I have said it before and I will iterate it again, that Georges Bataille probably had a considerable impact on Darden, and maybe more so than the Marquis de Sade. Early in Darden's career he would be introduced to Bernard Tschumi's essay "Transgression and Architecture," which he read at least prior to his last year at Harvard GSD when he designed Saloon for Jesse James, in which Darden cites this essay in some draft descriptions of the project. Tschumi's essay was heavily inspired by Bataille's Eroticism, and it is cited and quoted several times. Darden would also meet Tschumi some time in the summer of 1986 (mentioned in a letter to Valerie Smith of Artists Space, dated 8 June 1986) while Darden was teaching at Barnard College (affiliated with Columbia University, where Tschumi would later become the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture). This may have been Darden's introduction to Bataille. Darden would go on to read Eroticism and would cite it a few times in his essay "The Architecture of Exhaustion." Vidler's The Writing of the Walls was a book that impacted Darden's work on Sex Shop, and Vidler was likewise influenced by Bataille. All this I have discussed before. That said, the most I can confirm is that Darden did read Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, but I cannot confirm he read anything more by Bataille.
I recently read Bataille's Eroticism, as well as a few other works by Bataille, and more and more I'm fully realizing the impact Bataille had on Darden. These aren't things he opening acknowledges, and maybe he even moved away from Bataille, but there were ideas that stuck and continued to bleed into Darden's writings and work. I have previously written about the Dis/continuous Genealogies, but there I focus more on the "genealogy" part and its narrative applications to his projects. I did not at the time fully expound upon the "dis/continuous" aspect of the term, as I don't think I fully comprehended why he used that term. I copped out and said that they are a part of the narrative of the project but not part of the design process. Which I guess may still be true, but I think that Bataille's theories of eroticism, death and sensuality, are more the key to this "Dis/continuous" in the Genealogies.
Very early in Eroticism, Bataille describes our lives, our being as "discontinuous." We are discontinuous beings. We solidify our discontinuousness when we have children. Our "continuation" only occurs when we die. It seems like the opposite would be true, but not for Bataille. Like Darden, Bataille views things from the unusual side of things. For instance, when he contemplates the nature of the economy, up until Bataille economists had always viewed the economy in terms of production. Bataille would look at the economy in terms of consumption, and more so than consumption, waste. For Bataille there is always waste within any system, and waste tells us more about the structures of power in economics. Human sacrifice, potlatch, launching cars into space, building an eighth mansion, et al, power is demonstrated by wasting resources; the powerful accumulate resources only to waste them to illustrate how much wealth they possess, and by wasting it on useless things they flex the power they have.
Similarly, sex for pleasure is a waste. We don't need it biologically. It does nothing for the preservation of the biological machines we are. Masturbation is an obvious waste, as that was supposed to go towards the continuation of the species, and it was flushed down the toilet. And even sex for procreation is an act of discontinuation: we split off a part of ourselves to form a new life. Bataille initially uses the single-cell organism as an example: in mitosis the cell divides to become two cells. The process of dividing the cell cause the original cell to end and begin a state of two cells. The cell did not necessarily "die," but it was discontinuous until it divided. Upon dividing, ending itself to become two, it continued. In a sense, it was discontinuous until it could continue as two cells. That might be one way of rewording Bataille's analogy.
However, the principle does not change just because we are more complex organisms that reproduce via sexual procreation. For Bataille, we are nonetheless discontinuous beings until our deaths. With our deaths, our continuation is through what we leave to our children. We would usually think of this as a legacy of inheritance, wealth that is bequeathed, pretty much anything that can go in a will. However, there is always the problems of life, our genetic deficiencies, our generational traumas, &c that we pass on to our children. Basically, any issues with wasting of resources is always going to be a problem we kick down the road for our children to inherit. In other words, our continuation is the baggage we leave to our children as discontinuous beings. It fundamentally never goes away.
These ideas of Bataille's may seem superfluous, but this may be part of what Darden is thinking when he produces his Genealogies. After all, they are called "genealogies," which implies discontinuous entities procreating and generating new discontinuous entities. In the case of Darden's Dis/continuous Genealogies, there are a few illustrations, each discontinuous, that when overlain (incubare: to lay upon, usually sexually, such as the incubus, but also incubate newborns, the result of sexual procreation) upon each other to generate (generation) the Ideogram. The Ideogram is the offspring of the original illustrations.
Sometimes the illustrations that generate the Ideogram are pairs, like male and female. For instance, in Melvilla, the Iroquois meeting hut is paired with the upside-down New England meeting house, and the Iroquois hand loom is paired with the locomotive (both industrial mechanisms of indigenous and European cultures), which is reminiscent of Ishmael and Queequeg's "marriage" as "husband and wife." Sometimes pairing/duality is imbedded into the original illustrations themselves, such as Da Vinci's teeter-totter in Saloon for Jesse James, or the Temple of Roma/Amor and the Janus coin in Temple Forgetful, and the Coliseum in Night School (an amphi-theatre or "both"-theatres), &c.
There is something sexually procreative (and consequently erotic) in Darden's Genealogies, and at the same time something continuous-discontinuous in a Bataillean sense in their generation.
Certainly there is a lot to play with under this framework, but nonetheless, it appears Bataille is useful in further exploring Darden's Dis/continuous Genealogies.
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