Ispravak|Correction 

A Territory of the Uncanny

Interview with Anthony Vidler
Tehnikom omakom u prolom broju IP-a dolo je do izostavljanja zavrnog dijela engleskog teksta intervjua s Anthonyjem Vidlerom. Ispriavamo se Anthonyju Vidleru i autorici intervjua Aleksandri Wagner, te objavljujemo integralni engleski tekst istog intervjua. In the previous issue of the magazine, the final part of the English text of the interview with Anthony Vidler was missing due to a technical error. We apologize to both Anthony Vidler and Aleksandra Wagner. Following is the integral English text of the same interview.

something that can function as a framework in other landscapes and other times? AnthonyVidler| I suppose we should ask, How does the concept, any concept, come to existence? Is its invention (as well as usage) linked with some abstract date, or does it become salient only when it serves to explain something? For example, weve always lived in what we call, space. However, the word, space, was not part of architectural terminology until 1870s. Why were they thinking space in a certain moment in time? Why is someone thinking the uncanny? Why is someone thinking psychoanalysis, when, presumably, all kinds of mental disturbances existed well before Freud? Why does a certain thought-structure emerge in a certain moment in history? How does the conceptual territory get charted? Why was it necessary to invent phobias; to invent space in 1870s? Before that moment, space was a mathematical, philosophical construct, a universal concept. And, it was invented just then, because psychology revealed that my space and your space are not the same; that space is as much a projection of an individual self, as it is a universal, geometrically absolute entity. Questions of personal space became extremely important, and therefore the space of different buildings produced by different architects, produced by different moments in history became something to be studied. One was no longer studying the style of the building, but its spatial properties as well. Historical questions of the 1890s, such as, what produced the curvilinear confirmations of spatial organization in Borromini?, were not historical questions before. Francesco Borromini did not have a concept for space. AleksandraWagner|Did you expect, or hope, that the introduction of the concept into the field of architecture might become somewhat destabilizing not only for the reading, but, also, for the making of architecture?

|AleksandraWagner

Anthony Vidler, Ph.D., is the Dean of the Irving S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union, New York City. A historian and a critic, he specializes in French architecture from the Enlightenment to the present (The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, 1987), particularly in the work of the French radical neoclassicist, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (Architecture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Rgime, 1990; Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture of the Revolution between Vision and Utopia, 2006). To students of modern and contemporary architecture, Vidler has made an equally important mark by his insistence that the discourse about the architectural field become as nuanced and intense as are the building ambitions inherent in daily architectural practice. Conceptual material for both the extension and deepening of this territory, he proposes, can be found in psychology and psychoanalysis. Two of Vidlers books, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992) and Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), offer a persuasive guide not only into how this can be done, but why such a project is intellectually rewarding for architects themselves. This conversation is a probing of some of the many potentials for widening the scope of architectural history and theory. Its keyword is the uncanny. The concept was taken up by Sigmund Freud as a subject of an 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche. Freud opens his text by stating that it is only rarely that a psycho-analyst feels impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics, even when aesthetics is understood to mean not merely the theory of beauty but the theory of the qualities of feelings. He works in other strata of mental life By announcing the moment of disciplinary boundary-crossing, Freud himself acknowledges a need for a psychoanalyst to dwell in conceptual territories not taken for granted by the common division of intellectual labor. Yet, what Freud also makes clear is that comprehensive treatises on aesthetics prefer to concern themselves with what is beautiful, attractive and sublime rather than with the opposite feelings of repulsion and distress. This, the work in the negative, is what Freud takes to be the psychoanalysts task. By investigating the effects of psychoanalytic thought on the intellectual, and architectural, practices of modernism, Anthony Vidler takes the same, critical, position. Seen from such a vantage point, an interrogation of the meanings of the uncanny and an identifica-

tion of the possible function of this term in the realm of architecture, does two things at once; it attends to the feelings which mark the life in modernity and thus shape the practices of the modern self, and looks for the sources where, at the particular historical moment, architecture searches for its authority. AleksandraWagner|What made you think of the uncanny, as a concept and as a frame for your own theoretical project for your thinking about art and architecture?

