplation of an aesthetic composition we become one with that
composition, as we give ourselves over to it in aesthetic contemplation. We
succumb to the death instinctin order to live on through the work. Aesthetic
contemplation becomes a way of transcending death at a symbolic level. The
mechanism is that of the sacrifice, and it is one that applies to aesthetic con-
templation, erotic encounters, and religious devotion alike. We surrender our-
selves to the other, in order to live on through the other. We give ourselves up
to death, in order to transcend death.
Just as in a religious context the sacrifice of Christ opens up the possibility
for all worshipers of living in some paradise, so too we might recognize the con-
dition of love, and equally the state of being at one with the world through an
aesthetic experience, as having a paradisiacal nature. Through the bliss, the
ecstasy, of feeling connected, we enter a state of almost religious transcendence,
a paradise of the senses.
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M
M E L A N C H O L I A
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Ren Girard offers a different take on the question of sacrifice, linking sacrifice
to his understanding of mimesis. For him, violence lies at the heart of society.
Human beings, according to this logic, are by their very nature agonistic and
desirous of the other. They are competitive, rivalrous creatures. They compete
for various objects not because those objects are worth anything in themselves,
but because they are desired by others. Society is therefore bound together by
an acquisitive form of copyingwhich Girard calls mimesis. It constitutes an
inescapable logic that determines human behavior. This mimesis, which is quite
unlike that of Benjamin and Adorno, is, for Girard, essentially acquisitive. It is
born of envy. This seemingly unreflexive notion of mimesis serves, therefore, not
only to cement society, and ensure a degree of homogeneity, but also to fuel the
violence that lies at the heart of society.
The only way this violence can be checked is by the imposition of a form of
order whichin being imposeditself subscribes to the same logic of vio-
lence. Inevitably, comments Girard, the moment comes when violence can
only be countered by more violence.1 Hence the cycle of violence is continu-
ous, and any momentary halt is deceptive, since violence will always threaten to
erupt once again.
Sacrifice plays an important role in such a scenario in that it provides a poten-
tial mechanism for imposing some semblance of order. It does this by finding a
scapegoat, a figure around which society coalesces. The sacrifice of the scape-
goat offers a cathartic discharge of violence, and enables society to achieve some
momentary sense of order, before the cycle of violence restores itself. But only if
the sacrifice is that of an innocent victim does sacrifice hold out the possibility
of an end to this cycle of violence. Indeed, for Girard, it is the sacrifice of Christ
that lends Christianity the potential to rid the world of violence. As Girard says,
Christ dies not as a sacrifice, but in order that there be no more sacrifices.2
Only innocence can overcome violence.
Girard offers a pessimistic view of society, in which sacrifice and many forms
of religious activity are condemned to the impossible task of combating vio-
lenceimpossible, because religion itself subscribes to the logic of violence.
Religion serves merely to channel that violence. The religious, for Girard, is
nothing other than this immense effort to keep the peace. The sacred is vio-
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lence, but if religious man worships violence it is only insofar as the worship of
violence is supposed to bring peace.3 Violence, he observes, is the heart and
soul of the sacred.4
The theme of sacrifice is also central to the work of Julia Kristeva. For Kris-
teva, it acts as a symbol of social order, and contains violence. While Girard views
sacrifice as an unleashing of animal violence, Kristeva sees it as a violent and
regulatory thetic moment:
Sacrifice has been viewed as an unleashing of animal violence, a com-

memoration of prehuman bestiality. But, in our opinion, classical
anthropological sociology has a more accurate view, assigning sacri-
fice an ambiguous function, simultaneously violent and regulatory.
For sacrifice designates, precisely, the watershed on the basis of which
the social and the symbolic are instituted: the thetic that confines
violence to a single place, making it a signifier. Far from unleashing
violence, sacrifice shows how representing that violence is enough to
stop it and to concatenate an order. 5
In other words, sacrifice mimes conflict in order to control it.

The important aspect of Kristevas approach to sacrifice is that she deals with
it at a symbolic level. She is not concerned with the literal act of sacrifice so much
as with the question of its symbolic role. With literal sacrifice, she notes, all
violence can do is to filter into the symbolic order and explode, transforming
or shattering it. The sacred does not, therefore, celebrate pure violence; it cele-
brates instead the positing of violence.6 Nonetheless, a certain practice accom-
panies sacrifice, which is fundamental to understanding its positive side: This
practice is the representation that generally precedes the sacrifice; it is a labora-
tory for, among other things, theater, poetry, song, danceart. That the combat
it mimes precedes the sacrificial slaying is less important than the fact that it
mimes in the full sense of the term.7
For Kristeva, sacrifice lies at the heart of the development of human identity.
Significantly, it is associated with death-work, and turned toward a positive end.
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Sacrifice becomes a mechanism of purification which restores social order

through a process of miming conflict. As Martha Reineke puts it:
On the one hand, sacrifice functions as a rite of closure on death-

work. In sacrifice, the disruptive and destabilizing potential of nega-
tivity is mimed, placed under the control of the sign, and neutralized.
On the other hand, sacrifice produces a localized violence: a focused
and contained death-work. Associated with the body of a victim,
the positive dynamic of negativity is maintained in sacrifice, which
distributes broad-based renewal and order in its wake. 8
This is not to condone sacrifice. Indeed, for Kristeva, sacrifice inevitably

involves suffering. Rather, it is to recognize the pervasiveness of symbolic sacri-
fice within all aspects of human behavior, and to understand its primary role in
the formation of individual identity.
Kristevas work offers a compelling reason why the victims of sacrifice are so
often female. For Kristeva, as Lechte points out, sacrifice is constitutive of the
thetic moment dividing the symbolic from the presymbolic.9 Sacrifice is there-
fore often invoked in moments of thetic crisis. By thetic crisis Kristeva means
boundary failurea crisis, that is, of individual subjectivity. During this
moment the subjectivity of the individual is under threat, and the coherence of
the self-image is undermined, revealing glimpses of the chaos that lurks beneath
that image. Such a crisis is generally triggered off by external factors like the col-
lapse of a relationship, and so on, and it may also be initiated by economic or
political factors. The task is therefore to reestablish some semblance of order.
The crisis prompts the reenactment of an earlier moment of identity cre-
ation, the moment when the subject rejects the mother in the struggle for a sep-
arate identity. For Kristeva, this amounts to a mimetic crisisa crisis, that is
to say, of nondifferentiation. In order to establish a separate identity, the subject
must effectively murder the mother. Here we once more glimpse the familiar
theme of sacrifice which sets death at the service of life. The mother is, in effect,
sacrificed, as the individual struggles to escape the mimetic horror of noniden-
tity. For Kristeva, this operation comes about in part through the development
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of language as a mode of self-expression and in part through the constitution of

a spatial identity, separate from the mother. Yet memories of this struggle are
never entirely lost, and recur in subsequent moments of boundary failure
which threaten this identity.
A significant influence throughout must be that of the social context. Hence,
for Kristeva, patriarchy reinforces the likelihood that any sacrificial victim cho-
sen to reenact this earlier stage in the formation of self-identity is likely to be
female. Two factors conspire toward this tendency: first, the Law of the Sym-
bolic Order, which dictates that we find ourselves perpetually estranged; sec-
ondly, the abiding memory of this earlier struggle against the mother. When
these two factors are forged in the crucible of patriarchy, Reineke observes,
the social contract becomes a sacrificial contract with very different conse-
quences for women than for men. Fusion of a patriarchal code of sacrifice with a
Symbolic Law of absence places women at absolute risk of violence when they
are made to bear abject marks of violence of the maternal body.10
The thetic crisis demands a reenactment of the original sacrificea sacrifice
which established order and identity in the first place, and is evoked afresh in
order to regain that state. It is natural, moreover, to seek out a victim with whom
the subject has some intimate understanding, since the problem of the thetic
crisis is one of self-understanding. The victim is therefore associated with the
symbolic Mother, although not necessarily the actual mother.11 As Reineke puts
it: Because the vanquished abject of subjects struggles against boundary fail-
ure is described here as Mother, a vital point is underscored: sacrificial violence
is close to home. Mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends are among those who
are violated when death-work is drawn on sacrificially in patriarchy to main-
tain order.12
SACRIFICE AND ART
Kristeva recognizes the sacrificial moment within all forms of art. One of her key
essays on this subject is her discussion of Hans Holbeins Dead Christ. What
makes this essay so important is that it addresses artistic creativity in the con-
text of religion and death. In his painting of the dead Christ as a man of sorrows,
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Holbein does not flinch from displaying his horrific injuries. His representation
of Christs emaciated, tortured body is harrowingly realistic, and does not
attempt to hide anything. As Kristeva observes:
The chest bears the bloody mark of a spear, and the hand shows the
stigmata of the Crucifixion, which stiffen the outstretched middle
finger. Imprints of nails mark Christs feet. The martyrs face bears
the expression of hopeless grief; the empty stare, the sharp-lined pro-
file, the dull blue-green complexion are those of a man who is truly
dead, of Christ forsaken by the Father (My God, my God, why hast
thou forsaken me?) and without the promise of Resurrection. 13
This painting, which transgresses so many boundaries, raises a number of

questions on the capacity of art to help the subject overcome the problem
of loss, severance, and death at a psychic level. Is it possible, Kristeva asks, to
paint when the bonds which tie us to body and meaning are severed? Is it possible
to paint when desire, which is a bond, collapses? Is it possible to paint when one
identifies not with desire but with severance, which is the truth of human psychic
life, a severance which is represented by death in the imagination and which
melancholia conveys as symptom?14 For her, the answer is yes; it is not a ques-
tion of the subject matter so much as the paintings capacity to offer access to
the symbolic realm. Thus, although the painting is about death and loss, it hints
at a close affinity between the work of art and loss, as articulated through death,
to the point where this affinity serves to highlight and reinforce the role of art as
a mechanism whose purpose is to transcend death.15
If artistic expression offers the possibility of transcending death, then melan-
choliaa form of living deathrepresents the opposite pole. Artistic expres-
sion may open up and restore the subject, whereas melancholia threatens to
close off the subject, and deny the possibility of access to the outside world. In
their responses the artist and the melancholic opt for two diametrically opposite
positions, yet according to Kristeva the two remain dialectically related. Indeed,
the connections between art and forms of psychosis have long been recog-
nized.16 Not only do artistic expression and melancholia share common origins,
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but the one may serve to counter the other. As Lechte observes: The artist
always tends towards the melancholic pole of the psychic spectrum.17 While the
artist always threatens to be melancholic, the melancholic may seek some relief
through art. The message in Kristeva is that art is born ofbut also transcends
melancholia.
The problem of the melancholic can be traced back to the sense of loss that
structures individuation. Loss develops over time, and prompts a compensa-
tory drive to regain that which has been lost. Kristeva identifies this loss as a sep-
aration from some idyllic state of harmony which is registered psychically as a
separation from the mother. Since the mirror stage represents a significant
moment in this process, and marks the intervention of the symbolic, it is the
symbolic which, for Kristeva, offers a means of overcoming this loss. To hanker
after a union with the Real is to withdraw from the realm of the symbolic, and
this is what leads to melancholia or depression. As Lechte puts it:
If love is a striving (largely fuelled by symbolic idealization) for a

union with an object, melancholy, as Kristeva outlines it, corresponds
to union with Lacans Real: that is, for Kristeva, with the mother and
death. This, then, is a union based on a withdrawal from the symbolic,
from life. Melancholia, and its more temporary variant, depression,
would constitute an example of an unsuccessful separation from the
mother and a failure of primary narcissism to emerge. 18
Love is therefore contrasted to melancholia. The theme of love is a central

concern for Kristeva. To love is essentially to live, andby extensionto
refuse love is to die in some way. When love is not possible, Lechte com-
ments, we lose part of ourselves; we begin to die and perhaps then realize that
love is life. Such would be our distillation of Kristevas message.19
Kristeva further explores how, by comparison, a constructive engagement
with artand here we should include architectureentails an openness to
the other, and embodies an essentially erotic dimension. She lays great
emphasis on the very process of making art, which for her must remain an es-
sentially amateur activityamateur, that is, in both senses of the word, as
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non-professional and as loving. For Kristeva, professionalism detracts from

art, while artists come to express their love through the process of making art:
In the ideal hypothesis, the artist succeeds in probabilizing, in rela-

tivizing, his own production, as though it were a living system that
lives only on condition of being open to the other. A life, a work of art:
are these not works in progress only inasmuch as capable of self-
depreciation and of resubmitting themselves to the flames which are,
without distinction, the flames of language and love? 20
But when Kristeva refers to the connections between art and love, she has a par-
ticular form of love in mind. She is referring to Agape, a higher form of love which
enacts a union with God. Agape is more mystical than mere Eros, the common
form of love. It is a selfless, charitable love. Agape is not desire: it involves an
openness and identification with the other. Love as Agape in Kristevas work, as
Lechte has observed, is the basis of a dynamic potential in the process of iden-
tification.21 In Tales of Love, Kristeva articulates the various modalities of love,
contrasting Agape with Eros. She challenges the standard reading of Narcissus
as the emblem of Eros. Narcissus, she argues, dies not because of his narcissism
but, rather, through his lack of it. Narcissus desires otherness, and it is his failure
to consolidate his own subjectivity through narcissism that prevents him from
developing a fully fledged ego-ideal, and thereby constrains him from falling in
love with the other. One can love the other, only if one first loves the self. But
with Agape, a knowing, actative moment is introduced that surpasses the pas-
sivity of narcissism, and thereby transcends it. With Agape one has to love the
other as the self, but the self must always be distinct from the other. True love
(Agape) therefore depends on a form of abjectionseparation from the
motherwhereas Eros often manifests itself as a desirous, selfish form of love
that strives to capture the other. This sets the scene for an unending conflict
between the idealistic Agape and the violent and potentially destructive Eros.
Art, for Kristeva, plays a similar role to love. From a psychoanalytic perspec-
tive, they both serve to broaden horizons and maintain psychic space: The
experience of love and experience of art, which serve to solidify the identifica-
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tory process, are the only ways in which we can maintain our psychic space as a
living system that is open to the other and capable of adaptation and change.22
Art therefore has the potential to open up a series of relationships with the
other. It allows one to identify with the other, an identification which is always
essentially plural and in a state of flux. It is in this process of identification that
the amorousor vitaldimension of art is revealed. To be closed off to the
potential of art amounts to a form of death. An encounter with art is an
encounter with difference that holds the potential to forge new relationships in
a world where to live means to love. And art, like love, may play a form of sub-
stitute role for religion. As Lechte observes:
To refuse difference here, to be closed off to the dynamic aspect of

identity, is also to begin to die certainly in a symbolic sense, and
probably in a physical sense as well. Without God . . . the speaking
being in postmodern times risks becoming a stunted version of
humanity. Love . . . can compensate for God, and so can art, in Kris-
tevas view. 23
This sense of identification through a form of Agape is reinforced by other

Christian traditions, notably the transubstantiation of the body of Christ in
the taking of the Eucharist. For identification, in Kristeva, is always a transcor-
poration. This may be only a metaphorical gesture, but the notion of metaphor
itselfin its original Greek formcarries with it a sense of transportation.
One has to transport ones body into/onto the other: Identification with a
relation or an object (the mother, the father, or any one of their traits) is a trans-
ference between my body and my ever-evolving psychic apparatuswhich is
incomplete, flexible and fluidand an other whose immutability provides me
with a guide and a representation. I see myself as one of them. I become them.24
Eucharistic identification seems to extend beyond the realm of mere represen-
tation into an identification with the other through a form of absorption. In
this sense the Eucharist offers a model for how consummate identifications
might take place. Yet it is a model that has lost its currency within our contem-
porary cultural climate. All we can find to replace it, according to Kristeva, are
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art and love: If the Eucharist has lost the bewitching power that enabled us to
partake in such identifications, we will have two choices: we can read literature
or we can try to reinvent love.25
The problem of the melancholic, however, is a failure on the part of the sub-
ject to forge a symbolic relation with an object. Instead, the subject seizes upon
sadness itself, which becomes a form of ersatz object. This step operates
merely as a form of closed circuit. The subject is not opened up to a horizon of
possibilities, as in the moment of love or artistic creation, but closed down and
locked into an introspective condition that constitutes a form of living death.
We might therefore recognize that, in Kristevas terms, although artist and
melancholic have much in common at one level, the artist is more successful in
accessing the realm of the symbolic, and thereby undergoing a form of rebirth.
The abstraction of contemporary existence and the consequent erosion of
the symbolic dimension can be seen to encourage a culture of melancholia. One
way to resolve this condition is to reestablish the link with the lifeworld, and the
key can be found in artistic expression. The sense of detachment seems to pro-
voke a consequent desire for attachment. The symbolic holds the promise of this
attachment, and it is precisely through artistic expression that this attachment
might be achieved. The crucial factor is the nature of that expression. For the
melancholic, language and art appear foreign, whereas for the artist they are
intuitive. As Lechte puts it, for Kristeva, with the melancholic, words have
become detached from their drive base and marked with a deathly stillness.
Melancholia prevents an eroticization of the death drive (as manifested in hate),
and this distinguishes it from neurosis; but, above all, melancholia prevents an
eroticization of the separation from the mother: that is, the mother is not a lost
object, the subject dies in her place.26 Consequently melancholia holds the
drives and the symbolic apart.27 In other words, melancholics, in refusing loss,
absorb alterity within the structure of their own identity: they carry the mater-
nal Thing inside.28
This internalization is, in effect, a form of incarceration. It is a kind of death,
of being buried alive. As Kristeva puts it: They [melancholics] have lost the
meaningthe valueof their mother tongue for want of losing the mother. The
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dead language they speak, which foreshadows their suicide, conceals a Thing
buried alive. The latter, however, will not be translated in order that it not be
betrayed; it shall remain walled up within the crypt of inexpressible affect.29 This
sense of burying something alive, of walling it up within the crypt of inexpress-
ible affect, brings the problem of melancholics into sharp focus with the theme
of sacrifice and the work of artists. For it is by the symbolic absorption of this
process as ritualized myth that artists overcome this syndrome. Melancholics,
by comparison, do not have recourse to this mechanism. As Reineke notes, for
Kristeva, Melancholics do not so much refuse loss as they refuse to accept that
the Symbolic system compensates adequately for their loss.30
Artists, like melancholics, achieve a certain detachment through their work.
This detachment can be read as an attachment to a thing. In Lacanian terms,
it is the task of analysis to turn this thing into an object. Yet for artists, this
attachment is an active attachment. It is not the petrified living death of
melancholics. Artists live their lives through their works of art. Thus, while
always teetering on the brink of melancholia, and always sharing the melan-
cholics symptoms, artists can work with these symptoms productively. Artists,
furthermore, maintain a certain control over the symbolic, and, unlike melan-
cholics, can master the affect. This leads Lechte to conclude, as Kristeva seems
to suggest, that the work of art is the possible mark . . . of a vanquished depres-
sion.31 Artists, he adds, are like neither the psychotic nor the melancholic in
that they very often articulate the primary inscription of loss semiotically, and
so give loss a mode of articulation.32
ART AND THE SEMIOTIC
Art, then, is linked to the notion of sacrifice. Artthat semiotization of the

symbolicthus represents, Kristeva comments, the flow of jouissance into lan-
guage. Whereas sacrifice assigns jouissance its productive limit in the social and
symbolic order, art specifies the meansthe only meansthat jouissance har-
bors for infiltrating that order.33 Kristeva therefore offers us a further take on
the relevance of sacrifice to artistic creation. As Reineke observes:
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Art embodies in virtually complete form the sacrificial economy

