Piranesi's "Campo Marzio": An Experimental Design Author(s): Stanley Allen and G. B. Piranesi Source: Assemblage, No. 10 (Dec.

, 1989), pp. 70-109 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171144 . Accessed: 13/03/2011 11:59
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Stanley
Piranesi's
An

Allen

Marzio: Campo ExperimentalDesign

Stanley Allen is an architect workingin New YorkCity and a project editor for Assemblage.

The archeological mask of Piranesi'sCampo Marzio fools no one: this is an experimentaldesign and the city, therefore, remains an unknown. Manfredo and Tafuri,Architecture Utopia,1973 What is the nature of an experimentalaction? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen. of Musicin the UnitedStates," JohnCage,"History Experimental 1958 To locate precisely the beginnings of modernity has been a preoccupation of recent critical and historical work.' The work presented here seeks to suspend this "search for origins," proposing instead to enter into the classical at a strategic moment: a seam opened by Piranesi's "necrophiliac passion for the glory of ancient Rome."2 What is uncovered in the decay of the classical is not only a latent modernity (which could be a parasite upon this disintegrating body), but also the instability of the classical itself. Within Piranesi's project, the "naturalness" of the language of classical architecture (already called into question a century before) is destroyed by a contamination and fragmentation completely at odds with historically developed ideas of the wholeness of language. By directing architecture's gaze back upon itself with this "morbid precision," by demonstrating the futility of a return to origins, Piranesi establishes in the Campo Marzio a plane - a shifting, indeterminant plane - upon which the horizons of classicism and the most radical project of modernity momentarily coincide. It is for this reason that 71

1. G. B. Piranesi,frontispiece to IICampo Marzio dell'antica Roma, 1762

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2. Theater plan with performance notations

twentieth-centuryreadingsof Piranesihave underlineda dissonance and disjunction existing alongside of the classical: Sergei Eisenstein has called this explosion of concrete Manfredo relations in space an "ecstatictransfiguration"; Tafuri has referredto the application of the "technique of shock"to the foundations of rationality.Duchamp, Picabia, Kafka, and Roussel have all echoed the spirit of Piranesi in which, Tafuri writes, "the obsessivereiteration of the inventions reduces the whole organismto a sort of gigantic 'useless machine.'"'4 This project intends an excavation- through drawingand writing- of the "negativeutopia"drawnby Piranesifor the Campo Marzio of Rome. I have conceived of Piranesi's large plan (the grande pianta) as a site to be colonized, covered over, and modified, as when a building is erected on ruins. My attempt is to uncover and articulatethe surplus residue of meaning that confirms the inexhaustibility of a work of architecture. This process of rereadingestablishes a relationshipparallel to that which Piranesimaintained toward his own (archaeological)sources:dreamlike, inventive, and improvisational. Given this inexhaustibility,the evident surplus meaning, I would suggest that the only way to confront adequatelythe project of Piranesi is with another project. I have maintained a strict parallelismof drawingsand text. The drawings are independent of specific referencesto the text but must be read together with it. Analytical drawingsmap out the relation of the Piranesi reconstructionto existing ruins and the context - real and fictional - of eighteenthcentury Rome. Projectionsand constructionssuggest new ways of reading the notations of Piranesi'sproject. The text follows an absolutely normative pattern:site, context, program. Each of these three terms, however, is rereadin light of Piranesi'sown intentions, and the doubling of the middle term "text-context" intends to disruptthe stabilityof the three-partstructure. As this project has acquired shape and certainty,I have not sought an elaboration of meaning, but rather,a greater precision of detail and description, remembering,as Robbe-Grilletsaid of Kafka,that "even what the hero is searching for vanishes before the obstinancy of his pursuit, his trajectories,his movements; they alone are made apparent, they alone are made real."''

Site: The Fictional Present

Now let us, by a flightof the imagination, that suppose Romeis not a humanhabitation a psychical but entitywitha similarly long and copiuspast- an entity,thatis to say,in whichnothing whichhas once come into existence havepassed will awayand all the earlier of to continue existalongside phases development the latestone. This wouldmeanthatin Romethe palaces the of of Caesars the Septizonium Septimius and Severus wouldstill be risingto theirold heighton the Palatine thatcastleof and on S. Angelowouldstillbe carrying its battlements beautiful the statues whichgracedit untilthe seigeof the goths,and so on. Butmorethanthis. In the placeoccupied the Palazzo by Cafferelli wouldonce morestand without Palazzo the having been removed the Templeof Jupiter and Capitolinus; thisnot of saw only in its latestshape,as the Romans the Empire it, but also in its earliest forms and one, whenit stillshowedEtruscan wasornamented terra-cotta with antefixes.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930

The problem of site is fundamentalto Piranesi'sproject. "Beforetreatingof the worksof the Campo Marzio,"he notes, "it must be said in what place it was located, and what was its extent in ancient times." He defers here to the authorityof classical texts:"The Campo Marzio, therefore, accordingto these witnesses, was that level ground [pianura] of the City between the hills and the Tiber, situated at one time outside of the walls.'6 From here follow descriptionsof the grandeurof the Campo Marzio and of its architecture.But what motivatesPiranesiin his choice of site? Why, in a projectdevoted to reconstructing ancient Rome, has he ignored the historic, monumental center of Rome, where the existing ruins were concentratedand stood more or less free of contemporarybuilding?Cerromane, he tainly, in other volumes, such as the Antichitac had alreadydescribedthese monuments, but this still fails to explain the inordinantspace given over to the Campo Marzio; nor in the other worksdo we find the topographic and planimetricpreoccupationsthat characterizethe Campo Marzio. What, then, is the basis for Piranesi's interest in this (literally)marginalzone, "outsideof the city walls"?And paradoxically,if this site is marginalwith respectto ancient Rome, it coincides with the most densely built and crowded area of contemporaryeighteenth-century Rome: the lowland marsheswhere, since the fall of imperial Rome, a crowdedmedieval city had grown up.
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The first clue appearsin the dedicatoryletter to Piranesi's volume of plates:The Campo Marzio, he notes, had always been dedicated to the training of youth and military exercise;but during the empire it was opened to other uses - pleasure and spectacle. As more and more buildings were erected for such pursuits, "the Campo no longer appearedto be an appendageof Rome, but, more properly, Rome, the sovereign of all cities, an appendageof the Campo, as Strabone has attested."'Piranesihas faithfully mirroredthis inversion, and gone even further. In his variant, the city itself is absent, a blank space on the drawing. 8 This marginal status is consistent historicallyand is reinforced by an examination of the programmaticlegends of the building representedin Piranesi'splan. Buildings of military use are evident, as are those devoted to spectacle and to the culture of the body. But the plan is dominated by the immense figures of two funerarymonuments to Hadrianand Augustus. Lying outside of the consecrated ground defined by the city walls, the Campo Marzio had traditionallybeen the site of funeralsand burials. Thus the urban texture of the Campo Marzio is also characterized by marginality,by otherness. It becomes the locus of all that is excluded from the city proper:the armoriesand military exercise yards;the stadia and gymnasia;the amphitheatersand circuses;the gardensand pleasure fountains; the cryptsand tombs. The conventional institutionsof the imperial city are absent. Save in the funerarymonuments, there is no civic presence;streetsare nonexistent, as is the whole domestic fabric of the city. If the site plan is the result of an inversion, the city having been folded back upon itself, something analogous happens in Piranesi'srepresentationof time. A second clue appears in a plate entitled ScenographiaCampi Martii. The use of a theatricalterm here is not insignificant. It inscribesthis view within the whole problematicof Piranesi'srelation to the theater and to scenic design. But, paradoxically,this image, by the criteriaof the traditionalscena per angolo with which Piranesi is often identified, has none of the conventional scenographicelements or illusions. The point of view is from above; the horizon is excluded. The ruined fragments, covered with hieroglyphics, occupy the frontal