AnthonyVidler| I can speak here of a number of accidents, and of a number of intellectual questions. The concept, through its various expressions, was haunting the intellectual life in modernity since the Romantic period; it had a traceable intellectual history. While largely excluded from the modernist architectural discourse a discourse far more concerned with ideas such as transparency, zoning, abstraction to me the uncanny was a stratum within modernist thought. Yet, especially after Freud, its isolation in a specialized field of psychoanalysis set it even further apart from the general modernist sensibility. Following Foucault, I felt it was important to excavate it and bring it back into a larger modernist discourse. In my view, the uncanny bound together questions of alienation, psychic destabilization, exclusion, personal anomie and real life experiences of the displacement and exile of the intellectual in modern culture. It was a guide to how intellectuals confronted the conditions of mass urban metropolitan life. I wrote The Architectural Uncanny1 (and later, Warped Space2 ) as an investigation of the effects of psychoanalytic thought on the intellectual practices of modernism; it has been commonly mistaken as a psychoanalytic reading of architecture. AleksandraWagner|You seem to suggest that the uncanny is a kind of bourgeois sentiment

AnthonyVidler| The uncanny is never a product of an environment itself; it is a view from the subject. A mirror is not uncanny, unless you cannot see yourself in it. This is an uncanny moment but the mirror itself is normal before, and it is normal after. What is important, Id say, is that this experience is unrepeatable. Its force is the force of the first-time encounter; each subsequent experience of the same kind is merely a repetition of an experience already felt. I have no empirical evidence about the uncanny at all. I dont know if any psychoanalyst ever used the concept clinically; and I dont know if such a use, if practiced at all, was helpful. There is no uncanny architecture per se, no uncanny room, no necessarily uncanny experiences motivated by any thing. The uncanny cannot be produced, like fear, or like a stage production yet it is a sensation that a number of people got engaged in, saw as something that im-

pacted their lives. Not a conscious fear, not the fear with a cause, not the sort of terror that comes with situations of imminent danger and destruction (from bombs to unemployment) this eruption of the world of unease into the world of ease, a disruption of the comforts of everyday life and its equally quick disappearance, was of interest to me. Again, I looked at the uncanny as an intellectual construct of what could be an everyday occurrence used in short stories, in photographs, in films, in the productions of intellectual elites. In that sense, and in this particular context, it cannot be dissociated from the question of class. The uncanny erupted in several moments in history. It erupted in the work of German literati, such is E. T. A. Hoffmann, and in work of F. W. J. von Schelling. The unheimlich was defined with great precision in the dictionaries of that era. In German intellectual history it emerged as a disruption of domestic comfort at the moment when the domestic comfort itself had just been invented. The second time it emerges is in the late 19th century. Interestingly enough, it emerges around questions of archeology, of unearthing of what was long dead. There is an author called Wilhelm Jensen, who writes the novel, Gradiva (1903), which Freud uses as a subject of his own study in 1907.3 From there, Freud goes on to explore his fascinations with Etruscan tombs, with burials, with death and the death-drive Yet, it is hard to pin down the originary moment of Freuds interest in the term. It occurs, as a named sensation, in Totem and Taboo (1913). Then he drops it, and picks it up in essays that address the response of European middle classes to the severely destabilizing conditions brought about by World War I. Nowhere is that more clearly stated than in his essay On Transience, whereby the sense of European home had been broken. In terms in which Freud establishes the uncanny, there is always a rupture of the present, by a discomforting occurrence that, in one way or another, is brought to the front to consciousness You could say it was repressed; you could say it was forgotten. For Freud, the uncanny is that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.4 The resurgence of interest in the concept comes in late sixties and early seventies, in French theory. The first real investigation is in the circle around Jacques Derrida, who finds it lurking in the interstices of language. Of course, this can be further linked with lectures that Jacques Lacan gave in Paris, in the early sixties on the subject of anxiety. This is the nexus of the uncanny, at this particular moment. The fact that the concept emerges again in the 1990s, probably has to do with the time-lag in translation so you get the Anglo-Saxon, Italian, German authors responding, having a conversation. AleksandraWagner|To what degree is the uncanny a concept that belongs to the modern, pre-industrial and industrializing European West, or do you see it as

AnthonyVidler| When I write history, I write as an intellectual and social historian; when I write criticism, I write as an interpreter; and when I write theory, I write as a partisan-designer-architect. Since I was trained in all those areas, I shift my lens accordingly. I am always interested in destabilizing historical myths about architecture and, specifically, historical myths about the history of modernism. I want to find concepts that have been excluded by art historians who look at modernism as a stylistic development, or by architectural historians who look at modernism as a moment in development of mass architecture, of social architecture, or a development of new urban patterns. I tend to feel that precisely psychology and psychoanalysis have been sidelined in terms of their use for architectural design, and equally sidelined, therefore, by the historians of architecture. Historians of architecture dont find themselves involved in the study of all the disciplines that make up architecture. Psychology and psychoanalysis constitute major modes of thinking that emerge from the 1860s on, and as such they have to have entered into the conceptualization of space, conceptualization of the object, conceptualization of the subject in relation to the object. There occurred a moment in which psychological analysis interpreted causes of mental disturbances as related to real space, real time, real environment; phobias claustrophobia, movement phobia, agoraphobia have been articulated for the first time as pro-

