AEDIFICIUM SACER
Paolo Emilio Pisano AA School 4th Year 2017/2018 Commanding Architecture?
“Terminology is the poetic moment of thought�1
In his essay Profanation, Giorgio Agamben reflects upon the definition of a Homo Sacer as: One who belongs to the gods, has survived the rite that separated him from other men and continues to lead an apparently profane existence among them. Although he lived in the profane world, there inheres in his body an irreducible residue of sacredness. This removes him from normal commerce with his kind and exposes him to the possibility of violent death, which returns him to the gods to whom he truly belongs. As for his fate in the divine sphere, he cannot be sacrificed and is excluded from the cult because his life is already the property of the gods, and yet, insofar as it survives itself, so to speak, it introduces an incongruous remnant of profanity into the domain of the sacred.2 This definition builds upon a previous elaboration of the attribute of Sacer and the role of consecration and profanation as understood by Roman Jurists: Sacred or religious were the things that in some way belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could neither be sold nor held in lien, neither given for usufruct nor burdened by servitude. Any act that violated this special unavailability, which reserved these things exclusively for the celestial gods (in which case they were properly called “sacred”) or for the gods of the underworld (in which case they were simply called “religious”), was sacrilegious. And if “to consecrate” (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, “to profane” meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men. The great jurist Trebatius thus wrote, “In the strict sense, profane is the term for something that was once sacred or religious and is returned to the use and property of men”. And “pure” was the place that was no longer allotted to the gods of the dead and was now “neither sacred, nor holy, nor religious, freed from all names of this sort”.3 1 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays (Stanford University Press, 2009). 2 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 3 Agamben.
While sacratio aims to reserve a thing for the exclusive availability of the gods through an absolute removal of it from the sphere of human use or commerce, the definition of Homo Sacer opens up the possibility for something to have gone through a consecrative (or sacrificial) ritual and survive it. The survival thus places the subject in an ambiguous plane of existence, where although persisting in a profane world, “there inheres in his body an irreducible residue of sacredness.”4 In this sense “the adjective sacer means both ‘augustus, consecrated to the gods’ and (as Freud noted) ‘cursed, excluded from the community.’”5 There always is a substantiation of the removal of the subject from the human sphere through an apparatus – i.e. “a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge”6 – which is defined as effecting and regulating the separation through “a series of meticulous rituals”. This apparatus is sacrifice. The sacrificial act often involved a literal caesura – implicating a cut or separation – of its subject, to validate the acquisition of a sacred attribute for certain elements. While part of it, generally the entrails in the case of living beings, where reserved for the exclusive availability of the gods, another part – generally the outer skin – was profaned and returned to the use of man through contagione (contact): “in the machine of sacrifice, sacred and profane represent the two poles of a system in which a floating signifier travels from one domain to the other without ceasing to refer to the same object. This is precisely how the machine ensures the distribution of use among humans and divine beings and can eventually return what had been consecrated to the gods to men. Hence the mingling of the two operations in Roman sacrifice, in which one part of the same consecrated victim is profaned by contagion and consumed by men, while another is assigned to the gods.”7 What I am suggesting here is a reading of the ever more meticulous strategies and methodologies of development as a spectacular removal of the sacred from the strictly institutional sphere of religion or government and into the crafted object. As such, these are bent on producing (knowingly or unknowingly) a new paradigm which has assimilated the “touch that disenchants”8 (sic) and has learned to direct it to the parts which wants to be consumed; existing at the same time as a profane and sacred element on the human plane, but with specific rules of use. This paradigm will here take the name of Aedificium Sacer. If, on the footsteps of Agamben’s definition and the context of Palestinian territory, Forensic Architecture identified the existence of “the diverse manifestations of the contemporary sacred”9 in a series of military, religious and quasi-secular institutions; I suggest one could look at the contemporary sacred in London as comprising a conundrum of 4 Agamben. 5 Agamben. 6 Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus? 7 Agamben, Profanations. 8 Agamben. 9 Alessandro Petti, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman, Architecture After Revolution (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014).