plane and establish a barrierto the view of the site itself, markingout precisely on the image that they frame the extent of the Campo Marzio as it is renderedon the large plan. Piranesi depicts the monuments themselves in ruins, indicated by trace or fragment. He accuratelyshows their locations and the surroundingtopography,establishinga correspondenceto the actual condition of the ruins in the mid-eighteenth century. In this way Piranesi'sdrawing acknowledgesthe passageof history. But the fiction of the drawingis to present these objects shorn from their actual context, as if the interveningyears had passedwithout the of occupation and transformation this part of Rome, as if the level of the terrainhad not risen, burying the colonnades up to their capitals. The Stadium of Domition, for example, is indicated by a track in the earth and a solitary structuralbay, the remains, perhaps, of the imperial box. Its figure is preserved,empty, in denial that a medieval town had grown up precisely in this area, that the form of the circus, while still preserved,exists as a densely built urban space createdby the churches and houses constructedover the ruins of the stadium. This selective erasureof historyhas a parallel in certain of Piranesi'svedute, where he repeatsthis operationby dismantling subsequent construction and presentingthe view of the ancient structureas a spectralruin.9 This makes clear a fundamental ambivalence in Piranesi:the simultaneous negation and affirmationof the value of history. But, further, the equivalence establishedbetween the piled-up fragmentsin the foregroundand the ruins on the site seems to undercut the importance of topographyand precise location. Within the compressedspace of the foreground, each fragmentrepresents,through a metonymic operation, an entire monument, ready to be moved into place on the almost tabula rasa in the background.In this sense, Tafuri'scharacterizationof the Campo Marzio as does not seem exaggerated. "a formless heap of fragments" And the actual displacement of monuments may be verified by comparing the Campo Marzio with the Severan marble plan of Rome.10
75

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The Scenographiasignals the procedureof doubt to which Piranesi subjects the raw data. His is a violent act of distancing the project from the real historicalcontinuity of Rome in order to reinvent that history. In ideological terms, this operation is highly ambivalent, in as much as it engages in the very manipulations it seeks to criticize. With history and memory brought into play in this equivocal manner, we are left to wonder, given the fiction of the startingpoint, whether the subsequent moves can be any less contingent. This elasticity of historical time may also be observedin the representations the large plan itself. A careful examiof nation of this plan reveals that the project of the Campo Marzio anticipates its condition as ruin. This applies equally to a formal strategythat encodes the passageof time in the collisive juxtapositionoccurring in the city when a site is continually built over as it does to the representation itself. The only device capable of resolvingthe

ambiguities in the plan cut (sometimes a roof plan, at othof ers a cellar or foundation) is the representation ruins. And this is a third clue: like a primitiveX-ray, the representation in ruins actually clarifiesthe structure,its previous history, the traces of its past occupation and transformations. At this point, the referenceto the well-knownpassagefrom Civilization and its Discontents cited at the beginning of this section becomes clear. Freud and Piranesihave each radicalizeda condition existing in Rome itself:the selective persistenceof traces and fragmentsof the past continually juxtaposedwith the processof decay and deterioration.For Piranesi, this condition is made thematic:he turns the proformal cess of decay and deteriorationinto a paradigmatic method. This is consistent throughouthis work, and the systematicnature of this transformation distinguishesit from a picturesqueromanticism. For Freud, the persistence of memory traces is the key to using the metaphorof the city. Yet the impossibility,in physical terms, of the
76

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conditions. And these new conditions are uncontrollable - open to chance and free play. Here Piranesiconfronts another paradox,and in so doing anticipatescertain modernistpreoccupations.In the Campo Marzio, he is the author of that which has no single author. In the city, time is representedby the accumulation of materialand its decay and transformation; this is why Piranesi takes pains to representhimself as the and not the inventor, of the form of the Campo recorder, Marzio. The internal consistency of a work authored all at once is absent, by necessity. Two options emerge simultaneously: the autonomy of the discipline, a set of intrinsic, self-referentialrules that would supercedethe subjectivity of a single author, and its inverse corollary,the uncontrolled play of chance and contingency."
6. Man Ray,Dust Breeding, 1920. Photograph of Marcel Duchamp'sThe Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even signed by Man Rayand Duchamp.

scene he describessuggestsanother reading:the architecture of the city, too, is subject to amnesia and displacement. But, paradoxically,for Piranesi, this is precisely how the negative of history and the city may returnas a positive value for an architecturalculture "condemnedto operate with degradedmeans.""1 Finally, then: campo, a plane, a (battle)field; pianura, a level ground. But also tabula, a table or tablet. This is how Piranesi representsthe plan of the Campo Marzio as a rough stone tablet, clamped to the wall with heavy brackets,worn and crackedat the edges. The figuresof the plan show no respect for the edges of the tablet. They are cut arbitrarily, framed. The dedication is renderedas not another tablet casually covering a portion of the plan. The entire image has an aroma of the archaic, a simulated antiquity. Like the glass surface of Duchamp's Large Glass in the photographby Man Ray entitled Dust Breeding,it is a neutral screen that collects the deposits of age.12 As in this work signed by Duchamp and Man Ray, time is given an autonomous value. It both obscures form, through accumulation and deterioration,and creates new formal

Michel Foucault has noted the way in which the figure of the table can simultaneously stand for the rule of order and the realm of free play: I use thatword'table' two superimposed in senses: nickelthe in tableswathed white,glittering beneath glass a plated,rubbery sun devouring shadow the tablewhere,foran instant,perall and the encounters sewing-machine; the hapsforever, umbrella also a table,a tabula,thatenablesthought operate to uponthe entitiesof ourworld,to put them in order,to dividethem in to their classes,to groupthem according the namesthatdesignate similarities theirdifferences the tableuponwhich, since and of has the beginning time, language intersected space.4 It is this copresence of the scientific (geometricaland archaeological)and the ludic that makes Piranesi'sproject resonant in this century. The same site that authorizes Piranesi's"lawless" combinations also authorizesthe crosshistorical comparisonsthat would place Piranesiside by side with Duchamp, Man Ray, or Roussel. On the other hand, by locating Piranesi'sinnovations in precise historical terms, Tafuri has shown that this "equilibrium of opposites"has a political dimension as well. To dissolve the opposition of reason and subjectivityconstitutes an appropriation power through the consolidation of of technical control. This gives innovation itself an ideological role: "The 'power'will be that of the new techniques - unnamed but lying underneathlike repressed demands - capable of controlling the forces that elude the eighteenth-centuryphilosophe. "15
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III Jill

OPEC

(Con)Text
A textis not a textunlessit hidesfromthe firstcomer,fromthe and firstglance,the law of its composition the rulesof its game. Its forever A textremains, moreover, imperceptible. lawand its of in harbored the inaccessibility a secret; rulesarenot, however, into it is simplythattheycan neverbe booked,in the present, be that anything couldrigorously calleda perception.
1968 in "Plato's Derrida, Pharmacy," Dissemination, Jacques