Kristeva has sketched: in performance, the dynamic of the drives
bursts, pierces, deforms, reforms, and transforms the boundaries the
subject and society set for themselves. Art breaks through the sign,
tearing through the veil of representation to find the material signi-
fying process. Crossing the thetic break and taking on death, the
artist approximates the scapegoat of the sacrificial ritual, differing
from other victims of sacrifice only because she or he does not com-
plete the thetic cycle. 34
In order to understand the mechanism by which the artist takes on this role, it
is worth examining Kristevas understanding of the nature of art and poetic
expression in greater detail.
When Kristeva talks about the introduction of jouissance into and through
language, she distinguishes between two different modes of articulation
genotext and phenotextwhich correspond to the distinction between the
semiotic chora and the symbolic, between a preverbal state of connectivity and a
language-based condition of separation. Genotext is a process which tends to
articulate structures that are ephemeral (unstable, threatened by drive charges,
quanta rather than marks) and nonsignifying, whereas phenotext is con-
cerned with signification and communication.35 Kristeva names Mallarm and
Joyce as writers who have developed a genotext that manages to cover the infin-
ity of the process, that is, reach the semiotic chora, which modifies linguistic
structures.36 Both genotext and phenotext are evoked in writing. A successful
text, for Kristeva, will, through its semiotic distribution, both respect and
transcend the laws of signification: In this way such a practice takes on mean-
ings that come under laws and subjects capable of thinking them; but it does
not stop there or hypostasize them; it passes beyond, questioning and trans-
forming them.37
If we are to understand Kristevas work, it is important to grasp the notion of
writing, or any form of poetic expression, as a dynamic process. The human sub-
ject can also be perceived as a process:
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It is not a unity but a plural totality with separate members that

have no identity but constitute the place where drives are applied.
This dismembered body cannot fit together again, set itself in mo-
tion, or function biologically and physiologically, unless it is in-
cluded within a practice that encompasses the signifying process.
Without such a practice, the body in process/on trial is disarticu-
lated; its drives tear it up into stymied, motionless sectors and it con-
stitutes a weighty mass. 38
Kristeva elaborates a theory of what she calls the semiotic, a form of pre-
verbal enunciation: The semiotic is articulated by flow and marks: facilitation,
energy transfers, the cutting up of the corporeal and social continuum as well as
that of signifying material, the establishment of a distinctiveness and its order-
ing in a pulsating chora, in a rhythmic but nonexpressive totality.39 Whereas sig-
nification seeks to fix and establish meaning, the semiotic occupies a position
before meaning. We shall distinguish, writes Kristeva, the semiotic (drives and
their articulations) from the realm of signification, which is always that of a
proposition or judgment, in other words, a realm of positions.40 And it is here
that we could locate art as a process of articulation, but one that is not concerned
with meaning. Art, for Kristeva, constitutes a form of the symbolic. It is not
related to signification.41
At the heart of the semiotic is the notion of chorathat entity which, as
Derrida and others have observed, forges a link between the intelligible and the
sensible. For Kristeva, the semiotic chora orders the drives in early life:
Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject

who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his develop-
ment, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed
on this body always already involved in the semiotic processby
family and social structures. In this way the drives, which are
energy charges as well as psychical marks, articulate what we call
a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their
stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated. 42
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Poetic expression and art then raise chora to the level of a signifier, but never a
fixed signifier, rather one in a state of flux and indeterminacy, connotative rather
than denotative.
Here we might return to the theme of mimesis, which, for Kristeva, is linked
to the notion of chora. Kristeva, like Benjamin and Adorno, distinguishes her
understanding of mimesisthe mimesis embodied in modern poetic lan-
guagefrom classical mimesis. She therefore distances herself from Girards
interpretation of the term. Mimesis for Kristeva, is the construction of an
object, not according to truth but to versimilitude. 43 Importantly, it colludes
with the poetic as a form for intuitive expression: [Mimesis] is, however, inter-
nally dependent on a subject of enunciation who is unlike the transcendental
ego in that he does not suppress the semiotic chora but instead raises the chora
to the status of a signifier, which may or may not obey the norms of grammati-
cal locution. Such is the connoted mimetic object. 44 It therefore privileges the
connotative, and through a process of mimickingor perhaps parodyingthe
possibilities of the denotative, it expresses a certain disruptive potential in
undermining meaning itself. At the same time, it may operate in conjunction
with denotation, and thereby engage directly with the realm of the social.
Mimesis, then, may straddle both connotative and denotative domains, while
transgressing the thetic boundary and challenging our perception of truth:
Mimesis, in our view, is a transgression of the thetic when truth is no longer a
reference to an object that is identifiable outside of language; it refers instead
to an object that can be constructed through the semiotic network but is nev-
ertheless posited in the symbolic and is, from then on, always verisimilar. 45
For Kristeva, mimesis is inseparable from poetic language. It opens up and
pluralizes denotation, and undermines meaning:
Poetic mimesis maintains and transgresses thetic unicity by making it

undergo a kind of anamnesis, by introducing into the thetic position
the stream of semiotic drives and making it signify. This telescoping
of the symbolic and the semiotic pluralizes signification and denota-
tion: it pluralizes the thetic doxy. Mimesis and poetic language do not
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therefore disavow the thetic, instead they go through its truth (signi-
fication, denotation) to tell the truth about it. 46
Hence we can see that Kristevas particular take on mimesis is closer to

that of Benjamin and Adorno than to Girards very different understanding of
the term.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE TOMB
This theme of a creative deathof life secured through sacrificelocates us

within the logic of the cesarean birth, where the mother is maimed and risks
death in order to secure the birth of a child. Deathor potential deathleads
to life. The logic is one of both life and death, but also interiority and exteriority,
and this gives the analogy a certain architectural resonance. Kristeva herself
acknowledges the sacrificial folding of death into life in her discussion of art
as a form of murder, but one that equally transcends that murder:
Opposite religion or alongside it, art takes on murder and moves

through it. It assumes murder insofar as artistic practice considers
death the inner boundary of the signifying process. Crossing that
boundary is precisely what constitutes art. In other words, it is as if
death becomes interiorized by the subject of such a practice. 47
Significantly, she goes on to describe how this transcendence of death through

art leads to a kind of second birth: In returning, through the event of death,
towards that which produces its break; in exporting semiotic motility across the
border on which the symbolic is established, the artist sketches out a kind of
second birth.48
Architecture always threatens to be a tomb concealing death.49 Just as the
great pyramids of the Incas served as architectural monuments to conceal the re-
mains of sacrificial victims, so all architecture serves to hide and conceal, to ab-
sorb into the realm of the inanimate. Architecture serves as a social force to
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control and order, and to contain the unruly. And if, for Foucault, architecture
comes to operate as a controlling device which guarantees the subjectification of
the inhabitants, so that the panopticon becomes the archetypal form of archi-
tecture that illustrates certain conditions writ large within society as a whole, so
too for Bataille architecture serves as the medium which controls the populace:
Thus, the great monuments are raised like dams, pitting the logic of
majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form
of the cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose
silence on the multitudes. It is obvious, actually, that monuments
inspire socially acceptable behaviour, and often a very real fear. The
storming of the Bastille is symbolic of this state of affairs: it is diffi-
cult to explain this impulse of the mob other than by the animosity the
people hold against the monuments which are their true masters. 50
Nor should it be forgotten that Daedalus, the original artificer, the first archi-
tect, created the first buildingthe labyrinth in Creteas a temple of sacri-
fice. For the labyrinth was to serve the Minotaur, half-man, half-beast, who
each year consumed seven youths and seven maidens sent from Athens. The first
building was a building of death, a maze from which one might never escape. Yet
Daedalus also collaborated in the destruction of the Minotaur, by giving Theseus
the clue to the labyrinth. As a result, the Minotaur kept Daedalus trapped within
the labyrinth, until Daedalus and his son, Icarus, hatched a plot to escape by
fashioning wings from wax and feathers, and flying away. Daedalus escaped, but
Icarus flew too close to the sun. The wax on his wings melted, and he plummeted
to his death.51
But if tombs themselves are always forms of architecture, so too is the womb,
the very cradle of life. And if architecture is associated with death, it is also asso-
ciated with life. How, then, might we distinguish an approach to architecture
which sees it as potentially tomblikeone which propagates deathfrom
one which sees it as womblikeone which propagates life? Here we find the
two polar oppositesthe positive and negative sides of containment. If one fos-
ters a creative engagement with the world, the other constitutes a withdrawal
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into the self. Might we not characterize these two mechanisms in terms of the
difference between poetic expression and melancholia?
What differentiates an architecture of the tomb from an architecture of the
womb is the language in which that architecture is expressed. Architecture, by
its very nature, encloses. What becomes crucial is the manner in which it
encloses. It is a difference between an open architecture and a closed one,
where open and closed refer not to physical containment in itself, but to the
expression of that containment. Melancholia, the trap of being caught within
the crypt of inexpressible affect, would represent a closed architecture. But
how might we articulate an architecture of openness?
The answer lies, perhaps, in a brief analogy with literature. If, for Kristeva, it
is the literature of James Joyce, for example, that is charged with this capacity to
open up the subject, we might look toward an architecture that somehow shares
the intuitive potential of such writing. It is here, then, within this poetic and fun-
damentally intuitive, Joycean world that subscribes neither to some totalizing
closure nor to the absorption of the self in the other, but to a dynamic engage-
ment with the other, that we glimpse the potential for an architecture of open-
ness. This would be an architecture which, through its poetic intent, would
force open the subject, broaden it, and introduce it to new horizons. It would be
an architecture that would innervate, nourish, and have the capacity to trans-
form the subjectan architecture, in Kristevas terms, not of imprisonment but
of free expression, not of melancholia but of love.
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E
E C S T A S Y
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Saint Teresa of Avila (151582) was a Carmelite nun and religious mystic, a
reformer who established her own order and set up seventeen new convents
throughout Spain. She was regarded as a saint in her own lifetime and was well
known for her ecstatic religious experiences, of which Gian Lorenzo Bernini
would no doubt have been aware when he captured her so vividly in his exquisite
sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, in the Cornaro chapel of the church of Santa
Maria della Vittoria in Rome. Certainly Saint Teresas visions had been cited
when she was canonized in Rome in 1622, within thirty years of Bernini begin-
ning his sculpture.
To the contemporary world she is most famous for her vivid and incisive
accounts of her ecstasies or raptures in her autobiography: Rapture is, as a
rule, irresistible. Before you can be warned by a thought or help yourself in any
way, it comes as a quick and violent shock; you see and feel this cloud or this pow-
erful eagle rising and bearing you up on its wings.1 The eagle, of course, is God.
And a fundamental aspect of the rapture is the feeling of being raised aloft
by God:
One sees ones body being lifted from the ground; and though the
spirit draws it up after itself, and does so most gently if one does not
resist, one does not lose consciousness. At least I myself was suffi-
ciently aware to realize that I was being lifted. The majesty of One
who can do this is so manifest that ones hair stands on end, and a
great fear comes over one of offending so great a God. 2
In this state of religious convulsion, overwhelming rapture takes hold. It is a bit-

tersweet moment of ecstasy that is both pleasurable and painful. Saint Teresas
ecstasies share something of the sublime:
One seems to be on the point of death; only the agony carries with it so
great a joy that I do not know of any proper comparison. It is a harsh
yet sweet martyrdom. . . . Yet at the same time this pain is so sweet,
and the soul is so conscious of its value, that it now desires this suffer-
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ing more than all the gifts that it used to receive. It believes this to be
the safer state, too, because it is the way of the cross; and, in my opin-
ion, it contains a joy of exceeding worth, because the body has no part
in it but agony, whereas the soul, even while suffering, rejoices in the
bliss and contentment that this suffering brings. 3
As the word ecstasy implies, this experience takes place beyond the body.
Ekstasis means a standing outside of the body. The ecstatic rapture is an expe-
rience of the soul, an extracorporeal sensation. During the process the eyes
remain closed or half-closed, but, in any case, the individual is almost oblivious
to the outside world:4
Very often [the raptures] seemed to leave my body as light as if it had

lost all its weight, and sometimes so light that I hardly knew whether
my feet were touching the ground. But during the rapture itself, the
body is very often like a corpse, unable to do anything of itself. It
remains all the time in whatever attitude it was in when the rapture
came on it; seated, for example, and with the hands open or closed.
The subject rarely loses consciousness; I have occasionally lost it
entirely, but not very often, and only for a short time. Generally the
senses are disturbed; and though absolutely powerless to perform any
outward action, the subject still sees and hears things, though only
dimly, as if from far away. I do not say that he can see and hear when
the rapture is at its height; and by its height I mean those times
when the faculties are lost, because closely united with God. 5
But what begins to emerge is a markedly erotic undertone to Saint Teresaa

description of her raptures. In particular, when she is being stabbed with a long
golden spear, as in the sculpture by Bernini, her language shares much of the dis-
course of erotic pleasure. She uses a metaphor of penetration for her ecstasies
which seems to echo operations in sexual intercourse. Moreover, her ecstasy is
clearly a corporeal (or perhaps extracorporeal) ecstasy:
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In his hands I saw a long golden spear, and at the iron tip there
appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several
times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he pulled it out, I felt
that he took them out with it, and left me utterly consumed by the
great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter sev-
eral moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme
that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is ones soul then content
with anything but God. This is not a physical, but a spiritual pain,
though the body has some share in it even a considerable share. So
gentle is this wooing which takes place between God and the soul that
if anyone thinks that I am lying, I pray God, in His goodness, to grant
him some experience of it. 6
It is through her raptures, then, that Saint Teresa comes into union with God.
In this state of ecstasy, the boundary between the self and the other is
effaced. The ecstasy allows for a form of mystical bonding which, while reli-
gious in its essence, shares certain characteristics with a more carnal form of
love. Indeed, Berninis highly expressive portrait of Saint Teresa, with her
blissful expression and the spent appearance of her feet and hands, only
reinforces this connection.7
T H E E R O T I C S O F E C S TA S Y
If we are to look for early attempts to understand the condition of ecstasy

beyond a merely mystical religious interpretation, we might turn first to the
work of the influential French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, well known for
his use of hypnosis in the treatment of hysterics. Charcot practiced at the
womens psychiatric hospital in Paris, the Salptrire, and Freud himself was one
of his students. In general terms, Charcots attempts to offer a scientific account
of ecstasy were part of a more general project to overcome religious mysticism
through the epistemological rationality of science. Freud, however, describes
Charcot not as a theorist, but as a visual observer of symptomsan artist of
neurology: He was not a reflective man, not a thinker: he had the nature of an
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artisthe was, as he himself said, a visuel, a man who sees.8 In effect, with
Charcot the inspecting gaze of the doctor elides with the gaze of the artist, and
just as the artist can base his or her work only on interpretations of nature, so the
doctor divines his secrets of the neurological condition through inspection of
the symptoms.
Operating within this predominantly visual domain, Charcot takes numerous
photographic records of the conditions of his patients. What we find in Char-
cots work, then, is an attempt to render the invisible visible, although he some-
times succeeds in conflating religious ecstasy with hysteria, as he does in the case
of Saint Teresa. Charcot could also be accused of linking hysteria to questions of
sexuality, even if he rejects the traditional etymological link between hysteria
and the uterus, which reads hysteria as a wandering of the uterus. Moreover,
his emphasis on the visual leads Charcot to overemphasize the significance of
that realm. Medicine is coopted as a branch of aesthetics. What distinguishes
good hysterics from demoniacs, for Charcot, is that the former look like reli-
gious mystics in their poses. On occasions, the poses of the supposedly ecstatic
subjects seem to resemblesomewhat disturbinglywell-known religious
poses, such as the crucifixion. Nonetheless, through his charting of the pathol-
ogy of hysteria Charcot establishes a terrain for examining within a scientific
framework what had previously been considered the province of religious mys-
ticism. In so doing he opens up the possibility of understanding ecstasy within
the rubric of libidinal forces, as a condition of a corporeal psychopathology.
The connection between mysticism and the erotic has been explored further
by a number of commentators. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, for example, in his
early treatise on sexual pathology, Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), notes quite explic-
itly that sexual feeling is really the root of all ethics, and no doubt of aestheti-
cism and religion.9 Mysticism and eroticism would appear interchangeable for
him. Moreover, both may lead to a form of masochism or cruelty: Religious and
sexual hyperaesthesia at the zenith of development show the same volume of
intensity and the same quality of excitement, and may therefore, under given
circumstances, interchange. Both will in certain pathological states degener-
ate into cruelty.10 Hence ecstasy itself is a highly questionable condition. It is,
for Krafft-Ebing, a condition in which consciousness is so preoccupied with
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feelings of mental pleasure, that distress is stripped of its painful quality.11

