INTERSTICES02.indb INTERSTICES 07 Latecomers Carl Douglas Authorship and authority, originality and infl uence are genealogical concerns, arising in the relationship between a maker and his or her precursors. Genea- logy is concerned with lineage. It maps relations through time, tracking propaga- tion and inheritance, and establishing inter-generational debts. How many accounts of poets, artists and architects are prefaced with an intro- duction which seeks to unveil sources, get the inside scoop on the various depths of plagiarism of which the maker is guilty, and draw out a tally of debts to be paid? These debts have often, in the past, been explained by the mechanism of infl uence. Infl uence is the extent to which one’s work is attributable to another, can even be seen as belonging properly to that other. If one is infl uenced, he or she is no longer strictly an origin. The claim to originality and authorship breaks down if a work can be shown to originate in some precursor. Agamben describes genius as “the personalization of that, within us, which sur- passes and exceeds ourselves” (Agamben, 2006: 95). It is this condition of being exceeded within oneself that is considered here. This paper introduces two theo- rists of lateness in order to build a picture of the latecomer, one who follows on and risks being overshadowed or overwhelmed by those who have gone before, surpassed externally and exceeded internally. Clearing Space Harold Bloom, in his Anxiety of Infl uence (1973), develops a theory of poetry as essentially constituted in the relationship between a poet and that poet’s prede- cessors. Strong poets, argues Bloom, “wrestle with their strong precursors,” in order to “clear imaginative space” in which they can work (Bloom, 1973: 5). It is this, he contends, that defi nes a poet’s strength. The argument he builds seeks to “de-idealize” the notion of infl uence. Infl uence, historically, was an ethereal fl uid fl owing down from the stars and affecting a person’s character and destiny.1 As it is used today, it retains this sense of fl ow and ascendancy - someone is infl uenced more or less against his or her conscious will. Infl uence is not entered into so much as it is come under. Bloom sees this as an inadequate view of the relationship between poets, and proceeds to develop a more complex critical vocabulary for infl uence.2 Infl uence is not to be taken as a smooth and inscrutable subconscious transfer of techniques or tropes, but as a fraught, sometimes painful, and above all, anxiety-inducing relationship: “What strong poet desires the realisation that he has failed to create himself?” (5). 1 OED, ‘infl uence’ 2 Bloom explains that a gene- alogical view of the relationship between the precursor and the latecomer predates the modern concept of in-fl uence: “We remember how for so many centuries, from the sons of Homer to the sons of Ben Jonson, poetic infl uence had been described as a fi lial relationship, and then we see that poetic infl uence, rather than sonship, is another product of the Enlightenment, another aspect of the Cartesaian dualism” (Bloom 1973: 26). 35 In The Anxiety of Infl uence Bloom describes six ‘revisionary movements’ or ‘revi- sionary ratios’.3 These correspond to the various ways in which he perceives late- comer poets clearing space in which to work by deferring their precursors. For example, in the revisionary ratio, which Bloom calls Clinamen, the latecomer poet constructs a poem which makes the precursor appear to have missed in his or her aim. The precursor is taken to have been moving correctly up to a point; it is at this point that the later poet diverges, and in this swerving away, it is implied that the latecomer is correcting a failure on the part of the precursor. This ‘act of creative correction’ is a repression of the precursor.4 In the revisionary ratio Daemonization: “the later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor. He does this, in his poem, by so stationing its relation to the parent-poem as to generalise away the uniqueness of the earlier work” (15). In one of Bloom’s examples, William Collins attributes the power of Milton’s poems to Fear, understood as an autonomous spiritual power. When Collins then proceeds to open up his work to this force, this daemon, he is able to claim a kind of ascendancy over Milton: “a daemonic vision in which the Great Original remains great but loses his originality, yielding it to the world of the numinous” (101). In this way, too, the precursor is repressed, and a space in which to work is made. Bloom is careful to emphasise that infl uence is not a failure of genius, nor the ascendancy of genealogy: it is not a mark of poetic weakness, or a faltering of talent, nor the subsumption of the individual. On the contrary, the struggle to make space for oneself with respect to one’s predecessors is a necessary part of one’s constitution as a poet. The anxiety of infl uence or indebtedness arises from the process of self-appropriation. Contending with the Precursor Let us briefl y consider, in Bloom’s terms, the relationship between a specifi c late- comer architect and one of his signifi cant precursors, in order to observe this kind of repression at work in an architectural rather than a poetic context. At the close of his essay “Architecture (1910)” (Loos, 1985: 104-109), in which he formu- lates his theory of the essential alienation of the modern architect, Adolf Loos offers the following stellar commendation of Schinkel: But every time the minor architects who use ornament move architec- ture away from its grand model, a great architect is at hand to guide them back to antiquity. Fischer von Erlach in the south, Schluter in the north, were justifi ably the great masters of the eighteenth century. And at the threshold to the nineteenth century stood Schinkel. We have forgotten him. May the light of this towering fi gure shine upon our forthcoming generation of architects! (109). 