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ARCHITECTURE PASSES
noticing entropy, anxiety and indeterminacy
Tiago Torres - Campos
In her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf narrates the stories of the Ramsay family in their holiday house in the Hebrides, Scotland.1 In ‘Time Passes’ – a short middle chapter with no people in it – Woolf weaves ten turbulent years of family misfortunes during WWI with observations about the house crumbling while it is left unvisited. Time both contracts to offer glimpses of war devastation and expands to the point where the reader becomes attuned to dust accumulating on the window sill.
The simultaneity of the two radically different temporalities increases distortion. We learn about the death of important characters – mother, two sons and a daughter – in short parenthetical sentences. Lengthy descriptions ‘give voice’ to the house: people disappear, walls crumble, furniture dissolves and so does space itself. Small air currents creep indoor to inspect the different rooms. As day and night go by, and seasons, and years, the house is suspended in a viscous entropic state. Objects and materials inside and outside the space are not completely solid anymore, but also not yet completely dissolved. The narrative, at times congested to a point where time can no longer be measured, gains contours of delirious prose.
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1 Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) London: Penguin Books, 2000
2 See Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Criterion, T. S. Elliot (ed.) 1926. p32 The essay was reprinted in Forum (1926) under the title ‘Illness: An Unexploited Mine,’ and later, in 1930, as a stand-alone volume by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. See also Virginia Woolf, ‘Gas,’ in The Captain’s Death Bed & Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1950, pp219–22. The relation between the experience of being under anaesthesia and the trauma of psychological distress has been studied before. Eberly, for example, relates expressions such as ‘waters of annihilation’ and the experience of feeling through a narrow hole that progressively dilates both to the metaphor of childbirth and to the ‘dissociative state related to sexual abuse,’ which Woolf survived from at a young age (See David Eberly, ‘Gassed: Virginia Woolf and Dentistry,’ in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Issue 89. New Haven: Southern Connecticut State University, 2016.
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Though the tone in ‘Time Passes’ is apparently calm – or calm enough to notice and care about dust falling – it coats anxiety, obviously related to war and death, and possibly the influenza pandemic as well. Dust becomes a way to read entropy as disorienting depression. The viscous states of matter denote a disquiet sense of groundlessness before a world undergoing profound and uneasy transitions. As the house and its structures slowly disintegrate, so too do the world orders and systems of reference, changing irreversibly before and after the ten years in the middle chapter.
Extending beyond the novel, Woolf’s prose carries fraught significance with its undertones of melancholy, anxiety and paranoia. These are recurring themes in her work and personal life, punctuated with mental and physical illness, and they are foregrounded more explicitly in some of her essays, such as ‘On Being Ill’ (1925) or ‘On Gas’ (1929), where she links hallucinatory experiences at the dentist with the trauma of physical pain and emotional distress.2
If we can read Woolf’s unsettling account of ashes and dust as architecture – which I’m willing to, in the way one accepts architecture as a temporary suspension of entropy – we should also be prepared to labour through our states of anxiety and paranoia brought forward by the inevitable disintegration of any architectural condition, especially when it reflects any ethical, political, and social tension in key moments of transition. In this short essay, noticing a most humble material – dust on a windowsill – is also studied as a work of the mind as it begins to recover from these states. Thus positioned, architecture perhaps verges on the idea of geologic,3 through which an ethics of matter opens the possibility for noticing conditions connected at radically different scales.4 *
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3 Geologic is here defined centrally to the Anthropocene theory, as a set of entangled relational conditions that emanate their own aesthetic and cultural sensations. It enacts ways of thinking geologically with and through landscape and architectural conditions, by accepting human existence entangled within more-than-human materialities that unfold across deep time and at multiple scales. Ways of thinking attuned to the geologic can only partially reveal the complexity of infinitely connected conditions.
4 In conversation with architect Tom Wiscombe, Timothy Morton refers specifically to ‘Time Passes’ to discuss architecture. He says that in Woolf’s narrative of the house ‘there’s [sic] no people in it. It is just dust falling in the sunlight in the window frame and that kind of stuff. And it is so beautiful. … And it is how you have to think if you are in architectural space.’ (Morton with Wiscombe, Sci-Arc).
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Woolf’s description of the house slowly dissolving reveals a desire to engage with entropy, similar in many ways to how dust has been described architecturally as a spatial index for dynamic readings beyond registrations of building or form. In ‘Time Passes’ the house becomes the narrator of the passage of time, not as an internal and intuitive Bergsonian duration – as in other parts of the novel – but as an external and material poetic account of matter. The house becomes an assemblage of insentient apparatuses that scrutinize it internally and register entropy.
