1996_1
Eduard Fuehr
Practical Aesthetics
(back to introduction)
I. The Everyday Practical Aesthetics
Wieviel Engel sitzen können
auf der Spitze einer Nadel -
wolle dem dein Denken gönnen,
Leser sonder Furcht und Tadel!
`Alle!' wird's dein Hirn durchblitzen.
`Denn die Engel sind doch Geister!
Und ein ob auch noch so feister
Geist bedarf schier nichts zum Sitzen.'
Ich hingegen stell den Satz auf:
Keiner! - Denn die nie Erspähten
können einzig nehmen Platz auf
geistlichen Lokalitäten.
Kann ein Engel Berge steigen?
Nein. Er ist zu leicht dazu.
Menschenfuß und Menschenschuh
bleibt allein dies Können eigen.
Lockt ihn dennoch dieser Sport,
muß er wieder sich ver-erden
und ein Menschenfräulein werden
etwa namens Zuckertort.
Allerdings bemerkt man immer,
was darin steckt und von wo -
denn ein solches Frauenzimmer
schreitet anders als nur so.
Christian Morgenstern
(Dear adventurous reader! Think about "How many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle?"
"All! will immediatley come into your mind. Because the angels are spiritual beings. And even a big angel needs no space."
But I say: None!! Because invisible and bodyless angels are able to sit in spiritual locations only.
Is an angel able to mount a hill? No! Because he is too light. Only human feet can walk. If an angel wants to walk he has to materialize himself and turn into a human being. For example into a nice `Fräulein', let's call her Sugarcate. And when she walks...! It is not just walking!)
1. Miss Sugarcate
When we deal with architecture, we talk about it. We talk about it using secondary medium, for example plans or pictures. This is only in this way possible, and we are skilled to re-construct architecture in our mind and to re-present the primary physical presence from the secondary existence with the help of language and rationality.
However, this process bears the danger of elevating architecture all too quickly to an intellectual and spiritual realm and to consider it a spiritual entity.
I think that this danger becomes more and more real if you think of the production of postmodern architecture by Jencks or of the production of deconstructivism through the exhibit in the MOMA or the production of Tschumi's La Villette by Derrida.
I would therefore like to stress the material presence of the architecture and the user in this first chapter.
A. Materiality
Men are basically natural physical elements, that is a solid, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and physiological system. They are integrated in the general physical structure and cause and effect of physical proceedings.
The physical nature of architecture is fundamental, because man himself is physical. No angel can sit on the point of a needle. "Because invisible and bodyless angels are able to sit in spiritual locations only." (Morgenstern)
It was Hannes Meyer, the third director of the `Bauhaus', who expressed this basic physical nature in his theoretical and architectural work. He published the following in the `bauhaus' journal "building is a biological process, architecture is a biological apparatus to satisfy spiritual and physical needs" (Meyer 1928, my translation). In another text Hannes Meyer explaines his understanding of biology and bios; bios, life is in his opinion "...an impulse to harmony. Growing means striving for the harmonic consumption of oxygen + carbon + sugar + starch + protein" (Meyer 1929, my translations).
His sentence is as one-sided and unbalanced as it is fundamentally right. He refers to the non-transcendentable fundamental essence of human beings.
Men are not autonomous, they are not just beings which are uneffected by the physical forces of their environment. They are part of their physical environment. Physical reality is the basis by which existence is made possible. It commands activity as well as making activity possible.
Architecture is therefore not only a box nor a cover for our body. It is a system of physical forces, in which man is only one force among others.
The human solid is, like any other physical things, a constituent of a physical `world' and as such affects its composition. What does this mean?
The human solid can perceive and produce only certain forces, it can perform only certain electrical and chemical processes and it reacts and acts in a certain physiological and biological way.
Take for example physical oscillations.Men only react only to a certain range of all existing oscillations (which is interpreted in a meaningful world as seeing and hearing). This leaves a lot of physical forces and events out of the physical man-surrounding system. Therefor the physical world has a genuine `horizon', a specific structure and it generates a certain physical field of being, a certain physical phenomenal `world'.