Somewhat simplistically, he diagnoses Saint Teresa as sinking into an hysterical
faint. For him, hysteria is a question of sexual excess: In the hysteric the sexual
sphere is abnormally excited, and very frequently [hysteria] disposes girls, and
even women living in happy marriage, to become nymphomaniacs.12 We might
therefore conclude that for Krafft-Ebing, Saint Teresa herself was succumbing
to some sexual excitation. As Cristina Mazzoni comments:
This is the pitfall most often encountered by the mystics as well as

by women, Krafft-Ebing seems to imply, for just as religious fervor
frequently degenerates into sensuality (witness the lives of saints
and the orgies of the ancients), so the disappointed or unappeased sex-
ual instinct often finds a substitute in religion. It is possible, then,
and even likely that religious pathology springs from some sexual
pathology because religion as well as sexual love is mystical and
transcendental.13
B ATA I L L E A N D E R O T I C I S M
Georges Bataille was also intrigued by this connection between mysticism and
the erotic. He was a cultural commentator who delighted in excess, a critic who
both wrote and theorized on the subject of obscenity and eroticism. Alongside
his own often highly erotic fictional work, The Story of the Eye, he wrote a theo-
retical text, Eroticism.14 In Eroticism, Bataille picks up on the way in which the
religious always threatens to fold into the erotic, comparing and contrasting
these two overlapping moments. He is not interested in simplistic equations
which collapse the two into the same category, reducing the religious to the
erotic and treating rapture as little more than a form of sexual orgasm. The con-
trast between divine and carnal love, he notes, is a very marked one. . . . We
must avoid two reefs: we must not try to diminish the experiences of the mystics
for the sake of comparison, as psychiatrists have done albeit unintentionally.
Neither must we spiritualise the domain of sexuality to exalt it to the level of
ethereal experiences.15 Moreover, the key difference, for Bataille, is that the
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mystical experience leaves the individual in a state of exaltation, whereas the

sexual experience leaves that person in a state of disgust: Mystical and erotic
experience differ in that the former is totally successful. Erotic licentiousness
results in depression, disgust, and the inability to continue. . . . In contrast, a
promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook.16
Nonetheless, he admits that there are staggering similarities and even corre-
sponding or interchangeable characteristics in the two sytems. Marie Bona-
parte, he notes, compares religious rapture directly with the sexual act, citing
the example of a nun who had experienced such raptures, only to discover in
later life, when she left the convent and married, that these raptures had been
in fact a form of sexual orgasm. Saint Bonaventure, he also notes, likewise ob-
serves that mystics are not infrequently sullied with the flow of carnal flux
during their ecstasies.17
Eroticism was published in 1957, a few years before Batailles own death, and it
is perhaps no coincidence that a key theme in this text is that of death and its
relationship to life in the context of the erotic. For it is not simply that on occa-
sions the propagation of life may lead literally to death, as in the case of a mother
dying during childbirth. Rather, the two become intertwined within the erotic
moment. Eroticism, Bataille observes, is assenting to life up to the point of
death.18 It is this theme that he pursues through the figure of Saint Teresa, who
had herself acknowledged the sense of death that accompanied the vital experi-
ence of her raptures. For Bataille, it is as though the desire to live life to the
limits of the possible and the impossible with ever-increasing intensity brings
with it the desire for death, but it is a desire for death that amountsseemingly
paradoxicallyto a transcendence of death:
It is the desire to live while ceasing to live, or to die without ceasing

to live, the desire of an extreme state that St Teresa has perhaps been
the only one to depict strongly enough in words. I die because I can-
not die. But the death of not dying is precisely not death; it is the
ultimate stage of life; if I die because I cannot die it is on condition
that I live on; because of the death I feel though still alive, and still
live on. St Teresas being reeled but did not actually die of her desire
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actually to experience the sensation. She lost her footing, but all she
did was to live more violently, so violently that she could say that she
was on the threshold of dying, but such a death as tried her to the
utmost though it did not make her cease to live. 19
The ecstatic state of the religious mystic is one in which all differences are
effaced, and all distances overcome. The ecstatic subject is lost in a sea of oceanic
bliss: There is no longer any difference between one thing and another in any
respect; no distances can be located; the subject is lost in the indistinct and illim-
itable presence of the universe and himself ceases to belong to the passing of
time. He is absorbed in the everlasting instant, irrevocably as it seems, with no
roots in the past or hopes in the future, and the instant itself is eternity.20
Here there are clear links with Batailles theory of sacrifice. The death of
the erotic moment is akin to the death of the sacrificial moment. Eroticism
leads to a dissolution of the boundaries of the self, but so too a fusion of the self
with the other, which overcomes the self-contained character of our normal
existence. Eroticism, then, like sacrifice, leads to a transcendence of the self, and
an opening up to the fundamental continuity of existence:
Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in

it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy
sea. In sacrifice, . . . a violent death disrupts the creatures discon-
tinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the suc-
ceeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the
victim is now one. 21
Above all, it is important to recognize that, in Batailles terms, sacrificelike

loveleads not to discord, but to a form of harmony: It is the common business
of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life,
life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown.
Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way
into the infinite.22
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While Bataille does not make any explicit reference to aesthetic experience
in general, he draws a connection between poetry, death, and eroticism, and
articulates clearly the fusion that poetry itself may offer: Poetry leads to the
same place as all forms of eroticismto the blending and fusion of separate
objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to conti-
nuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.23
Thus, for Bataille, the erotic and the mystical come together to some extent
in the ecstatic moment, and they do so within the symbolic framework of life
and death.
LACAN AND THE JOUISSANCE OF SAINT TERESA
Jacques Lacan is also fascinated by Berninis sculpture The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, and
uses it to illustrate the front cover of one of his publications.24 Like Bataille, he
too observes the parallels between eroticism and religious mysticism to which
the sculpture seems to allude. Certainly, for Lacan, Saint Teresas experiences
as conveyed by Berninis sculpture are deeply erotic ones: Its like for Saint
Teresayou need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately
understand that shes coming. Theres no doubt about it.25 There is, admittedly,
a certain reductive and patronizing tone to Lacans somewhat flippant com-
ments about Saint Teresa. Mazzoni is surely right to criticize him for regressing
to the positivistic attitude of Charcot and of his school at the Salptrire, where
doctors, wrapped up in their visual contemplation and compulsive photograph-
ing, did not bother to listen to the hysterics and the mystics words.26 Lacans
key contribution, however, is to locate the whole question of ecstasy within the
broader context of jouissance.
The term jouissance has been used in English literature since the sixteenth
century. It might literally be translated as pleasure, referring, for example, to
the pleasure of the text. In French, jouissance maintains a certain erotic
purchase that has been lost in English appropriations of the term. It has overt
sexual connotations, referring to the pleasure of the sexual act itself.27 If post-
structuralist writers from Derrida to Cixous constantly evoke the term, it is in
this extended sense of the erotic pleasure to be derived from reading the text.
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In Lacans work, the term jouissance exceeds the simple sense of pleasure.
It is at the point when we go beyond the pleasure principle, when the sheer
overload of pleasure constitutes a form of pain, that we experience jouissance,
which can therefore be understood as a form of painful pleasure. As Dylan
Evans puts it: The term jouissance thus nicely expresses the paradoxical satisfac-
tion that the subject derives from his symptom, or, to put it another way, the suf-
fering that he derives from his own satisfaction.28
The problem with jouissance, for Lacan, is not that we have too little of it, but
rather that we have too much. Jouissance comes to be perceived as unbearable suf-
fering, although at an unconscious level it is experienced as a form of pleasure.
This might explain why some individuals continue to make the same mistakes
that cause them pain and grief. The point is that they enjoy the consequences of
their mistakes. In jouissance we might therefore glimpse the presence of the sub-
lime. For it is the moment of jouissance that reveals a trace of the intensity of the
real, whichin Lacanian termsis forever inaccessible. The real cannot be
symbolized. It remains a foreclosed element that may be approached, but never
grasped. Thus jouissance itself comes to stand for what is hidden. As Borch-
Jacobsen observes: Jouissance, which is nothingnothing that could ever be
presentedis nonetheless thought of as what is hidden, veiled, disguised by
the image that represents it.29 And when we encounter an object that bears wit-
ness to the real, like the terrifying angels of Rainer Maria Rilkes second
Duino Elegy, it is always a traumatic event. Hence the bittersweet ecstasies of
Saint Teresa offer a perfect example of jouissance at work. Above all, it is impor-
tant to recognize that, for Lacan, the urge to break through the pleasure prin-
ciple and seek this bittersweet moment of jouissance is an urge to realize the
death drive. Thus, as Evans puts it, Jouissance is the path towards death. In so
far as the drives are an attempt to break through the pleasure principle in search
of jouissance, every drive is a death drive.30
AESTHETICS-RELIGION-LOVE
What begins to emerge is a sense in which the realm of the erotic shares similar
characteristics with the state of religious ecstasy, as observed by Bataille, on the
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one hand, and the jouissance of the text observed by Lacan, on the other. If we
include architecture and other objects of aesthetic contemplation within the
latter category of the text, we might begin to recognize that the mechanisms
at play with aesthetic contemplation replicateto some extentthose within
the experience of both an erotic and a religious encounter. Hence we might
explore the fundamental nature of the moment of aesthetic contemplation by
comparison with the moments of religious and erotic experiences.
There are clear parallels between all three moments. Religious ceremonies,
especially within Christianity, often depend upon the aestheticthe singing
of the choir, the smell of incense, the visual display of religious garments,
paintings, statues, and architecture. Art, moreover, is for Freud a form of subli-
mated eroticism, while Adorno compares the aesthetic to a mode of loving, and
Kristeva makes connections between all threethe religious, the aesthetic, and
the erotic.
Throughout there is a sense in which the engagement with the other
amounts to a forging of a relationship with the other. This relationship is, of
course, a symbolic one. It is as though the basic mechanism that underpins
religious identification with the otherthe mythic leap of faithcan be found
in all identifications with the other. This might be extended to include the
identification implicit in love, and also aesthetic identification.
According to psychoanalytic theory, in the case of love there is no actual link
between the self and the other. Il ny a pas de rapport sexuelThere can be no
sexual relationshipas Lacan has observed. Love therefore becomes a mirage
that fills out the void of the impossibility of a relationship between the two
sexes.31 Although love appears decidedly real to those involved, it is important to
recognize that within Lacanian theory, what we take for the real is not the real
itself, but an appearance. Fantasy plays an important role in how we see the
world, and everything that we perceive is filtered through our imagination. As
Zizek comments: Far from being a kind of fragment of our dreams that
prevents us from seeing reality as it effectively is, fantasy is constitutive of
what we call reality: the most common bodily reality is constituted via a detour
through the maze of imagination.32 This is not to reduce love merely to some
realm of fantasy. While love depends upon the existence of an image, true love,
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as Renata Salecl observes, always aims at the kernel of the Lacanian real, that
raw element whose trace appears in jouissance.33
This same principle would hold true for religious devotion, where faith fills
that gap between the self and the otherbetween the worshiper and God. For
faith here is equally a mythic construct. There is nothing to authorize the sup-
posed communication between the worshiper and the divine except belief
itself. The worshiper simply believes that he or she is in communication with
God. Faith, like love, takes the form of a mirage, and while, like love, it is not
real, it appears as such to the worshiper.
Again, the same principle would hold true for an aesthetic engagement with
anything, such as architecture, where a symbolic attachment comes into play.
Here we must speak not of physical engagementsthe actual presence of an
individual in an environmentbut of the symbolic engagement which serves to
personalize that environment, and give it meaning. Attachments, in this sense,
are no more than symbolic attachments, susceptible to shifts and erasures, as the
full fluid dynamics of unconscious identification comes into play. The environ-
ment, thenthe world around usshould be understood as fundamentally
other. We may forge emotional links with that environmentthat is, identify,
with itbut this identification can be understood only as a symbolic identifica-
tion that shares the essential characteristics of love and religious devotion.
It is within this framework that concepts such as home can be understood.
The very fluidity and transferability of the concept of home, which may shift
from one place to another, reveal it as a term of merely symbolic identification
an identification, that is, forged over a period of time. The process of making
ourselves at home in a new space is akin to the process of shifting our allegiance
from one lover to another. It is a question of forging a relationship with that
space. We must acknowledge, of course, the complexity of the operation, for
attachment to place does not depend simply on aesthetic questions, just as
attachment to a loved one does not depend solely on beauty. Yet parallels per-
sist. Likewise, although most people do not change their religion as they do
their homes, the very process of developing a religious belief, and allowing it to
wane, belongs in the same category. We can therefore see that religious affilia-
tion, emotional bonding, and aesthetic appreciation share the same inherent
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structure. All these forms of identification must be based on some belief system
which claims a link between the self and the other.
At the same time, a degree of caution must be introduced here. For just as
there are different modalities of love so, there are different modalities of aes-
thetic engagement and religious devotion. Here it might be useful to return to
Kristeva, who famously differentiates various forms of lovenotably Agape
from Eros. Kristeva is anxious to distinguish love from theological concerns.
Her argument goes back to the question of the thetic divide, and the problem
as she sees itof boundary failure. There is a potential crisis of nondifferenti-
ation, which points also to the potential dangers of mimetic absorption into the
other, when the thetic divide is not maintained. Art breaches the thetic divide.
It pulverizes the thetic through the negativity of its transgression, but in the
end, for Kristeva, it does not relinquish that divide.
It is this maintaining of the thetic break that, for Kristeva, distinguishes
religious sacrifice from art:
We thus find sacrifice and art, face to face, representing the two as-
pects of the thetic function: the prohibition of jouissance by language
and the introduction of jouissance into and through language. . . . On
the other hand, poetry, music, dance, theaterartpoint at once
to a pole opposite that of religious prohibition. . . . Far from denying
the thetic, which through the ages religion has assigned itself the priv-
ilege of celebratingthough only as a prohibition art accepts the
thetic break to the extent that it resists becoming either delirium or a
fusion with nature. 34
The problem with sacrifice, then, is that it manifests the tendency in religion to
destroy the thetic divide, and collapse the selfuncriticallyinto the other.
Can we therefore assert that love and theological devotion do not overlap,
and that one maintains the thetic divide, while one annihilates it? The answer,
perhaps, is contained in Kristevas own work. For, significantly, the modality of
love that she celebratesAgapeis itself a religious term. Agape points to an
open, selfless love, or communion, that underpins a form of belief that is
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not fixed within some rigid structure of dogma. For dogma must be seen as the
negative side of religion that implies an uncritical absorption into the other.
It is here that we should turn once more to mimesis and poetic language in
that, according to Kristeva, they resist the dogmatization of the sacred:
Mimesis and poetic language do more than engage in an intra-

ideological debate; they question the very principle of the ideological
because they unfold the unicity of the thetic (the precondition for
meaning and signification) and prevent its theologization. As the
place of production for a subject who transgresses the thetic by using
it as a necessary boundarybut not as an absolute or as an origin
poetic language and the mimesis from which it is inseparable, are pro-
foundly a-theological. They are not critics of theology but rather the
enemy within and without, recognizing both its necessity and its pre-
tensions. In other words, poetic language and mimesis may appear as
an argument complicitous with dogmawe are familiar with reli-
gions use of thembut they may also set in motion what dogma
represses. In so doing, they no longer act as instinctual floodgates
within the enclosure of the sacred, and become instead protestors
against its posturing. 35
In other words, while mimesis and poetic language operate from within the
same space as religionthey are the enemies from both within and with-
outthey do not partake of a dogmatic, ideological position. Instead, they
both recognize and challenge the limitations of dogma, attempting to release
what dogma represses. Yet it is not as though mimesis and poetic language do not
align themselves with the sacred. Rather, they serve to counter the theologiza-
tion of the sacred. If, then, we are looking for their equivalent within the realm
of the sacred, we should turn to Agape, as the expression of the sacred which
resists the posturing and pretension of theology.
Agape is a form of devotion which preserves the thetic divide, and is consti-
tuted by a form of abjection. It is an idealized notion of devotion that operates
within an open system. Agape is therefore quite distinct fromand, indeed,
236 CAMOUFLAGE
MIT Leach_13 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 237
antagonistic towardreligious dogma. In this sense, provided we accept reli-

gion as Agape, the overlapping of the religious and love is perhaps less prob-
lematic than might first appear. Indeed, we might even go so far as to follow
Simone de Beauvoir, who distinguishes between masculine and feminine
love, ascribing to the former a more theological quality. As Mazzoni comments:
It is not that divine love is a rarefied, sublimated version of sexual love; rather,
sexual love has for woman the quasi-religious character of a love for (divine) tran-
scendence; for common, earthly lover is thus granted, by the sole virtue of his
masculinity, the attributes of (a) g/God.36
By extension, Agape also has strong affinities with poetic expression as em-
bodied in the principle of mimesis. Both are concerned with opening up to the
other, yet both preserve the thetic divide. But this might also lead us to rethink
the question of ecstasy. For if ecstasy were to be aligned to a notion of love and
devotion as Agape, it would not be a complete surrender of the self to the other,
nor a complete dissolution of boundaries. Rather, it would subscribe to the dis-
ruptive potential of poetic expression, which breaches and reconfigures the
thetic, but ultimately respects it. Ecstasy, then, would amount to a yielding,
an assimilation, a close approximation between the self and the divine. It
would offer a conditional surrender but never a total surrender, a blurring and
reworking of boundaries but never a complete dissolution of boundaries.
237 ECSTASY
MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 238
A C
C O N C L U S I O N :
T H E O R Y O F C A M O U F L A G E
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MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 240
What are we to understand by the term camouflage?

