agglutinations.com

March 10, 2003

Correspondence with Daniel Bertrand Monk: Discussing An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestinian Conflict (2002)

by Nader Vossoughian

Dear Daniel,

One of the things that kept lurking in my mind upon reading your book centers on the relationship between you as the author and your subject. We might as well be talking genetically about authorship here, or about historians, and how historians relate to their work, but since I'm interested in hearing more about your work, your book, maybe you could comment on the dilemmas you experience as a writer/historian/theorist who is trying to write an "historical analysis" (your word) of a non-Western culture.

The reason I ask this is because your work appears to be working on many registers at the same time (which is a good thing, it seems to me, but a very difficult one at that). Namely, one of your goals appears to have been to document a period in time, that is to say, to "reconstruct" a series of events. I know you'll probably have a lot of problems with this kind of language -- because the myth of "reconstruction," of making history present, of making the past seem immanent (like a parallel universe that runs alongside, perhaps even within, our own) is something that you want to distance yourself from.

By the same token (and you're probably aware of this, that is, if I'm not totally out of my mind), you seem to want to critique the very possibility of writing about the very thing you're writing about, namely architecture and the Palestinian conflict. How do you cope with this dilemma? Are there ways to talk about architecture (or anything for that matter) that don't belabor the very metaphors of immediacy and immanence that you're trying to critique in the first place?

My second question has to do with your own research methods. You've meticulously researched this book. You've done your tour of duty at the archives. You cover your primary texts. You've read the extant scholarship. Doesn't this desire to get "at the heart of the matter," historically speaking, belie the (philosophical) premise of the book (namely that trying to "get it right" is a positivist fantasy to begin with)?

I look forward to hearing your response.

Best regards,

Nader

And here’s the response I received….

To: Nader Vossoughian

From : D. Monk

Re: An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict

Many thanks for your note of 28 February. I think I can best begin to answer your intriguing questions if I state up front that I always envisioned An Aesthetic Occupation as a critical history. ‘Critical,’ in the very precise sense that the work aspires to show how normative claims for the this conflict’s course of events are premised upon a vision of history that is logically ‘untenable.’ By documenting as rigorously as possible the origins of a current political culture’s own efforts to account for the relation of architecture to savagery in its own structure of causation –what some have called its ‘cycles of violence’— I try to present the history of this struggle’s normalized incapacity to account for itself. In practical terms, this means that where political actors have pointed to architecture with the intention of advancing arguments about the immediate causes of mass violence, I present a history of that process of pointing instead. By following this history of recrimination methodically, what one discovers is that nothing has proved to be more abstract than the model of the ‘concrete’ that political actors have been forced to present as history’s bludgeon –i.e., architecture. At the same time, nothing has shown itself to be more concrete (in the sense of structuring a brutal history) than the abstract logic that has compelled the same actors to identify architecture with instantiated politics to begin with. The way we explain this conflict is actually part of its historical course.

The kind of project I’ve just outlined necessarily engages the epistemological questions with which you begin your letter. It is perfectly legitimate for one to ask in what way the critique of a normative historiography could itself assume the form of a history. (This is what I take you to mean when you raise the issues concerning the possibility of reconstructing a “Non-Western culture,” or a period in time). I guess my answer is this: if a reconstruction of an occluded world beyond reification had been my aim, you would be quite right to suggest that my own project falls prey to what it represents. But, in An Aesthetic Occupation I never sought to reconstruct such a world (the Orient obscured by orientalism, for example), so much as I wanted to write a history of the experience of mediation to begin with; that is, of its objective intrusion into a political context in the form of a series of failed efforts to bypass it. The book’s strategy is negative.

This ‘negative’ strategy --or more properly, this strategy of negation— bears a crucial relation to historical truth. (As such it invites the question about the possibility of ‘getting it right’ that you raise in reference to research, archives, and ‘positivist fantasy’). What can it mean, after all, to suggest that when political players have invoked a reality beyond mediation (in the form of arguments relating concrete symbols to mass violence) they have confirmed the abstract actuality of their own historical circumstances? And more, what can it mean to suggest that this process itself possesses a history? To the extent that it exists, the ‘positivist fantasy’ you raise is not mine. It properly belongs to the history I present, in which political players repeatedly identified the absolute in the concrete. Stated more simply, in the documentary record of these historical actors representations of the experience of alienation as something already overcome, the character of their tragic historical situation presents itself to view ‘in the negative of its trace.’ (This is why the archives are so crucial. In my experience, that’s where Proust and Lukács necessarily meet. There, ‘involuntary memory’ and the ‘charnel house of long rotted interiorities’ converge, and if you are willing to take a long whiff of its decayed Madeleines, you get to smell history)

In the end, An Aesthetic Occupation is a chronicle of the philosophy of history tacitly developed by all of those who have shaped this conflict. As such, it also advances the argument that in its untruth, this tacitly-shared understanding tells us something quite true about History. This argument presumes that architecture does play a role in this history, in the sense that it is the site where a dialectics of necessity and autonomy –contingency and play—perpetuates itself with tragic political effects --- advances itself, in other words, as political actors have attempted to split its constitutive moments into an impossible relation of cause and effect. I think this connects with the last of your questions, in which you ask about the responses to An Aesthetic Occupation so far. I can only say that my hope is that the fate of this book will not turn out to be the fate of the dialectic it exhumes –i.e., a kind of rejection that perpetuates the same logic it denies.

Sadly, I already see signs of this. I’m witnessing an interesting political effort already at work vis-à-vis this book, an argument between those who see An Aesthetic Occupation as a ratification of the view that architecture is immediately political and those who see architecture as immediately autonomous from politics (Editor’s note: see, for example, Gabriel Piterberg’s “Postcard from Palestine,” New Left Review 17 (September/October 2002) p. 150-157). Sometimes both these arguments have been implicit in the responses of one person. For example, one reviewer suggested that my meditation on the place of architecture in the Israel/Palestine struggle boiled down to an ‘evasion of the structuring realities of the conflict.’ Though I doubt he’ll understand why, in the moment when the same criticfaulted me for evading architecture’s utility to politics –its status as a dominative gun-- he was advancing an argument for architecture’s autonomy. In this process it appears that readers may well end up performing the very dynamic whose history I tell.

Daniel Bertrand Monk

New York, 2003

Daniel Monk teaches in the Department of Art History and Criticism at SUNY Stony Brook.