EDITORIALS 

A Particular Encounter 

Defined by domestic ritual, a house speaks to "houses" of many other times and places; it occupies the 
enviable condition of simultaneity. The resonance of the individual architectural project holds true within 
other building typologies as well. 

At the same time, individual architects often wish to bring something of their particular selves to the 
architecture project, to enliven it, to particularize it as we are. Architecture is not necessarily responsive to 
this particular calling. 

Our human dilemma is thatwhilewe identify ourselves and ourworkwith the particulars ofourindividual 
being, these are always subject to universals . The particular and collective dimensions of living were, of 
course, fiercely debated in Vienna between Freud andthatnotoriouscircledefined by Wittgenstein, Kraus, 
Schoenberg and Loos-the contest between the determination ofan organism and the lifeoflanguage. 

lfwe boldly make a claim for the individual life, then we can say that while architecture lives many lives, 
we each live but one particular life; or as Milan Kunderawrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our 
previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come. /1 

To the project of architecture, architects must persist in drawing that breathe of life that one discovers in 
the sketch; to enliven architecture, to particularize it, even when it resists us. Through a tense labor, the 
individual has the cunning to conceive a near-vital architecture. 

Keith Evan Green 

Specifications 

As a rt of ordering architecture demands a coherence, a bringing together, a joining, a jointing of 
specific differences. A construction joint or a room do not have to hold together the way a garden or a 
city, which is neverfinished, do but a building at a certain level must be assembled and hold together. 
The challenge of the particular, however, isthethreatthat nothing might be able to be said of it or made 
of it. ltposesthe limits of language. Canweevensaythatthe particular is an idea, exceptinsofarasitis 
already brought within an existing system of sense, which is to say, a system of universals? The moment 
of resistance by something trulyspecifictoanyform of generalization, any elevation to the level of unity 
and of ideas that sustain a unity, is potentially a moment of sublime breakdown to be contemplated and 
even prolonged with a certain cultivation. Thisveryattemptateditorializing, with its necessary 
demands for an overview, must acknowledge its own limits in the face of this. 

The unique, the singular, the heterogeneous, the new, fall outside the canon, they fall outside sense, 
raising the dilemma ofauthentication and authorisation in the guise ofother singulars : the individual 
witness and the signature. But even the 'I' in its declaration of si ngu la rity does not turn out to be a stable 
entity. 

At the furthest limits of certainty and the known world chance and unaccountable phenomena demand 
to be brought into the realm of intelligible systems and institutionalized knowledge. The task of 
ordering, mapping, and bringing to the level ofculturalvisibilityisan intimate part of the colonial 
universalization of productive and habitable space that is now so questioned by exposure of internal 
conflicts. Places, sites, texts, for example, are not simply 'found' but are a product both of the coloniser's 
expectations, intentions, and interpretations and of dialogue between coloniser and colonised. Thus a 
diversity may be exposed between and within presumed homogeneous discourses where the smallest 

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particulars may become the focal point of their intersection . 

In effect it is the smooth finish of discursive rationality itself which totalises and enslaves in its refusal to 
risk the death of meaning in anything that stands outside its empire. Order, classically, was constructed 
bya systems of substance and accidents, form and matter, part and whole; relationships supported by 
grammar, metaphysics, power structures. With the break up of such systems has come the need to think 
otherwise - obliquely and peripherally-to elude thetotalising effect of purely rational thought. 

Architecture is never simply analytical but necessarily projective. The sort of conjectural thinking that 
Ginzburg locates in the minute and specific narratives of clues and traces has been related by Marco 
Frascari to architectural knowledge, itselfa way of thinking that cannot be explained through the use of 
demonstrative reasoning or by the scientific method. If Mies' minute concern with the particularityof the 
building craft relative to the universals of modernist space, was typified by his "God is in the details," a 
notion with its own particular micro-history, Frascari reads the detail as site of creation itself. The 
exercise of detailing here becomes the guiding concept for the discipline ofarchitecturewhere by 
invention the elements and jointing are seen as a fertile nexus of all forms of connection in a chiasmus, a 
tense dialectical crossing, between reason and constructing, between the construction of construal and 
the construal of construction . 