Let us start by clarifying that the term is being used here not within the nar-
row, conventional sense of military camouflage, but within the broader sense of
representation and self-representation that is always-already at work within cul-
ture. Military camouflage is but a subset of a larger category of camouflage.
Indeed, the growing use of camouflage combat clothing within the fashion
industry reveals not only that camouflage can be a kind of clothing, but also that
clothing can itself be a kind of camouflage. In this respect, the flamboyant for-
mal outfits which make soldiers stand out on military parades are as much an
example of camouflage as the outfits worn during military combat which serve
to conceal them on the battlefield.
Camouflage is a form of masquerade, a mode of representation. But cam-
ouflage is not restricted to self-representation in terms of clothing, make-up,
hairstyle, and so on. Rather, camouflage operates through the medium of rep-
resentation itselfthrough art, dance, music, poetry, architecture, and so on.
Camouflage does not entail the cloaking of the self so much as the relating of the
self to the world through the medium of representation. Aesthetic expressions
of all kinds, from high art to popular music, from jewelry to urban planning,
operate as a form of mediation between the self and the world.
Camouflage, then, is understood here as a mechanism for inscribing an indi-
vidual within a given cultural setting. This need not be a literal state of visual
equivalence with that settingmimicrysuch that the definition of the self
is lost against the background of the other, or a building is masked against its
surroundings. The role of camouflage is not to disguise, but to offer a medium
through which to relate to the other. Camouflage constitutes a mode of symbol-
ization. It operates as a form of connectivity.
Military camouflage, then, offers us a very limited understanding of the pos-
sibilities of camouflage. Nonetheless, the specific connotations of military cam-
ouflage are helpful in illustrating two important attributes of camouflage: its
emphasis on the domain of the visual, and its strategic nature.
240 CAMOUFLAGE
MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 241
V I S U A L O P E R AT I O N S
Camouflage is not restricted to the visual domain. It can be enacted within the
domains of the other senses, especially smell and hearing. Perfume is precisely
part of the masquerade of self-representation that defines the operations of
camouflage. So too is music, which is often used to provide an ambient setting.
Indeed, it is precisely the example of walking into a space and hearing music
which makes us feel connected that illustrates the true potential of camou-
flage. Yet camouflage is primarily visual, at least within the realm of human
behavior. The chameleon, a creature that has little sense of smell or hearing but
a highly developed sense of vision, is perhaps the ultimate creature of visual cam-
ouflage. But human beings are also creatures that tend to privilege vision, and
visual camouflage plays a key role in their behavior. Many animals, by compari-
son, have a more sophisticated sense of smell or hearing. A dog, for example, may
sense smells and sounds well beyond the range detectable by human beings.
Camouflage can be taken as a term to encapsulate various visual strategies
that have been developed in recent years in response to an image-driven culture.
These strategies have evolved as a knowing manipulation of the use of images,
whose early antecedents include the work of the photographer Cindy Sherman,
but whose more recent articulations can be found throughout popular culture,
and especially in the realm of design.
Strategies of camouflage have always existed in one form or another in human
operations, but they have become dominant within our contemporary image-
based society. They amount to a mode of engaging creatively with the conditions
of postmodernity. The temporal specificity of this mode of operating is impor-
tant. Human beings are to be recognized here as mutant creatures who are con-
stantly evolving, and forever devising new strategies for dealing with their
ever-changing material conditions.
Camouflage has therefore come to express an effective response to contem-
porary conditions, but also one that has begun to define those conditions. Far
from being a distraction from the actual business of living, the domain of cam-
ouflage now delineates the horizon of much of contemporary existence. In this
way the concept of camouflage operates as a form of corrective to critiques of
241 CONCLUSION: A THEORY OF CAMOUFLAGE

MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 242
postmodernity which adopt a predominantly negative view toward our highly

visual culture.
First, according to the principle of camouflage, it is recognized that human
beings are no longer overwhelmed by the onslaught of various forms of repre-
sentation in contemporary life, but see the realm of representation as a domain
of self-empowerment. Camouflage should not be read here in negative terms as
a loss or concealment of some originary ideal state but, rather, in positive terms
as a mode of self-expression. In this respect the concept of camouflage is aligned
closely with psychoanalytic perspectives that recognize the important role of
representation in the constitution of identity.
The concept of camouflage therefore exposes fundamental problems in
ontological arguments by critics of postmodernity who posit that reality is
somehow lost beneath the play of surface imagery within contemporary cul-
ture. It is not, as Guy Debord maintains, that in the society of the spectacle our
true identities are somehow concealed in a culture where everything is medi-
ated through images and commodities.1 Rather, in a culture of branding, iden-
tities are themselves forged through that domain. Nor is it, as Jean Baudrillard
claims, that reality itself has been so obscured by the ecstasy of communica-
tion of our culture of hyperreality that it has, in effect, been stolen.2 Rather,
if we follow psychoanalytic thinking, what we take for the real is in fact the
imaginary. It is precisely through the imaginary realm of representation that
so-called reality is acted out.
Secondly, camouflage reveals how the totalizing treatment of visual imagery
within much of postmodern discourse is itself a reductive one. Within the work
of many critics of our image-based society, there seems to be a somewhat homo-
geneous understanding of images. No accommodation is made for differentia-
tion through design or composition. Yet an image may or may not be effective at
establishing some form of connectivity, and much depends on the nature of that
particular image. Camouflage can be read as a productive exchange, which is
entirely dependent on the efficacy of its aesthetic expression.
Camouflage here refers to an engagement with the world. It may operate in
three dimensions, and is not limited to the two-dimensional realm of the image.
It may even be immaterial, as in the case of music. But there is always a visceral
242 CAMOUFLAGE
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engagement, even though that engagement might be perceived ideationally.

Indeed, it is the very corporeality of aesthetic engagement that points toward
the bond that might be established between individual and the world.
Nor need camouflage depend upon material conditions. The operations of
camouflage may equally be enacted through creative processesthinking, writ-
ing, designingthat also serve to inscribe the individual in the world no less that
the products of those creative processestexts, designs, and so on. Camouflage
is therefore a condition of connectivity established either by creative activities
or by the results of those activities.
Camouflage operates through a process of assimilation based on representa-
tion. Here representation can be read in terms of the model, and camouflage
amounts either to a modeling of the self on the other, or to assimilating to the
other through the medium of the model. We may never fully become the other,
but through the process of modeling we may approximate ourselves to the other.
Here we might cite the work of thinkers, such as Fredric Jameson, who see the
realm of representation as a mechanism for reinserting the individual within
society, and do not take such a negative stance toward that realm as other com-
mentators. Jameson himself has explored the potential of cognitive mapping as
a means of overcoming the lack of spatial coordinates within a society of late
capitalism.3 He recognizes the potential of the aesthetic domain to provide such
mapping. What we need today, Jameson seems to be saying, is a viable form of
aesthetic expression that reinserts the individual into society. The aesthetic
domain can therefore be seen to be somewhat Janus-faced. It is the source of
many of our problems, in a culture in which everything is coopted into images
and commodities, and also potentially the way out. It offers a mechanism of
locating the self within the otherwise homogenizing placelessness of contempo-
rary existence.
The question remains as to what forms of aesthetic expression these opera-
tions might take. It is clear that any such expression is governed by the condi-
tions of the age. This is not a question of signification, as though aesthetic works
contain hidden meanings which need to be decoded, for the aesthetic realm is,
of its very nature, prelinguistic. Rather, this engagement is produced through
a dynamic interaction with the work. Yet this interaction is dependent on

MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 244
contexton time and placeand may easily lose its relevance. Thus we find
that various cultural works which were once highly meaningful now appear
redundant. The example of outmoded art, which no longer holds any popular
resonance, serves to illustrate how art does not escape fashionin its broadest
sensebut is circumscribed by the very logic of fashion. Fashion determines
which aesthetic expressions are relevant to a particular cultural context.
Aesthetic production should maintain the capacity to operate as a mediation
between the self and the world, but only aesthetic production whose design has
been carefully controlled can achieve this. This highlights the role of design in
facilitating this mediation through a process of sensuous correspondence. In
this respect we can recognize the important social role of design in providing a
form of cognitive mapping. Design becomes a crucial consideration for the
effective operation of camouflage.
S T R AT E G I C O P E R AT I O N S
Traditionally, camouflage has been taken to refer to a strategy of concealment

against a given background. It is important to recognize, however, that, within
the more comprehensive understanding of the term, camouflage refers to both
revealing and concealing. The chameleon, after all, uses its changes in coloration
both to blend into an environment on some occasions, and to stand out on oth-
ers. These changes are dependent on the mood of the chameleon. We human
beings replicate this behavior. At various moments we may wish either to blend
in or to stand out from the crowd. Camouflage therefore acts as a device for us
to define the self against a given cultural setting through the medium of repre-
sentationeither by becoming part of that setting, or by distinguishing our-
selves from it.
Camouflage always involves a process of becoming other and seeing the self
in the other. This urge to become other is a deeply strategic one. It involves a
broadening of horizons and an opening up to the world. It amounts to an over-
coming of a condition of melancholic introspection that might otherwise isolate
an individual. It establishes connections. It serves to counter the horror vacui of
244 CAMOUFLAGE
MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 245
a depersonalized, atomized self in a society of increasing alienation. Camouflage

may therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of
traditional structures of belonging has begun to break down. This aesthetic
sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of attachment, such as reli-
gious devotion or romantic engagement.
Yet the opposite tendency, the urge to distinguish the self from the other and
overcome the horror of the undifferentiated self, can itself be a product of an
overinvested engagement with the other. Both the horror vacui of the alienated
self and the horror of the undifferentiated self are potentially nihilistic condi-
tions. Failure to engage with the world may lead to self-absorption, while an
overinvested engagement may lead to an uncritical absorption into the other. In
this respect, camouflage operates between two extreme states of melancholic
withdrawal into the self and a potentially fascistic loss of self in the other.
The logic of camouflage is a performative one. It is a process-based inter-
action with the world. Even if it operates merely through the gaze, the gaze it-
self must be recognized as performative. Meanwhile, repetitive and ritualistic
actions and spatial practices can be seen as alternative mechanisms for reinforc-
ing its effects. Repetition operates as a mechanism of familiarization that serves
to overcome alienation.
The condition of camouflage is not a static one. It resides neither in the state
of being connected, nor in the state of being distinct. Rather, it involves a con-
tinual shuttling between these two conditions, a keeping alive of the very possi-
bility of change. Camouflage should be viewed as an interactive process of
becomingof becoming one with the world, and of becoming distinct from that
worldwhere both states are locked into a mechanism of reciprocal presuppo-
sition. It is only by becoming other that a sense of distinction can be envisioned,
while it is only by becoming distinct that a sense of connection can be postu-
lated. The two tendencies operate as a form of gestalt formation, and are inter-
dependent. Camouflage is ultimately a question of foreground and background.
It is a matter of defining the self against a given cultural horizon.
Even if we accept the term camouflage within the limited traditional frame-
work of concealment, we should not see its purpose as being that of simply

MIT Leach_14 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 246
blending in and losing the self within a particular setting. For ultimately, cam-
ouflage is not about the loss of self so much as the protection of the self.
Camouflage is a defensive strategy, a survival mechanism. The logic of camou-
flage is precisely to lose the selftemporarilyin order eventually to preserve
a sense of individuality.4
Camouflage in this sense involves a form of surrendera becoming one
with the otherand a subsequent overcominga differentiation of the self
from the other. It involves a form of dyingof taking a step backwardand a
subsequent form of livinga reinforcement of our lan vital, and a consolida-
tion of our sense of self. It is precisely through a tactic of feigned death that life
is secured. The principle behind this strategy is that of the sacrifice, whereby
life folds into death, and vice versa. Maggots thrive off the dead, while all vital
energies are premised on their own extinction, like fireworks fading in the night
sky. Just as life is born of death, so death is the end-product of life. The desire for
life or death is ultimately grounded in its opposite.
Camouflage therefore operates within a double moment from a temporal per-
spective. It involves a primary operation which appears wasteful and nihilistic,
but ultimately prepares the ground for a secondary operation that is productive
and beneficial. In economic terms it is a form of investmentan initial loss
offset against an long-term gain.
Camouflage also operates at different levels, a manifest level and a latent
level. It involves a play between the two, where the manifest level becomes a
decoy for the latent level. Like a wolf in sheeps clothing, the latent level may
be disguised by the manifest level. The latent level may, of course, never be
revealedjust as a spy may never be detectedbut it remains the primary
horizon of operations.
Camouflage is therefore a form of masquerade, yet the structure of its opera-
tions appears more complex when we grasp the subtleties of the masquerade. For
the simple perception of a decoy manifest level concealing a true latent level is
disrupted once we accept the ways in which the manifest level might influence
the latent level. The masquerade itself may come to be constitutive of an iden-
tity. In other words, far from merely concealing a true identity, a decoy identity
might begin to influence that identity. Representations of the self, and the con-
246 CAMOUFLAGE
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sequent responses to those representations, will have some bearing on the

nature of the self. For if we accept that identity is constituted to some extent by
a form of specularityreflection of the self in the otherinteraction with the
world will influence possible modes of behavior.
It is perhaps by turning to the figure of the actor that we might illustrate the
complexities of this operation. The actor, whether or not she or he adopts a
physical disguise, subscribes to the logic of camouflage. Yet it is not as though
there is some originary self concealed beneath the assumed self. What has been
concealed is itself an amalgam of previous assumed selves, which have left their
mark on the subsequent self as positions that have been either rejected or
embraced. The actor will always be conditioned to some extent by the roles that
she or he has played. Once, however, it is acknowledged that we are all actors in
a manner of speaking, in that, according to the logic of performativity, we are
constantly performing, and identity itself is a performative construct, we can
see that this principle is all-pervasive.
Camouflage can therefore be read as an interface with the world. It operates
as a masquerade that re-presents the self, just as self-representation through
make-up, dress, hairstyle, and so on, is a form of self-re-presentation. But this
need not be a temporary condition. The surface masquerade may have a lasting
impact on questions of identity. Far from denying any true sense of self beneath,
it may actually contribute to a sense of self. Camouflage should therefore be
seen as a mechanism for constituting human identity through the medium of
representation.
The concept of camouflage should allow us to move beyond the often sim-
plistic denigration of the aesthetic realm within recent critiques of postmodern
culture, and to grasp the complexities involved in our negotiation with the world
afforded through that realm. Above all, it should allow us to recognize the
important strategic significance of the role of representation in contempo-
rary culture.

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MIT Leach_notes 1/25/06 9:25 AM Page 249
N O T E S
PREFACE
1 Neil Leach, The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
2 These would include Karsten Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997); David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994); Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004);
Alberto Prez-Gmez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983);
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).
3 Obvious exceptions to this would include Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1992).
INTRODUCTION
1 Woody Allen, Three Films of Woody Allen (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 115.
2 Ibid., p. 67.
3 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner
(Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 96, as cited in Martin Jay, Mimesis and Mimetology, in Thomas Huhn
and Lambert Zuidervart, (eds.) The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 41.
4 Allen, Three Films of Woody Allen, p. 97.
5 Leon Whitey Thompson, Alcatraz Cellhouse, audio tour produced by the Golden Gate National Park
Association.
6 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London: Rout-
ledge, 1997), pp. 8697.
7 This principle applies also to aesthetic questions. What once seemed ugly may eventually appear accept-
able. It is not so much that an object can lose its ugliness. Rather, it becomes less noticeable, and therefore
less offensive. Indeed, with time, an ugly object may be viewed with some affection. But equally, beauty and
attractiveness may take time to reveal themselves. This is what is evoked when reference is made to a tune
catching on, or an item of clothing becoming fashionable. It is precisely the use of the present parti-
ciplecatching and becomingthat highlights the often gradual nature of aesthetic recognition.
8 Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow, On Weathering (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1993).
9 Gianni Vattimo, Ornament/Monument, in Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, p. 159.
249 NOTES TO PAGES 000000

10 The Eiffel Tower famously caused outrage when it was first built, although it has since been appropriated
as a much-loved universal symbol of Paris. Roland Barthes tells the story of Guy de Maupassant, who used
to take his lunch in the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower on the basis that it was the one place in Paris from
which he could not see the Eiffel Tower. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, in Leach (ed.), Rethinking
Architecture, p. 159.
MIMESIS
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 216.
2 Ibid., p. 221.
3 Ibid., pp. 220221.
4 Ibid., p. 221.
5 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), p. 332.
6 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), p. 217.
7 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), p. 154.
8 Benjamin developed this theory in two short writings, Doctrine of the Similar and On the Mimetic
Faculty, the latter being a condensed reworking of the former. Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, in
Reflections, pp. 333336.
9 Benjamins understanding of mimesis is also dissimilar to that of other thinkers, like Ren Girard, who seem
to see it as an unreflexive form of replication that merely echoes the given, and thereby instantiates some
hegemonic norm.
10 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (London: Rout-
ledge, 1960), p. 193. For further reading on mimesis, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard Trask
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London: Routledge,
1993; Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
11 Freud, Jokes, pp. 191192.
12 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), in James Strachey (ed.), The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter SE ) (London: Hogarth Press, 1953
73), vol. 18, p. 110, as quoted in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 252.
13 See Jacques Derridas critique of hermeneutics in Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing, in The Truth in
Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 255 ff.
Likewise mimesis can be seen to share the same epistemological fragility of hermeneutics, in that its only
source of validation is that of the interpreting agent. The understanding of mimesis as a form of creative
appropriation echoes the theme of Narcissus trying to reach out and appropriate his own image.
14 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, p. 335.