In architecture these are the topics of the civil engineers, of the physiologist and medical practioners. This is, for example, that a building has to have an opening to enter it, as well as a window if anybody wants to see things and activities outside. The weight of a person is important for the load capacity of the floor, the lung capacity for the volume of a room and the air-conditioning system. The temperature of a room must lie between 10/15 deg. C and 40/50 deg. C or the biological apparatus will collapse.
Acoustics (reverberation, sound absorbent coefficient, space effect etc.) as well as features of the walls (humidity balance, heat balance etc.) are of fundamental importance for the functioning of the human body and its well-being.
A particular body always designs a world of its own. Please, consider if you will the unique world of a blind man or woman or that of a left-handed person. Modifications of the system of the body can change the world, for example, through modified quantitative or qualitative abilities experienced as a result of handicaps or paralysis, poor eyesight or blindness, being very short or very tall, or being physically fit or unfit.
Let me explain this with the `Frankfort kitchen' which is a prototype for the `functionalistic' thinking of the 1920s.
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Pictures 1a-d: The Frankfort Kitchen
(Click on the pictures for better versions. [0KB,123KB,138KB,6KB])
The kitchen was designed in 1922-26 by Schütte - Lihotsky in connection with the plans of Ernst May for satellite towns of Frankfort (see e. g. Mohr / Müller 1984, p. 122/123). The kitchen was one of the most important dwelling experiments in Germany before World War II. The kitchen existed in different types from which I will take here only one example.
We are interested here in the meaning of physical order in this room.
In terms of technical dimensions, the room is 3.44 m large and 1.90 m wide. At the smaller side you find the entrance, at the opposite side a window. A room must be furnished (in a wider understanding, e.g. a door also constitutes part of the furniture of a room), unless it doesn't make any sense. Furniture in the kitchen consists mainly of working tools. Let me take the ironing board as example.
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(Click on the picture for a better version. [40KB])
An iron and an ironing board are the physical tools which make ironing possible and facilitate it. In designing particuliar tools, you have to take into account the kind of fabric and the fashion, how to produce the heat, and all the physical conditions of man and then you have to develop a specific iron and a specific ironing board. In our `Frankfort kitchen' the board is installed behind the entrance.
What kind of physical world is constructed by the physical organization of the room and the ironing board?
In respect to the physical extensions of the human body it is only possible for 1 person to work in the kitchen (unless you obstruct each other totally).
The ironing board is suitable only for a right-handed person and for a person of a certain height.
Thus the opposite of the right-handed person is not only the left-handed but here in this situation it is the wrong-handed. A taller or shorter person would also be wrong.
The ironing board forces people to face the wall during ironing. It brings men - more likely women - into a situation in which it is very difficult to talk to people who are behind him or her or who are in another room.
When analyzing the physical order of the kitchen, we see that the physical features relating to the physical body are of normative importance for the specific definition of man or woman.
I hope that I could explain that there is no neutral technical reality which is independent from physical body of man, yet the physical surrounding of man is a human world.
I have talked about the physical body of man and shall now go on to explain what this means. Since the physical body of man is not naturally, biologically produced, man is not born but produced by others or himself, because his body is a phenomenal body `embodiment'.
B. Embodiment and the phenomal world
Embodiment is a term used in phenomenology. It means the integration of external things in a certain way in what is believed to be my own body. It means the incorporation of things, as well as the projection of the self into surrounding things, the excorporation of the self. The term `embodiment' goes back to Husserl, and in the last 5 decades many other philosophers have written about it. I would like to stress here only the most important points and my own understanding.
Bodies are produced and developed by people consciously or unconsciously. One must not necessarily be a bodybuilder. You have a certain hairstyle, some have a shave some don't, some practice a sport others don't, some eat meat, some don't, some smoke or drink and others don't. This is work on your body and it shows.
What makes my physical `me' is not necessarilly identical with my physical body. Some fat people think that they have an ordinary slim body, on which fat is attached. Fat is considered a type of clothing, but unfortunatelly it cannot be taken off like clothing. Their embodiment is in this respect much smaller than their physical body.