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In Piranesi, context must be read as text. We have already seen how everythingthat might be called context is either excluded or fictionalized. The parallelsbetween Piranesi's theory need not be ennumerproject and poststructuralist ated in depth: a returnto origins that calls into question the value of the origin;the idea of a critique from within; the notion of architecture'srationalitybeing turned against of itself, a critique of the instrumentality classical reason, the of geometry, of "foundations"; elevation of the marto ginal and fragmentary a constitutiveposition;the ambiof frame and subject, of structureand ornament. But guity an what are the consequences of understanding architectural project as text?And where, precisely,does this insight leave us? How is it possible to enter into this text;what are the terms properto its analysis? Tafuri has outlined the profoundambiguitywith which the question of language is treatedin Piranesi'swork. "The problem turns out to be one of language,"he begins;but this may simply be a mask for Piranesi'srefusalto intervene in the world:"This makes even more significantthe fact that the Carceriand the Campo Marzio unequivocably attack'languageinsofaras it is a mode of acting upon the world.' All of which means, conversely,to claim an absolute autonomy for that language. But, at the same time, it also means to cover over a disconcertingsuspicion regardIt ing the unfeasibilityof such an autonomy.'"'6 is, perhaps, worth pointing out that Tafuri'stext (publishedin Italian in 1971) is itself markedby an intellectual climate in which it was understoodthat problemsof form and meaning could legitimatelybe reduced to problemsof language. But not all language constitutesitself as text. Derrida would argue againstthe possibilityof even a dialectical resof olution, denying both the transparency (discursive)lanand the "residualmarginsof a positive presence." guage
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7. Piranesi,system of connecting segments. Plate from the Campo Marzio.

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Yet, paradoxically,it is also Derridawho seems inclined to call to our attention the objectlike nature of the text, to examine its shape, its surface texture, and to trace its contours. My strategywill be to approachthe problem from inside, to addressone of the many internal contradictionsin Piranesi'swork. It is clear that Piranesi has violated traditional notions of the internal consistency of an oeuvre.The question posed is one of "stylistic" inconsistency, but one that cannot be resolved in conventional art historical

terms. What conceptual framework could accommodate such dissimilarproductionsas the ornamentalplates of the Pareresu l'architettura(Opinions on architecture)or Diverse maniered'adornarei cammini (Variousways of decoratingchimneypieces) alongside of the structuralanalysis of the Ponte Fabrizio in the Antichita romaneor the methodical studies of hydraulictechniques at the Lago Albano? How to reconcile (or at least situate in some logical way) the willful eclecticism of the image with the rigorousplanimetricgeometrythat seems to inform the structure? 80

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10. Piranesi,analytical study of the Ponte Fabrizio.Plate from Le antichita romane, 1756. The place of ornament and its relation to structure is fundamental to approaching this question. Piranesi's discontinuities and disjunctions cause uneasiness in the viewer less by the exaggerated nature of the parts than by the way in which they contravene the rules of their placement. As early as 1938 Rudolf Wittkower called attention to these inversions. Referring to the plates of the Parere, he observed that Piranesi reversesthe traditionalmeaning of architecturalstructurein general and of the single parts. A pediment, on which the structural

of by emphasis the buildingis usuallylaid, is degraded him to a becomestructural frames ornamental features; decorative detail; and S. columnsin the samerowarefluteddifferently standon . which ornament evenvegetable of framed panelsinstead bases; is shouldgrowupward turnedupsidedown.'7 WittkowerdescribesPiranesi'santiclassicaloperationsin terms of an attackon the proprietyof structure:the pedito ment is "degraded" a decorativedetail. The ornamental (i.e., inessential)frame occupies the position reservedfor is the structure.The effect of these transgressions anxiety
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11. Tiber and monumental figures, external and internal borders

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and uncertainty- as well as a greaterdifficulty in "locating" the resulting assemblage. Wittkower,however, minimizes the radicalityof these operations. On the one hand, he understandsthe text of the Parereas a process whereby Piranesibegins to dismantle his own rules to bring his written discourse in line with Parereis an act of libhis practicalproduction:"Piranesi's eration from traditionalfetters, and from the ideas with which the artisthad grown up. His theoreticalstandpoint On now conforms with his artisticpurpose."'is the other the novelty of the plates, preferring hand, he dismisses instead to see them as a returnto strategiesof transgression alreadytested within the classical canon: "In short we are faced with the principle of an earlier style, in which originality and individualityreplace an objective doctrine that of sixteenth-centuryMannerism."19 Finally, he points out the continuity between theory and practice in the work that follows. In discussing the polemical text of the Cammini of 1769, Wittkowernotes that Piranesi"asksfor a properframing of all ornament."As Wittkowerconcludes, "This is a classicistic demand which in his own work he never fails to satisfy, however fantasticthe result."20The ability of the frame to establish limits and control the violence of the ornamental is thus identified as essential to an architecturethat would maintain itself within the classical tradition. Wittkowerrefersto a specific passagein this text (the is only one where "framing" discussed), which is perhaps worth examining in detail. In the firstpart of the passage, Piranesi discusses the tendency towardeclecticism in ornament. Let them havetheirwill, forno curboughtto be put on the to of according the caprices men, but then let thembe executed rulesof art. Let Tritonsand fishbe placedon chimneys,if it be to but so required, let them not so coverthe frameas entirely be Let hide it, or takeawayits character. the architect as extravabut not gantas he pleases,so he destroy architecture, giveto character. its everymember proper Immediately afterward,he proposesan analogy to the plastic arts. as a be Let the artist freeto drape statue,or figurein painting, he with the likesbest,let him adjust foldsandgarments the greatest

an he so variety is able;but let it be always thatit mayappear withdrapery.21 humanbodyand not a blockcovered Ornament, like drapery,is considered additive, inessential. Further, it must be subject to control to preservethe of "propercharacter" that to which it is added. Ornament or proceeds not from necessity but from "caprices" the the artist. Its position is describedwith precipleasure of sion - it is placed on or over a preexistingarmature.The body below the drapery,the structurebeneath the ornament remains untouched. And in the case of the chimneypiece, it is the frame that mediates between architecture and ornament, preservingthe supportfrom the uncontrollable present in ornament. Derrida discusses at length this curious in-between status of the frame in his essay of 1974 "The Parergon,"which organizes itself around a reading of Kant'sthird Critique. Here the supplemental characterof the frame acquires thematic importance. The third Critique, Derridaproposes, makes evident a lack, a shortcoming in its own arguments. But this gap is not to be filled up; within the economy of the supplement, reconciliation can only structureitself as The desire for grounded structure,which is anticipation.22 fundamental to Kant'sproject, elicits an architecturalanalitself as a part of its ogy: "Here philosophy . . . represents as an art of architecture. It re-presentsitself, detaches part, itself, dispatchesan emissary, one part of itself outside itself to bind the whole, to fill up or to heal the whole which has suffereddetachment."23 This process, in turn, begs another question: how to distinguish with certaintybetween intrinsic and extrinsic. "It presupposesa discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art object, in this case a discourseon the frame. Where do we find it?"24 Kant'stext supplies this through recourseto a traditional term of philosophical discourse that will be rereadby Derrida in its more literal (i.e., physical) terms:"Even what is called ornamentation(parerga), i.e., what is only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representationof an object, in augmenting the delight of taste does so solely by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the draperyon statues, or the colonnades of palaces."25 Derrida cites this passage
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from the third Critique, which presentsitself as a kind of a key, but a key that only creates new dilemmas: "A parergon is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperatesin its Thus the parergonsupplementsa operation from inside."26 lack in the work itself. It makes the work possible but is not itself part of the work. It is something secondary,foreign to the work (horsd'oeuvre).27 Yet it collaboratesin the realizationof the work. It would seem to thematize itself around Kant'sfirst example, the frames on pictures, but the others are problematicas well. Referringto the case of the draperyon statues, Derrida asks, if the parergonis that which is added to compensate for a lack within the system it augments, "whatdeficiency in the representationof the body does draperysupplement?"28 This leads to the entire problematicof inscription in a milieu, the difficulty of distinguishinga work from its ground, and it underscoresthe futility of detaching the frame, of separatingout the detachable from the integral: "The parergonis distinguishedfrom both the ergon (the work)and the milieu; it is distinguishedas a figure against a ground. But it is not distinguishedin the same way as the work, which is also distinguishedfrom a ground. The parergonalframe is distinguishedfrom two grounds, but in relation to each of these, it disappearsinto the other."29 The frame has depth and thickness, but its incomprehensibility emerges with the attempt to detach it. This creates certain difficulties. The dialogue of Piranesi'sParereturns preciselyon the question of the detachable. If ornament is that which can be detached without affecting the structure,what is left after the inessential has been taken away?This is the thrust of the argument of Didascolo (generallyunderstoodto represent Piranesi'svoice). By ironically taking the demand of to his adversary its logical end, he subvertsthe purist argument; he demonstratesthat it is based on a premise that that there exist some intrinsic criteriA' would rigorouslydistinguish between the ornamentaland the structural. Let us now observe insideand outsidewallsof the building. the . Now I askyou, whatholdsup the roofof the building? If S. the wall is supporting then thereis no needforthe architrave; it,