If dust unsettles established orders of permanence and control, Teresa Stoppani then claims that engaging in a way of thinking that notices dust as a transitive verb – dusting, meaning both removing through cleansing and sprinkling with pulverised matter – implies a radical approach to architecture that questions existing official histories or institutionalized spaces of representation, and demands new systems of reference.5 Dust as agent of performative change that forces time to be brought into the architectural realm, may desecrate architecture – perhaps the reason why it has been consistently removed from representational systems – but it also activates a relation between ‘making and undoing … at work with and on the materials of architecture.’6 Dust exerts both external and internal pressure, that is, it both accumulates on architecture and breeds from within. An architectural practice that notices dust in the ways suggested by George Bataille, is one that engages more honestly and openly with entropy by registering materiality across different stages of integration and disintegration.7 *
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5 Stoppani studies convergences between Bataille’s 1920s texts ‘Dust’, ‘Formless’ and ‘Architecture,’ all three included as entries in his 1920s ‘Critical Dictionary.’ Teresa Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille),’ in The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, 2007. p437
6 Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions,’ 441.
7 See Georges Bataille, ‘Critical Dictionary,’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica. London: Atlas Press, 1995. pp35–36; 42–43; 51–52
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Woolf’s narrative of the house is activated by light, both cosmic and electric. The sun dictates the opposition between diurnal stillness and nocturnal chaos, and it varies seasonally. We are allowed into a world of entropy witnessed through the insentient ‘eye’ of the house and the help of a rhythmic lighthouse beam. The lighthouse, both distant and present throughout the novel, pulsates light into the house – two short beams and a longer one – allowing it ‘to scrutinise’ its own interior. It is through light that Woolf describes dust sedimenting, both chemically and geologically.8
Light photons also accumulate on the surfaces inside the house as they lose energy and sediment in materials weathering through bleaching or fading. Woolf describes the house as an architectural condition that exists in between states of matter, in between still being solid and already disintegrating into particles. Light helps diffuse boundaries across scale and it expands the threshold between the dusty interior and the much wider territory it connects with, to the point when it stops being any of those specifically, or in fact, acquiring the possibility of becoming any of those at any given moment. The expanded threshold becomes a porosity of light, waves and particles.9 It is something not quite architecture anymore but not yet geology either.
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8 The properties and qualities of light help Woolf examine in detail the dust particles in suspension and observe their eventual deposition in layers that coat the house itself. In chemistry, this tendency for particles in suspension to settle out of the fluid that keeps them in fluctuation and come to rest against a barrier is called sedimentation. In geology, the definition of sedimentation differs; it often refers to the opposite of erosion and it involves actions of building up in layers or horizons.
9 When zooming out of To the Lighthouse to look more widely into Woolf’s work, it becomes possible to relate some of her literary devices with significant discoveries in physics throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it is not uncommon to read about the relations between Woolf’s stream of consciousness and Einstein’s relative space-time continuum. Woolf was a contemporary of Einstein. The Theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published a year earlier. She was very much attuned to the scientist’s revolutionary ideas, mainly through her friendship with Bertrand Russell. In To the Lighthouse, more specifically, the architectural space is revealed through light and dust, engaging even if in a free, literary sense, to the wave-particle quantum model. There is a significant number of scholars who assert Woolf’s tangible and premonitory relationship to the wave-particle model that came to define quantum physics throughout the century, in anticipation of the physicists themselves, like Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, or Schrödinger. It is precisely this duality of qualifying matter according to the wave-particle quantum model that Timothy Morton attributes to the qualities of architectural space described in ‘Time Passes’. See Paul Tolliver Brown, ‘Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2009. pp39–62; and Mark Hussey, ‘To the Lighthouse and Physics: The Cosmology of David Bohm and Virginia Woolf’, in New Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Helen Wussow. Dallas: Contemporary Research Press,1995 pp79–97 For a more thorough explanation of how Morton engages with Woolf’s novel, see Timothy Morton in conversation with Tom Wiscombe, in Sci-Arc (2016), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2lbtwd3KZU
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Starting with a perhaps quintessential Scottish discussion of whether to visit the lighthouse depending on the weather, the narrative is also coated with cinematic qualities akin to film noir, which denote a disembodied and dislocated experience of voyeurism. The noir-like experience is not unexpected given Woolf’s interest in cinema, then still an emerging art.10 In her brief essay ‘The Cinema’ from 1926, Woolf focuses on the qualities the moving picture eventually adds to still photographs mainly through the manipulation of time.11 Written synchronously with To the Lighthouse, it seems plausible that the experiences Woolf describes in ‘The Cinema’ may have affected her writing more widely.12 In the essay, Woolf seems to load the marginal with endless possibility with the description of her experience at a screening of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, when she suddenly glimpses ‘a shadow shaped like a tadpole [that] appeared at one corner of the screen.’ The experience, she adds, triggered ‘some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain.’13
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10 Laura Marcus argues that ‘Time Passes’ ‘can be read as a form of experimental cineplay,’ through which Woolf’s writing as ‘ghostly realism’ is indicative of film as a media that is ‘complete without us.’ Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p120, quoted in Caleb Sivyer, The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter (PhD Thesis, School of English, Communication & Philosophy, Cardiff University, 2015), p22
The ghostly presence of Mrs Ramsay at the end of the chapter is described as a film projection on to the interior of the decaying house: ‘… and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand …’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p149)
11 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, in The Nation and Anthenaeum Vol. 39, No. 13 (1926), pp381–383: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/thecinema-by-virginia-woolf-from-the-nation-and-athenaeum.