On the other hand a man who wears glasses is only complete in the morning when he has put them on. In our modern society we are only then complete in the morning when we have dressed. Clothes change but are extremly important for the production of the ordinary `me'. You notice this if you suddenly lose all your clothes, for example in a fire. In this case something of my `me' is lost and has to be reconstructed with effort and care. It's not a question of simply buying a certain number of trousers and shirts which could also be done by a friend or a servant.
If you are dressed, you recognise, that your clothes are part of your `me' through different sensations. For example, if you are walking in the street you feel the asphalt directly, not your shoes or even your socks. Socks and shoes are part of the phenomenal body. They are incorporated in the phenomenal body or the body is excorporated to them.
Merleau-Ponty explains embodiment using an analogy of a blind man's cane.
After a certain time the use of a cane by a blind man to touch this surroundings leads to the result that he feels with the top of the cane; i. e. he doesn't scan the handle of the cane, rather he feels things at the tip of the cane. In a certain way the blind man has projected a sense organ to the tip and substitutes seeing with touching.
He has extended his borders up to the tip of the cane or, in other words, he has incorporated the cane in his phenomenal body.
In doing that, the blind man can `see', but he is limited to the possibilities of the cane. The cane has a certain length, it can inform him of plastic characteristics of the touched object and, indirectly by the noises, of the kind of material. The cane cannot identify colours or temperature. So it is an instrument which can construct a `visual' world. But a world which is defined by the constructing instrument.
The cane is an extension of the phenomenal body rather than an extension of the body.
During these proceedings the physical difference between things and space vanishes.
Space is no longer a mathematically or physically defined space which is empty, isotropic and homogenious rather, it has phenomonological qualities (for details see E. Ströker 1976).
Phenomenal space is never empty, it is constructed by the things. It is always a world of things in a specific order and with a certain sense. Things have an excorporated subjectivity and thus they build a phenomenal world by themselves which could also exist independently from the actual presence of a specific human subject.
The specific phenomenal sense of a certain place lies in the order of the things. What does this mean?
Let me explain it with my example, the `Frankfort kitchen' (Merleau-Ponty took the piano and showed that a skilled piano player must incoporate the spacial order of the keybord. Due to the pace of the music it is not possible to find the exact keys in time by visual scanning. The visual information affords only a certain support.) The incorporated meaning of the built-in ironing board in this position is to enable the woman to stand during ironing and so to facilitate the task. You play the ironing board as you play the piano, you incorporate the order and ist possibilities to act which means you incorporate the meaning of the things.
In the kitchen, man /woman is defined as a monadic individual, rightly handed if he /she is right-handed and of a correct or incorrect height.
If you were to speak to somebody you would only say what is absolutely necessary because no reinforcement or control of speech which is made possible by face-to-face communication can take place. You would not chat. Alternatives are not realised, for example the provision of ironing facilities in a common utility room, where woman can meet and do the ironing together talking about there problems and so on.
In the Frankfurter kitchen housewifes are excluded frm any extrafamilial social contact, they are domesticated. Within the family they are even excluded from family life.
Schütte - Lihotski did not consider that people need space in order to perform their being, she reduced space and therefore excluded the possibility of varied activities and social interactions.
The working person turns to a biological working machine.
The kitchen liberates the other rooms from physical work and generates their character of mere social spaces for intellectual activities.
My example, the `Frankfort kitchen' is a prototypical example of the reduced understanding of the everyday in the `functionalists' . Body and soul are considered as being completely separated. The physical body should be minimized to liberate the spirit.
Actually, the reduction of the physical world is a destruction of the field for social and individual behavior, a destruction of the possibility to have a world. Of course, embodiment and the phenomenal world are anchored in the physical body and in the physical surrounding. But the body is not a neutral, technical machine, no `technem' (Baudrillard 1968), but a cultural design even in the smallest biological cell or in the singular atom in which history is itself presented and on which many people are working.