identity (identitario), social and economic quasi-institutions. The transposition to the sacred is thus commonly manifested as the image of the historic city, supposedly possessing an innate identity and originality – which needs to be referred to in its double etymological meaning indicating a non-derivative proper character and suggestion of belonging – and its individual representatives, in the guise of Listed Buildings. The role of the crafted object in this context is thus inseparable from the assignation of an aesthetic value relative to an inherent distinctive identity, which following the description proposed until now will be referred to as the value of the original. But the qualitative designation of original is not necessarily required to apply to the entirety of the crafted object; as long as the recognisable – and extensively exposed or expos-able – identity components are preserved. Thus, I would suggest that the quality of original is in this context a chiefly visual-aesthetic character and that the possibility of a caesura between the core constituent parts of the originality attribute – the visible, exposed or exposable ones – and the rest of the object – and their disposal – does not invalidate its reading. The historical apparatus of sacrifice, recounts Agamben by quoting Benveniste, was substantiated by a binary relation between the spoken word and the physical act: “the power of the sacred act lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that
Gas holders in London Oval and King’s Cross. The Aedificium Sacer before and after the sacrifice.
reproduces and stages it.”10 While it is essential that this binary condition remains actual in the transposition to the crafted object as a fundamental relation (inseparabile); the ritual has been in its course spoliated and replaced by a mystical protocol or procedure establishing how the intervention is staged on the crafted object itself and the narrative or myth surrounding it acquired the traits of the litany. The suggestion of a litany (litaneia) implicates the presence of two facets to this term, which correspond to a prolonged series of invocations and supplications alternated by recurring formulaic responses and the inference of the very same supplication (litanos), which has a character of negotiation and persuasion. The corollary of the term is the necessary presence of the congregation to enable the alternate nature of the process and relate to the further extreme presented by the figure now occupying the previously empty sacrificial altar – in its clear resemblance to a throne and a stage – and sanctioning the enacting of a Mysterium Fideis – a spectacular exhibition brought to the eyes of the faithful as a transcendental thus fundamentally incomprehensible but acceptable truth. The figure in the altar is to become the Aedificium Sacer. The quest leading to its encounter can then be read in these terms as the sacrificial ritual operated on the historic building to separate a sacred part from a disenchanted, or profaned one. This is accomplished through a spectacular reversal of the relation of interiority and exteriority in the victima; with a consequent complete consumption of the entrails and cultic exhibition of the outer skin: “What cannot be used is, as such, given over to consumption or to spectacular ex10 Agamben, Profanations.
Battersea Power Station, 2013. The altar.
hibition.�11 Once the consumption of the entrails has been completed, the sacred element is ready to be stuffed and prepared for its future use as Aedificium Sacer, which is given to the use of men over specific conditions and rules. The first section of The Society of The Spectacle is introduced by Guy Debord with an intriguing title, which fittingly fluctuates across the totality of the work without ever been closely pinpointed: Separation Perfected. It is interesting to understand how this term is closely followed by a digression on the sacred through an introductory quote of Feuerbach: But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence‌ Illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness. Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The Essence of Christianity12 The conclusion of the separative process can here be read as the perfecting of the sacri11 Agamben. 12 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, New York, 1995).
Battersea Power Station, 2013. The faithful
ficial ritual, where the Aedificium Sacer, through the act of a literal caesura, acquires a new symbolical meaning close to religious reliquary properties, which while elevating it to a transcendental value also inescapably condemns it to a condition of being other from its original self. The process recalls once more the properties of the Mysterium Fidei and the practices of Transubstantiation and Transfiguration – the symbolical and apparent process of becoming something other than what ostensibly manifest; either in the physical substance (the wine becoming the blood of Christ during the Eucharist) or in the symbolical potential (Christ becoming radiant glory upon a mountain and showing the perfection of life in Heaven). The curse of the Aedificium Sacer consist though in the impossibility of reaching a complete otherness through this separation, falling back into a vicious circle of substitution of the original signifier by its sign or representation. But it could be argued that the representation is the likely end product of interest in contemporary practice; this is what argued by Debord when describing the emergence of a Society of The Spectacle, and the goal of consumption of the entrails, the non-exposable part of the Aedificium Sacer, is thus closely related and complemented by the spectacular exhibition of what is now a transfigured other. For one to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings – tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behaviour. Since the spectacle’s job is to cause a world that is no longer directly perceptible to be seen via different specialized mediations, it is inevitable that it should elevate the human sense of sight to the special place once occupied by touch; the most abstract of the senses, and the most easily deceived, sight is naturally the most readily adaptable to present-day society’s generalized abstraction. This is not to say, however, that the spectacle itself is perceptible to the naked eye – even if that eye is assisted by the ear. The spectacle is by definition immune from human activity, inaccessible to any projected review or correction. It is the opposite of dialogue. Wherever representation takes on an independent existence, the spectacle re-establishes its rule.13 The representation of the Aedificium Sacer can be seen in a way as carrying on the preten13 Debord.
