isparchitecture.com non-projects for the uninhabitable: lyotard's architecture philosophy ashley woodward Jean-François Lyotard remains best known for his association with the postmodern, and in many circles there is little awareness of the significant difference between the way he used this term and other influential uses of it. Also little known are Lyotard’s writings on architecture, despite some casual recognition of his apparent relevance to this field due to the prominence of postmodernism in architectural theory.1 My aim here is to provide an introduction to Lyotard’s practically unknown contributions to architecture philosophy, and to suggest two ways in which his work might be thought to make an original and interesting contribution to the field. First, Lyotard critically intervenes in phenomenology, which has had an influential place in the philosophy of architecture. 2 He challenges the values that tend to be accorded to the relations of the body to space in this tradition, celebrating dislocation over location, on the grounds that architecture should be understood as an art and should challenge the body to new experiences. Second, Lyotard’s understanding of the modern and the postmodern cuts across the way these terms are typically deployed in architectural theory, inviting a fresh perspective through the reorganization of critical categories. AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 34 w oo dw a r d Lyotard’s writings on architects and architecture are relatively scant: there is an essay on Le Corbusier, a couple of pieces on Arakawa and Gins, an interview, a dialogue with the architect Piero Derossi, and a short contribution to a group dossier in an architecture journal.3 However, this field is broadened if we also consider reflections on the nature of the city and the built environment in general,4 which we can find in various forms throughout Lyotard’s writing career, from his early discussions of the political space of the “ideal city,” through his writings on the notion of the pagus, his reflections on California, and on ideas such as the oikos, domus, and megalopolis. I will focus here, first, on some of these main general ideas about space, the built environment, and human habitation, before moving on to a review of the main ideas which emerge from Lyotard’s writings on architecture as an art. These themes will then draw together with the critical comparisons with phenomenology and postmodernism which help to situate Lyotard’s reflections on architecture. As with Lyotard’s treatments of other arts—most famously, “the unpresentable” of postmodern sublime art5—he signals his point of interest in architecture with privative terms, in particular the uninhabitable and the non-project, for reasons which will be elucidated. Spaces: habitus, megalopolis Lyotard develops a thesis on the transformation of our lived space, the space inhabited by human beings, broadly consistent with his reflections on postmodernity in its other manifestations.6 This is a transformation from a rural or agrarian way of life and the villages or cities it involves, through the development of modern metropolises, to the postmodern “megalopolis.” Lyotard’s primary thesis is that this last is not simply a quantitative extension of the metropolis, but a qualitative transformation. Employing a device typical of continental philosophers, Lyotard elaborates these ideas using classical terms, drawing out suggested meanings in his own unique way. The value of doing this is that it gives the concepts an ontological status, and resists a simple reduction to the empirical which might be risked by using contemporary language. Lyotard conceptualizes a “traditional” way of inhabiting space under the various names of oikos (Greek), domus, and habitus (Latin). While oikos and domus could literally be translated as “house,” Lyotard uses these terms to indicate a manner of inhabiting space, a way of life or being much more general than the term “house” tends to invoke, and which can be understood to apply to spatial situations which are not literally houses. 35 isparchitecture.com We find an evocative description of the way of life indicated by the terms oikos, domus, and habitus (which Lyotard tends to use interchangeably) as a kind of domestic idyll in the essay “Domus and the Megalopolis”: Let's suppose that it's pretty hot outside. The courtyard is surrounded by walls and farm buildings. A large tree of some kind, willow, horse chestnut, lime, a clump of pines. Dovecots, swallows. The child raises its eyes. Say it's seven o'clock in the evening. Onto the kitchen table arrive in their place the milk, the basket of eggs, the skinned rabbit. Then each of the fruges goes to its destination, the dairy, the cool scullery, the cooking pot, the shelf. The men come home. Glasses of fresh wine. A cross is made in the middle of the large loaf. Supper.7 In this “domestic” model of space, there is a border between the inside and the outside. It is porous and non-exclusionary: strangers may be welcomed into the domestic space and offered hospitality. This extension of hospitality is in fact characteristic of the space of the oikos, domus, or habitus. On this traditional model of the space of the human environment, outside the habitus is the pagus – the surrounds of the village which acts as a permeable boundary. Lyotard explains: pagus always means the country, the region, the opposite of Heim, of home, that is, of village. It is moreover a very beautiful word, the word that gives us pax, companion, etc. It is precisely the place where