15 Benjamin, as quoted in Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. xi.

16 Benjamin, as quoted in Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Aesthetic Theorys Mimesis of Walter Benjamin, in
Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1997), p. 60.
17 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), SE, 4, 150, as quoted in Jean Laplanche and Jean-
Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac,
1988), p. 206.
18 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt, ed. G. Adorno and R. Tiedermann (London:
Routledge, 1984), p. 162, as quoted in Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos
Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 146
19 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 81.
20 Ibid., p. 141.
21 Benjamin, On the Mimetic Faculty, in Reflections, p. 336.
22 Benjamin, Reflections, p. 273, as quoted in Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, p. 336.
23 Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso,
1979), p. 74.
24 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1980), IV: 1, 262263, quoted in
Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, pp. 277278.
25 Benjamin, Reflections, p. 333.
26 Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood, in Reflection, p. 417, as quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, p. 143.
27 For a discussion of the death instinct, see pp. XXX.
28 Miriam Hansen, Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer, Critical Enquiry
39 (1993): 53, reprinted in Max Pensky (ed.), The Actuality of Adorno (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 90.
29 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Le sujet de la philosophie (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1979), p. 206, as quoted in
Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 256.
30 Hansen, Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing, p. 91.
31 Ibid.
32 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (London:
Verso, 1979), p. 180.
33 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 184 as quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, p. 155.
34 Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, p. 278.
35 Benjamin, A Berlin Chronicle, in Reflections, p. 333.
36 Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 74, quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1991), p. 263.
37 Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 11.
38 Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Vintage, 1995),
p. 437.

39 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, translated from the German under the
general editorship of James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1984), p. 39. For an analysis of daydreams, see
Rachel Bowlby, The Other Day: The Interpretation of Daydreams, New Formations 34, Summer 1998.
40 Benjamin, One-Way Street, p. 328.
41 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 232.
42 Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kinderheit um Neunzehnhundert, in Gesammelte Schriften, IV: 1, pp. 262263,
quoted in Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, p. 277.
43 Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 89.
44 It is important to recognize here that the doll can come to operate not as a model of a human being but
as a vicarious object of identification with a human being. For the child can imagine itself through the doll
in the role of that human being. Thus the doll offers a mechanism of identification not with the world
of toys, but with the potential world of adults. Playing with a doll, in other words, amounts to a form of
role-playing. By extension, the dolls house can come to figure within the imaginary as the environment
of that human being. Its role is ultimately not as dolls house so much as a potential manifestation of the
real house.
SENSUOUS CORRESPONDENCE
1 Lambert Zuidervaart, Introduction, in Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of
Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 12.
Routledge, 1984), p. 79, as quoted in Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos
Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 146. Throughout, Nicholsen makes her own emendations
to the translation of Adornos works.
3 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), p. 184.
4 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Routledge edition), p. 164, as quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination,
pp. 163164.
5 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Routledge edition), p. 116, as quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, p. 162.
6 Miriam Hansen, Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer, Critical Enquiry 39
(1993): 53, reprinted in Max Pensky (ed.), The Actuality of Adorno (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), p. 90.
7 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Routledge edition), p. 105, as quoted in Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, p. 162.
8 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Routledge edition), p. 164, as quoted in Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Aesthetic
Theorys Mimesis of Walter Benjamin, in Huhn and Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of Subjectivity, p. 62.
9 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1995), p. 292.
10 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Routledge edition), p. 54.
11 Martin Jay, Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, in Huhn and Zuidervaart (eds.),
The Semblance of Subjectivity, p. 32.

12 On the concept of transubstantiation in Kristeva, see pp. XXX.

13 Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis, pp. 286287.
16 Ibid., p. 287.
17 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Athlone edition), p. 176, as quoted in Matt Connell, Body, Mimesis and Child-
hood in Adorno, Kafka and Freud, Body and Society 4, no. 4 (December 1998): 72.
18 Even with Freuds use of mimesis there always lurks the figure of the child. For it is in the jokes of adult life
that we might recognize an urge to return to the bliss of childhood. As Freud observes in his comments on
ideational mimesis, the aim of jokes is to compensate for what has been lost with maturity. Children, Freud
notes, do not need jokes:
The euphoria which we endeavour to reach by these means is nothing other than the
mood of a period of life in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work
in general with a small expenditure of energythe mood of our childhood, when we
were ignorant of the comic, when we were incapable of jokes and when we has no need
of humour to make us feel happy in our life. (Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation
to the Unconscious, (1905), SE 18, p. 236, as quoted in Connell, Body, Mimesis and
Childhood, p. 82.
Verso, 1986), pp. 181182, as quoted in Connell, Body, Mimesis and Childhood, p. 69. This whole chap-
ter has benefited considerably from the advice and help of Matt Connell.
21 As Harry Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou comment:
Sensations, however, compose only the first and lower stage in the perceptual process.
They become enhanced and deepened by the mind, which creates ideas or images of
every sensory event. When combined with the image of our self, we respond with feel-
ing (Fhlung), which like sensation can be both immediate (Zufhlung) and
responsive (Nachfhlung). The first is an instinctive compatibility or incompati-
bility with a certain visual image, a color, for instance; the second is a feeling condi-
tioned by motor activity, such as the enjoyment we may experience in visually tracing
the line of a mountain silhouette. There is for Vischer a third and more important level
of feeling our empathetic feeling or empathy with the form of the object. In this mode
of viewing things, our mental-sensory ego (to use Vischers term) is projected inside the
object. The hypothesis of this projection, with all the aesthetic consequences that it
entails, is the crux of his theory. What is most interesting in this crucial deliberation,

however, is that Vischer arrives at his notion of empathy not on the basis of his physi-
ological studies but from his reading of an early book on dream interpretation.
Harry Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Introduction, in Harry Mallgrave and Eleftherios
Ikonomou (eds.), Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 18731893 (Santa Monica, CA:
The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994), p. 23.
22 Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics, in Mallgrave and
Ikonomou (eds.), Empathy, Form and Space, p. 104.
23 Ibid., p. 106.
24 Lambert Zuidervaart, Introduction, in Huhn and Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of Subjectivity, p. 11.
25 Ibid.
26 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 193.
27 In the clown, the child, the primitive, and the animal can be glimpsed the joyous potential of art:
In its clownishness, art consolingly recollects prehistory in the primordial world of

animals. Apes in the zoo together perform what resembles clown routines. The collusion
of children with clowns is a collusion with art, which adults drive out of them just as
they drive out their collusion with animals. Human beings have not succeeded in so
thoroughly repressing their likeness to animals that they are unable in an instant to
recapture it and be flooded with joy; the language of little children and animals
seems to be the same. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Athlone edition), p. 119, as quoted in
Connell, Body, Mimesis and Childhood, p. 86.
28 Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 180.

29 Ibid., p. 187.
30 The danger of fascism, it would seem, is the danger of overinvested identification. In a similar vein, one
might recognize how an identification with the soil through a sense of situatednessin Heideggerian
termsmay lead to an evocation of Heimat, and an incipient nationalism. Klaus Theweleit has analyzed,
through a study of the Frei Korps in 1930s Germany, how one might understand the growth of fascism in
psychoanalytic terms as the desire to reinforce the ego through identification with a larger bodyein Volk ,
ein Reich, ein Fhrer. (Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris
Turner, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, 1989]).
31 See Vikki Bell, Mimesis as Cultural Survival: Judith Butler and Anti-Semitism, in Vikki Bell (ed.),
Performativity and Belonging (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 133162; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Nazi
Myth, Critical Enquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 312.
32 See Neil Leach, The Dark Side of the Domus, in Neil Leach (ed.), Architecture and Revolution (London:
Routledge, 1999), pp. 150162.
33 Connell, Body, Mimesis and Childhood, p. 74.


35 Theodor W. Adorno, Functionalism Today, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London: Rout-
ledge, 1997), p. 10.
36 Ibid., p. 6.
37 Bloch argues that functionalism has paralyzed architecture, and stripped it of all imagination. If architec-
ture is to fulfill its utopian function in line with art and literature, and provide a more intuitive means of
experiencing the worldas did the Gothic cathedralit needs to be more humane. Architecture should
learn the lesson of art and sculpture, and free itself from the harsh shackles of Enlightenment rationality.
What we need is an architecture with wings, which would confront the railway-station character of our
existence (Ernst Bloch, Formative Education, Engineering Form, Ornament, in Leach [ed.], Rethinking
Architecture, pp. 4350).
38 The Papuan tattoos his skin, his boat, his paddles, in short everything he can lay his
hands on. He is not a criminal. The modern man who tattoos himself is either a crimi-
nal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the inmates show tat-
toos. The tattooed who are not in prison are latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats.
If someone who is tattooed dies in liberty, it means that he has died a few years before
committing a murder. (Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime, in Ulrich Conrads (ed.),
Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture [London: Lund Humphries,
1970], p. 19).
39 The man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the walls with erotic sym-
bols is a criminal and a degenerate. It goes without saying that this impulse most fre-
quently assails people with such symptoms of degeneracy in the lavatory. A countrys
culture can be assessed by the extent to which its lavatory walls are covered in graffiti.
In the child this is a natural phenomenon: his first artistic expression is to scribble
erotic symbols on the walls. But what is natural to the Papuan and the child is a symp-
tom of degeneracy in the modern adult. (ibid; translation slightly modified).
40 Ibid., p. 20.
41 Adorno, Functionalism Today, p. 8.
42 Ibid., p. 10.
43 As Jay puts it:
Adorno, to be sure, was aware that the delicate balance he admired in certain mod-
ernist works was threatened by the increasing hegemony of spirit and construction,
understood in essentially instrumental, rationalist terms, over mimesis and expression.
The withering away of the sensuous moment in late modernist art meant that all that

was being imitated was the reified social relations of the administered world. ( Jay,
Mimesis and Mimetology, p. 35)

45 Ibid. Here, symbol should be understood not in the Jungian sense of universal signification, but in the La-
canian sense of personal attachment. Symbol here relates to meaningfulness, rather than meaning itself.
46 Ibid., p. 8.
47 Ibid., p. 10.
48 We must, of course, acknowledge that in some cultures, such as Japan, the tattoo does indeed constitute a
form of symbolic identification associated with the criminal underworld. In other cultures, tattoos pro-
vide a mechanism for warding off evil spirits. Equally, tattoos may represent a form of battle insignia, or
some erotic emblem of courtship. But the common feature throughout is that the tattoo is a mechanism of
symbolic identification.
50 On the question of mimesis and technology, see Neil Leach, Forget Heidegger, Scroope 12 (2000): 5059.
51 Adorno, Functionalism Today, p. 14. The term innervation refers in Freud to the transmission of energy
along a nerve-pathway. On this, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-
Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac, 1988), p. 213.
53 Ibid., p. 17.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., p. 15.
56 We might even begin to interpret such an approach in gendered terms, as one that is open to what Hlne
Cixous calls criture fminine. Here, rational thought is characterized as masculine, while irrational,
intuitive thought is characterized not as female, but as feminine. Indeed, it is significant that Cixous
cites James Joyce as an exponent of criture fminine. In this context, Rosalind Minsky refers to the cre-
ative, containing power of the mother or womb, symbolizing a non-rational, intuitive way of knowing and
creativity to counterbalance the rationality of existing language:
The meaning of the phallus as male power would need to be balanced by the meaning of
the womb and female power and creativity. . . . More access to intuitive, artistic
forms of knowledge within individuals and institutions that make up culture might
begin to modify the seductive but often emotionally sterile rationality associated with
commercially competitive and technology-driven cultures, frequently lacking intu-
itive insight or, for want of a better word, wisdom and the capacity for intuitively
informed judgement. (Rosalind Minsky, Psychoanalysis and Culture [Cambridge:
Polity, 1998], p. 125)

57 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Athlone edition), p. 44.

58 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. N. Walker (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
59 Jacques Derrida questions the primacy of function within the realm of architecture. Function comes to
constitute part of the concept of architecture as an inhabited constructum: Ethico-political finality, reli-
gious duty, utilitarian or functional ends: it is always a question of putting architecture in service, and at ser-
vice (Derrida, Point de folie, in Leach [ed.], Rethinking Architecture, p. 327). Yet functionalism itself, for
Derrida, is not part of architecture. It belongs to a charter of extra-architectural concerns that comprise
a network of metaphysical evaluations which induce and inform, even if indirectly, all the theory and crit-
icism of architecture, from the most specialized to the most trivial (ibid., pp. 327328). Such concerns had
trapped architecture, threatening to stifle it: The charter had come to arraign the work, it imposes on it
norms or meanings which were extrinsic, if not accidental. It made its attributes into an essence: formal
beauty, finality, utility, functionalism, inhabitable value, its religious or political economyall the services,
so many non-architectural or meta-architectural predicates (ibid., pp. 328329). What Derrida calls for
now is an architecture that is no longer governed by these external norms: These norms will be taken into
consideration, but they will find themselves subordinated and reinscribed in one place in the text and in a
space in which they no longer command in the final instance (ibid., p. 329). This call for invention and the
refusal to be limited by such traditional concerns as functionality is echoed in the work of Andrew Ben-
jamin, who champions the need to think beyond the recuperative and nihilistic unfolding of tradition:
Tradition is housedsince there is no pure beyondbut the housing of tradition takes place within a plu-
rality of possibilities that can no longer be foreclosed by function, by teleology or by the aesthetics of form.
Works with open doors must be what are henceforth demanded by philosophy and architecture. (Andrew
Benjamin, Eisenman and the Housing of Tradition, in Leach [ed.], Rethinking Architecture, p. 300)
60 It is almost as though the only way to resolve the dialectical tension between aesthetic concerns and func-
tional concerns is to collapse that dialectic, and evacuate the space between the two opposites. This would
lead us into a Deleuzian world where aesthetics and function become mutually responsive, and locked into
a mechanism of reciprocal presupposition.
S Y M PAT H E T I C M AG I C
1 James Frazer, The Golden Bough (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 13. The distinction between the Law
of Similarity and the Law of Contact or Contagion is somewhat fragile. Certainly, if perceiving similarity
involves vision, it could be argued that retinal perception involves a form of contact between rays of
light and the eyes as receptors for the central nervous system. Within the logic of mimesis, at any rate, the
distinction becomes somewhat blurred.
2 Ibid., p. 14.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 44.

5 Ibid., p. 15.
6 Ibid., p. 16.
7 Ibid., p. 15.
8 Ibid., p. 16.
9 Ibid., p. 21.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 23.
12 Ibid., p. 141.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., pp. 2324.
15 George Stocking, Introduction to Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. xx.
16 Frazer himself refrains from talking about mimetic magic, since it suggests, if it does not imply, a conscious
agent who imitates, thereby limiting the scope of magic too narrowly (Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 13).
However, he makes an important observation in noting that the magician infers that he can produce any
effect he desires merely by imitating it. For this suggestion infers that the representation shares certain
properties with the original. In this Frazer is indebted to his predecessor, E. B. Tylor, who had begun to
construct a theory of ideational logic for magic. See Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London:
Routledge, 1993), p. 48.
17 Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), pp. 148149.
18 Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1997), pp. 139140.
19 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 47.
20 Ibid., p. xv.
21 Erland Nordenskild, with Ruben Prez, edited by Henry Wassn, An Historical and Ethnological Survey of
the Cuna Indians, Comparative Ethnological Studies 10 (Gteborg: Ethnografiska Museum, 1938).
22 According to Nordenskild, they also gave the seers great powers:
[The seer] is able to see what illnesses are affecting any person who comes to consult
him. When he examines a sick person he seats himself facing the patient and looks at
him. He sees right through him as if he were made of glass. [He] sees all the organs in
the body. He is also able, with the assistance of the nuchus [i. e. figurines] to give his
verdict as to what illness a patient whom he has not seen is suffering from. [He] can
foretell how long a person is going to live. It is of the greatest importance that he is
able to say when and how a persons soul is carried away by spirits. (Nordenskild,
An Historical and Ethnological Survey, p. 83, as quoted in Taussig, Mimesis and
Alterity, p. 10.

