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Piranesi's "Campo Marzio": An Experimental DesignAuthor(s): Stanley Allen and G. B. PiranesiSource: Assemblage, No. 10 (Dec., 1989), pp. 70-109Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171144 .Accessed: 13/03/2011 11:59

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Stanley Allen

Piranesi's Campo Marzio:

An Experimental Design

Stanley Allen is an architect working in New York City and a project editor for Assemblage.

1. G. B. Piranesi, frontispiece to II Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, 1762

The archeological mask of Piranesi's Campo Marzio fools no one: this is an experimental design and the city, therefore, remains an unknown.

Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 1973

What is the nature of an experimental action? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen.

John Cage, "History of Experimental Music in the United States," 1958

To locate precisely the beginnings of modernity has been a

preoccupation of recent critical and historical work.' The work presented here seeks to suspend this "search for ori-

gins," proposing instead to enter into the classical at a stra-

tegic moment: a seam opened by Piranesi's "necrophiliac passion for the glory of ancient Rome."2 What is uncov- ered in the decay of the classical is not only a latent mod-

ernity (which could be a parasite upon this disintegrating body), but also the instability of the classical itself. Within Piranesi's project, the "naturalness" of the language of classical architecture (already called into question a century before) is destroyed by a contamination and fragmentation completely at odds with historically developed ideas of the wholeness of language.

By directing architecture's gaze back upon itself with this "morbid precision," by demonstrating the futility of a return to origins, Piranesi establishes in the Campo Marzio a plane - a shifting, indeterminant plane - upon which the horizons of classicism and the most radical project of

modernity momentarily coincide. It is for this reason that

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twentieth-century readings of Piranesi have underlined a dissonance and disjunction existing alongside of the classical: Sergei Eisenstein has called this explosion of concrete relations in space an "ecstatic transfiguration"; Manfredo Tafuri has referred to the application of the "technique of shock" to the foundations of rationality. Duchamp, Picabia, Kafka, and Roussel have all echoed the spirit of Piranesi in which, Tafuri writes, "the obsessive reiteration of the inventions reduces the whole organism to a sort of gigantic 'useless machine.'"'4

This project intends an excavation - through drawing and writing - of the "negative utopia" drawn by Piranesi for the Campo Marzio of Rome. I have conceived of Piranesi's large plan (the grande pianta) as a site to be colonized, covered over, and modified, as when a building is erected on ruins. My attempt is to uncover and articulate the surplus residue of meaning that confirms the inexhaustibility of a work of architecture. This process of rereading establishes a relationship parallel to that which Piranesi main- tained toward his own (archaeological) sources: dreamlike, inventive, and improvisational.

Given this inexhaustibility, the evident surplus meaning, I would suggest that the only way to confront adequately the project of Piranesi is with another project. I have main- tained a strict parallelism of drawings and text. The drawings are independent of specific references to the text but must be read together with it. Analytical drawings map out the relation of the Piranesi reconstruction to existing ruins and the context - real and fictional - of eighteenth- century Rome. Projections and constructions suggest new ways of reading the notations of Piranesi's project. The text follows an absolutely normative pattern: site, context, program. Each of these three terms, however, is reread in light of Piranesi's own intentions, and the doubling of the middle term "text-context" intends to disrupt the stability of the three-part structure.

As this project has acquired shape and certainty, I have not sought an elaboration of meaning, but rather, a greater precision of detail and description, remembering, as Robbe-Grillet said of Kafka, that "even what the hero is searching for vanishes before the obstinancy of his pursuit, his trajectories, his movements; they alone are made apparent, they alone are made real."''

Site: The Fictional Present Now let us, by a flight of the imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copius past - an entity, that is to say, in which nothing which has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one. This would mean that in Rome the palaces of the Caesars and the Septizonium of Septimius Severus would still be rising to their old height on the Palatine and that castle of S. Angelo would still be carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced it until the seige of the goths, and so on. But more than this. In the place occupied by the Palazzo Cafferelli would once more stand - without the Palazzo having been removed - the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes.

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1930

The problem of site is fundamental to Piranesi's project. "Before treating of the works of the Campo Marzio," he notes, "it must be said in what place it was located, and what was its extent in ancient times." He defers here to the authority of classical texts: "The Campo Marzio, therefore, according to these witnesses, was that level ground [pianura] of the City between the hills and the Tiber, situated at one time outside of the walls. '6 From here follow descriptions of the grandeur of the Campo Marzio and of its architecture. But what motivates Piranesi in his choice of site? Why, in a project devoted to reconstructing ancient Rome, has he ignored the historic, monumental center of Rome, where the existing ruins were concentrated and stood more or less free of contemporary building? Cer- tainly, in other volumes, such as the Antichitac romane, he had already described these monuments, but this still fails to explain the inordinant space given over to the Campo Marzio; nor in the other works do we find the topographic and planimetric preoccupations that characterize the Campo Marzio. What, then, is the basis for Piranesi's interest in this (literally) marginal zone, "outside of the city walls"? And paradoxically, if this site is marginal with respect to ancient Rome, it coincides with the most densely built and crowded area of contemporary eighteenth-century Rome: the lowland marshes where, since the fall of imperial Rome, a crowded medieval city had grown up.