one forms pacts with something else (it is the same root; let’s from time to time put up with parody-etymologies; this one in any case is “true”); it is a place of boundaries.8 AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 36 w oo dw a r d The pagus is described elsewhere by Lyotard as the zone; it refers to the area surrounding the village or city walls, which acts as a “zone of contact” between those belonging to the habitus, and strangers who come from other regions.9 The main distinction organizing this space is that of home/elsewhere, which can also be formulated as culture/nature, or more generally as inside/outside. The idea of nature is key to this traditional, rural, pre-industrial mode of existence: the domus is “[a] mode of space, time, and body under the regime (of ) nature.”10 It is a way of habitation in which domesticating a powerful, often hostile nature, and organizing life according to its rhythms, is the predominant concern. The great mutation in this model of space that Lyotard identifies is not between the rural village and the metropolis—he understands the latter as maintaining intact the inside/outside, and the border between them. The metropolis is only a “complication” of the space of the domus insofar as different suburbs become their own center, and the borders between them act to both link and separate them in relation to other suburban centers. The change, rather, comes with the transformation of the metropolis into the megalopolis. Lyotard has in mind here most specifically California, which he understands as a new model of space, one that has undergone a qualitative change. It is a model spreading to span the world: Through means of communication and of telecommunication, the great urban conglomerations extend like a dense network along the coast of California and will soon cover the globe, from San Francisco through Yokohama and Singapore as far as Ankara and Milan, and from Milan through the Ruhr, London, and New York as far as Los Angeles.11 California is a space of “conurbation”: suburbs connected by highways, one after the other, without reference to any urban center. As the quote above suggests, technologies of communication and information also play an important role, as they liberate ties to fixed physical times and spaces, and connect things in a decentralized, “free” manner.12 The transformation Lyotard sees here is the displacement of the border and the decentering of the center. Human community is similarly diffracted and dispersed. Space is no longer divided between a “here” (home) and “elsewhere,” an inside and an outside – the border zone seems to have expanded indefinitely, such that “there is nothing left but surroundings.”13 The “outside,” understood as nature, or as the place where the stranger or 37 isparchitecture.com the other dwells, also disappears. The implication is that there is no longer an idea of an external reference point, a nature which would provide a rhythm to regulate the ordering of the habitus. The space of the megalopolis is entirely artificial, if that term even continues to have meaning. Relations between different human groups are no longer structured through a mediating border which allows hospitality: while we might say that the megalopolis is certainly a space of integration or assimilation, of peaceful multicultural coexistence, Lyotard in fact emphasizes that the relations with other cultures in the megalopolis are also often “based on distrust, on conflict, on a latent state of war that explodes, at times, into violence.”14 What interests Lyotard is how the minorities, outsiders, or “remainders” of human communities are positioned in these different organizations, representations, or structurings of space. This leads him to a characteristically complex position on the relation of the domus to the megalopolis, in which neither is unambiguously touted as better than the other. First, Lyotard asserts that, contrary to what one might think, a space for otherness or the remainder is better preserved in the traditional domus than in the contemporary megalopolis. There, otherness not only existed outside, in the pagus or beyond, but was welcomed into the home as a guest. Moreover, Lyotard points to the otherness at the heart of the home, of domestic life, in the fact that it is the traditional location of the intrigues and dramas represented in tragedy.15 In this manner, in the privacy of the oikos a certain otherness or remainder is secluded and protected from the public life of the polis. In the megalopolis, by contrast, everything becomes a matter of public exchange, and there is no longer a space removed from this circulation, public scrutiny, and transparency. This accords with the capitalist economy in which everything can be translated into exchange value California is a space of “conurbation”: suburbs connected by highways, one after the other, without reference to any urban center. “ ” AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 38 w oo dw a r d and sold on the market, and also to the all-pervasive sphere of human rights in which every aspect of life is expected to have a rational accounting and legitimate defense.16 The idea of the habitus, Lyotard suggests, today arouses our nostalgia, and this nostalgia can act as a kind of resistance to the contemporary system and a spur to thought and creativity. 