are if the columnsor the pilasters holdingit up, then what what exactlyis the functionof the wall?Pleasechoose, Protopiro, You do you wantme to knockdown,the wallsor the pilasters? Cast do not answer? Well, then, I will destroy everything. it
aside. Please note, then, buildings without walls, columns, pilasters, friezes, or cornices;without vaults; without roofs;space,

tabularasa.30 barecountryside; emptyspace; This empty prospectcorrespondsnegativelyto what lies and institutional hidden in the purist position: the arbitrary law. nature of "natural" This would also confirm Derrida'sintuition that it is in the is realm of the architecturalthat "detachment" most violent: "But in the architecturalwork the representationis not structurallyrepresentational or it is, but according to a detour so complicated that it would undoubtedlydisconcert anyone who wanted to distinguish, in a critical manner, the inside from the outside, the integralfrom the detachable."'Therefore not only is it - as representedby Piranesi- an impossible choice, but, by pressingthe issue, a kind of internal economy is revealedwhereby any removal threatensto destabilize the entire system. Given the fundamental role that the architecturalmetaphorplays in philosophy, this seems a serious, not to say structural, flaw. Considered in this light, the ambivalence of the plates that accompany the text of the Parereis symptomatic. Wittkowergoes so far as to say that they representbad examples, excesses to be avoided.32 What Piranesihas done, it seems to me, is to make the frame thematic having fully comprehended its ambiguous status between structureand ornament. The frame moves from a peripheral to a central position in Piranesi'swork, and it takes on a complexity that undermines its status as a stopgapagainst the excesses of ornament. Frames are superimposedon other frames and structureis understoodas one more frame. The compositional rules are absent or contravened; the only constant rule is the presence of the frame itself. But these are not Piranesi'smost radicalimages, nor his oddest, nor most eclectic. Their displacementsoccur in two dimensions only. The combinations of the Campo Marzio are more scandalous;the spatial complexities of the
87

assemblage 10

. ......

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17. Le Corbusier,Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds,1916, main facade

Carcerid'invenzione (Prisonsof invention) are more challenging. Their importance is ratherthat they state the thematic that is to underlie the rest of the work. The absurdities" Piranesi'sornamentalexcesses in of "apparent these "marginal" plates turn out to have a constituent role." Under a thematics of the frame, the "stylistic" inconsistencies are dissolved. The framework that might link the eclectic plates of the Parereto the typological delirium of the Campo Marzio or to the meticulous technical reconstructionsof the Ponte Fabrizio is contained within the contours of the project itself. The insistent demand that the work be framed and situated is revealedas a paradigmaticalinstance of the means of classical rationality turned back upon itself. This is recordedin the convoluted profiles of the plates of the Parereas much as in the elaborateplay of bordersin the Campo Marzio. The diversity of these manifestationsonly reflectsan internal tension

warpingand twistingthe frame, releasinga measure of the violence inherent in the act of framing. This insight might be extended. The markingof a boundary, the establishmentof a frame appearsto be a preoccupation specific to architecture.Territory,precinct, and enclosure are fundamentalterms in architecturalspeculation. The "architectural" continually displacedto the is peripheryand the empty frame marksout the space of use and allows participation.Piranesi'sparticularinsight is to have discovereda latent tension between the figuraland the frame. The complexity, the incompleteness, and finally the emptiness of his frameswould seem to confirm this. Nor is it insignificantthat one hundred fifty yearslater the empty frame would take on iconographicsignificancefor the modernistproject.
88

Allen

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18. Piranesi,Egyptian chimneypiece. Plate from Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini, 1769. 89

assemblage 10

Program:Montage of Attractions
The madness consists only in the pilingup, in the juxtapositions whichexplodethe veryfoundation the objects' of customary 'posof a whichgroups sibility,' madness objectsinto a system arches in which'go out of themselves' sequence,ejecting new arches fromtheirbowels; systemof staircases a in exploding a flightof new passages staircases; systemof vaultswhichcontinuetheir of a fromeach otherinto eternity. leaps
or of 1947 "Piranesi, the Fluidity Forms," SergeiEisenstein,

Eisenstein enters Piranesi'swork by means of a comparison in sequence. He begins by describingthe first image: It is a Piranesi etching. It is partof the seriesOperevariedi Architettura. And it is calledCarcere . oscura . . I am now lookingat this etchingon my wall.14 His reading will result in the uncovering of a latent formal Contension, an "explosion,"an "ecstatictransfiguration." firmation is found in a second image, plate XIV of the Carceri:"The scheme which we devised - turns out to actually exist . .. Piranesi'ssecond etching is actually the first one exploding in ecstatic flight."" This collapse of the dissimilarinto the similar has been achieved through precise formal and critical analysis. Eisenstein systematicallylocates the dynamic potential embedded in the fixed architectureof the earlier image. The disembodied memory of the firstetching persistsin the second like an afterimage. Here as elsewhere, he plays upon the literal meaning of the Greek root of ecstasy: "going out of oneself." In fact, the topological uncertainty of this phrase is to mark the terms of the analysis itself. Disjunction is found inside of the image, to be set in from within, in orderto disruptthe motion, "dissolved" stasis:"these arches can undergo an 'explosion'within their are own form."36 All elements of the transformation present in the initial image; they are transposedand reconfigured, but nothing is imposed from without. Piranesi'sformal language of fragmentsand disjunctive adjacenciesis situated in a dialectical relation to the principlesof classical solidity.
19. Piranesi,Carcereoscura (Darkprison). Plate from Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, 1743.

20. Sergei M. Eisenstein, diagram of Piranesi'sCarere oscura, ca. 1947 90

Allen

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21. Piranesi,Carcere,second state, ca. 1760. Plate XIVfrom Carcerid'invenzione, 1760-66.