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The first clue appears in the dedicatory letter to Piranesi's volume of plates: The Campo Marzio, he notes, had always been dedicated to the training of youth and military exercise; but during the empire it was opened to other uses - pleasure and spectacle. As more and more buildings were erected for such pursuits, "the Campo no longer appeared to be an appendage of Rome, but, more properly, Rome, the sovereign of all cities, an appendage of the Campo, as Strabone has attested."' Piranesi has faithfully mirrored this inversion, and gone even further. In his variant, the city itself is absent, a blank space on the drawing. 8

This marginal status is consistent historically and is rein- forced by an examination of the programmatic legends of the building represented in Piranesi's plan. Buildings of military use are evident, as are those devoted to spectacle and to the culture of the body. But the plan is dominated by the immense figures of two funerary monuments to Hadrian and Augustus. Lying outside of the consecrated ground defined by the city walls, the Campo Marzio had traditionally been the site of funerals and burials. Thus the urban texture of the Campo Marzio is also characterized by marginality, by otherness. It becomes the locus of all that is excluded from the city proper: the armories and military exercise yards; the stadia and gymnasia; the amphi- theaters and circuses; the gardens and pleasure fountains; the crypts and tombs. The conventional institutions of the imperial city are absent. Save in the funerary monuments, there is no civic presence; streets are nonexistent, as is the whole domestic fabric of the city.

If the site plan is the result of an inversion, the city having been folded back upon itself, something analogous happens in Piranesi's representation of time. A second clue appears in a plate entitled Scenographia Campi Martii. The use of a theatrical term here is not insignificant. It inscribes this view within the whole problematic of Piranesi's relation to the theater and to scenic design. But, paradoxically, this image, by the criteria of the traditional scena per angolo with which Piranesi is often identified, has none of the conventional scenographic elements or illusions. The point of view is from above; the horizon is excluded. The ruined fragments, covered with hieroglyphics, occupy the frontal

plane and establish a barrier to the view of the site itself, marking out precisely on the image that they frame the extent of the Campo Marzio as it is rendered on the large plan.

Piranesi depicts the monuments themselves in ruins, indicated by trace or fragment. He accurately shows their locations and the surrounding topography, establishing a correspondence to the actual condition of the ruins in the mid-eighteenth century. In this way Piranesi's drawing acknowledges the passage of history. But the fiction of the drawing is to present these objects shorn from their actual context, as if the intervening years had passed without the occupation and transformation of this part of Rome, as if the level of the terrain had not risen, burying the colonnades up to their capitals. The Stadium of Domition, for example, is indicated by a track in the earth and a solitary structural bay, the remains, perhaps, of the imperial box. Its figure is preserved, empty, in denial that a medieval town had grown up precisely in this area, that the form of the circus, while still preserved, exists as a densely built urban space created by the churches and houses constructed over the ruins of the stadium.

This selective erasure of history has a parallel in certain of Piranesi's vedute, where he repeats this operation by dismantling subsequent construction and presenting the view of the ancient structure as a spectral ruin.9 This makes clear a fundamental ambivalence in Piranesi: the simulta- neous negation and affirmation of the value of history.

But, further, the equivalence established between the piled-up fragments in the foreground and the ruins on the site seems to undercut the importance of topography and precise location. Within the compressed space of the foreground, each fragment represents, through a metonymic operation, an entire monument, ready to be moved into place on the almost tabula rasa in the background. In this sense, Tafuri's characterization of the Campo Marzio as "a formless heap of fragments" does not seem exaggerated. And the actual displacement of monuments may be veri- fied by comparing the Campo Marzio with the Severan marble plan of Rome.10

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5. Piranesi, Scenographia Campi Martii (aerial panorama of the Campo Marzio). Plate from the Campo Marzio.

The Scenographia signals the procedure of doubt to which Piranesi subjects the raw data. His is a violent act of dis- tancing the project from the real historical continuity of Rome in order to reinvent that history. In ideological terms, this operation is highly ambivalent, in as much as it engages in the very manipulations it seeks to criticize. With history and memory brought into play in this equivocal manner, we are left to wonder, given the fiction of the starting point, whether the subsequent moves can be any less contingent.