17 However, Lyotard also maintains a strongly critical and vigilant attitude towards such nostalgia. First, he acknowledges that it is probably nostalgia for something which never really existed; a projection from the position of the contemporary megalopolis.18 Second, he warns of the danger of believing that the world of the habitus could be restored, aligning such a belief with Heidegger and the politics of National Socialism. He thus sees danger not in the old organization of space and society itself, but in the nostalgic desire to restore it. (“Homo re-domesticus in power kills in the street shouting ‘You are not one of ours: He takes the visitor hostage. He persecutes anything that migrates’.”)19 The task for thinking in the megalopolis is, for Lyotard, to resist the homogenization of thought along with the homogenization of space. In this way he sees a parallel between philosophy and architecture. Architectures: project, non-project In a conversation with the architect Piero Derossi, Lyotard suggests that the task of both philosophers and architects has changed with the shift from the habitus to the megalopolis. Modern philosophers (and here the quintessential model is Descartes’s Discourse on Method) assumed an architectural model of thought. Descartes describes how thought was like a city which has been built up through generations, with conflicting designs, and what is needed is to raze the city to the ground, to begin again and, on a secure foundation, to build a city according to a consistent rational plan. Modern philosophers also thought that they could give prescriptions to architects and urban planners in terms of a general representation of an ideal city which would instantiate an ideal human community. Similarly, modern architects followed the model of believing that everything human beings need for dwelling well together can be rationally planned out in advance, and given to a population which will be perfectly suited to its use. We can recognize here the great modernist architectural projects of the early to mid-twentieth century, such as those of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and so on, in which cities are planned, all ornamentation is sacrificed to function, and a single style is imposed everywhere (the International Style). In painting, Lyotard notes, there is also an analog insofar as urban planning has been represented using 39 isparchitecture.com a uniform organization of space – such as in “The Ideal City” by the school of Piero della Francesca (circa late 15th century), one of the first to apply the principles of perspective prescribed by Alberti’s On Painting.20 Today things are quite different in philosophical thought, first of all because modern philosophy —in the sense of a project of finding a secure foundation for thought, and building a consistent and homogenous structure of knowledge upon it— has been radically cast into doubt. Along with this, the possibility of political philosophy presenting an ideal for human community has also been seriously questioned. According to Lyotard, the philosopher today is no longer in a position to be able to prescribe to the architect a project, understood as a model of human community which could be followed as a guide for what to build to ensure an ideal being- together.21 More strongly, Lyotard suggests that this term “project” implies a control or domination over “the totality of phenomena in the world and over human phenomena.”22 Such an attitude of mastery and control has also been subjected to extensive critique (as, for example, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, or Heidegger’s reflections on technology). Lyotard suggests that the architect, now in a similar position, can no longer believe that design for a human community is something that can be entirely thought out in advance. Both philosophers and architects are united in asking the question, “What can a community be today?” and in not knowing how to give an answer to this question.23 Without a concrete answer, the model of the ideal city must be abandoned, and along with it the very idea of a “project” as something that the architect can plan from scratch. The architect must then find a new way of working, which Lyotard suggests might be something like a “non-project”: Lyotard suggests that the task of both philosophers and architects has changed with the shift from the habitus to the megalopolis. “ ” AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 40 w oo dw a r d As you see we are dealing with a project that in the end is not even a project. Rather it is a sort of attitude, a frame of mind, that is, to be precise, an attitude of non-domination over the thing to be built or thought. We could say, a sort of passivity, or better still passibility, that seems to me an essential part of art, of the artistic attitude, and certainly of thought as well. I do not know whether we can still give everything the name of project, project of the non-project.24 While fleeting and tentative, these suggestions put the architect in a position closer to that of the painter or the musician, insofar as they must open themselves to a “passibility,” as he says here – that is, to trying to feel and make judgements about what is to be done which are not based on any predetermined rule. No doubt there has always been much of this in architectural invention, but Lyotard’s model of the megalopolis suggests that this aspect of architecture must be accentuated today. Architects must become artists, because they can no longer work with an ideal model of human community. When they engage in (non-)projects, they must be attentive to the contingencies of the situation in which they build, the conditions which already pre-exist, the complexities of the communities they