91

assemblage 10

22. Eisensteinrehearsing in Gas-Masks the Moscow Gas Factory,1924

To underline the cinematic nature of these operations would be tautological. Eisenstein applies to Piranesi's images the terms of his own discipline, and more than that, his own practice. Eisenstein sees Piranesiin terms of montage. He sees the entire series of the Carcerias "discontinuous fragmentsof a single sequence."" Montage has a highly specific meaning for Eisenstein:"Montageis the
stage of explosion of the movie frame. .
.

the dismantlingof these conventions is not to be accomplished within the limits of this work (this despite a careful
analysis of certain perspectival distortions a telescopic

. When the

tension within a movie frame reaches a climax and cannot increase any further, then the frame itself explodes, fragmenting itself into two pieces of montage."'sThe parallel to his analytical method is clear: formal tension within the frame, the explosion of the frame, the multiplicationof the formal possibilities in the fracturingof the frame. In this way, the explosion of forms in both the film language and in Piranesi'sCarceri is made to seem an inevitable result of internal tensions and contradictions. But there is a limit point, an impasse in the system of formal transformations: "One stone may have 'moved off' another stone, but it has retained its represented'stony' The first stage of the transformation concreteness."19 from the Carcereoscura of 1743 to the plate from the Carceri of 1760 - concerned itself primarilywith structural displacementswithin the frameworkof the space represented. Eisenstein asks, "Is it possible, after a relatively short first stage with its dissolution of forms, to foresee and discover through the second stage - which is already
exploding the very objects of depiction
-

effect that collapses depth and foreground,creatingprofound dimensional ambiguity). Here as elsewhere, Piranesi upholds convention in orderto contraveneor subvertit, but not to overthrowit. The disintegrationof realistconvention into its autonomous geometricalcomponents remains "a leap beyond the limits of this opus.'"42 Tafuri has pointed out that this attemptto reconcile realist and avant-gardepractice correspondspreciselyto Eisenstein's own position, especially if understoodin its particular political context.4 It is unsurprising thereforethat the analysisshould produce this parallel. Eisenstein'scritique has become operativein the work itself. It is careful not to its structure transgress own limits. The representational accommodatesthe newly discoveredformal dynamism in orderto preserveits own intrinsic structure. Tafuri assignsto this operationof legitimationa reactionary status. In its "anxioussearch for historicalantecedents capable of justifyingthe theoreticalcompromise between and autonomy of formal structure," the representation of its utopian potential and of its avant-garde,"deprived
ideology . . . can only fall back upon itself; it can only

. . . one more

'leap,' one more 'explosion,' one more 'spurt'beyond the limits and dimensions and thus, apparently,the 'norm which in the last variant of the Carceriexploded comEisenstein asks, in effect, for an explorationof pletely?"40 the new formal possibilities opened by this analytical construct. The next stage would have to explode the means of representation itself: "What is left to explode - is concreteness. A stone is no longer a stone, but a system of intersecting angles and planes in whose play the geometricalbasis of its forms explodes.7"'4 Eisenstein's careful use of language reflects his awarenessof the mediation of representational conventions. He does not confuse the thing with its representation. But, following on this awareness,he notes that

explore the stages of its own development. At best, it may recognize the ambiguity of its own origins."4 Piranesi's "subjectivity" along with the (negative)utopian impulse - has been jettisoned. Tafuri criticizes Eisenstein for not advancingthe terms of the critique beyond those set by the Russian formalists.He points out the incongruityof Eisenstein's comparisonof Piranesiwith Picasso and Cezanne, characterizingit as a desperatesearch to situate his own work within an unfolding historyof the avant-garde.The very self-consciousnessof this move makes it suspect, a knowing cooption of "history" the avant-garde.And it by compromisesthe terms of the analysis itself:only a critique that goes beyond the formal, Tafuri argues, would be capable of radicalizingand multiplyingthe ambiguitiesof Piranesi'sproduction. I would suggest two provisionalstrategiesfor mobilizing some of the contradictionsof Piranesi'swork. In this concenters around a proposal text, the rewritingof "program"
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to rereadthe classical: not as a seamless, closed, and internally consistent text, alreadyended, but a system in which of the apparentorder conceals the arbitrariness its foundations and rules - fictions of order that can be rereadand reordered.Piranesi'sequivocal relationshipto classical authority is taken as a privilegedstartingpoint. The first strategywould embrace the problem of origins, linking it back to Piranesi'sown speculations. No problem is more typical of Enlightenment thought, and Piranesi's position clarifies his ambivalent relationshipto this intel-

lectual milieu. The storyof origins that Piranesirecounts, in responseto Le Roy, Winckelmann, or Laugieris well known:The Egyptiansinvented a massive, stereotomic architecturethat was passedon to the Etruscansand broughtto perfectionby the Romans. The Greek contribution is minimized, relegatedto the margins. Yet, like a repressedmemory, the marginalreturnsobsessively.In the Parere, Didascolo is made to say, "A purist rebukedthe Romans for having corruptedthe architectureof the Greeks;Piranesi had to make them see that the Romans, on the contrary,being unable to heal the scarsof an archi94

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tecture infected at its roots, nonetheless embracedit, and tried to mitigate its rules."'4 The original is thus already contaminated. The resignedacceptance of this loss allows architecturein this manno other conclusion: to "ground" ner is futile. For Tafuri, Piranesi'sanswereffectively undermines the idea of a returnto origins:"Ifthe very foundations of the language are recognizedas precarious, then there is no point in seeking any 'salvation'in the returnto their original state."But the critical moment also contains within it an additionalmandate:"To build on those precariousbases, 'infected at the roots,' is a tragic duty."46
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Plate from the Campo Marzio.

out To recuperateand redeploythe "negative": of the crisis of form emerges both the loss of freedom and the clarification of new possibilities. If the play of oppositeswill never dissolve into similarity(as Tafuri has shown), then what those remains for criticism is to sharpenand exaggerate differences. "Artis fundamentallyironic and destructive," Viktor Shklovskyhas written, "It revitalizesthe world. Its function is to create inequalities, which it does by means of contrasts."'4 Shklovsky's coupling of destructionand revitalizationunderlines the paradoxof the modernistcritique of formal categories. Only by dismantlingthe structure can that structurehope to survive. "Estrangement" reconstructsthe perceptionof the world. Shklovskycontinues, "New forms in art are createdby the canonization of peripheralforms."This might be comparedto Eisenstein in his essay on theater "Montageof Attractions." "The weapons for this purposeare to be found in the leftover But today, a "countermemory of apparatus the theater.'"48 of the modern would have to include that which has been made peripheralby the institutionalizationof the modern; thereforethis project proposes, instead of an outrightrejection of classicism, a subversivereuse of its discreditedstratuse egies. This "illegitimate" of exhaustedprinciples attemptsto bypassthe closure of the modern. The absence of a margin - the privilegedground of the modernistcritique - is thus acknowledged.This "unconscious"use of the modern next to the classical operatesin full awareness of their mutual loss of meaning. The negative will have to be deployed simultaneouslyfrom within and without. To the appropriate words of Blanchot, "Certainpeople have
96