The embodiment is a medium for having a world. It is a cultural and phenomenal construction of a world on the basis of its materiality. The embodiment as medium of having a world gives the conditions of the reality of the world. There is no real world without embodiment, but - let me stress this - this doesn't mean that the physical world can be derived from the physical appearance of the human body. The extensions of an appartment cannot be deduced from the height of an English policeman, just to mention Le Corbusier's `modulor'.
C. Senses and cognitions (memory, experience, emotions, recognition, abstract thinking) and the Intellectual World
Human senses form the borderline between `functionalists' and `artists'.
The `functionalists' consider the senses only as means of transporting information from the environment to the brain. They are very puritanical and are against sensual architectural decoration; `ornament is crime' as Loos said.
For the `artists' the senses are the basis of their work especially the visual sense. Their aesthetic aims are to invent sensual architectural elements and thereby to develop human sensibility.
The senses are part of the physical and of the phenomenal body. Sensory perception is a receptive and a productive activity of `heart and soul', even the brain takes part.
The senses do have their own needs (The eye for example needs permanent changes of visual stimulation otherwise it goes blind). The senses enable a wide range of sensations and feelings, which are part of the phenomenal body. The sensory aesthetic qualities are qualities of life as well.
The brain has an important role in perception, it constructs and re-constructs the perceived world. Besides this, people can also remember, create regularities, plan their futures and operate mentally with abstract representations in formal ways.
The single object or the concrete action is usually integrated in a context. To understand a singular item means always to allocate it, to classify it, and to interprete it. So single experiences and reflections are joined to a more or less lasting system, to an everyday scientific and - more formally - to an academic scientific system.
And again, everybody or better said `every body' needs to think. We feel satisfied, having had the right explanation, having had the right prognosis. We gain great pleasure in developing new and witty philosophical systems. And we have a need to do this, for example; why do we write, why do we give talks?
There is no reason to restrict the definition of needs to eating, sleeping and working. There is no reason to seperate physical being, instrumental and social interaction and cognition. It is a unit, which is called `practognosis' by Merleau-Ponty.
2. Interactions between men and things
Now I'm going to study the interaction between the physical and incorporated subject and the physical and phenomenal world.
A. Objects lurk
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"Oh, the object lurks. After breakfast I take place at my desk, I am
refreshed and optimistic; with no presentiment of an enemy. I dip my quill to
start writing. I write; a hair in the nib! So it starts. I cannot get this
devil thing out, I stain my fingers with ink, a spot soaks the paper - I have
to find a new sheet, then a book and so on. In short, this fine morning is
gone. From dawn to dusk, as long there is a human being, the object plans
naughtinesses and malices. ... So all objects lurk, the quill, the nib, the
ink-well, paper, the lamp, cigars, glasses - everything until the moment, when
you are not aware of the danger ... Like a tiger who pounces with one furious
jump on his victim at the first possible moment, such is this damned
object..."
(I am also one of these. A Travel Acquaintance)
Things lurk. Friedrich Theodor Vischer used this notion with respect to his dissidence from Hegelianism in his story on a Hegelian, who is threatened by the materiality of the world.
Of course (as Vischer emphasized) the object doesn't lurk in this active and deliberate way. But throughout my `dwelling' in the physical and phenomenal world things are forced upon me.
Nobody stops me from walking along a straight line (e. g. a fascist axes) in a zigzag but I don't usually do it this way. It's not effective but that's not the point because usually I take the path which winds through a meadow and don't walk - effectively - in a straight line through.
If I have to iron I could do it on the dining room table(in the Frankfort flat). But I prefer the kitchen because the ironing board lurks, it coaxes with the temptation to make ironing much easier. And with a jump it has incorporated me into its world.
Things demand to be done right. This is not only a social controlled convention. Things themselves reward you with the success.Things try to catch me with the promise to make things easier.
B. Dwelling in things
I have already mentioned dwelling in a physical and phenomenal world in connection with the `Frankfort kitchen' and I have mostly referred to a singular man or woman. However - as Norbert Elias said - the man, the singular man, cannot exist alone. Men and women are always in the plural.
From birth to death we interact directly with an alter ego or in a social field. Men can not be understood as independent from their physical environment nor can they be seperated from their social world.