ducts of urban life, as generated by precise urban conditions. Therefore, it is historically incorrect to screen psychoanalysis and psychology out of the history of modern architecture. In 1920s and 1930s there were many attempts to apply psychoanalysis to history. Yet, they were so crude that generations afterward have come to see psychoanalysis as a tool to be avoided, as opposed to having a place in intellectual history. I learned this by teaching, for many years, with a historian of fin-de-sicle Vienna, Carl Schorske5; he and I were working to re-establish the meaning of the complex historical territory in which an architectural proposition gets made. There are other things that should not have been screened out of the history of modern architecture, such as religion and religious thought. Religion is still the big frontier to be breached by those architectural historians who want to understand the discursive framework in which architecture is projected. To reach such an understanding, one would have to reexamine common assumptions about secularization; about continuous modernization; the notion that architecture has nothing to do with religious thought in any national or local context as if architects have never been in any way involved with religion either as believers, or as its opponents. When I worked on the 18 th century, I felt it was very important to bring into architectural history the theories of sign, theories of language to talk about the relation between the subject and the object, communication of societies to each other, the ways in which signs and their assumed representations circulated at that time. What matters, in my view, is not just the question of style; in this particular case, it is also the question of architects and their circles being deeply involved in language theory. Again, because of the disciplinary regimes of architectural history being within art history, and apart from social, political and economic history, this type of interrogation does not come easily. Discursive formulation of architecture which draws from, and utilizes, at any moment in time a whole series of disciplinary practices, is not open to the conventionally trained architectural historian. My work in architectural history has always been to challenge the boundaries of disciplinary historical practices and to see where, at a particular moment, architecture searches for its authority, for its motivations, for its relationship with society. Sometimes it is a medical discourse; sometimes it is a discourse of science; sometimes it is a discourse of industrial technology; and sometimes it is a political discourse of social massification and class struggle. Architecture continuously, through the modern period, searches for its authority in other disciplines and it is therefore important to know how the discourses in other disciplines intersect with architecture. It is important to know how the architectural discourse is, in fact, established as a coming together of different authorities. Yet, these kinds of projects have not gained in force; there has been a turn away from general intellectual history, to more specialized, more focused history. The real problem of the manufacture of doctorates is that they tunnel vision, by insisting on specialization. AleksandraWagner|You make a comment at the end of the Introduction to The Architectural Uncanny, which alludes to the elimination of the political (from architecture) except for the ghost of the politics of avant-garde, that still lurks There is a sense that you are reminding the reader of the disruptions produced by the new arrangements of race,

class and gender. I am not sure if the anxiety you address is a submerged anxiety of the uncanny, or is it an anxiety of a more explosive kind. AnthonyVidler| The book on the uncanny was written at the time when what we now call postmodernism, was at its height. The entire apparatus of social commitment on the part of the architects that had been generated before the World War II (in relationship to the class-struggle, in Europe) and post-war (in relation to the politics of decolonization and of reconstruction), had been largely abandoned at that time. For someone like me, raised in Britain in the climate of post-war reconstruction, housing, social welfare, questions of the amelioration, if you want, of a class struggle through social-democratic means were a worthy agenda of architecture. The loss of that in the United States, if it had ever been here, is something I felt very keenly, especially in the Eighties. Maybe it was my uncanny; maybe it was a sense of a loss of memory that was repressing the entire field, the theory and practice. This repression, as I see it, shifted the agenda to the aesthetics of the individual building in relation to the corporate and institutional identity. I think this was part of my complaint. The remark you are referring to, I think was a wistful remark. I was trying to escape, in a literal sense, an architecture that looked as if it was falling apart, called deconstruction, de-constructivism; that strange word, the merger of constructivism, of the literal putting together of the bits of pieces of the world by the Russian revolutionary architects, and deconstruction, the taking-apart. Rem Koolhaas was looking at Ivan Ilich Leonidov; Daniel Liebeskind was looking at El Lissitzky, and the list went on. It worked as a play, at the exhibition that Philip Johnson put together at MOMA; but, for me, it didnt work intellectually at all. I remain much more interested in looking at architects aiming to destabilize and therefore looking to profile the contemporary self. Clearly, the city has lost the body, by which I mean that the paradigm of organicism, of an organic whole, is no longer possible as means to measure and to interpret the city. I am interested in exploring the moments in the city experience, cases in art and architecture which destabilize the subject in a way that brings the subject back to itself, in a light that is confrontational, critical, non-passive.
  Endnotes
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Vidler, Anthony (1992). The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely. The MIT Press. Vidler, Anthony (2000). Warped Space. Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture. The MIT Press. Freud, Sigmund (1907). Delusions and Dreams in Jensens Gradiva. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 9, pp. 3 95. Freud, Sigmund (1919). The Uncanny. [Das Unheimliche.] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 17, p. 220. Schorske, Carl E. (1980). Fin-de-sicle Vienna. Politics and Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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