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discoveredsomething beyond this: [architecture] not only is illegitimate, it is also null; and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity it may constitute an extraordinary force, a marvelousforce."49 The second strategytakes the problem of origins and turns it inside out. For Piranesi, the question of the origin is alreadyhistorical. It is thematized around the figure of the ruin and the fragment. The "speakingruins"both collapse and accentuate historical distance. They providethe only possible access to the past;at the same time, they are the sign of its absence and the measure of its incomprehensibility. Georges Teyssot has pointed out that repetitionand synecdoche are fundamental to the idea of classicism.5 Alberti'swell-known phrase may be taken as axiomatic: "Beautyis that reasoned harmony of all partswithin a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or This altered, but for the worse.""51 idealized internal coherence promotes a kind of theoretical reversibility.If the smallest detail is known, the entire composition can also be known. Synecdoche "authorizesthe partto represent the whole.""52 to uphold this consistency, the classical But language must not only maintain a perfect transparency but also remove itself from historical contingency:classicism's "eternalbeginning." And just as the processassumes reversibility,it also assumes repeatability.But this kind of "scientific"confirmation is precisely what Piranesi'spractice calls into question. Piranesiassertsthat from a single stone he can reconstruct the entire edifice. He must assume as his startingpoint the theoretical axioms of synecdoche and repeatability.Without this basic confidence in the regularityof classical principles he would be paralyzed. But the machine cannot be depended upon to run smoothly. Doubts and imprecision compromise its workings. How, for example, can this assurednessbe reconciled with the statement in the Parere that "thereis no building, among the ancient ones, whose proportionsare the same as another'sand there are also no old buildings that have the same columns, intercolumnations, arches, etc."" Here as elsewhere, opposed principles coexist in Piranesi'spractice. The discrepanciesfound in the ideal model are made to participatein its reconstruc-

tion. "The ancients," he writes, "transgressed strict the rules of architecturejust as much as the moderns."54 The variationof the partsis inconsequential. Piranesi has incorporatedcontingency - in the form of the baroque principle of variety- into the workingfabric of the classical idea. This explains his assertionthat there is "one and only one style of architecturethat we follow. How much longer will we refrainfrom admitting that to vary the ornament is not the same thing as creatinga new But order?""55 Piranesi'srefusalfully to recognize these contradictionsis telling as well. If his discourse is internally is disjunctive by design, "order" displaced and evaluated in abstractterms. It can no longer hold together the perfect and repeatabilityof the classical. transparency In the Campo Marzio the seamless manner in which the known fragmentsof the past have been integratedinto the whole composition atteststo an overridingprinciple. The internal correspondenceof the partsto one another ratherthan the "truthfulness" the partsthemselves of allows these fragmentsto be insertedat a meaningful point into the largerorder of the project.56 Piranesihas invented a compositional language in orderto make sense of the fragment. These fragmentsdisappearinto the composition not because their fragmentarynature has been concealed or covered over, but because they have themselves redefined the rules for "fittingin." The whole and the parts submit to the same geometric rules. Piranesidemonstrates that, through the multiplication of the simple, the rationality of geometry can describe both the indecipherable fragmentand the fully realized composition. But the arbitrarinessof the combinations suggeststhat, given those rules, the permutationsare endless. The plan confirms this. The assuranceof repeatability contained in the classical principles of regularityis entirely pervadedby contingency. Geometry is understoodhere for the first time as "instrumental," this instrumentality but undercutsthe rational principles that underlie it. The critique of formalism turns back on itself, uncovering the mechanics of an endless chain of combinations that is by itself unable to constrain the combinatorymechanisms. The "uselessmachines" of the Campo Marzio turn out to be self-perpetuating.
97

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Notes
1. Joseph Rykwert,The First Moderns: The Architectsof the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (Princeton: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1987), or Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphereand the Labyrinth:AvantGardes and Architecturefrom Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), are only the most obvious examples, to which might easily be added the writings of Georges Teyssot. Foucault, especially the Foucault of The Orderof Things, would seem to be behind much of this work. Tafuri'schapter on Piranesi in The Sphereand the Labyrinth, "'The Wicked Architect':G. B. Piranesi, Heterotopia, and the Voyage," as well as the passagesin his Architectureand Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. BarbaraLuiga La Penta (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), have been fundamental in the formulation of my approachto this project. 2. Rykwert,The First Moderns, 370. 3. The phrase is Rykwert's,ibid. 4. Tafuri, Architectureand Utopia, 15. 5. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "From Realism to Reality"(1955), in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 165. 6. C. B. Piranesi, Campus Martius antiquae Urbis (Rome, 1762); reprinted,with an introduction by Franco Borsi, as Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma (Florence: Colombo Ristampe, 1972), chap. 1, p. 3. It should be noted that the volume in which the project for the

is Marziois published Campo of something a mixedbag. Piranesi beganthe largesite plan, apparently thegrande pianta,in 1757.John that Wilton-Ely suggests the Campo as Marzioshouldbe understood the volumeof Le antichita' final(fifth) romane (Rome,1756),andshould withthe thusbe seen in continuity earlier investigations archaeological The (Wilton-Ely, Mindand Artof BattistaPiranesi Giovanni [London: Thamesand Hudson,1978],73). Likethe earlier volumes,the historical Marziocontains Campo texts,reconstructed plans,andviews of the "raw material" the ruins, oftenwithlateraccretions stripped away.Butthe detailandelaboration of the site plan, the perspective with consistent the reconstructions plans,as well as the sequential development mapsof the historical of this zone areall uniqueto this in volume.Therefore, this case, it of senseto speak the "projmakes ect"forthe CampoMarzio. 7. Piranesi, letterto Dedicatory Robert Marzio. Adam,Campo the 8. Note, forexample, wallthat of formsthe lowerborder the large more site plan.This corresponds or to less accurately the courseof the in wall Servian erected the sixth in B.C. century and rebuilt the fourth century The historic B.c. centerof the city,the Forum,the founPalatine of the legendary (site dationof Rome),all lie withinthe walls,to the southof the Campo Marzio,andoutsideof Piranesi's as This zone is rendered a drawing. blankon his plan. But, further, the during firstandsecondcenturiesA.D., the cityexpanded beyond the Servian wall, encompassing muchof the areaof the Campo Marzio.In 271 a wall, knownas This the Aurelian wall, waserected. in wallalsoappears Piranesi's plan. as function a It doesnot, however,

border,but becomes an internal incident in the plan; it occupies, as far as that is possible, the center. 9. Plate XLIII, for example, is a view of the Tomb of Hadrian(later the Castel Sant'Angelo),depicted as though it had fallen into ruin and no furtherbuilding had taken place. 10. For example, Piranesihas accuratelyreproducedthe Septa Julia from the fragmentof the Severan marble plan (the forma urbis), but has relocated it to a site adjacent to the Servian wall. He has translatedthe figure of the septa to a site along the Via Lata and then accommodatedthe site to the idiosyncraciesof the figure represented in the marble plan. Other transpositions and departuresare noted in the commentarieson the Campo Marzio in G. B. Piranesi:Drawings and Etchings at Columbia University, exhibition catalogue, ed. D. Nyberg (New York:AveryArchitectural Library,1972); Michael McCarthy, in "The Theoretical Imaginationin Piranesi'sShaping of ArchitecturalReality,"Impulse 13, no. 1 (1986-87), charts in detail of Piranesi's"misreadings" the archaeologicalrecord in the case of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella. and Uto11. Tafuri, Architecture pia, 16. 12. Man Ray has describedthis photographas follows:"In the far corner near a window stood a pair of trestleson which lay a large piece of heavy glass covered with intricatepatternslaid out in fine lead wires. It was Duchamp's major opus: The Bride StrippedBare by her Bachelors,Even. . . . I suggested to Duchamp that I pick up my camera, which I had never taken out of my place and photograph his glass. . . . Looking down on the work as I focused the camera, it appearedlike some strange