build for, and they must be willing to be open to the possibility that the effects their buildings will have, once actualized in the community, will be to a significant degree unpredictable. Architects: Le Corbusier, Arakawa and Gins Let us consider now some of the architects Lyotard discusses explicitly, and treats as artists. Despite his opposition to the modernist architectural project of the “total plan,” this does not prevent Lyotard from seeing a tendency contrary to total planning—and thus, the artistry—in the late work of Le Corbusier, one of the dominant figures of modernist architecture. In an essay on Le Corbusier—“Conventus,” from 1994—Lyotard repeats but also reconfigures some of the main ideas he had previously made in his fleeting encounters with architecture. Lyotard’s focus for the essay is a single work by Le Corbusier—the convent at La Tourette in Lyon, completed in 1961 (figure 1)—yet the scope of this short piece is ultimately much broader. Although the term is not used, we see the great modernist Le Corbusier positioned here as an architect of the non-project, insofar as he opposes his “free plan” (plan libre) to "the project." The idea of “the project” is here described in terms of an “Egyptian” ideal of space, where 41 isparchitecture.com all of urban planning is centralized in and unified by the fixed “block” of the pyramid: “Geometric plan, blind facades, identical in all directions, tons of amassed stone weigh on the land of the living. […] All this crushing of time and space …”25 “The project” is evident here as a fixed and homogenous idea of space which is imposed on all space and lived relations in a dominating way. In contrast, Lyotard presents Le Corbusier’s architecture as led by the ideal of a “free plan,” which he describes as a “variable” space conceived in terms of waves or vibrations: “Question of frequency. This is a variable of vibration: it’s the number of times by unit of time that a mobile object animated by a wave movement passes on the axis of its propagation.”26 Despite this apparently precise physical definition, the use of the terms “waves” and “vibrations” is largely metaphorical, and concerns space as conceived and lived. These terms work simply to open architecture to alternative ways of conceiving the nature of materials and the experiences of bodies in space. Le Corbusier decomposes the supposed unity Figure 1: La Tourette AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 42 w oo dw a r d of space into component volumes, and considers these as having a “free” relation to each other, a relation not determined in advance. The emphasis in this essay appears largely to fall on the habitus, the problem of the habitation of space; of how architects can design buildings in which we can feel ourselves to be at home (thus recalling oikos and domus). But with Le Corbusier—or at least, Lyotard’s interpretation of him27—this turns out to be a matter closer to what he will call “the uninhabitable.” With the decomposition of the plan and the consideration of space in terms of vibrations, the question of habitation becomes one of the “resonance” of the body with the built environment, of the sensing body and the sensed architectural space: “In order to be my home, it need only resonate with the vibrations of my whole body. I only need it’s resonance with my rhythms in order to inhabit it.”28 To explain this idea of resonance, Lyotard plays on the similarity between frequency and frequentation.29 To be at home in a space is not a matter of inhabiting it in the manner of a homogenous body’s fixed relation to a given space, but of a variable relation, in which frequencies would be “modulated” by the body’s frequentation, its comings and goings, in that space. Describing the way we might get up in the night, half asleep, to get a glass of milk, and successfully navigate the space without turning on the lights, Lyotard writes that “[t]here, where I can be a sleepwalker without error, is my home.”30 Yet in posing the “at home” in terms of frequencies and frequenting, there is something which is never truly at home, at least as conceived on the old model of a natural fit between a given body and a given space. In this sense, being at home is a matter of “inhabiting the uninhabitable”—a degree of habituation to a space that will never settle into a fully tamed habitus, because it is always a matter of variable resonance between bodies and spaces which are never completely stable of fixed. We can note here a first contrast with phenomenology. While schooled in the phenomenological tradition and a some-time follower of Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard criticized the latter for an overly harmonious view of the relations between the body and space, which he believed limited both the phenomenologists’ ability to explain disharmonious experiences (such as sleep and orgasm) in which the body doesn’t make sense of its surroundings, and art as the creation of the new.31 If art is understood as witnessing “the birth of perception,” as Merleau-Ponty contends, then this limits the scope of what kinds of art are viewed as legitimate. For Lyotard, art—and this includes architecture—should destablize the body’s habitual relations to the world by giving it disharmonious, challenging experiences. 