23 Taussig gives the example of a primitive figurine of General Douglas MacArthur which offers an almost
comical caricature of the general:
Because the Indians were not familiar with military regulations governing dress they
made some grave errors. Instead of wearing khaki, the image is painted so as to be wear-
ing a green cap with a pink band and one white star. His coat was painted a powder
blue with two pink breast pockets. Below the left pocket was what appears to be a Ger-
man Iron Cross. He also wore a black bow tie and black pants. Although the Indians
have small flat noses, they admire long pointed ones. They therefore made the image
with a nose that projected three inches from the face. (Leon De Smidt, Among the San
Blas Indians of Panama [Troy, New York: 1948], pp. 356357, as quoted in Taussig,
Mimesis and Alterity, p. 10).
24 Nordenskild, An Historical and Ethnological Survey, p. 492, as quoted in Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 11.
26 Ibid., p. 219.
27 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 267.
Routledge, 1984), p. 453, as quoted by Martin Jay, Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and Lacoue-
Labarthe, in Thomas Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (eds.), The Semblance of Subjectivity (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1997), p. 33.
30 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), pp. 53, 54, 55.
31 Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1995), p. 283.
32 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Athlone edition), p. 54.
33 Ibid. At the same time, Adorno is keen to distance mimesis, as a mode of critical reflexivity in art, from the
uncritical replication of trends within the culture industry. For Adorno, at any rate, there is no redemptive
potential to the culture industry.
34 Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity, p. 16.
35 Ibid., p. 22.
36 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 391.
37 Neil Leach, Millennium Culture (London: Ellipsis, 1999), p. 74.
MIMICRY
1 Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, October 84: 1632 (reprinted in Annette Michel-
son et al. [eds.], October: The First Decade [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987], pp. 5874). Jacques Lacan

refers to the study in his own seminal essay on the mirror stage. Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 3.
2 Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, pp. 6667.
3 There is a bright spot surrounded by a palpebral circle, notes Vignon, then by circular and overlapping
rows of small radial feathery strokes of variegated appearance, imitating to perfection the plumage of an
owl, while the body of the butterfly corresponds to the neck of the same bird. Vignon quoted by Caillois,
Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, pp. 6061.
4 Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, p. 64.
5 Ibid., p. 65.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 67.
8 Ibid., p. 69.
9 Eugne Minkowski, as quoted by Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, p. 72.
11 Eugne Minkowski, as quoted by Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, p. 72.
13 Ibid., p. 59.
14 Ibid., p. 70.
15 Quoted by Caillois, ibid., p. 73.
16 Ibid. Interestingly, Caillois also cites the works of Salvador Dal, which, he notes, are less the expression of
ambiguities or of paranoiac plurivocities than of mimetic assimilations of the animate to the inanimate
(ibid.). Caillois is perhaps unaware of Dals own obsession with mimetic insects, but this obsession may
well explain the constant refrain within Dals oeuvre, in which either human beings dissolve into their
environment, or the environment reconfigures itself into the form of human beings.
18 Tantalizingly, Caillois acknowledges in one of his footnotes that the instinct for renunciation may be
linked with Freuds notion of the death instinct, but does not pursue this connection. Caillois, Mimicry
and Legendary Psychasthenia, p. 74.
19 Ibid., p. xx.
20 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 99.
21 Georg Simmel, Bridge and Door, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge, 1997),
p. 66.
22 See pp. XXX.
23 Roger Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964). This work was
published originally in French in 1960 as Mduse et Cie.
24 Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, p. 63.
25 Ibid., p. 63.
26 Ibid., p. 88.

27 Ibid., p. 21.
28 Ibid., p. 77.
29 Ibid., p. 87.
30 Ibid., pp. 8788.
31 As James Martin observes:
Special cells called chromatophores, containing red and yellow pigments, lie in two dis-
tinct layers just under the transparent outer skin. A stratum reflecting blue and one
reflecting white cover the deepest layer, which contains the brown chemical melanin,
the substance responsible for tanning in humans. Fibers of melanin rise up through the
other layers like an inverted root system. To modify skin color, color cells expand or
shrink , mixing brown, red and yellow in different proportions and masking the reflec-
tive layers in varying amounts. An angry chameleon sends melanin toward the skins
surface, blocking the white layer and darkening the animal. If yellow cells enlarge over
the blue cells, a calm green results. Color change is rapid and results in increased skin
temperatures. ( James Martin, Chameleons [London: Blandford, 1992], pp. 3738)
32 Ibid., p. 40.
33 Ibid.
34 One might further object that Martins findings are based on laboratory work, and that even if they had
been derived from research into chameleons in their natural habitat, they are likely to be compromised in
that the very disguise of the chameleon defies successful observation. Chameleons capacity to camouflage
themselves must not be overlooked. So why the disguise? Martin himself reports an incident in the Lake
Nakuru National Park, Kenya, where a ranger, asked to find some chameleons, replies that it is impossible.
It is not that there are no chameleons there. Rather, it is simply that they cannot be seen. (Ibid., p. 37)
35 As Martin observes:
In place of the ear opening, a membrane of skin on the side of the skull called the audi-
tory area registers airborne vibrations and transmits them to a delicate bone structure
called a pterygoid plate. Embedded in tissues within the skull, the plate relays the
vibration down a twisting and constricted pathway leading to the inner ear. Compared
to the open pathway of the human ear, the chameleon analogue is inefficient, losing most
of the higher frequencies. (Ibid., p. 28)
36 It is therefore only natural for the chameleon to rely on visual techniques in both offensive and defensive
moments, and to assume that other creatures have similar properties. For how is a chameleon to be
expected to judge the sense of smell or hearing in other creatures when it has itself only the slightest under-
standing of these senses?

BECOMING
1 Friedrich Barth, Insects and Flowers, trans. M. A. Biederman-Thorson (London: George Allen & Unwin,
1985), pp. 185192. Usually, an insect is attracted to a flower by the promise of nectar. Here, however, the
sole attraction for the wasp is the possibility of copulation, although it remains unclear as to whether
the wasp is actually duped into perceiving this as a form of copulation.
2 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi
(London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 10.
3 Ibid., pp. 257258.
4 Tamsin Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 182.
5 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 360, as quoted in Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life
(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 169.
6 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parent, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London:
Athlone Press, 1987), pp. 67.
7 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 275.
8 This, at least, is the position taken by Laura Marks, who sees parallels between Deleuze and not only Ben-
jamin, but also Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray. Marks compares the term fossil, used once by Deleuze, with
Benjamins fetish, in her terms both forms of recollection objects. Indeed, while she does not address
becoming specifically, she reads Deleuzes discussion of the cinema in line with Benjamins discussion of
images. Marks perceives mimesis as an onto-hermeneutical concept based on bodily memories, which
shares further common ground with seemingly equivalent positions held by Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray,
while Merleau-Ponty, she notes, like Deleuze, draws inspiration from Bergson:
Despite Irigarays critique, I find that Merleau-Ponty shares her ethical insistance on
defining a relationship between self and the world that is symbiotic, indeed mimetic.
They both emphasize that in embodied perception the perceiver relinquishes power
over the perceived. The proximal senses are more capable of such a mimetic relation-
ship than vision is, for while looking tends to be unidirectional, one cannot touch with-
out being touched. Yet vision too, insofar as it is embodied, is able to relinquish some of
the power of the perceiver. (Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film [Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2000, p. 149)
Certainly, to equate mimesis with the work of Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray would entail a collapsing of a
dialectical imagethe flash of recognition(albeit a body-image in Markss terminology) into the
apparent intersubjectivity espoused if not by Merleau-Ponty, then certainly by Irigaray.
9 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 36.

11 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 1.
12 Ibid., p. 78.
13 Jacques Derrida, as quoted in Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), p. 5.
14 Ibid.
15 Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desires (London: Sage, 1996), p. 218.
16 Keith Ansell Pearson, Germinal Life (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 156.
17 As Greg Lynn explains:
The multiple orchids and wasps unify to form a singular body. This propagating unity
is not an enclosed whole, but a multiplicity: the wasps and orchids are simultaneously
one and many bodies. What is important is that there is not a pre-existing collective
body that was displaced by this parasitic exchange of sexual desire but rather a new
stable body is composed from the intricate connections of these previously disparate
bodies. Difference is in the service of a fusional multiplicity that produces new stable
bodies through incorporations that remain open to further influence by other external
forces. (Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies and Blobs [Brussels: La Lettre Vole, 1999], p. 139)

19 Ibid., pp. 274275.
20 Deleuze and Guattaris work can hardly be described as scientific in the true sense. Indeed, we might
do better to refer to it as a form of science fiction. But their work has certain affinities with a scientific
tradition.
21 Pearson, Germinal Life, pp. 162163.
23 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 192. Meme is a contraction
of the Greek mimeme, and, according to Dawkins, is intended to sound similar to the term gene.
24 Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 7.
25 Ibid., pp. 78.
26 Ibid., p. 98.
27 According to Keith Ansell Pearson, however, this would be incorrect. The weakness, for example, of Jean
Baudrillards otherwise powerful critique of deterritorialization, he observes, is that it conflates the
schema of deterritorialization with the economic system of capital as an ideal nomadism, and equally of
the deterritorialization of Deleuzes ethological rhizomatics with the deterritorialization of capital
(Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 172).
28 Ibid.


30 Ibid.
31 Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 173.
32 Ibid., p. 172.
33 Georg Simmel, Bridge and Door, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge, 1997),
p. 66.
34 John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 4.
35 Ibid., p. 13.
36 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 10. Deleuze and Guattaris opposition to signification is an
integral part of their theoretical position. Signification subscribes to the discourse of binary opposi-
tions. Moreover, it belongs to the realm of representation rather than process, and therefore can never
account for the complexity of the rhizome.
37 John Marks, Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity (London: Pluto, 1998), p. 45.
39 Pearson, Germinal Life, p. 153. For Kristevas understanding of chora, see pp. XXX.
40 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 11. Deleuze and Guattari do not distinguish between differ-
ent types of booksbetween, for example, a book of poetry and a practical manual.
41 Marks, Gilles Deleuze, p. 31.
43 Ibid., p. 477.
44 Ibid., p. 479.
45 Ibid., p. 493.
46 Ibid., p. 494.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid., p. 499.
49 Gothic architecture is indeed inseparable from a will to build churches longer and
taller than the Romanesque churches. Ever further, ever higher. . . . But this difference
is not simply quantitative; it marks a qualitative change: the static relation, form-
matter, tends to fade into the background in favor of a dynamic relation, material-
forces. It is the cutting of stone that turns it into material capable of holding and
coordinating forces of thrust, and of constructing ever higher and longer vaults. The
vault is no longer a form but the line of continuous variation of the stones. It is as if
Gothic conquered a smooth space, while Romanesque remained partially within a
striated space (in which the vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars).
(Ibid., p. 364)

50 One does not represent, one engenders and traverses. This science is characterized less by the absence of
equations than by the very different role they play: instead of being good forms absolutely that organize
matter, they are generated as forces of thrust (pousses) by the material, in a qualitative calculus of the
optimum. (Ibid.)
51 Royal, or State, science only tolerates and appropriates stone cutting by means of templates (the opposite
of squaring), under conditions that restore the primacy of the fixed model of form, mathematical figures,
and measurement. (Ibid., p. 365)
52 A further way to distinguish these two models of operation is the distinction Deleuze and Guattari make
between minor and major sciences: the tendency of the broken line to become a curve, a whole opera-
tive geometry of the trait and movement, as pragmatic science of placings-in-variation that operates in a
different manner than the royal or major science of Euclids invariants and travels a long history of suspi-
cion and even repression. (Ibid., p. 109)
53 It is tempting to read Deleuze and Guattari as though they are referring to a language of forms, as opposed
to the ways of thinking that generate those forms. Deleuzes The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque in some ways
exacerbates the potential problem (Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993]). At a superficial level, it may be taken as a manifesto
for folded architecture. Moreover, Deleuze supplies a description of a Baroque house that could be taken
at face value as an endorsement of a specific architectural language. Yet the fold is not a literal fold, any
more than the Baroque edifice is a literal building. The Fold is at once the most and the least architectural
of Deleuzes works. To be fair, many architects are aware of this problem. By folding, Greg Lynn under-
stands disturbances to programmatic organizations rather than the manipulation of form as such. But the
form itself may respond to these new organizations by being submissive, pliant, and adaptable, rather
than adopt the tactics of disruption and disjuncture of deconstructivist architecture: Architects who fold
seek to place seemingly disparate forces into relation through strategies which are externally plied. Per-
haps, in this regard only, there are many opportunities for architecture to be affected by Deleuzes book.
The formal characteristics of pliancyanexact forms and topological geometries primarilycan be more
viscous and fluid in response to exigencies. Lynn, Folds, Bodies and Blobs, pp. 130131.
54 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1.
55 Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze, p. 234.
D E AT H
1 In his translation of Freuds work, Strachey famously translates Trieb as instinct. This has led to consid-
erable confusion. As Boothby comments: Freuds notion has little in common with the patterned, sponta-
neous behaviour of animals that we think of as instinctual, but rather points to an elemental impulse or
striving that is radically unspecified with respect to its aims and objects. Richard Boothby, Death and
Desire (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 229.

2 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-
Smith (London: Karnac, 1988), p. 241. As Freud puts it: If we assume that living things came later than
inanimate and arose from them, then the death instinct fits in with the formula . . . to the effect that
instincts tend towards a return to an earlier state. (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis
[1940a], SE 23, pp. 148149, as quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,
pp. 9798).
3 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923b), SE 19, p. 40, as quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language
of Psycho-Analysis, p. 153.
4 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 241.
5 Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926d), SE 20, p. 125, as quoted in Laplanche and
Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 99.
6 Sigmund Freud, Terminable and Interminable Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937c), SE 23,
p. 243.
7 Slavoj Zizek questions this. For him, the death instinct is concerned with the symbolic order, and does not
relate to biological concerns. See Slavoj Zizek, There is No Sexual Relationship, in Elizabeth Wright and
Edmund Wright (eds.), The Zizek Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 190.
8 Since the assumption of the existence of the instinct is mainly based on theoretical grounds, we must also
admit that it is not entirely proof against theoretical objections. (Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Dis-
contents [1930a], SE 21, pp. 121122, as quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,
p. 101.)
9 As Freud admits: To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the views that I have developed
here, but in the course of time they have gained such a hold on me that I can no longer think in any other
way. (Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, p. 119, as quoted in Boothby Death and Desire, p. 6.)
10 As Kristeva observes: While Eros means the creation of bonds. Thanatos, the death drive, signifies the dis-
integration of bonds and the ceasing of circulation, communication, and social relationships. (Ross
Mitchell Guberman [ed.], Julia Kristeva Interviews [New York: Columbia University Press, 1996], p. 79).
11 Freud, Dissection of the Personality, SE 22, p. 73, as quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of
Psycho-Analysis, p. 198.
12 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (London: Penguin, 1969), pp. 2930.
13 At a straightforward level, then, we might recognize an apparent parallel between the drive for harmony
within the principle of architectural proportions, and the drive for resolution that underpins the death
instinct in Freud. There is an obvious point of comparison between the state of equilibrium sought in pro-
portions, and the equilibrium of the Nirvana principle. Proportions offer a mechanism that strives for a
resolution, a reconciliation of tensions. The aesthetic gratification of harmonic proportions in architecture
might therefore be seen to represent a return to the Nirvana of the womb, to the sensory realm of the pro-
tected. Yet this realm need not be a closed, interior space. It need not be a womblike space. Indeed,
according to the logic of the argument, open architecture would have a similar effect, provided that it is
harmonious.

14 Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, p. 29.

16 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g), SE 18, pp. 5556. Zizek, however, makes a clear dis-
tinction between what he sees as the purely biological cycle of generation and corruption of the Nirvana
principle, and the symbolic nature of the death instinct.
17 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, p. 20.
18 Repetition, in this sense, would be linked to the death instinct, the urge to discharge tensions and return to
a state of oneness, evoking the Nirvana of the womb. See Boothby, Death and Desire, pp. 23, 7475, 79.
19 Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, p. 243.
20 Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 301, as quoted
in Boothby, Death and Desire, p. 10.
21 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique, 19531954, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), p. 232, as quoted in Boothby, Death and
Desire, p. 10.
22 Jacques Lacan, crits (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1966), pp. 4445, as quoted in Boothby, Death and
Desire, p. 11.
23 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 19591960, ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 212.
24 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 33.
25 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923b), SE 19, p. 46, as quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language
of Psycho-Analysis, p. 99.
26 Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915b), SE 14, pp. 289291, as quoted in
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1991), p. 95.
27 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), p. 81.
28 Ibid., pp. 8485.
29 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 294.
30 Ibid.
31 Joan Copjec, The Tomb of Perseverance: On Antigone, in Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (eds.), Giving
Ground (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 249.
32 Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 6.
33 Salvador Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, trans. Haakon Chevalier (London: Vision, 1942), p. 152.
34 Lacan, Seminar, Book I, p. 149.
35 Evans, An Introductory Dictionary, p. 199.
37 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), SE 23, p. 148, as quoted in Laplanche and
Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 242.
38 Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, p. 91.