landscapefrom a bird's-eyeview. There was dust on the work and bits of tissue and cotton wadding that had been used to clean up the finished parts, adding to the mystery. This, I thought, was indeed the domain of Duchamp ... Since it was to be a long exposure, I opened the shutter and we went out to eat something, returning about an hour later, when I closed the shutter. I hurriedback to my basement and developed the plate - I alwaysdid my developing at night, not having a darkroom.The negative was perfect"(Man Ray, Self-Portrait[New York:Little Brown, 1963]; cited in Man Ray: The Photographic Image, ed. Janus and trans. Murtha Baca [Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's,1980], 180). has 13. Peter Buirger noted this convergence of seemingly opposed principlesin twentieth-century work, citing Adorno avant-garde (AestheticTheory)to the effect that "the progressof art as making is accompanied by the tendency . towardtotal arbitrariness. . . The convergence of the technically integral, wholly made work of art with one that is absolute chance has been noted with good reason." Theoryof the Avant-Garde, (Buirger, trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1984]). 14. Michel Foucault, The Orderof of Things:An Archaeology the Human Sciences (New York:Pantheon, 1973), xvii. Foucault refers here to Raymond Roussel: in a work such as Roussel'sLocus Solus, field supports the neutral (narrative) a series of episodic fragmentsof intense individuality,each one drawn and describedin minute detail, barely held together by the ground they share. A furthercomparison is suggestedby Leo Steinberg'suse of the term "flatbed

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picture plane" to describe a change in the conception of the picture plane in American art of the 1950s. He notes that the picture plane no longer refersto a window opening out onto the world but ratherto an all-purposesurface, a screen, upon which may be depositied any manner of material of the world "The actual or representational: flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfacessuch as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards- any receptorsurface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed- whether coherently or in confusion." By referringto the flatbed printing press, Steinbergsignals that it is the horizontalityof this surface that is crucial: "no longer an analogue of a world perceived from an upright position, but a matrix of information conveniently placed in a vertical situation"(Steinberg, "Other Criteria,"in Other Criteria:Confrontationswith Twentieth-Century Art [Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1972], 82ff.). 15. Tafuri, The Sphereand the Labyrinth, 30. Tafuri'sremark,and his broaderproject of characterizing Piranesi'srelationshipto Enlightenment thought under the notion of "negativeutopia"(including his ambivalent relationshipto the of "authority" classical architecture), might be contextualized by comparing it to the following passagefrom Max Horkheimerand Theodor Adorno:"For subjectivity,reason is the chemical agent which absorbs the individual substance of things and volatilizes them in the mere autonomy of reason. In order to escape the superstitiousfear of nature, it wholly transformedobjective entities and forms into the mere veils of a chaotic matter, and

anathematizedtheir influence on humanity as slavery, until the ideal form of the subject was no more than unique, unrestricted,though vacuous authority"(Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming [1944; New York:Herder & Herder, 1987], 89-90). 16. Tafuri, The Sphereand the Labyrinth, 34. See also p. 38: "Inasmuchas it is - despite everything - an affirmationof a world of forms, the Campo Marzio, precisely because of the absurdityof its horrorvacui, becomes a demand for language, a paradoxicalrevelation of its absence."On the other hand, Maurice Blanchot has written, "Trustin language is the opposite - distrustof language - situated within language. Confidence in language is language itself distrusting - defying - language .. All this is justifiedon the condition that it (recourseand refusal)be employed at once, at the same time, without belief in any of it, and without cease" (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln, Neb.: University of NebraskaPress, 1986], 38). 17. Rudolf Wittkower,"Piranesi's Pareresu l'architettura,"Warburg Journal2 (October 1938): 156. 18. Ibid., 157. 19. Ibid., 156. 20. Ibid., 157; see also Rykwert, The First Moderns, 280. 21. C. B. Piranesi, Diverse maniere d'adornarei cammini (1769), in C. B. Piranesi:The Polemical Works, ed. John Wilton-Ely (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972), 2-3 (Piranesi's pagination). 22. Jacques Derrida, "The Parergon," trans. Craig Owens, October 9 (1979): 3-40. Kant, Derrida points out, has artificiallyseparated

the faculty of judgment (the third Critique)from the critique of pure reason. This is a provisionalmove for Kant, because in a perfect metaphysics the separationwould be unnecessary. But, as Derrida notes, "it is not yet possible. There is as yet no possible programoutside the critique"(p. 6). That is to say, there is no possible programof pure philosophy, outside of its individual parts, capable of subsuming all of the separatemembers in an affirmative system. Therefore:anticipation, "detachment,"provisionalseparation. The readingof "The Parergon" is structuredaround these separationsas well as strategiesto rejoin the parts. "The abyss elicits analogy - the active recourseof the entire Critique - but analogy succumbs to the abyss as soon as a certain artfulnessis requiredfor the analogical descriptionof the play of analogy"(p. 4). This shuttling back and forth, the construction and deconstruction(and reconstruction) of analogy will characterizethe reading developed here. Mark Wigley has warned of the danger inherent in a too-easy translation of the terms of deconstruction to architecture. "It is a reading that seems at once obvious and suspect. Suspect in its very obviousness. Deconstruction is understood to be unproblematicallyarchitectural"(Wigley, "The Translation of Architecture, The Production of Babel," Assemblage8 [February 1989]: 7). My reading owes something to Wigley's ideas and is developed with a full awarenessof the trapsthat exist in such a comparison. For example, Derrida foregroundsthe architecturalmetaphors, playing upon their physicality as a way of dismantling the abstractionof philosophical discourse. To returnthese terms the frame, the parergon- unprob-

lemmatically to the realm of the visual and the physical would be, then, to lose the fluidity, the analogical characterof the writing, in a simple illustration. On the other hand, within the terms that Derrida has established, there is a need to point out the parallelismand to interrogateits suspect affinity. This kind of work seems necessaryif we assume, as Wigley does, that deconstructionproblematizesarchitecture as much as philosophy. 23. Derrida, "The Parergon,"7. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1952), 85; cited in Derrida, "The Parergon,"18. 26. Derrida, "The Parergon,"20. 27. Hors d'oeuvreis often cited as the most literal French translation for parergon.It might also be noted that the criticism leveled by PierreJean Mariette against the work of Piranesi is stated in similar language: "There is no composition that is not full of superfluousornament, and absolutely hors d'oeuvre " Gazette de (Mariette, "Letter ... November 1794]; cited l'Europe [4 in the introduction to C. B. Piranesi, "Thoughtson Architecture," trans. M. Nonis and M. Epstein, Oppositions 26 [1984]: 5). 28. Derrida, "The Parergon,"22. 29. Ibid., 24. 30. Piranesi, "Thoughtson Architecture," 11. 31. Derrida, "The Parergon,"22. This theme of the supplemental characterof ornament is a constant in the theory of classical architecture. Alberti, for example, writes, "Ornamentmay be defined as an auxiliarylight and complement to beauty. From this it follows, I