3 In Clinamen, “A poet swerves away from his precursor … as a corrective movement in his own poem”. In Tessera, “A poet antithetically ‘completes’ his precursor, by so reading the parent-poem as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense”. In Kenosis, “The later poet, appa- rently emptying himself of his own affl atus, his imaginative god- hood, seems to humble himself while actually de-fl ating his pre- cursor”. In Daemonization, “The later poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precur- sor”. In Askesis, the poet “yields up part of his own human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from others, including the precursor”. In Apophrades, the poet opens his poem to the precursor widely, “and the uncanny effect … makes it seem to us … as though the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work” (Bloom 1973: 14-16). 4 Bloom’s theory of infl uence is heavily Freudian, particularly in its emphasis on repression and the family romance: “Freud’s investigations of the mechanisms of defense and their ambivalent functionings provide the clearest ana-logues I have found for the revisionary ratios that govern intra-poetic relations” (Bloom 1973: 8). INTERSTICES 07 Schinkel is commended as a guide, a kind of lighthouse pointing away from himself. Loos invokes him to shine forward onto the following generation, and praises Schinkel for indicating a return path, like von Erlach and Schluter, to the ‘grand model’ of Classical antiquity. Loos is deeply concerned to establish a lineage. He authorises his own production by demonstrating that it takes place within a specifi c genealogy. However, it is only in appearance that this appeal to genealogy is self-deprecating. Just a little earlier in “Architecture (1910)”, prior to this monumental fi guring of Schinkel as an illuminating tower, Loos remarks on the potency of the Classical, which appears as an autonomous cultural force: Our culture is based on the knowledge of the all-surpassing grandeur of classical antiquity. We have adopted the technique of thinking and feeling from the Romans. We have inherited our social conscience and the discipline of our souls from the Romans ... Ever since humanity sensed the greatness of classical antiquity, one common thought has unifi ed all great architects. They think: the way I build is the same as the way the Romans would have built (108). The true power of great architects, Loos implies, derives from the amor- phous potency of Roman Classicism, the “one common thought” of European architecture. In this way, Loos, the latecomer, disarms Schinkel, his direct pre- cursor (and perhaps the one with whom his entire career can be seen to be directly concerned), and places him safely on a pedestal to serve as a lamp for the inexperienced. According to Loos, Schinkel’s greatness, his potency, lies precisely in the extent to which he channels the historical ‘force’ of classicism. Loos mythologizes a genealogy for Schinkel in such a way as to clear space to become an individual. In Loos’ backhanded compliment, Schinkel’s greatness is deferred, and identifi ed as originating elsewhere. Bloom might identify this ‘elsewhere’ as the Classical daemon, and the kind of deferral taking place here an instance of Daemonization. Prompted by Bloom, we might re-conceive this apparently harmonious relationship as a struggle in which Loos is attempting to clear a space to practice in. Loos emphasises a relationship of essence between himself and Schinkel, in which petty differences in detail of execution are unimportant. What matters, he insists, is the shared daemon rather than any particularities of style. To what extent is this a mis-representation of the relationship? Bloom says that latecom- er poets proceed by ‘misreading’ their precursors. To what extent is Loos mis- reading Schinkel? Loos defers Schinkel; he puts him away and elevates him on a pedestal. If we squint sceptically for a moment at this deferral, we might see it appear as a signifi cant repression of Schinkel’s presence in Loos’ work. Might it be possible to ask whether some of Loos’ most personal moments are in fact the moments when he is someone else? Agamben suggests that genius is precisely such a chiastic moment, a moment when “this most intimate and personal of gods is also the most impersonal part of us” (Agamben, 2006: 95). We might go on to ask whether the strength of Loos’ work is in fact the invention of the very daemon he claims to be channelling. In favour of this possibility is that it is far from clear that the absence of ornament held the same signifi cance for Schinkel as it did for Loos. It is more likely that, for Schinkel, the absence of orna- ment was a marker of rurality, even a kind of poverty, while for Loos it signifi ed classical urbanity and civilisation. 