The menace and instabilityofthe particular, is in that it is accidental, it is what simply befalls and denies 
classification. The risk, so common in our local architecture, isthataworkmay, in theabsenceofan 
idea, fall apart into an assemblage of details or else never rise beyond the banal, that is, the general 
which is opposed to the particular, for in becoming common property, a commonplace, the particular is 
transformed into the banal, being the particular we know too well to see. The banal is "the singular in 
general," that is to say, the inability to maintain the two terms in their difference. Unlike Duchamp's 
"beauty of indifference" that comes so close to it but instead raises the question of what was not already 
art, the banal defies the impulse to become symbol, orfigure; it belongs to no poetic genus. The 
challenges are to transform the everdaydetail into myth, to join and make differences visible while 
maintaining theirfertile particularity. 

Ross Jenner 

Counting Particulars 

"Et n' est-ce pas lefantasme lui - meme qui appelle le' detail,' la scene minuscule, privee, dons laquelle 
je puissefinalement predre place? ... " 

(Roland Barthes, Le Ploisirdu texte) 

To film is to particularise . 
A film shows everything at the same time on the same surface. 
Yet the number of things we chose to distinguish in a film is confusing and variable. 
Its completeness never ceases to bethere in front of us, a power from afar, but viewing is somehow never 
a complete act. 
We are ever aware of what we miss. 
One never looks at a film, at least heuristically speaking, we gaze which is not the same mode of 
apprehensision. 
To gaze is notto see, notto see at a 11. 
We gaze to see more in the whole, todiscoverthe imperceptible. 
Perhaps what we gaze at is really the more we cannot see? 
So what can it mean to possess a detailed knowledgeoffilm, a film? 
Orto turn that question round, what is the role of detail in film? 



To film is to engage the triple operation which marks detail. 
The first is to approach or enter into a field, to enter into the particulars. 
This is the penetration ofan elective epistemology of the intimatewhichtheaction of the zoom lens or the 
rack of focus brings with it. 
Descending to particulars. 
This intimacy however also conveys with it a perverse violence, and surely it is perverse. 
Oneapproachesthusonlytocuttosomething else, ortocutup, to morcelise. 
This is the fundamental meaning, the 'part', of particular and it is the etymology of detail, too, in /a faille, 
'tocutfrom.' 
The cutting bench of the film edit. 
Finally the particular, in a move no less perverse, designates an operation that is symmetrically opposite 
to the cut: the assembling together of the pieces of the whole. 
As if the cut has only provided for the collection together of all the pieces, was only to provide for the 
possibilityofa summation inthe pan of the camera around a room across its objects, oroverthefaces in a 
crowd, entranced with diversity. 
It is also there in thetotalising systematics of combination in film montage. 

So a triple and paradoxical operation is in play. 
The particular with its three operations - proximity, portage, summation - depends upon an ideal of 
knowledge and totality. 
The whole depends upon the part. 
But fixing the particular also allows us to redefine and reconstitute the whole. 
The particular is not a fragment. l 
For the fragment relates to a whole in order to put it in question by posing itasabsenceorenigma orlost 
memory. 
The fragment is not defined by its position in a compositional chain since, as Barthes has noted, itis 
"syntagmatically irresponsible. "2 
The fragment can only be explained according to the whole. 
In contrastthe particular imposes the whole, its legitimatised presence, its hegemony, its recovery. 

The greatfortune of the particular in the field of interpretation is that it is not simply restricted to its common 
sense meaning. 
Theassumptionthatsimplyin orderto know something one needsdiscoverit in detail, discover its details . 
As if the enigmas of the visible have but one solution. 
But the particular, as we have seen, is more ofan event than an object. 
Its presuppositionsarecertainlymorecomplexand more strategic and in this sense it is a riskforthought. 
It is this risk which interpretation must indicate: it can only indicate, not measure, it. 
The intractable which constitutes its object. 
The object of the particular is not a representation of the visible world but the fragile moment of its 
defiguration . 

Every film ends with a cut but also keeps going. 
The reel never stops like the endless list of the etcetera.3 
This etceteraisthetropeof inexpressibility and incompletion which seems to dominate all discourses of 
the particular. 
For the particular is a discussion that is without end. 

Laurence Simmons 

1 See Omar Calabrese, Neo - Baroque. A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles Lambert(Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1993) , in particularChapter4 
' Detail and Fragment'; and Jacques De rrida, " Les marts de Roland Borth es," Poe tique, Xll 47 (1981):269-292 . 
2 "Letroisiemesens : notes de recherch essurqu e lques photogrammes d e S. M. Ejzenstejn ," Cahiers du cinema, 222 (1970) : 17. 
3 See Alan Liu , "Local Tran scend e nce : Cultural Criticism, Postmoderni sm, and the Romanticism of Deta il," Representations 32 (Fall 1990) : 75 - 113 , 
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