12 The ten years between the first and third chapters of the novel also have an important resemblance in the gap of ten years that Woolf alludes to in ‘The Cinema’. In the essay, these ten years pass between ‘the present in which the early films are being viewed and the past of the realities they record’ (Laura Marcus, ‘Cinema and Modernism,’ in Discovering Literature: 20th Century (2016), available online: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/cinema-andmodernism)
13 Before Woolf, and at a screening of a Lumière film, Maxim Gorki comes remarkably close to this undoing of the orders in representational systems with his attention to the marginal and the eccentric, when he glimpses a strange flicker passing through the screen, which stirs the picture to life.
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Woolf’s glimpses of the house, seemingly tangential to the novel’s narrative, are unexpected appearances that materialise and immediately vanish. They resemble the accidental interferences flickering in old cinema screens, which are marginal to the projected movie, but strong in triggering a way of thinking that is alien to the chronological order of the projection. Instead, they dislocate the audience’s attention and briefly detach them from the cinematic immersion. They augment the thick and porous threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. Light in ‘Time Passes’ does not only scrutinise the surfaces it dusts; it examines the dusted dust itself. It connects the making and undoing of materiality across deep temporal scales, not necessarily always in a chronological order but also sometimes noticing how marginalia are dragged laterally or obliquely into the described scene. It may even allow the following of a dust speckle in its queer movement before it deposits. The interferences unsettle the immersive experience and glitch the brain into a world of different dimensions. The flashing light not only accentuates paranoia, giving the scene an uneasy feeling of being controlled or surveyed by military searchlights, but it also complicates time. The story unfolds with the expectation of that visit, which never actually happens. Unlike dust, which is literally tangible, the lighthouse is a future that is there as expectation; a destination illuminated in brief rhythmic flashes, but never fully realized.14
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14 The literary formulation rehearses a previous journey in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out. Deceivingly conventional in her plot, Woolf’s proposed voyage is less external – when Rachel embarks on ship to South America – than it is internal – when the main character journeys from a sheltered education to emancipation. When Rachel dies, the journey remains unclear; an anticipation that never happens and whose end approaches when she ‘kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move.’ See Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915, New York: The Modern Library, 2021).
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Woolf notices dust as a labour of the mind in its process to recover from depression. She works through material (dis-)organizations and humble matter as a way of engaging with the world. The process may help thinking of an architecture that can help address our indeterminate times and refine an ethics of matter that begins to explain how matter comes to matter, that is, an ethics engaged with productive reconfigurations of matter, and how it ‘feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’15
Woolf’s architectural condition is not just reconfigured in space or time; it reconfigures the spacetime it activates both inside and outside the house. Noticing is a set of decisions of how the process is registered and how it may be continuously reconfigured. In traversing across scale – from the dust speckle on the windowsill to the vastness of the ocean illuminated by the lighthouse beam – noticing becomes a way of ‘knowing [that] is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility.’16 It suggests the need to be accountable for the marks it causes and the entanglements it chooses to notice.
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15 Karen Barad, “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”, interviewed by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Open Humanities Press, 2012. pp48–70
See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007
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In an age when architectural practice committedly engages with the geological impacts of human-induced action, stories like Woolf’s may expand in their possibility to narrate the anxiety of having to live tangled amongst planetary existential crises, which intensify and complicate sea level rise, pollution, erosion, and socio-environmental injustice. These narratives may also talk about the possibility of retrieving to some state of humility, one where it matters how stories are told, and how they productively reconstruct the world every time they are told.17
One could argue that Woolf’s stream of consciousness in the novel – which in ‘Time Passes’ becomes more of a stream of unconscious consciousness – reveals an idea of architecture that verges on the geologic.18 By steering away from conceptions of architecture as material organizations to come closer to poetic accounts of matter, we may also become more attuned to thoughts that notice and engage in productive transitions of living indeterminately.
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17 Haraway quotes what she considers to be an important lesson from social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with). … It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.
Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. quoted in Donna J. Haraway, SF, 4.
The author makes a similar argument in relation to the experience of Manhattan’s environmental phenomena in Tiago Torres-Campos, ‘Duck and Cover: Experiencing the Anthropocene in 21st Century Manhattan’, in Pidgin Magazine, Issue 27. Princeton: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2020. pp132–147
18 In To the Lighthouse, light enables both the stream of consciousness and, one could argue, a correlated state of mind that will be here called a stream of unconscious consciousness.
TIAGO TORRES-CAMPOS s a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He co-edited ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ (2022) and completed a PhD in Architecture by Design, through which he explored architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic.