37 In “Architecture (1910)”, Loos aligns the purifi cation of modern architecture with Classicism. He observes: It is no coincidence that the Romans were incapable of inventing a new column order, or a new ornament. For they had already progressed so far. They had taken all that knowledge from the Greeks and had adapted it to their needs. The Greeks were individualists. Every build- ing had to have its own profi le, its own ornamentation. But the Romans considered things socially. The Greeks squandered their inventiveness on the orders; the Romans wasted theirs on the plan. And he who can solve the great plan does not think of new mouldings (108). Loos sees the Romans’ disregard for ornament as an advancement over the Greeks. He argues that the time has come to move even closer to the Roman ideal. Not only should the production of new ornament be ceased by civilised people, but what ornament remains should be actively stripped off. Ornament may continue in the country, amongst the non-urbane - the farmer and the shoemaker are less civilised in Loos’ terms, and taking ornamentation from them would amount to something like parental cruelty. The Romans’ progressiveness is their urbanity, characterised by their disinterest in ornament. It is this force of Roman progres- siveness that Schinkel is taken to be a herald for. The primary symptom of posses- sion by this particular daemon is, according to Loos, the removal of ornament. For Loos, his shared ground with Schinkel is the act of stripping away decoration in the service of civility. It is doubtful that Schinkel marks increased civility with reduced ornament. According to Schinkel’s own account, he begins to design with geometric shapes, manipulates them as masses, and then articulates them according to the impression they are required to make.5 Distinctions in formality and consequence are indicated by an increased consideration of ornament. His large, civil build- ings, and especially his designs for the aristocracy, develop rich ornamental schemes: the fi gures standing around on the roof and above the portico of the Schauspielhaus; the colour, depth and detail of the Altes Museum’s facade. The sparest of his buildings are those with rural or informal connotations: they are farm houses, pavilions, garden retreats for aristocrats seeking an alternative to their more formal houses. This collection of arcadian buildings does not warrant the additional social emphasis supplied by ornament.6 Minimalism, in Schinkel, is more likely to be a state of deliberate underdevelopment; Loos alone elevated the removal of ornament to an historical principle. On the other hand, there may be a very direct contact with his predecessor in Loos’ most personal. His apparently idiosyncratic scheme for Lina Loos’ bedroom, in which the interior is shaped by draping and spilling fabric and furs from the walls and the bed, can be seen as a version of Schinkel’s tented guest bedroom for the Schloss Charlottenhof, in which the interior is draped with striped fabric which also forms a canopy for the bed. In each case, the interior connotes the exterior, the place of tents and bears. In the same way, the careful and characteristic niche arrangement used by Loos, could be seen to be a revision of Schinkel’s niches, which similarly establish interior lines of sight towards the outside.7 In fact, some typical elements of Loos’ work, which we may be inclined to consider signatory marks - the things we look for in order to recognise Loos in his work - may be the points at which he is most closely Schinkel’s disciple. 5 See “Karl Friedrich Schinkel” (2003). 6 This group of buildings in- cludes the Lusthaus, the Neuer Pavilion at Schloss Charlotten- burg, and the garden build- ings of Schloss Gleinicke and Schloss Charlottenhof. The most direct comparison can be made between Schloss Gleinicke, and the informal Casino in its grounds. 7 These niches are analysed by Beatriz Colomina (1994: 233- 281). The clearest comparison is between the niche in the Garden Room of the Neuer Pavilion, and the Zimmer der Dame, Moller House. INTERSTICES 07 This inversion of the personal and impersonal, of the traces of the desired self and the ingested Other is the same as that found in Agamben’s account of genius. Loos’ production of himself as an individual, including the genealogy which he posits for himself, is an eluding of his precursor, an attempt to avoid acknowled- ging what is not simply a debt to Schinkel, but Schinkel’s presence in Loos’s identity. The Domain of the Remainder These considerations imply a spatiality which can be further developed by refer- ence to another, earlier theorist of the latecomer. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English doctor and man of letters, is no longer widely read, perhaps because of the dense style of his prose. His heavy use of historical, theological and Classical allusion can render him opaque to a mod- ern reader. In Hydriotaphia, or Urne-Burial (1669), an antiquarian text regarding the discovery of a number of burial urns in Norfolk, his writing is ceaselessly referential and laden with irony, elaborate rhythms, and catachresis. Browne is concerned principally with the relationship between the material world (of bod- ies, matter and material productions), and the various registers of the immaterial (the imaginary, the spiritual, the conceptual). From considering how the human subject is constituted at this intersection arises a concern for the precision of the vague, the necessary relationship between uncertainty and vagueness.8 Al- though ‘lateness’ (as a theme, an operating principle and a subject position) can be traced in other of Browne’s writings, it is Hydriotaphia in which it is addressed explicitly. In 1658, in a fi eld in Old Walsingham in Norfolk, a cache of between forty and fi fty burial urns was uncovered, a metre below the surface, in sandy soil. The urns typically contained about a kilogram of ashes, bone fragments and other miscel- laneous materials. Having described the urns and speculated at length about their origins,9 Browne turns to a meditation on the lateness of the present. He writes: “Tis too late to be ambitious. The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may be too short for our designs” (Browne, 1669: 26). In the opening scene of the essay, we are just too late to witness the urns’ interment: When the general pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred friends, little expecting the curi- osity of future ages should comment upon their ashes; and having no old experience of the duration of their relicks, held no opinion of such after-considerations (i). Having arrived too late to witness, the latecomer knows only echoes and impres- sions, after-images that fade away, and traces which require inference or inter- pretation. Too late to observe the scene ourselves, we must admit Browne as a witness. The world is thus conceived as the domain of the remainder, where the contents of the world are left behind to be encountered by the latecomer. Primary amongst 8 Perhaps because of his often strangely inconclusive tone and recondite subject matter, literary criticism of Browne has often talked as if he were primarily a stylist and that his subject matter is really only a premise for sty- listic exercises. “To the nineteenth century, the fi fth chapter showed how Browne, fi red with the nobility to which his subject was allied, could abandon his modest scholarly purpose and a pedes- trian scholarly style to seize upon the poetic possibilities of mortality, transforming what had started out as an antiquary’s report into a work of undeni- able, if baffl ing, greatness. This view of Browne as an artist in spite of himself has been ex- orcised by modern criticism” (Nathanson, 1967: 12). Along with the argument that Browne is only a stylist, I discard the view that he does not present a theory. I contend that the consistency of his concepts is theoretical. Engraving of the Old Walsing- ham urns. 39 the characteristics of the remainder in Hydriotaphia is the tendency towards dis- persal. Browne composes a litany of dispersing and degenerating materials: clay crumbles into the ground, silverwork turns into “small tinsel parcels”, bones and ashes are found “half mortared unto the sand and sides of the urn” with grass roots “wreathed about”, liquors have “incrassated into jellies”, wood has trans- muted into charcoal, thin brass plates are found melted amongst the bones, and the tiny iron pins found in some urns decayed rapidly, “exposed unto the piercing atoms of air, in the space of a few months, they begin to spot and betray their green entrails” (13). This concern with decay spills over from the urns into the rest of Hydriotaphia. Every material thing is in a state of gratuitous decomposition. Browne discusses mingling of the ashes of relatives, the practice of grinding up mum- mies for use as balm, the plundering of graves, the coagulation of fatty deposits in graves into a kind of soap, and the amount of ash into which a human body can be reduced, as well as the fading of gravestones and the collapse of monuments. In this way, Browne makes explicit the logic of death implicit in genealogy. Associated with material failure is the problem of semantic failure. Signifi ers are shown to repeatedly fail; inscriptions and engravings last no longer than the material on which they are engraved, “Gravestones tell truth scarce forty years“ (26). With respect to those who have left nameless tombs and urns, Browne writes: “Had they made as good provision for their names, as they have for their relicks, they had not so grossly erred in the art of perpetuation. But to subsist in bones, and be but pyramidally extant is a fallacy in duration” (25). Arbitrarily is subsistence in memory achieved: “Who can but pity the founder of the pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple of Diana, he is almost lost that built it. Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian’s horse, confounded that of himself” (26). Semantic subsistence cannot be assured by appealing to material permanence; signifi cance does not survive the material failure of the signifi er. For Browne, the material world is a dense fi eld of detritus consisting of items which have failed to signify, fragments of bodies and matter that have been left behind by precursors. This world is a domain shared amongst latecomers, and between precursors and latecomers. However, the communal genealogical detritus is not shared because of its meaningfulness, but rather for its failure to retain meaning. Within this ap- parently pessimistic perspective, Browne retains a distinctly utopian streak. He writes: We have enough to do to make up ourselves from present and passed times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction. A complete piece of virtue must be made up from the Centos of all ages, as all the beauties of Greece could make but one handsome Venus (ii-iii). The latecomer, alienated, displaced and threatened with dispersal, sets about constructing self and context. A ‘cento’ is a literary composition assembled from 9 Hydriotaphia is undoubtedly of importance in the history of archaeology, for his metho- dical description and thought- ful conjecture. At the time, speculation regarding British history prior to the Roman occupation was vague. The urns themselves are no longer extant, but an engraving of them (Figure 1) has been used to classify them as Anglo-Saxon rather than Roman, as Browne suggested. INTERSTICES 07 scraps and quotes of other writers, deriving its name from the Latin word for a patchwork garment.10 The temporal world is a place of partial values, and the present does not have a monopoly on virtue or beauty. Therefore, in the domain of the remainder, it is necessary to assemble a “complete piece of virtue” from wherever it may be found, past or present, in the manner of Zeuxis making a portrait of Hera by selecting and composing the best features of a number of women. Browne’s description of the latecomer’s need to construct a place proper to him or herself in the domain of the remainder is directly analogous to Bloom’s “clearing space”, and so is Bloom’s “self-appropriation” to Browne’s “making up ourselves”. Browne makes the failing material world the scene in which genea- logical relationships are negotiated, and in which individuality must be attained through an act of resistance against the precursor. In Hydriotaphia, with its dominant fi gure of the urn, this movement of individu- ation takes on an explicitly spatial sense. The urn represents at once the various framings or encasings of the human body, and the failure of bodies to cohere and signify. One of Browne’s more curious pronouncements in Hydriotaphia is a description of bodies: “Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortal right-lined circle [the character of death] must conclude and shut up all” (26). For Browne, what constitutes something as a body, is delimitation and closure; that is to say, a body must be an interior, demarcated by a line which separates it off from the outside. As Browne puts it, this delimitation and closure is a function of geometry. Auctoritas Browne may also be evoking deliberately the Vitruvian fi gure of man’s body framed by circle and square.11 In the Vitruvian fi gure of the body, centrally pinned and stretched, the body receives passively, or attains by strenuous ef- fort the geometric closure necessary for constitution as a body. This fi gure was a demonstration of ratio – not simply a relationship, or a kind of proportionality, but a force of coherence. Indra Kagis McEwen writes in her analysis of Vitruvius: “Bodies were wholes whose wholeness as qualifi ed matter was, above all, a question of coherence. The agent of coherence – in the body of the world and in all the bodies in it – was ratio” (McEwen, 2003: 55-56). Ratio is closely associated with authorship via the concept of auctoritas. An auctor is one who increases, augments, or magnifi es. According to J.J. Pollitt, an auctor “had the power to bring something into existence and/or ensure that its exist- ence continued” (in McEwen, 2003: 34). Bringing something into existence is a matter of making it cohere. There could be no wholeness without coherence, and therefore no wholeness without ratio. An auctor supplied ratio. Auctor is the root of the word and idea ‘author’ and, similarly, auctoritas is the root of the word and idea ‘authority’. Originally, according to McEwen, auctoritas was a kind of security offered by an auctor in underwriting some action for another party (e.g., a lawyer offered auctoritas as a service). McEwen argues that it was this kind of service Vit- ruvius provided to Caesar Augustus in his De Architectura, when he offered the Emperor his knowledge of how architecture established authority. In this light, 10 OED, ‘cento’ 11 Browne was familiar with Vitruvius, explicitly citing him elsewhere. However, Browne also appears to be referencing the Platonic symbol of two circles intersecting at right an- gles to form a three-dimensional hieroglyph, which appears from one angle as a cross and from another as the letter theta, symbol of thanatos, death. For Browne, death and architecture have this in common: they bring fi nality and limit. It would per- haps not be out of place to sug- gest that Browne considers ar- chitecture to be a deathly case. 41 Vitruvius wrote in order to position architecture as the privileged art of