43 isparchitecture.com It should dislocate the body in space, not simply help it to feel located. In the context of architecture, this disharmony and dislocation which produces new aesthetic sensations is precisely what he calls “the uninhabitable.” The uninhabitable is more heavily accented in Lyotard’s treatment of the experimental architecture of Shusaku Arakawa and Madelaine Gins. In their collaborative architectural projects – such as the Site of Reversible Destiny (Yoro, 1995), the Reversible Destiny Lofts (Mitaka, 2005), and the Bioscleave House (New York, 2008)32 – Arakawa and Gins seek to “reverse destiny” with respect to the human body. They created spaces in which the body will decidedly not feel at home, in order to provide it with constant stimulation. This sensori-motor stimulation is thought, in turn, to stimulate the brain and the immune system, and to keep the body young and healthy by promoting brain plasticity and freedom from disease. In their avant-gardist hyperbole, Arakawa and Gins announce a hope for defeating mortality through an appropriate architecture: “We Have Decided Not To Die” and “Making Dying Illegal” are two of their slogans.33 What interests Lyotard in their work is not this rhetoric of immortality, but the dehabituation of the body as conducive to provoking an aesthetic experience. Arakawa and Gins develop the concept of the “architectural body,” which is the body considered as ontologically continuous with, and shaped by, its architectural environment.34 What interests Lyotard is the way that they conceive architecture as having a direct effect on the body, and of its capacity to make art of inhabitable space. Lyotard conceives of their work as a mutation of three-dimensional space, just as painting is a mutation of 2-dimensional space, or of color itself. This mutation, which is an artistic event in lived space, is precisely the uninhabitable: “For one instant, the body, the everyday body, Despite his opposition to the modernist architectural project of the “total plan,” this does not prevent Lyotard from seeing a tendency contrary to total planning—and thus, the artistry—in the late work of Le Corbusier “ ” AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 44 w oo dw a r d the body of the habitus, is exposed to the uninhabitable.”35 In order to feel the effects of this mutation, the body must undergo an “ascesis” in relation to the habitable36—its habits and habituations must be undone. Arakawa and Gins seek to produce this ascesis, for example, by making space difficult to navigate – introducing steep inclines, or placing barriers in unexpected places. (figure 2) The functional approach of modernist architecture is reversed. The aim is not to obliterate all function, however, but to introduce difficulties to be overcome by the body in its attempts to achieve its goals. Summing up and generalizing these conclusions from Arakawa and Gins’ work for all architecture, Lyotard writes: [A]rchitecture seeks to transfer into inhabitable space a power of habitation that is not itself inhabitable. This art cannot offer human beings any topos where they might live and be sheltered, that is to say, where they might escape from this elsewhere. Architecture as an art cleaves space-time in such a way that there and then are at home here and now while still being far away.37 Riffing on Lyotard’s well-known theme of “presenting the unpresentable,”38 the problem or stake of architecture as an art would then be how to “inhabit the uninhabitable.” The question for the architect would be: how to construct a habitation in which the uninhabitable can be encountered? Comparisons: phenomenology, postmodernism Now that we have surveyed Lyotard’s relevant texts, we are in a position to draw out the critical contrasts announced at the outset. We have already noted Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty, but his challenge to phenomenology may also be extended to Heidegger, whose writings on dwelling have been highly influential in architectural theory. In a rare text on Lyotard’s writings on architecture, Rob Shields notes some similarities with Heidegger.39 However, there is also an important contrast to be made between Lyotard and the German phenomenologist. In short, we might see the Heideggerian perspective as expressing a nostalgia for the habitus, as Lyotard’s referencing of Heidegger in this regard suggests.40 While we have noted that Lyotard does not believe this mode of dwelling in itself, nor a nostalgia for it, signal anything worrying, we also saw that the same cannot be said for the attempt to reimpose it. And so we might well think that for Lyotard, any architectural model based on the Heideggerean notion 45 isparchitecture.com of dwelling will risk being out of step with the transformations of time, space, and being- together that the megalopolis has effected.41 At worst, such a r c h i t e c t u r a l projects might be conceived as conservative, even “fascistic,” in their attempts to make the body feel at home in a fixed place, with others who are part of an autochthonous c o m m u n i t y , while keeping strangers beyond the borders (or welcoming them only on the strictest conditions). Although there are no explicit references to this in Lyotard’s writings (as far as I’m aware), it is easy to see his notions of space as linked far more closely to Emmanuel Levinas.’ In his essay “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us,” Levinas bemoans the Heideggerean notion of place, with its fixed horizon, as ethically problematic, and instead celebrates the exposure of Gargarin—the first person to space-walk—to a space without fixed horizon as analogous to the nomadism of the Jewish peoples.42 Certainly Lyotard’s comments about Husserl’s notions of Earth, body, and space in his short text “Habitus” seem to head in this direction. According to Husserl, the relativistic discoveries of physics regarding time and space do nothing to change our body’s perception that “the earth does figure 2: site of reversible destiny--arakawa and gins AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 46 w oo dw a r d not move,” the existential truth that we are grounded on an Earth with a fixed horizon.43 Rather than opposing the existential truth of the body to the scientific truths of reason, Lyotard instead asserts: There is no need for the bodies to form a nature that would hold the secret of distances, and still less that the focal point they form should be a home. On the contrary, the failure of this metaphysics liberates another truth, one that can be reconciled with the relativism of the physicists. The focal point of the field is in the field and does not stop moving, just like everything that is in the field.44 For reasons that are both ethical and political, then, as well as artistic, Lyotard challenges the dominant phenomenological views of the body and space. Because of Lyotard’s own deep association with the postmodern, there is the obvious need to compare his views with those of the famous postmodern architectural theorists, such as Robert Venturi and Charles Jencks. The latter is an especially interesting comparison to make, since Lyotard explicitly sought to distance what he meant by the postmodern from Jencks’ use of the term. For example: As for the 'trans-avantgardism' of Bonito Oliva and the similar currents one can observe in the USA and (including Jencks's 'postmodernism' in architecture, which the reader will do me the favour of not confusing with what I have called 'the postmodern condition'), it is clear that behind the pretext of picking up the tradition of the avant-gardes, this is a pretext […] to encourage the eclecticism of consumption. Mixing the same surface neo- or hyper-realist and abstract, lyrical or conceptual motifs means that everything is equivalent because everything is good for consumption. […] What is called on by eclecticism are the habits of magazine readers, the needs of the consumer of standard industrial images - this is the spirit of the supermarket shopper.45 As Lyotard makes abundantly clear here, he sees Jencks’ architectural postmodernism as nothing more than a market-driven eclecticism consistent with trans-avantgardism in painting (which was also sometimes called postmodernism). Certainly, if we compare some of Lyotard’s ideas on architecture which have emerged above with those of Jencks and other representatives of the “popular” form of architectural postmodernism, 47 isparchitecture.com we can identify at least some significant points of similarity. Most notably, with both we see a critical break with the modernist ideal of total planning for an ideal community. Jencks famously proclaimed the death of modern architecture and the birth of the postmodern with the demolition of the Pruitt- Igoe housing estate in St. Louis, USA, at 3:32 pm on 15 July, 1972. For him, this demolition of a characteristically modernist project after the years of social dysfunction it had housed signaled the end of the modernist dream of planned community, and ushered in a new era, in which ornamentation and locality-specificity returned.46 However, Lyotard rejects this kind of clear linear periodization which seeks to delineate the modern and the postmodern, and—as we have already seen with the example of Le Corbusier—his concerns with the arts incorporate much that is usually delineated as “modern.” Briefly glossing a complex topic, Lyotard extols the virtues of experimentation in the arts, and highly values this dimension of modernism, but he critically rejects the tendency of modernism to construct a narrative of progress, with a particular style and an ideal of purification or perfection. Rejecting such notions does not mean for him the end of new developments in the arts and a pastiche of past styles, but a free pluralism of experimental creation.47 Lyotard’s approach to the postmodern then invites a more nuanced view of how different architectures might be understood and judged. Endnotes 1. See for example William M. Taylor and Michael P. Levine, “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://iep.utm.edu/ architec/#SSH3ci 2. As noted by both Taylor and Levine “Philosophy (Lyotard) sees Jencks’ architectural postmodernism as nothing more than a market-driven eclecticism consistent with trans- avantgardism in painting “ ” AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 48 w oo dw a r d of Architecture” and Saul Fisher, “Philosophy of Architecture in Historical Perspective” (supplement to “Philosophy of Architecture,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ architecture/perspective.html 3. These texts are, respectively: “Conventus” in Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 2000); “Reserves of Spatial Events” and “Dear Neverending Architectonic Reflective Wherewithal” in What to Paint?, ed. Herman Parret. Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists 5 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012); “Dwelling and the Postmodern: A Conversation with Jean- François Lyotard,” Skala 22 (1990): 36-41; “What Are We Looking For?: A Conversation Between Architect and Philosopher,” Lotus International 73 (1992): 67-75; and “Habitus” – contribution to “Il paradiso perduto = Paradise Lost,” Lotus International 79 (1993): 102-131. 