NARCISSISM
1 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), SE 23, p. 149, as quoted in Jean Laplanche
and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London:
Karnac, 1988), p. 241.
2 Ross Mitchell Gubermann (ed.), Julia Kristeva Interviews (New York: Columbia University Press,
1996), p. 214.
3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 84.
4 Ibid., p. 85.
5 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 164.
6 Ibid., p. 167.
7 Ibid., p. 164.
9 For a discussion of the mirror stage, see pp. XXX.
10 Charles Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 107.
11 Sigmund Freud, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin,
1984), p. 80.
12 Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915b), SE 14, p. 90, as quoted in Laplanche
and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, p. 33.
13 Freud, On Metapsychology, p. 81.
14 Ibid., p. 84.
16 Ibid., p. 168.
17 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930a), SE 21, p. 13, as quoted in Marcuse, Eros and
Civilisation, p. 168.
19 Ibid., p. 169. There would appear, however, to be a fundamental problem in Marcuses model of narcissistic
identification. He seems to conflates primary narcissism with secondary narcissism. How, one might ask,
can someone like Narcissus partake of primary narcissism?
20 Ibid., p. 194.
21 Ibid., p. 166.
22 Ibid., p. 203.
23 Laurie Schneider Adams, Art and Psychoanalysis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 6.
24 Robert Vischer, On the Optical Sense of Form: A Contribution to Aesthetics, in Harry Mallgrave and
Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.), Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 18731893 (Santa
Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1994), p. 117.
25 Samuel Butler, quoted in Louis Hellman, Archi-ttes (London: Academy, 2000), p. 7. An obvious example
of this essentially narcissistic principle may be found in the series of archi-ttes cartoons by Louis

Hellman. These are caricature portraits of famous architects in the manner of Arcimboldo, based on fea-
tures from their own buildings. Thus the portrait of Le Corbusier, for example, is composed of elements
from the plan of his church of Notre-Dame du Haut at Ronchamp. Although these cartoons are clearly fic-
tional, they illustrate well the principle that what we create is a reflection of the self, and that a narcissistic
urge lies at the base of all artistic creativity.
26 Vitruvius provides us with one of the earliest with his story of Dinocrates (Vitruvius, The Ten Books on
Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan [New York: Dover, 1960], p. 36). We might also consider the
parade of architects dressed up as the skyscrapers they designed. In Fte Moderne: A Fantasy in Flame and
Silver, a ball held in New York in 1931, seven architects lined up posing as their buildings. The centerpiece
was William Van Alen dressed up as his design for the Chrysler Building in a dramatic display in which
architect and building become interchangeable. Van Alen is the Chrysler Building and the Chrysler Build-
ing is Van Alen. (Pencil Points, February 1931, p. 145, quoted in Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York [New
York: 010 Publishers, 1994], p. 129. This scene has been reevoked recently in Vanity Fair, with images of
Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman impersonating their buildings (Mary McLeod, Everyday and Other
Spaces, in Debra Coleman, Elizabeth Danze, and Carol Henderson (eds.), Architecture and Feminism
[Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996], p. 26).
27 For Lasch, this is a form of secondary or pathological narcissism, and he is careful to distinguish it from pri-
mary narcissism. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner, 1979).
28 Ibid., pp. 9697. This culture of technological reproduction does not only feed into the cult of self-
examination noted above, so that the Kodak camera becomes a form of aesthetic self-examination, an
X-ray of the surface fueling the society of the spectacle, but, as Susan Sontag has observed, it also consti-
tutes a direct and immediate form of narcissistic self-surveillance. As Lasch notes: Among the many nar-
cissistic uses that Sontag attributes to the camera, self-surveillance ranks among the most important, not
only because it provides the technical means of ceaseless self-scrutiny, but because it renders the sense of
selfhood dependent on the consumption of images of the self, at the same time calling into question the
reality of the external world (ibid., p. 98).
IDENTITY
1 Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 34.

2 Ibid.
4 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
5 Moreover, all relations are based on the paradoxical proposition that a relation with the other qua other
is impossible. Furthermore, the other can be truly other only when it is dead. The conflict is further
articulated through the example of Oedipus, who is trapped between the compulsion to murder his father
and the compulsion to respect him. It is a conflict between primary and secondary identifications. As

Borch-Jacobsen explains: In other words, little Oedipus, after hatefully identifying with the fraternal
or paternal rival, on the level of primary identification, peaceably identifies with the social or paternal
prohibition on the level of secondary identification. (Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 31.)
6 Ibid., pp. 3637.
7 Ibid., p. 41.
8 Lacan mixes the psychologist Henri Wallons examination of the mirror with Freuds narcissism and Hegels
dialectic. See Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 46.
9 Jacques Lacan, crits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 12.
10 The mirror stage persists throughout adult life, and characterizes the relationship between the subject and
its image. The mirror stage, as Lacan observes, is a phenomenon to which I assign a twofold value. In the
first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning point in the mental development of the child.
In the second place, it typifies a libidinal relationship with the body-image. ( Jacques Lacan, Some Reflec-
tions on the Ego, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953): 14, as quoted in Evans, An Introductory
Dictionary, p. 115).
11 We need to distinguish here between imaginary and symbolic identifications. Imaginary identifications
come into operation during the mirror stage, and relate to the formation of the ideal ego. Symbolic identi-
fications, on the other hand, allow for the formation of the ego-ideal. As forms of secondary identification
which nonetheless partake of the imaginary, they serve to stabilize the subject by transcending the aggres-
sivity of the mirror stage. They also mark the transition into the symbolic order. Zizek characterizes the
distinction as follows: Imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear like-
able to ourselves, with the image representing what we would like to be, and symbolic identification,
identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so
that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love. From this perspective, the imaginary identification
associated with the ideal ego is one of a constituted identification, while the symbolic identification as-
sociated with the ego-ideal is constitutive. In other words, as Zizek observes: In imaginary identifica-
tion we imitate the other at the level of resemblancewe identify ourselves with the image of the other
inasmuch as we are like him, while in symbolic identification we identify ourselves with the other precisely
at a point at which he is inimitable, at a point which eludes resemblance. ([Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object
of Ideology [London and New York: Verso, 1989], p. 109). There is always a gap a leftoverbetween
these two operations, a gap which Zizek associates with the figure of desire.
12 The mirror stage constitutes a form of recognition which is at the same time a form of misrecognition.
This is not because the subject identifies with an image, which must necessarily be an inverted image of the
self, and hence a false representation of the self. Rather, it is because the subject, by identifying with an
object exterior to the self, fails to grasp certain characteristics of the self. This misrecognition embodies
the illusionary nature in our engagement with reality that characterizes Lacans entire philosophy.
13 To return to our earlier discussion of mimetic identification in Freuds theory of jokes: it is precisely
because we have already formulated our own primary identification that we can participate in secondary
identifications with the subjects of a joke. Here we should also acknowledge the importance of the mirror

stage in viewing a film, in that it is first necessary to understand the self as an object in a world of objects. In
other words, it is because we know that we are different from those with whom we are entering into an
identification that we are able to identify with but also laugh at them.
14 Here we might return to two earlier examples. In the case of Zelig, we can see that his assimilation to those
around him was patently a strategy aimed not at losing his own identity, but at preserving it. Likewise, for
the inmate at Alcatraz, identification with his cell was merely a self-defense tactic.
15 To this extent, we might even postulate that on some occasions secondary identifications are precisely not
identifications. They are strategic, decoy identifications which merely act out the principle of identifica-
tion without actually enforcing it, and it is only when they are removed that we might glimpse the actual
underlying identity.
16 Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (1915b), SE 14, p. 286, as quoted in Jean
Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith
(London: Karnac, 1988), p. 388.
18 The maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon, he notes, depends upon the pigeon seeing another, while
the migratory locust develops patterns of social behavior when it is exposed to animated movements that
mimic that of its own species.
19 Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, October 31 (1984): 1632 (reprinted in Annette
Michelson et al. (eds.), October: The First Decade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 5874.
20 Lacan, Some Reflections on the Ego, p. 3.
21 See Mimicry, pp. XXX.
22 Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 173.
23 Ibid., p. 177.
24 See, for example, Georg Simmel, Bridge and Door, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London:
Routledge, 1997), p. 66.
25 Bowie, Lacan, p. 198.
26 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and
Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 44.
27 Ibid., p. 48
28 Ibid., p. 49.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid., p. 51.
31 Ibid., p. 54.
32 Laura Mulvey adds a certain gloss to Metzs work, highlighting the scopic pleasure that may be derived
from such identifications. Her own engagement with the question of identification in her seminal article
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema is situated within the more general framework of the cinema, and
the specific context of gender relations. Mulvey sets out two models for pleasurable structures of looking
within mainstream cinema. The first is scopophilia, the pleasure of looking, which, as Mulvey observes,

Freud had traced to the inquisitiveness of children anxious to comprehend the forbidden secrets of geni-
talia and bodily functions. This extends in later life to the pleasure of looking at others, which, although
mainly innocent, can develop into forms of voyeurism and other obsessive perversions. The cinema,
Mulvey observes, feeds this tendency. The second pleasurable structure of looking is grounded in the
former, but develops in a narcissistic direction. It has less to do with the pleasure of seeing another as an ob-
ject of sexual stimulation than with an identification with that person. Mulveys comments on visual plea-
sure within the cinema leave open the possibility of a similar regime of visual pleasure within the domain
of architecture (Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, in Visual and Other Pleasures
[Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999], pp. 1426).
34 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994). The notion of
oneiric space is also central to De Certeaus concept of space. As he observes: From this point of view, after
having compared pedestrian processes to linguistic formations, we can bring them back down in the direc-
tion of oneiric figuration, or at least discover on that other side what, in spatial practice, is inseparable from
the dreamed place. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), p. 103.
35 See Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture (London: Routledge,
1997), pp. 92 and 142 respectively.
37 If we are to look for a model of the way in which content might be understood as a kind of projection, we
could consider the work of the Polish-Canadian public artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, who literally projects
politically loaded images onto buildings as a commentary on the politics of use of that building. In 1985
Wodiczko projected the image of a swastika onto the pediment of South Africa House in Trafalgar Square,
London. This act was intended as a political protest against the trade negotiations then under way between
the apartheid government of South Africa and the British government under Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher. The projection of the swastika onto the building raises some interesting questions about the
relationship between buildings and politics. In particular it highlights the condition of buildings which have
been blemished with the stain of evil. Wodiczkos projection of content-laden images onto monuments
and buildings echoes the process by which human beings project their own readings onto them, as though
onto some blank cinematographic screen. On the work of Krzysztof Wodiczko, see Public Projections
and A Conversation with Krzysztof Wodiczko, October 38 (Fall 1986): 352.
38 I have come to think that no work of art or culture can set out to be political once and
for all, no matter how ostentatiously it labels itself as such, for there can never be any
guarantee it will be used the way it demands. A great political art (Brecht) can be
taken as a pure and apolitical art; art that seems to want to be merely aesthetic and

decorative can be rewritten as political with energetic interpretation. The political

rewriting or appropriation then, the political use, must also be allegorical; you have to
know that this is what it is supposed to be or meanin itself it is inert. (Fredric Jame-
son, Is Space Political?, in Leach [ed.], Rethinking Architecture, pp. 258259)
39 See Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 233. The seemingly static model of identification forged through a reflec-
tionas though in a mirrorappears at first sight to contrast markedly with the more dynamic notion of
identity based on performativity, as explored by Judith Butler and others. Yet if we perceive the former as
being grounded in a certain intentionality, we should recognize the actative dimension to the gaze itself. For
performativity is not merely a question of physical performance. It can be extended to the gaze as the
potential site of an identification with place, since any act of viewing may be charged with a conscious
moment of politicized reading. Visual attachments might therefore be read as containing an actative, per-
formative moment. And what applies to the gaze may equally apply to the other senses. What we find, then,
is that identification based on a process of mirroring is but a variation on the actative identification with
place embodied in ritualistic patterns of behaviour. It is through the repetitive performativities of these
various modes of perception that a mirroring can be enacted, and a sense of identification with place can be
developed and reinforced through habit.
40 For a discussion of the Thing, see Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire VII (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1986).
41 Slavoj Zizek, Eastern Europes Republics of Gilead, New Left Review 183 (SeptemberOctober 1990): 53.
42 Renata Salecl, Ideology of the Mother Nation, in Michael Kennedy (ed.), Envisioning Eastern Europe
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 94.
43 Zizek, Eastern Europes Republics of Gilead, p. 53.
44 Julia Kristeva, Holbeins Dead Christ, in Michel Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body
(New York: Zone Books), p. 261.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 262.
47 Zizek, Eastern Europes Republics of Gilead, pp. 5062. Here enjoyment, as Zizek notes, is not to be
equated with pleasure: enjoyment is precisely pleasure in unpleasure; it designates the paradoxical satis-
faction procured by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium of the pleasure prin-
ciple. In other words, enjoyment is located beyond the pleasure principle (Zizek, Eastern Europes
Republics of Gilead, p. 5248.Ibid., pp. 5354.
49 Attacks on these groups can be understood within the logic of the sacrifice. For the sacrifice, as Ren Girard
has observed, is grounded in the mechanism of the scapegoat. Guilt and aggression are displaced onto the
victim, so that a single entity serves as a mimetic substitute for the many who condemn it. The overall effect
is a sense of collective purging, or even bloodletting. The community is cleansed of its internal discord,
and harmony results. The paradox here, as with all sacrificial gestures, is that harmony is born of violence,
and communal bonding is founded on hatred of the other. At once the heimlich and the unheimlich seem to
fold into one another. And if, as Walter Benjamin once remarked, There is no document of civilization

which is not at the same time a document of barbarism, an echo is to be bound in Girards own conclusion
that all cultures are founded on the murder of a surrogate victim. (Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans.
Edmund Jephcott [New York: Schocken, 1978], p. 248).
50 On imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London and New York:
Verso, 1983).
PARANOIA
1 Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 140.
2 Ibid., p. 141.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., p. 133.
5 Ibid., p. 147.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 148.
8 Ibid., pp. 147148.
9 Ibid., p. 148. By way of example, Freud cites the case of Schreber, whose own well-known paranoid delirium
can be traced to the disavowal of his homosexuality. According to Freud, Schreber loves his persecutor
sexually, but this love inverts into a form of hatred, because it is not reciprocated. Distraught, Schreber
descends into self-negation, and consequently develops a persecution complex.
10 Ibid., p. 150.
11 Freud considers that the obsessive self-reproaches of the survivor as to whether he or she may have been
partly responsible for the loss of that loved one may in fact be reproaches against an unconscious wish
which would not have been dissatisfied by the occurrence of death and which might actually have brought
it about if it had had the power. (Ibid., p. 116.)
12 Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoague dans ses rapports avec la personnalit, followed by Premiers crits sur
la paranoia (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1975), p. 392, as quoted in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute
Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 21.
13 See Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 38.
14 Salvador Dal, The Unspeakable Confessions, trans. Harold Salemson (London: W. H. Allen, 1973), as quoted
in Bowie, Lacan, p. 39.
15 Bowie, Lacan, p. 40.
16 Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, p. 57.
17 Lacan, De la psychose paranoaque, p. 326, as quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 57.
18 Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 57.
19 Lacan, De la psychose paranoaque, p. 326, as quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 57.

Verso, 1979), p. 187, as quoted in Gunter Gebauer and Christoph Wulf, Mimesis: Culture, Art, Society, trans.
Don Reneau (Berkeley: Univeristy of California Press, 1995), p. 286.
22 For further discussion of the mirror stage, see pp. XXX.
24 Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de lindividu (Paris: Navarin, 1984), pp. 2930,
quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 67.
25 Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940a [1938]), SE 23, p. 299, as quoted in Borch-Jacobsen,
Lacan, p. 66.
27 Ibid., pp. 5960.
28 Ibid., p. 60.
29 Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 87.
30 The myth of Medusa tells the tale of Perseus, who is responsible for killing Medusa, the most famous of the
three Gorgon sisters. Medusa, with her furious, frightening face and hair of snakes, has the ability to turn
anyone who looks at her to stone. Perseus is given a pair of winged sandals, a bag and helmet of Hades, which
make him invisible, a sickle, and a mirror. Looking at the Medusa only through her reflection in the mirror,
Perseus manages to cut off her head. However, Medusas head still retains the power to petrify anyone who
sees it.
31 Tobin Siebers, The Mirror of Medusa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983),
p. 68.
32 Ibid., pp. 8586.
33 See pp. XXX.
34 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1997), pp. 175176.
35 Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 88.
36 Lacan, Les complexes familiaux, p. 60, quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan, p. 49.
BELONGING
1 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 140, as quoted in Vikki Bell (ed.), Performa-
tivity and Belonging (London: Sage, 1999), p. 136.
2 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 12.
3 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 136, as quoted in Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 136.

4 Butler, Imitation and Gender Insubordination, in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian and Gay Theories
(New York: Routledge, 1991), as quoted in Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 137. There are parallels here
with Irigarays use of mimesis in the constitution of gender:
to play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation
by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit
herselfin as much as she is on the side of the perceptible, of matterto ideas, in
particular to ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as
to make visible by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invis-
ible: the cover up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. (Luce Irigaray,
This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. C. Porter and C. Burke [Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1985], p. 76.)
There is an important distinction, however, between Butlers and Irigarays use of the term. For Irigaray,
mimesis is at work in feminine language, and offers a means of resisting a dominant, masculine logic; while
for Butler, mimesis explains the manner in which gender of whatever kind is constituted. As Bell notes:
For Irigaray, mimesis is on the level of strategyone that reveals through its repetition of ideas about
womenand not of constitution, as it is for Butler. (Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 139).
5 This leads to a certain pessimism in Butlers work. As Vikki Bell argues:
The category of mimicry as Butler employs it in her work is one that I would argue car-
ries with it a sense of sadness, both of forfeiting (possibilities of being otherwise) and
of resignation to carrying on under duress. There is no playful repetition here. Gen-
der performance is regarded as a strategy of survival, formed within a heterosexual
matrix which, while not compulsory, is hegemonic, such that the psychic structures it
deploys are analogous to melancholia, in which the lost object is incorporated into
psychic life as part of the ego, object of ambivalence, i.e., both loved and hated. (Bell,
Performativity and Belonging, p. 140).
6 Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 125.

7 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 112.
8 As Derek Robbins explains: The habitus of every individual inscribes the inherited parameters of modi-
fication, of adjustment from situation to position which provides the legacy of a new situation. (Derek
Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture [London: Sage, 2000], p. 30).
9 Bell discusses the possibility of understanding Jewishness in this light in Performativity and Belonging.
See also Sneja Gunew, Performing Australian Ethnicity: Helen Demidenko, in W. Ommundsen and
H. Rowley (eds.), From a Distance: Australian Writers and Cultural Displacement (Geelong: Deakin Univer-
sity Press, 1996), pp. 159171.