imperial auctoritas. An architectural auctor manipulated ratio in order to provide auctoritas. Importantly, authority, auctoritas, simply did not exist without instantiation, with- out a coherent body to demonstrate it. Buildings, cohering as bodies through ratio, were authorities, rather than simply expressing or referring to authority. “Strictly speaking, public buildings did not ‘represent’ power any more than a dispatch ‘represented’ a victory” (McEwen, 2003: 36). In the same way that there was no victory without a dispatch announcing it, there was no power without physical interventions announcing it in the public sphere. One such intervention was Augustus’ Mausoleum, the largest and one of the fi rst buildings he commissioned as the fi rst Emperor of Rome (completed by 23BC). It consisted of a circular base, some 87m in diameter, on which earth was mound- ed as a hill and planted with trees. From among the trees rose a central drum, topped again with earth and foliage, and a statue of the Emperor, with a total height of about 44m. Faced in marble, it stood next to the Tiber in a confi gura- tion which included the Ara Pacis and the Horologium Augustae. Two obelisks out- side, engraved with the Res Gestae, enumerated the Imperial accomplishments. The Mausoleum was a receptacle into which the family was collected, or from which they could be excluded. Emperors down to Nerva were included, but Augustus’ daughter and granddaughter were excluded. The tomb served to au- thorise the family tree. Prior to Augustus’s Mausoleum, the Romans had very rarely constructed round tombs. The Emperor’s undertaking, however, seems to have prompted a fl urry of circular tomb-building. The Mausoleum served as a model for the new Empire’s architecture – it was offered as a model, an architectural authority. Penelope Davies argues that Augustus’ Mausoleum was deliberately multivalent, incorpo- rating a broad scope of reference. In particular, she considers it to refer to the circular labyrinthine tomb of Alexander the Great, the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos, and the Pharos lighthouse, as well as Etruscan tumuli, Roman trophies, and Egyp- tian pyramids.12 This multivalence seems to imply a condensing of historical and cosmic signifi cance in the person of the Emperor. The Mausoleum incorporates its references in the truest sense of the word ‘incorporate’. It draws them together into a coherent body. In Vitruvian terms, the tomb is made coherent by ratio, and is therefore an instance of auctoritas. Among the circular constructions which took Augustus’ Mausoleum as a model, the most signifi cant is perhaps the Mausoleum of Emperor Hadrian, (com- pleted 139AD). Like its model, Hadrian’s Mausoleum rises as a drum above the Tiber. The square base is 85m on a side and the drum, mostly concrete and sur- mounted by a gigantic statue of Hadrian riding in a chariot, rose to over 50m. A bridge, the Pons Aelius, approaches the tomb from across the river. This revision of Augustus’ Mausoleum shows the importance for Imperial Roman architecture of magnifi cence, which entails in particular the practice of out-doing what has gone before.13 The new Mausoleum would have been quite clearly understood as a public state- ment of Hadrian’s belonging in the Imperial line (perhaps particularly important for one adopted into the Antonine succession). By closely following Augustus’ model, 12 See Davies, Death and the Emperor (2000). 13 “Auctoritas in buildings is a concomitant, variously, of in- creased spending, of greater richness of materials, of grander spaces, of heightened contrast in the light and shadow of a peristyle, of bigger columns and more of them” (McEwen, 2003: 37-38). INTERSTICES 07 Hadrian demonstrates that he is well-founded. In adopting Augustus as a precur- sor, Hadrian publicly confi rmed the greatness of the present with relation to the past by outdoing him, while also authorising himself by reinforcing the connec- tion. Confl ict between Hadrian (as a latecomer) and Augustus (as his precursor) can perhaps also be traced in their different uses of circularity. While the Mausoleum is nearly Augustus’ only circular building, Hadrian was responsible for a great many others. His most famous circular construction is of course the Pantheon, whose importance in architectural history belies how little is understood about its signifi cance. Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli is also home to a large number of circular spaces: the famous Island Enclosure, sunken and moated; the Circular Hall, a massive internal drum; a number of semi-circular triclinea; the Inverse-Curved Hall, which was to prove infl uential for the Baroque sense of formal plasticity; and the Park Rotunda, a curious domed structure in the grounds of the Villa. 