While recently revisiting Darden's essay "Architecture of Exhaustion" (Pratt Journal of Architecture, Vol. 2, 1988, p. 88-94), it becomes abundantly obvious that Darden is all over the place — shifting from one thing to another, fluidly moving from idea to idea, inspiration to inspiration, without any segue. He jumps from eroticism and death in Bataille's work, inspiration from Tschumi, on to Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, Edgar Allen Poe, then on to Deleuze and Guattari, a mention of Faust, on to Baudelaire, a bunch of quotes from Barthes, et al. Not only is the essay itself confusing, but it is almost as if Darden wants us to misinterpret him, or at least find our own meaning in his ideas of the Architecture of Exhaustion (i.e. the Underbelly).
The fact that one of Darden's citations in this essay is Deleuze and Guattari is telling. I don't doubt for a minute that Darden read far more from Deleuze and Guattari than just some commentary on Kafka. Oedipus Rex was a work of immense interest to Darden — in Looking After the Underbelly he claims it to be one of the quintessential tales that illustrates the Underbelly — so I imagine Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus would have been in his hands at one time or another.
The following is the passage from "The Architecture of Exhaustion" that D&G inspired Darden:
In the elaboration of the sublime through the representation of pain and danger, the architecture of exhaustion emerges to enhance and counterpoise fact. By situation itself beyond the pleasure of utility, it registers the utility of desire. "Desire" is not form, but a procedure, a process. Desire, rather than its accommodation, represents an intention to signify life on a perilous edge, prompting us to peer into the pumping chambers of the chest and perceive the virtue of confronting our world as an exceptional yet exhilarating ordeal, by which we make our way through our lives and possibly to an "other" world.
(Bold: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986, p. 8)
Yeah... this passage does not make any more sense in context than out of context. I mean, you get what he's driving at, but it is just so badly worded. How did an English major (at CU Boulder) end up writing like this?
I don't think it is essential to prove or fully analyze how far Deleuze and Guattari, or even Bataille, were influences on Darden. We know they had some influence on him and that is enough. Whether it is founded or unfounded to dive deep into D&G and Bataille and then look back at Darden through their work and ideas, ultimately is not of much concerned. If Darden truly understood D&G or even Bataille, he would not find such interpretations to be out of bounds. If Darden were alive today, he might have given some clarification, but would not consider it unfounded.
On the other hand, I have found no evidence that Darden read William S. Burroughs, or really anything written by the Beat writers. Beat culture was big in Denver (where Darden was from and died), and yet there is no evidence that Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, et al were influential to his work. He likely read their work, maybe, but there is no evidence they were influential to him. Thus, if I were to try and bring any Beat ideology into interpretations of Darden's work on the Underbelly, Sex Shop, transgression, &c, I would be out of line.
So what? What's the big deal?
Deleuze and Guattari propose the idea of "schizoanalysis," which might be best described as trying to put together a modern day conspiracy theory. Whether or not Jim Garrison actually read D&G, his conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination is very much in line with schizoanalysis. It looks for patterns, similarities, dispersed across the vast range of history and humanity. It is an analysis that is not linear, but clumps of genres and categories. It tends to be all over the place. Think of the image of Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
This is kind of how D&G propose we analyze things, in a sort of "split," disjointed manner. Their writings are very schizo (split, shattered). So when they analyze, it should be equally split and shattered.
So now I am going to do what I said was out of bounds: interpret Darden with the Beats. Brion Gysin and Bill Burroughs pioneered a technique called "cut-up." This is where they would write a poem or song or novel, whatever, and then cut it up and rearrange it. You may be familiar with this, as this was how David Bowie composed a lot of his songs. Burroughs would use the technique to conduction divination, magical prognostications (Dr. Alexander Cummins gets into this in his incredible essay in Mandragora, published by Scarlet Imprint). For Burroughs, the cut-up technique was just as valid for divination as tarot or geomancy. In fact, all divination techniques are a form of cut-up: we shuffle and cut the deck; we cut up the Mother figures in geomancy to create the Daughter figures; dream divination is interesting as our own dreams are cut-up, oftentimes non-linear and broken, and our own thinking tends to be cut-up (Dr. Cummins actually answered this question for me on the Glitch Bottle podcast, at the 1:35:29 mark... and yeah, now you know one of my aliases). Burroughs was deeply into the occult, and even helped pioneer chaos magic. In many ways, this is what is going on with schizoanalysis: cutting up and interpreting, even intuitively, and following mental patterns and conspiratorial connections. Psychoanalysis is dead. Let's explore the shattering of our own minds.
Now put all this in reverse: a shattered world, pulling from all directions, looking for patterns and ideas across the whole of human history and knowledge, exploring the wild and the dark side of things human, all too human, and creating something from it. This is schizoschedio. This is what Darden was doing. This is why schizoanalysis is not out of bounds to explore or discuss Darden's works.
Curiously, my first introduction to Darden was while I was taking some classes at the Boston Architectural College. I was designing a space for a schizophrenic that I named Abraham. My instructor told me to look at Oxygen House. Love at first sight.
Can one discuss Temple Forgetful without getting into memory magic, memory palaces, Romulus and Remus, bird divination, Roman archaeology, Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris, Terragni's Danteum, Basilica of Constantine, the Colosseum and the Capitoline Hill Plaza, the Temple of Roma-Amor, Janus, opposites of dry and wet, high and low, &c...? So many things to explore and discuss and play with. Or consider Oxygen House: how many works by Faulkner must one read to properly explore Oxygen House? How deep into Faulkner must one go to get a good handle on Oxygen House? And do we just stop with Faulkner? No. Faulkner is just the beginning. Darden's work truly is ergodic: he makes you work to understand him.
In analyzing Darden's work, one will inevitably be all over the place, connecting weird pins in a conspiracy board.
And I think it is hard to discuss Darden's designs without schizoanalysis. One does not so much create a linear narrative, but rather picks elements of his architecture to dig into, and then may (optional) connect those analyses loosely to other elements of the designs. One cannot necessarily say there is a "system" at hand to analyze Darden or his works. It feels more like Nietzsche's aphorisms — a bunch of loosely categorized thoughts — than a system.
I think the approach of schizoanalysis as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari would be beneficial, and perhaps a more appropriate way to discuss and analyze Darden's work. Is Darden not Post-Structural? Further, I think this approach is necessary, as in many ways this is how he designed: schizoschedio or schizo-design. I like "schizoschedio." It's got a nice ring to it.
Postscript:
As I am pulling together the materials I need for this post, I stumbled across a book by Chris L. Smith, Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis. Turns out he uses examples and has some discussion on Oxygen House in it. I guess I need to get this book. I don't know what Smith discusses yet, but I think it validates that I am not out of line here when I endeavor to illustrate the influence D&G had on Darden.
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