Advertisement for Greenwhich Peninsula development. The iocus.
Advertisement for Deptford Arklow Road development. The myth.
sion of originality through a literal erasure of the life entertained by it; the schizophrenic functioning of a zombie-like entity which continues to work through the endless repetition of a protocol: “The spectacle in its generality is a concrete inversion of life, and, as such, the autonomous movement of non-life.”14 While it could be argued that the non-life of the Aedificium Sacer has a resemblance to the bare-life postulated by Agamben, it is necessary to note that the basic attribute of the Aedificium Sacer is the capacity of retaining a symbolism of originality through the recounting of the myth of its origin. A guide to your new Home and Neighbourhood 15 “The myth will become the new history,” these are the authoritative words Camillo Bo-
ano borrows from a promotional video of a new city in Cambodia, where the splendour of the projected city is ostensibly derived from a mythical condition once achieved by the Khmer culture at Angkor Wat. While the Cambodian precedent draws a hyperbolic line in time that relates to a distant past which has now acquired mythical attributes, we can think at the movement of time in the city as a greatly accelerated and non-linear one, where the speed of change compresses the historical layers of the city into a thin stratigraphy and narratives are recounted, multiplied and transform into myth accordingly. In such a way, formulations such as ‘Industrial Past’ or ‘Victorian Period’ already acquire the aura of the myth and can be used as the physical basis of originality on which to construct the new history. The mediation of the sign is thus the main element of substantiation of the new history being constructed, which by drawing a direct correlation to it, also validates it and regulates the discourse around it, in Debord’s words “[t]he spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”16 The formulaic nature of the sign does eventually terminate in the wordplay – in an almost Situationist recuperation of Agamben’s description of iocus17 – to command the myth towards the intended direction and spell out the specific rules of use of the Aedificium Sacer. It is thus through a mechanism of inclusion into a certain set of foundation myths and identity conundrums that the cycle of production of the disenchanted touch controls the exclusivity of access and participation to the feast consuming the sacred and the conditional openness to further contagion.
14 Debord. 15 Camillo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, ‘Fences and Profanations: Questioning the Sacredness of Urban Design’, Journal of Urban Design 19, no. 5 (20 October 2014): 700–721. 16 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. 17 Agamben, Profanations.
Forensic Architecture, in Architecture After Revolution identifies the moment of inoperativity as “the most radical condition of architecture – the very moment that power has been unplugged: the old uses are gone, and new uses not yet defined”18 and recognises this as the most apt moment in time in which the potential for subversion of the institutional order can be achieved. In the context of the Aedificium Sacer, a subversive use can be seen as an early form of contagion, which the consecrative ritual will eventually redirect and spoliate of its subversive attributes, often elevating it to an untimely martyr for the cause. Discussions around the “inoperative operation”19 of certain paradigms which produce “above all a deactivation of existing values and powers”20 offer a glimpse of the destitution of previous orders by acknowledging that “Only a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely neutralized”21; and possibly the inoperativity process can construct a couter-apparatus. While the moment could be right though, the form of the counter-apparatus, in a similar way to the Agambeian community, has yet to come. 18 Petti, Hilal, and Weizman, Architecture After Revolution. 19 Giorgio Agamben and Stephanie Wakefield, ‘What Is a Destituent Power?’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (1 February 2014). 20 Agamben and Wakefield. 21 Agamben and Wakefield.
Deptford Safa House, Arklow Road. The inoperativity.
Bibliography - Agamben, Giorgio. Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone Books, 2007. - Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus?’ And Other Essays. Stanford University Press, 2009. - Agamben, Giorgio, and Stephanie Wakefield. ‘What Is a Destituent Power?’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (1 February 2014): 65–74. - Camillo Boano and Giorgio Talocci, ‘Fences and Profanations: Questioning the Sacredness of Urban Design’, Journal of Urban Design 19, no. 5 (20 October 2014): 700–721. - Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, New York, 1995. - Petti, Alessandro, Sandi Hilal, and Eyal Weizman. Architecture After Revolution. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014.