14 It is noteworthy that, if Hadrian and Augustus are archi- tects, they may be so in a differ- ent sense to Loos and Schinkel. However, what is of primary importance here is that in both cases a genealogical confl ict is played out in an architectural scene. Into the chronological distance between these two exemplary relationships (Loos/ Schinkel and Hadrian/Augustus) should be read a desire to test the range of applicability of a conception of lateness, rather than an assertion of its univer- sality. Current state of Augustus’ Mausoleum and reconstruc- tions after Gatti and Cording- ley/Richmond. Hadrian’s Mausoleum with Ba- roque additions removed, and reconstruction after Eisner 43 Apart from the triclinea, uses for these spaces remain highly uncertain. It has been variously suggested, for example, that the Park Rotunda was a tomb for Hadrian’s dead lover, a cool store, or a proof-of-concept for the Pantheon itself. What is most noticeable is that there is not a single conceptual picture which can make sense of these spaces. It is as if it is a formal game over which Hadrian presides. If Hadrian’s circular spaces seem gratuitous, this could be passed off as a chang- ing Roman taste in favour of formal pluralism, but I believe this misses the point. Hadrian’s use of circular form is the absolute antithesis of Augustus’. Where Augustus uses it as a receptacle in which to gather signifi cance, Hadrian disperses its signifi cance almost completely. Hadrian unpicks the ratio of Augustus’ Mausoleum, and this should be understood as a strategic weakening of the precursor. Hadrian fragments the consistency of Augustus’ architectural body in order to constitute his own, in order to succeed Augustus, not simply follow him in time.14 Return To whom is architecture properly attributable? To whom can it be returned or restored? Traditionally, architectural history and criticism has sought to return architecture to the architect as its individual origin. The very notion of an individual - one who cannot be divided or internally separated – almost precludes being ‘under the infl uence’. Infl uence is an infl owing; to be a descendant, follower, or disciple, is not merely to be overshadowed by a precursor, but to be laid open to, and potentially fl ooded by, that precursor. Bloom’s insight with respect to poetic infl uence is that this laying-open does not escape the latecomer’s attention. On the contrary, it is a source of anxiety: that one’s work is not one’s own, that one is too late to be original, that in coming after the precursor one is doomed to be infl uenced. To become an origin, to make with- out precedent, it is necessary not to be infl uenced, not to be a mere descendant, follower, or disciple. The precursors, the poetic parents, must be set to one side. Bloom’s thesis is that this setting-aside occurs both in, and by means of, poetic construction. Bloom’s theory of infl uence is pertinent to architectural construction. Architec- ture, too, can be the scene and means of setting aside precursors (warding them off, evading them, escaping them). Rather than thinking of architecture simply as constructive or productive, architecture can be imagined as a wrestling with a precursor, a setting-aside of one’s architectural parents. In this antagonism, archi- tecture itself is not a side-effect. On the contrary, architectural acts themselves are the offensive and defensive movements of individuation. Two specifi c instances of are Loos’ deferential disenfranchising of Schinkel, and Hadrian’s dilution of Augustus. Ideas of lateness, failure, and the exhaustion of the present also emerge in a reading of Browne. Bloom and Browne present parallel conceptions of the world as the domain of the remainder, the state of struggle with respect to this inheritance, and INTERSTICES 07 the motivating anxiety which accompanies lateness. For Browne, the anxiety of inheritance is closely associated with the anxiety of material failure (dispersal and degeneration). The two anxieties are so tightly bonded, or entangled, that it is diffi cult to tell them apart, to ascertain whether one is an allegory of the other. In order to open the full register of architecture, it is necessary to dispose of uncritical presumptions about the relation between an architect and his or her precursors. There is a need for a more antagonistic reading of architectural gene- alogy, which recognises identities rather than individuals, identities which are not contained within individuals but which pass through them and provide a ground against which the individual is resolved. References Agamben, G. Genius (L. Simmons, Trans.). Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts (7), 94-99 “Karl Friedrich Schinkel, New Pavilion, Berlin, Germany, 1824-1825”. (2003). A+U, 388(1), 42-44. Bloom, H. (1973). The Anxiety of Infl uence, 2nd Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Browne, T. (1669). Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial. London: Henry Brome. Colomina, B. (1994). Privacy and Publicity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Davies, P. (2000). Death and the Emperor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McEwen, I. (2003). Vitruvius. Cambridge: MIT Press. Nathanson, L. (1967). The Strategy of Truth. A Study of Sir Thomas Browne. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press. List of Illustrations: Engraving of the Old Walsingham urns. (Browne, Hydriotaphia, or Urn-Burial. London: Henry Brome, 1669, p.viii) Current state of Augustus’s Mausoleum and reconstructions after Gatti and Cordingley/ Richmond. (Carl Douglas) Hadrian’s Mausoleum with Baroque additions removed, and reconstruction after Eisner. (Carl Douglas)