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believe, that beauty is some inher-

ent property . . whereas . ornathanbeinginherent, ment, rather has the character something of attached additional" or On (Alberti, theArtof Buildingin TenBooks, trans.Joseph Neil Rykwert, Leach, and Robert Tavernor [Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press,1988], 156;also see the discussion the "glossary" in on "Beauty Ornament," and 420). 32. Wittkower, "Piranesi's Parere su 148. I'architettura," 33. Richard has Rorty remarked, T. following S. Kuhn,that"when the of reading works an important lookfirstforthe apparent thinker, absurdities the textand askyourin self how a sensible could person havewritten them. When you find an answer, .. whenthesepassages . makesense,then you mayfindthat morecentral ones you passages, previously thoughtyou understood, havechanged theirmeaning" Tension (Kuhn,TheEssential [Chicago:ChicagoUniversity Press, 1977]xii;citedin Rorty, Philosophy and theMirror Nature[Princeof ton:Princeton Press, University 1979],323. 34. SergeiM. Eisenstein, "Piraof nesi, or the Fluidity Forms," 11 Oppositions (1977):85. 35. Ibid.,91. 36. Ibid., 88. 37. Manfredo Tafuri,"TheDialectics of the Avant-garde: Piranesi and 11 Eisenstein," Oppositions (1977): 74. 38. Vladamir with Nizhny,Lessons ed. Eisenstein, andtrans.Ivor and Montagu JayLeyda (NewYork: Hill & Wang, 1962), 124;citedin of Tafuri,"Dialectics the Avant74. garde," 39. Eisenstein, 94. "Piranesi," 40. Ibid.Here,as elsewhere, there

is an unmistakablesexual undercurrent to Eisenstein'sdescriptivelanguage (alreadysuggestedby the insistent repetition of the word "I "ecstasy"): ponder what would happen to this etching if it were brought to a state of ecstasy, if it were brought out of itself." This is present in his films as well (cf. the cream separatorin The General Line), but escapes comment by Tafuri. 41. Eisenstein, "Piranesi," 94. 42. Ibid., 95. Eisenstein's careful maintenance of "limits"might be contrastedto Dziga Vertov's(earlier) manifesto:"Seen by me and by every child's eye: / Insides falling out. / Intestines of experience / Out of the belly of cinematography/ slashed / By the reef of revolution, / there they drag / leaving a bloody trace on the ground, shuddering from terrorand / repulsion. / All is ended" (Vertov, "From the Manifesto of the Beginning of 1922," in Kino-eye:The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and trans. Kevin O'Brien [Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1984]). 43. Tafuri, "Dialecticsof the 79. Avant-garde," Although never explicitly stated, Tafuri implies that Eisenstein's analysis, written in the late 1940s, is the result of compromises with Stalinism and social realism. 44. Ibid. 45. Piranesi, "Thoughtson Architecture," 11. 46. Tafuri, The Sphereand the Labyrinth, 42. 47. Viktor Shklovsky,A Sentimental Journey:Memoirs 1917-1922, trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1970), 232-33. The parallel between Shklovskyand Eisenstein - collab-

oratorsand friends- is well documented. FredericJameson has pointed out some of the sharedtheoretical concerns in The PrisonHouse of Language (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972), 61. Regardingthe hidden "modernity" of traditionalworks, he writes: "Arewe to assume that all forms of art exist only to 'baretheir own devices,' only to give us the spectacle of the creation of art itself, the transformation objects into art, of their being made art?(But in that case, only so-called modern art has any value, or rathereven traditional art is really secretly modern for Shklovskyin its essence)"(p. 83). The search for historicalantecedents in eighteenth-centurywork, on the other hand, has a close parallel in Shklovsky's readingof Laurence Sterne'snovel of 1760: "Tristam Shandy thus takes its place, for the Formalists,as a predecessorof modern or avant-garde literaturein general:of that 'literaturewithout subject matter'"(p. 70). This aspect of Eisenstein'saffinity with Shklovsky would tend to undercut Tafuri's assertionthat Eisenstein'sappropriation of Piranesias predecesorrepresents a retrogressive attempt to reconcile realism with the avantgarde. Is not the "defamiliarization" of the traditionalin itself a more radicalproject than the careful delimitation of a closed precinct of the "modern"or the avant-garde? 48. Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York:HarcourtBrace Jovanovich, 1975), 230. 49. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" (1949), in The Gaze of Orpheusand Other LiteraryEssays, trans. Lydia Davis, (Barrytown,NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 22. It should be no surprise that Blanchot refershere to surrealism.

50. Georges Teyssot, "The Anxiety of Origin:Notes on Architectural Program,"Perspecta23 (1987): 94. 51. Alberti, Ten Books, 156. 52. Teyssot, "The Anxiety of Origin," 94. 53. Piranesi, "Thoughtson Architecture," 15. 54. Piranesi, Dedicatoryletter, Campo Marzio. 55. Piranesi, "Thoughtson Architecture," 18. 56. The close parallelbetween the method of the archaeologistand the psychoanalyst(pointed out by Freud, and elaboratedby Carl Schorskein "Freudand the PsychoArcheologyof Civilizations,"Skyline [December 1981]: 28-30) could be extended here. The patient presents to the analysta picture of the past characterizedby incompleteness: memory traces, fragmentsof dreams, all mixed up with the obsessions of present-daylife. The interpretivetask of the analyst is reconstructive.From these fragments a complete picture is to be constructed:a whole in which every dream fragmentis revealedas "a psychical structurewhich has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignablepoint in the mental activitiesof the wakinglife" (Sigmund Freud, The Interpretationof Dreams, trans. James Strachey [New York:Avon, 1965], 35). But the rules for this reconstruction, while having as their outcome a complete explanation, are in themselves characterizedby ambiguity. As Freud wrote in his essay of 1910 "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words,""Dreamsshow a special tendency to reduce two opposites to a unity or to representthem as one thing. Dreams even take the liberty, moreover, of representingany element what-everby the opposite

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wish." The ambivalence of the dream thoughts, the difficulty of disentanglinglatent content from manifest content all point to a broad interpretivelicense. The uncertaintyof this has led Wittgenstein to remark,"He wants to say that whateverhappens in a dream will be found to be connected with some wish which analysis brings to light. But this procedureof free association and so on is queer, because Freud never shows how we know where to stop - where is the right solution" (Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations[Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1967], 42). Setting aside the literary interpretationthat has connected Piranesi'simagery with dreams (De Quincey and so on), there can be found, in Piranesi and in Freud, a process of reconstructionfrom fragments, artificiallyconstructinga frameworkwithin which the fragments make sense, while at the same time admitting a fundamental uncertaintyin the terms of the process itself. Freud's methodological caution would seem to apply as well to Piranesi:"Our first step in the employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content" (The Interpretationof Dreams, 136).

Figure Credits
1, 5, 7, 26, 29. C. B. Piranesi, Campus Martius antiquae urbis (Rome, 1762); reprintedas Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, with an introduction by Franco Borsi (Florence: Colombo Ristampe, 1972). 2-4, 8, 11-16, 23-25, 27, 28, 3036. Drawingsand constructionsby Stanley Allen. 6. Man Ray, Self-Portrait(New York:Little Brown, 1988). 9. C. B. Piranesi, Pareresu l'architettura (Rome, 1765); reprintedin C. B. Piranesi:The Polemic Works, ed. John Wilton-Ely (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972). 10. C. B. Piranesi, Le antichita romane, 4 vols. (Rome, 1756). 17. Le Corbusierand PierreJeanneret, Oeuvre compete 1910-1965 (Zurich: Editions Girsberger,1967). 18. C. B. Piranesi, Diverse maniere d'adornarei cammini (1769); reprintedin C. B. Piranesi:The Polemic Works,ed. John WiltonEly (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972). 19. C. B. Piranesi, Prima parte di architetturee prospettive(Rome, 1743); plate reproducedin Ian Jonathan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy Editions, 1975). 20. Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms," in Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphereand the Labyrinth:Avant-Gardesand Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987). 21. C. B. Piranesi, Carcerid'invenzione (Rome, 1760-66); reprinted in John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London:Thames and Hudson, 1978). 22. Jay Leda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work(New York:Pantheon, 1982).

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