4. Following for example Le Corbusier, who writes: “I consider architecture and city planning together as a single concept.” Precisions: On the Present State of Architecture and City Planning. Trans. Edith Schreiber Aujame (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), p. 70. 5. See for example Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 6. Most famously in The Postmodern Condition. 7. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 191. 8. Jean-François Lyotard with Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming. Trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 42. 9. See “The Zone” in Lyotard, Postmodern Fables. Trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Previously published in The Dimensions of Play: Ways of Thinking Architecture and the City. ANY : Architecture New York, 12. New York: Anyone Corporation, 1995. 10. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 192. 11. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110. 12. For Lyotard on these effects of communication technologies, see for example “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy” in The Inhuman. 13. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110. 14. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 110. 15. See the essay “Oikos” in Jean-François Lyotard: Political Writings. 49 isparchitecture.com Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). And in “Domus and the Megalopolis” we read: “In the lowest depths of the domus, rumour of anti-nature, threat of stasis, of sedition. Father, mother, child, female servant with the heart of gold, niece, old man-servant, shepherd and ploughman, gardener, cook, all the figures of wisdom, the corner of the park under the fig tree, the little passage for whispering, the attic and its chests – everything is matter for obscene crimes. Something in the domus did not want the bucolic.” Lyotard, The Inhuman, pp. 195-6. 16. See Lyotard, “The General Line” in Postmodern Fables. 17. Lyotard, “Domus and the Megalopolis” in The Inhuman. 18. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 201. 19. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 197. 20. See Lyotard’s discussion of this in “Painting as a Libidinal Set-Up,” translated by Kieth Crome, in The Lyotard Reader and Guide. Ed. Keith Crome and James Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 21. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking For?,” p. 70. 22. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking For?,” p. 69. 23. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking For?,” p. 70. 24. Derossi and Lyotard, “What Are We Looking For?,” p. 72. 25. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 199. Translations from this text are mine. 26. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 200. 27. Lyotard openly acknowledges that his interpretation takes a great deal from that of Jacques Lucan. See the latter’s “Tout a commence là” in Le AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 Corbusier, une encyclopedié. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987. 28. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201. 29. “Fréquence” and “fréquentation” in French. 30. Lyotard, Misère de la philosophie, p. 201. 31. On Lyotard’s relation to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, see my article “Lesson of Darkness: Phenomenology and Lyotard’s Late Aesthetics,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology vol. 50, no. 2 (2019): 104-119. 32. Some of these projects were realised only after Lyotard’s death, but embody earlier ideas on which he commented. 33. See Arakawa and Gins, Pour ne pas mourir / To Not To Die (Paris: Éditions de la difference, 1987) and Making Dying Illegal (New York: Roof Books, 2006). 34. See Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 35. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407. 36. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 391. 37. Lyotard, What to Paint?, p. 407. 38. See Lyotard, “Answering the Question.” 39. Rob Shields, “Oblique Views and Heterodox Spaces: Le Corbusier’s Conventus” in Rereading Jean-François Lyotard: Essays on His Later Works. Ed. Heidi Bichis and Rob Shields (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), p. 111. 40. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 195. 41. See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1993). A key distinction here that could be pursued is that of the boundary, which is essential to Heidegger’s account of space, locale, and dwelling, and which is the distinctive feature that disappears in Lyotard’s account of the space of the postmodern megalopolis. 42. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 43. See Edmund Husserl, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature: The Originary Ark, The Earth Does Not Move.” Trans. Fred Kersten in Edmund Husserl: Shorter Works (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1978). 44. Lyotard, “Habitus,” p. 111. br os s 50 51 isparchitecture.com 45. Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 127. 46. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, 4th edn. (London: Academy Editions, 1984), p. 9. In a later interview, in fact, Lyotard does seem to present Jencks’ architectural postmodernism as broadly in line with his own thinking of the postmodern insofar as both reject the tabula rasa approach of modernism, and instead connect with tradition. See “Dwelling and the Postmodern.” This would be a point from which to take up further comparison. 47. On this topic, see my article “Lyotard on Postmodern Music,” Evental Aesthetics 5.1 (2016): 118-143. AP . vol 5 . No 2 . 2021 52 w oo dw a r d