10 Butler herself has addressed this question:
I do think that there is a performativity to the gaze that is not simply the transposition
of a textual model onto a visual one; that when we see Rodney King, when we see that
video we are also reading and we are also constituting, and that the reading is a certain
conjuring and a certain construction. How do we describe that? It seems to me that that
is a modality of performativity, that it is radicalization, that the kind of visual read-
ing practice that goes into the viewing of the video is part of what I would understand
as the performativity of what it is to race something or to be raced by it. So I sup-
pose that Im interested in the modalities of performativity that take it out of its purely
textualist context. ( Judith Butler [interviewed by Vikki Bell], On Speech, Race and
Melancholia, in Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 169).
11 Marc Aug, A War of Dreams, trans. Liz Heron (London: Pluto, 1999).
12 Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
13 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 240, as quoted in Homi Bhabha, Of
Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse, in Annette Michelson et al. (eds.), October:
The First Decade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 318.
14 Some glimpse of the satirical potential of repetition can be found in the myth of Echo and Narcissus. Echo,
unable to utter anything but a repetition of the words of Narcissus, nonetheless constructs a discourse that
alters the sense of the whole, and undermines the position of Narcissus. So too, repetition can destabilize
an original model, and challenge its authority.
15 Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man, p. 318.
16 Ibid., p. 320.
17 Bhabha comments:
The authority of that mode of colonial discourse that I have called mimicry is there-
fore stricken by an indeterminacy: mimicry emerges as the representation of a dif-
ference that is itself a process of disavowal. Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a double
articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which appro-
priates the Other as it visualizes power. Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate,
however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of
colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both normal-
ized knowledges and disciplinary powers. (Ibid., p. 318).
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 321.

20 Such considerations force us to rethink the very tenets on which architectural discourses such as critical
regionalism are based.
21 Fredric Jameson, The Constraints of Postmodernism, in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture
(London: Routledge, 1997), p. 255.
22 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 176177.
23 Ibid., p. 176.
24 Butler, Bodies That Matter.
25 Homi Bhabha, Introduction, in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 3.
26 Bhabha, DissemiNation, in ibid., pp. 298299.
27 Mariam Fraser, Classing Queer, in Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 111.
28 Derek Robbins, Bourdieu and Culture (London: Sage, 2000), p. 35.
29 It is this thinking that Fredric Jameson has sought to challenge. Form, for Jameson, is essentially inert, and
whatever content is grafted onto it is allegorical in character. Jameson, Is Space Political?, in Leach
(ed.), Rethinking Architecture, pp. 258259.
30 Bell, Performativity and Belonging.
31 Anne-Marie Fortier, Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s), in Bell, Performativity
and Belonging, p. 42.
32 Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 3. Fortiers own study is of a specific Italian migr community in Lon-
don, whose ritualistic performances, often bound to specific religious festivals, negotiated a sense of spatial
belonging that was both part of an emigrantand specifically Italiancommunity, but also quintessen-
tially in Britain. The study was based on a community and its association with a particular church,
St. Peters, its rituals and forms of cultural expression. Her study relies heavily on Butler. As Fortier puts it:
As I sat there in the pews, it seemed as if I was watching a re-run of part of an identity
in the making: the stylized repetition of acts reached into some deep-seated sense of
selfhood that had sedimented into my body. The rituals, in turn, cultivated a sense
of belonging. This short episode made me realize the extent to which cultural identity
is embodied, and memories are incorporated, both as a result of iterated actions. And
how these, in turn, are lived as expressions of a deeply felt sense of identity and
belonging. (Fortier, Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belong-
ing(s), p. 48).
Fortier concludes:
St. Peters is a place of re-membering. It is a place of collective memory, in which ele-

ments of the past are cobbled together to mould a communal body of belonging. It is a
place where individual lives, present and past, are called upon to inhabit the present
space, to member it. Finally, it is a site where individual bodies circulate, come and

go; where bodies are signifying actors in claims for, and practices of, the identity of
St. Peters and former Little Italy. These bodies, in turn, are projected into a structure
of meaning that precedes them and re-members them into gendered definitions of iden-
tity and becoming. Re-membering The Hill works through bodies that are ethnicized
and gendered at once, while the circulation of these bodies that are ethnicizes and
genders a space in the process of claiming it as an Italian (terrain of ) belonging(s).
(ibid., p. 59).
33 See Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 3.

34 Fortier, Re-membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s), p. 42.
35 Marc Aug, Non-Place (London: Pluto Press, 1993).
36 This is in line with Foucaults thinking that transgression of the limit does not deny the limit but, rather,
illuminates it in the flash of its passage. See Foucault Preface to Transgression, in Donald Bouchard
(ed.), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), pp. 3334.
37 Bell, Performativity and Belonging, p. 9.
SACRIFICE
1 For the complete ballad, see Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, trans. Willard Trask (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 164170.
2 Ibid., p. 167.
3 Ibid., p. 168.
4 James Frazer, The Golden Bough (London: Penguin, 1996), p. 191.
5 Ibid., pp. 230231.
6 Eliade, Zalmoxis, p. 181.
7 See G. Cocchiara, Il Ponte di Arta e i sacrifici di costruzione, Annali del Museo Pitr, I (Palermo, 1950),
p. 60.
8 Eliade, Zalmoxis, pp. 182183.
9 Ibid., p. 186.
10 Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W. D. Halls (London: Cohen &
West, 1964), p. 65.
11 Ibid., p. 10.
12 Ibid., p. 13.
13 Ibid., p. 10.
14 Ibid., p. 11.
15 Ibid., p. 99.
16 Ibid., p. 98.

17 Ibid., p. 99.
18 Ibid., p. 97.
19 Ibid., p. 102.
20 Eliade, Zalmoxis, pp. 182183.
21 Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 224.
22 Ibid., p. 228.
23 Ibid., pp. 224225.
24 Part of Batailles project is to expose the constructed way in which we frame the world. Our understanding
of the world is dominated, according to Bataille, by social norms and established hierarchies which can be
exposed as fictions. They often attempt to deny the contradictions that lie at their core. It is through his
often counter-intuitive writing that Bataille attempts to move beyond our inherited understanding of the
world. In his sometimes gory and lurid description of sacrifice, he seeks to undermine the tenets on which
Western civilization is based.
25 Bataille, quoting Bernardino da Sahagn, Historia General de las cosas de Nueva Espaa (Mexico City: Porra,
1956), in The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), pp. 4950.
26 Bataille, The Accursed Share, p. 50.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 51.
29 John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 73.
31 Ibid., p. 56.
32 Ibid., p. 56.
33 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 44.
34 Ibid., p. 43.
35 Ibid., p. 61.
37 Bataille, The Theory of Religion, pp. 4647.
38 Ibid., p. 47.
39 Ibid., p. 48.
40 Ibid. This is where the link with poetry is revealed, but so too the danger of the extremes that such a posi-
tion invites. For it is one thing to claim that contemporary society has lost its understanding of sacrifice,
another to reintroduce sacrifice in the name of art. For in the aesthetic moment, the very will to power
that Nietzsche had celebrated always threatens to lead to violence. Nor can it be guaranteed that this vio-
lence will be contained, as in a sacrifice. In this intensely poetic moment of the sacrifice we can therefore
recognize also the potential aestheticization of politics which, as Walter Benjamin has observed, lies at the
root of fascism. The key concern here is the question of control. Sacrifice is violent, but it also serves to
contain violence. Fascism, by contrast, may prove purely anarchic.


42 Indeed, Bataille also links sacrifice to questions of identification: In the sacrifice, the sacrificiant identifies
with the animal struck with death. Thus he dies while seeing himself die, and even, in a certain way, by his
own willthe heart with the arm of the sacrifice. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Gallinard,
1988), 12, p. 336, as quoted in Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolulte Master, trans. Douglas Brick
(Stanford, CA: Stanford California Press, 1991), p. 256.
MELANCHOLIA
1 Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1977), p. 31.
2 Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1978), p. 210.
3 Ibid., p. 32.
4 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 31.
5 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), p. 75.
6 Ibid., pp. 7879.
7 Ibid., p. 79.
8 Martha Reineke, Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on Women and Violence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1997), p. 71.
9 John Lechte, Julia Kristeva (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 149.
10 Reineke, Sacrificed Lives, p. 29.
11 Such an argument can then be used by analogy in the context of the legend of Master Manole. The identity
of the masons is effectively constituted by their ability to build structures. By implication, the collapse of
those structures can be read as a thetic crisis, which would correspond to the collapse of ones self identity.
That identity can be restored only by the sacrifice of a victim in the figure of the symbolic Mother. The
most natural manifestation of this figure would be the wife of the mason, especially as she is portrayed
throughout either as an actual mother, or as an expectant one, as is so often the case with Balkan myths of
building sacrifice. The sacrifice of ones wife can be read as a mechanism for restoring self-identity, which
has been undermined by the structural failure of the wall or bridge.
13 Julia Kristeva, Holbeins Dead Christ, in Michel Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body
(New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 241.
14 Ibid., p. 264.
15 Moreover, it suggests a connection already alluded to by Bataille on the links between art and religion.
Bataille describes the crowds emerging from a visit to the Louvre visibly animated by the desire to be

totally like the heavenly apparition with which their eyes are still enraptured, just like worshipers emerg-
ing from church purified and purged of their sins. (Georges Bataille, Museum, in Neil Leach [ed.],
Rethinking Architecture [London: Routledge, 1999], p. 22). Religion therefore seems to offer the same
potential as the work of art to restore the subject psychically.
16 Making art and being an artist, observes the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, keeps you balanced somewhere
between being neurotic and psychotic. (Sam Taylor-Wood, The Times Magazine, October 24, 1998, p. 43).
17 Lechte, Julia Kristeva, p. 187.
18 Ibid., p. 185.
19 Ibid., p. 184.
20 Julia Kristeva, quoted in Lechte, Julia Kristeva, p. 215.
22 Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 175.
24 Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, p. 173.
25 Ibid., p. 175.
27 Ibid.
29 Ibid.; emphasis added.
30 Ibid.
32 Ibid., p. 187.
33 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 79.
35 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 86. These terms refer to quite different modalities of languages,
one a form of topology, one a kind of algebra:
The phenotext of a structure . . . obeys rules of communication and presupposes a sub-

ject of enunciation and an addressee. The genotext, on the other hand, is a process; it
moves through zones that have relative and transitory borders and constitutes a path
that is not restricted to the two poles of univocal information between two full-fledged
subjects. (Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 87).
36 Ibid., p. 88.
37 Ibid., p. 101.
38 Ibid. Here Kristeva echoes Judith Butler, who also sees identity as a process. See p. XXX.
39 Ibid., p. 40.
40 Ibid., p. 43.

41 Obvious parallels can be drawn here with the Adornos thinking on the subject. See p. XXX.
42 Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, p. 25.
43 Ibid., p. 57.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., p. 58.
46 Ibid., p. 60.
47 Ibid., p. 70.
48 Ibid.
49 A perfect emblem for architecture might therefore be the church of Saint Mary of the Conception in
Rome, which had so fascinated Bataille, and was used to illustrate his Dictionary. The crypt contains a series
of chapels whose walls and ceilings are encrusted with the bones of Capuchin monks, in such a way that the
whole ornamentation of those spaces is constituted by human remains. An architecture of entombment
becomes an architecture articulated with the bones of the entombed.
50 Georges Bataille, Architecture, in Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, p. 21.
51 Echoes abound here with the legend of Master Manole. In both stories humans are sacrificed; in both sto-
ries the architect/mason is threatened with incarceration; in both the architect/mason attempts to escape
by flying with wings; and in both the escape attempt ends in death, although Daedalus himself survives.
But it is important to recognize that in each case the architect/mason aims to be the bringer of life, to ani-
mate the inanimate. Indeed, Daedalus enjoyed the reputation of being able to bring statues to life. And
even if Manole plummets to the ground, and is killed, he lives on through the stream that springs up, a
stream that evokes the inspiration of the Muses as the winged horse Pegasus strikes his hoof on the
ground. Nor should we overlook the fact that Pegasus sprang from the blood of Medusa, the petrifying
demon who was eventually beheaded by Perseus. Just as Pegasus, whose origins lay in stone, brought
forth the gushing stream, the inspiration of the Muses, so the architect/mason animates the stone, and
gives the inanimate life.
E C S TA S Y
1 Saint Teresa, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1957), p. 136.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., pp. 140141.
4 The eyes are generally closed, although we may not wish to close them, and if occasionally they remain
open, the soul . . . does not perceive anything or pay attention to what it sees. (Ibid., p. 143).
5 Ibid., p. 142.
6 Ibid., p. 210.
7 At the same time, we should be wary of reading Saint Teresas ecstasy through a sculptural interpretation
of her by a male sculptor, who had no direct contact with her and was no doubt using models whose expres-
sions and poses may have been based on emotions quite different to Saint Teresas own.

8 Sigmund Freud, Charcot (1893f), SE 3, p. 12, as quoted in Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 23.
9 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. Franklin Klaf (New York: Scarborough, 1978), p. 1,
as quoted in Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, p. 40.
10 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, as quoted in Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, p. 41. It should be noted that
Krafft-Ebing was the person responsible for coining the term masochism on the basis of the activities of
his contemporary, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.
11 Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, as quoted in Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, p. 41.
12 Ibid., p. 40.
13 Ibid., p. 41.
14 Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye by Lord Auch (1928), trans. Joachim Neugroschal (Harmonsworth:
Penguin, 1982); Eroticism (1957), trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Marion Boyars, 1987).
15 Bataille, Eroticism, p. 245.
16 Georges Bataille, Guilty, trans. Bruce Boone (Venice, CA: Lapsis Press, 1988), p. 13.
17 Bataille, Eroticism, pp. 224226, 247.
18 Ibid., p. 11.
19 Ibid., pp. 239240.
20 Ibid., p. 249.
21 Ibid., p. 22.
22 Ibid., p. 91.
23 Ibid., p. 25.
24 Jacques Lacan, Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan, Libvre XX: Encore (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1975), p. 70.
25 Ibid., p. 76.
26 Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, pp. 4647.
27 In French the verb jouir is slang for to come.
29 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
31 Renata Salecl, Editorial, New Formations, no. 23 (Summer 1994): v; see also Salecl, Love: Providence or
Despair, ibid., pp. 1324.
32 Slavoj Zizek, From Virtual Reality to the Virtualisation of Reality, in Neil Leach (ed.), Designing for a
Digital World (London: Wiley, 2002), p. 122.
33 Salecl, Editorial, p. v.
34 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984), p. 80.
35 Ibid., p. 61.
36 Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, p. 50.

CONCLUSION
1 Guy Debord, La socit du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967 ; Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1971).
English translations: The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977); and trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
2 Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1996).
3 Fredric Jameson, Cognitive Mapping, in Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader
(London: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 277287.
4 By extension, we might surmise that the opposite tendency to concealmentthe urge to stand outis
perhaps the ultimate form of conformity. For fashion itself operates in this mode. To stand out and to be a
creature of fashion is precisely to be constrained by fashion. Freedom of choice is ultimately only a specter,
as fashion is governed by its own particular dictates.


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MIT Leach_front 1/25/06 9:21 AM Page i

THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND

Camouflage neal leach

2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This book printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

We human beings are governed by a chameleonlike urge to blend in with our

Elizabeth Churchill, Andrew Ballantyne, Shirin Hommann-Sadaat, Laura

opportunity, so that he could make something anonymous of himself by belong-

perfect human chameleonis not unique. The Zelig syndrome is a common

This desire to assimilate potentially contains within it a specifically archi-

the universe. Like animals returning to their traditional breeding grounds, we

Likewise the notion of home extends to include questions of motility and

CONSEQUENCES FOR ARCHITECTURE

Technology is soon appropriated as an extension to our bodies, like some

elaborate a theory of animate knowledge as a further way of understanding how

For Walter Benjamin, the bourgeois cosiness of the nineteenth-century domes-

The difficulty in reflecting on dwelling: on the one hand, there is

great potential significance for aesthetics: I believe that if ideational mimetics

When, now, I perceive a movement like this of greater or lesser size in

original object. Mimesis is therefore an operation that may be evoked both by

ceived as a form of correspondence with the outside world, then Enlightenment

In One-Way Street, Benjamin describes a child playing a game of hide-and-seek:

Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child becomes himself

objects. In so doing they surrender their mimetic desire to the universe of

MIMESIS AND CHILDREN

For Benjamin, it is children who have privileged access to mimetic processes.

The child, on the one hand, approximates himself completely to the

It is as though the childs creative imaginationthe capacity for indulging in

For I was therein Tabarz, Brindisi, Madonna di Campiglio, Wes-

This seemingly throwaway commentI was there, . . . when I gazedis one

with my little bowls and brushes, suddenly in the picture. I became

The artist must be able to regress to early instinctual impulses in

themes. The emphasis on regression and childhood access derives

What is significant, however, is the manner in which we gaze at these represen-

become objectified as they do in discursive language.7 And so, if we are to look

Conceptual thought can be understood as an act of aggression perpe-

By contrast, mimesis for Benjamin is a form of non-sensuous correspondence. If

Mimesis, then, for Adorno, seems to refer to a vital moment of assimilation to

There is, then, an overlap between mimesis, as an aesthetic formulation, and

THE MIMICKING OF MIMESIS

Those blinded by civilization experience their own tabooed mimetic

There is in imagination a prompt stimulation and pulsation (imme-

It would be wrong, however, to reduce mimesis to simple empathy. If true

internal articulations.24 On the other hand, some sense of distance must be

remain open. By contrast, the mimicking of mimesis is often closed. In terms of

As long as the process concerns adaptation to dead nature, it remains

MIMESIS AND ARCHITECTURE

Adornos discussion of mimesis takes on an architectural dimension in his essay

According to Freud, symbolic intention quickly allies itself to tech-

In this essay Adorno is primarily concerned with the architecture of postwar

redundant, purposelessness aesthetic vestige. According to Loos, ornament may

degenerate. He seems to see in ornament, observes Adorno, the mimetic

It is to mimesis, then, that we should turn in order to understand how, for

An interaction takes place between purpose, space and material. . . .

Purpose, then, is a key component in restoring architecture to what it should be,

concerns. Moreover, the aesthetic expressions in which mimesis is embodied

Great architecture gains its suprafunctional language when it works

How are we to understand this expression of function? Clearly it exceeds the

function, even if it does not necessarily incorporate an ontological function of

If we analyze the processes of thought on which magic is based, they

When an Ojebway Indian desires to work evil on any one, he makes a

A variation on this is the Malay practice which involves making a figurine of