The social world is integrated into the phenomenal world, social behavior always takes place in a physical world or through physical means.
C. The Polyverse of Man
I want to emphasize, that the physical nature, body, incorporation, senses and cognitions are not separate from each other or organized in strata. They are aspects, which are all integrated into one another. And they can be in conflict with each other.
I can mention the well known example of the phantom arm. (This is feeling a pain in an amputated arm.) Here there is a conflict between the physical and the phenomenal body.
Or see the difference between the classical history of architecture and the everyday use of architecture, which shows a conflict between an abstract and formal academic scientific system and a phenomenal world.
Usually many people are working on different concepts. We live in the present but also in synchronous and diachronous worlds, in fellow men's worlds and in the world of our forfathers, which additionally amalgamate.
Usually you have to behave, act and interact in a jumble of the remains of different historic worlds and of partial worlds developed by others and in your own unfinished world. Only a dead man can have his unique own world (as Adolf Loos pointed out in his story `the poor rich man')
Worlds are always in progress, they never finish. Dwelling in the physical and phenomenal world is always a transformation, a rearrangement and a reorganisation.
D. Architecture as a game
I have always referred to buildings as the architectural unit. In fact, the unit is the city. `City' here is understood as agglomeration, for example, as capital, metropolis, town, village or settlement.
What I want to say with this definition is, that a singular building is not the basic unit in architecture. Architecture is a configurated unit, which is more or less differentiated. The city is a configuration of buildings, places, streets etc. A building is a configuration of indoor and outdoor places, rooms and floors. A room is a configuration of features and furniture.
To generalize this enumeration, architecture is a static order of things.
To behave and act in architecture means to present architecture. Presence is the transformation of the static order of things into a structured running action differentiated into events and durations.
The specific material architecture and the complex action are interrelated in the way that a playing field is related to a specific game or a score to the performance of music.
`Play' means that there are not only determining physical laws as well as obligatory social conventions but also specific performative liberties that transform the performance into a game, into a unique event.
You can change the whole game, when you break the conventions or when the order of ist elements is changed (this might even result from a singular event such as the fall of the Berlin `wall').
C. Engagement and mental distance, attachment and detachment
To succeed with everyday acting I have to act in worlds which are not mine. I have to attach to strange worlds in order to realize my own. To use the strange worlds in my sense I have to detach from it as well. But I can also adopt to strange worlds to detach from my previous world or to develop it.
For my purpose to be realized I have to use things which were specified for alternative actions. I have to adapt to them to act at all. But undetached adaptation can also mean complete involvement into another world. Thus the more I get attached the more I incorporate the alternative world. The more I am detached the more I remain in my own world, but the danger not to recognize the thing in question as an helpful tool rises all the more as well.
To act is always `to tinker', to use a term which Levi-Strauss (1979) brought into academic discussion.
There is much to be said about the everyday. However, I would like to sum up this part with two remarks:
- The everyday cannot be denounced as trivial and simple. It is apriori not dull, not perpetual and not against subjectivity. It is not in opposition to brilliant, innovativ and subjective art. The human everyday is then - if it suceeds then (and it is liable to failure) and if it is managed with reflection - possibly the wittiest and most intelligent piece of art man can create.
- The purpose of acting is not to produce a sole and unique harmonic world, not a one-dimensional everyday (Marcuse 1964). The everyday improves when it is differentiating or when it consists of more or less seperated or integrated worlds. Even when my working everyday meets my planned desires completely and is therefore exactly my own genuine phenomenal world, it needs not necessarilly should equal the world of my reproduction- and sparetime.
People have always been driven to have more than 1 world and to coordinate these subworlds to a differentiated net. The working place, the apartment, the tram and the pubs (Here I mean the places as institutions) are particuliar worlds woven into a fabric in which the footballstadium, the museum, the church and the holiday-cottage are integrated as utopian islands. This fabric contains undifferentiated dark tangles as administrations or hospitals and also unconscious white spots. Each is a world by itself, a phenomenal world for myself.
Now I turn to the second part of my talk. Here I am going to consider the part of art in this complex:
The question is what has this to do with art?