| God Knows I Tried. An experimental approach to orientalism and the practice of writing. (excerpts) |
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Whether it ís writing architectural theory, scaffolding, canonizing historical narratives, or ventilation engineering - what distinguishes these professional domains is not their degree of abstraction, since they obviously are all examples of practices - babbling on about "architectural principles" in a university auditorium, or at Alexanderís court, is just as physical - or abstract - a gesture as hammering a plank to another. This is not to resort to populist wishful thinking about a level playing field between proles and professors, all happily speech-acting away. But it is to say that the difference between the two lies not in the (a-)theoretical nature of their physical acts per se, but in their respective degrees of authority. As Wlad Godzich argues, in an essay on the "act of reading", "theory" was not always understood as an opposition to practice. Rather, the Greek theorein was opposed to aesthesis, with the latter referring to a private act of contemplation. The theoria were individuals designated by the city state, "summoned on special occasions to attest the occurrence of some event, to witness its happenstance, and then verbally certify its having taken place". The City needed an "ascertainable form of knowledge if it was not to lose itself in endless claims or counterclaims" (of individual citizens offering only aesthesis, and never the "bedrock of certainty" of the theoria) and it invested the assembly of theoros with the undeniable and exclusive authority to mediate the passage "from the seen to the told", or "between the event and its entry into public discourse". In this sense, hammering one plank to another is indeed no more "theoretical" than this memoir. Both are decidedly "aesthetic", compared to the varying theoretical import of an Alexander, a Vitruvius, or a Wlad Godzich. And just as tapping my computer keyboard amounts to a form of speech, depending on what is being hammered - and on who decides on the hammering, why, when and where - a shack, a church, or a corporate bank can be highly articulate in their respective ways: which brings me to the effective common ground between "aesthetic" and "theoretical" forms of practice; since both the semiotic disposal of a church and the wording of an essay resort to language in one form or another, both are deictically articulated. Even the most abstract speculations depend on context, both in the sense of making themselves understood to an audience, and in the sense of the material conditions of their production. This is already hinted at, in the ancient Greek context, in the similarity between a theoros and a court witness. In his essay, Godzich goes on to elaborate Paul de Manís notion of the "resistance to theory" - a process we encounter during the act of reading, that is, "the resistance of the material to the ideological overlay". |