This elasticity of historical time may also be observed in the representations of the large plan itself. A careful examination of this plan reveals that the project of the Campo Marzio anticipates its condition as ruin. This applies equally to a formal strategy that encodes the passage of time in the collisive juxtaposition occurring in the city when a site is continually built over as it does to the representation itself. The only device capable of resolving the

ambiguities in the plan cut (sometimes a roof plan, at others a cellar or foundation) is the representation of ruins. And this is a third clue: like a primitive X-ray, the representation in ruins actually clarifies the structure, its previous history, the traces of its past occupation and transformations.

At this point, the reference to the well-known passage from Civilization and its Discontents cited at the beginning of this section becomes clear. Freud and Piranesi have each radicalized a condition existing in Rome itself: the selective persistence of traces and fragments of the past continually juxtaposed with the process of decay and deterioration. For Piranesi, this condition is made thematic: he turns the process of decay and deterioration into a paradigmatic formal method. This is consistent throughout his work, and the systematic nature of this transformation distinguishes it from a picturesque romanticism. For Freud, the persistence of memory traces is the key to using the metaphor of the city. Yet the impossibility, in physical terms, of the

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6. Man Ray, Dust Breeding, 1920. Photograph of Marcel Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even signed by Man Ray and Duchamp.

scene he describes suggests another reading: the architecture of the city, too, is subject to amnesia and displacement. But, paradoxically, for Piranesi, this is precisely how the negative of history and the city may return as a positive value for an architectural culture "condemned to operate with degraded means.""1

Finally, then: campo, a plane, a (battle)field; pianura, a level ground. But also tabula, a table or tablet. This is how Piranesi represents the plan of the Campo Marzio - as a rough stone tablet, clamped to the wall with heavy brackets, worn and cracked at the edges. The figures of the plan show no respect for the edges of the tablet. They are cut arbitrarily, not framed. The dedication is rendered as another tablet casually covering a portion of the plan. The entire image has an aroma of the archaic, a simulated antiquity. Like the glass surface of Duchamp's Large Glass in the photograph by Man Ray entitled Dust Breeding, it is a neutral screen that collects the deposits of age. 12 As in this work signed by Duchamp and Man Ray, time is given an autonomous value. It both obscures form, through accumulation and deterioration, and creates new formal

conditions. And these new conditions are uncontrollable - open to chance and free play. Here Piranesi confronts another paradox, and in so doing anticipates certain modernist preoccupations. In the Campo Marzio, he is the author of that which has no single author. In the city, time is represented by the accumulation of material and its decay and transformation; this is why Piranesi takes pains to represent himself as the recorder, and not the inventor, of the form of the Campo Marzio. The internal consistency of a work authored all at once is absent, by necessity. Two options emerge simultaneously: the autonomy of the discipline, a set of intrinsic, self-referential rules that would supercede the subjectivity of a single author, and its inverse corollary, the uncon- trolled play of chance and contingency. "

Michel Foucault has noted the way in which the figure of the table can simultaneously stand for the rule of order and the realm of free play:

I use that word 'table' in two superimposed senses: the nickel- plated, rubbery table swathed in white, glittering beneath a glass sun devouring all shadow - the table where, for an instant, perhaps forever, the umbrella encounters the sewing-machine; and also a table, a tabula, that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them in classes, to group them according to the names that designate their similarities and their differences - the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space. 4

It is this copresence of the scientific (geometrical and archaeological) and the ludic that makes Piranesi's project resonant in this century. The same site that authorizes Piranesi's "lawless" combinations also authorizes the cross- historical comparisons that would place Piranesi side by side with Duchamp, Man Ray, or Roussel.

On the other hand, by locating Piranesi's innovations in precise historical terms, Tafuri has shown that this "equi- librium of opposites" has a political dimension as well. To dissolve the opposition of reason and subjectivity constitutes an appropriation of power through the consolidation of technical control. This gives innovation itself an ideological role: "The 'power' will be that of the new techniques - unnamed but lying underneath like repressed demands - capable of controlling the forces that elude the eighteenth-century philosophe. "15

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7. Piranesi, system of connecting segments. Plate from the Campo Marzio.

(Con)Text A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

Jacques Derrida, "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination, 1968

In Piranesi, context must be read as text. We have already seen how everything that might be called context is either excluded or fictionalized. The parallels between Piranesi's

project and poststructuralist theory need not be ennumer- ated in depth: a return to origins that calls into question the value of the origin; the idea of a critique from within; the notion of architecture's rationality being turned against itself, a critique of the instrumentality of classical reason, of geometry, of "foundations"; the elevation of the mar-

ginal and fragmentary to a constitutive position; the ambi-

guity of frame and subject, of structure and ornament. But what are the consequences of understanding an architectural project as text? And where, precisely, does this insight leave us? How is it possible to enter into this text; what are the terms proper to its analysis?

Tafuri has outlined the profound ambiguity with which the

question of language is treated in Piranesi's work. "The

problem turns out to be one of language," he begins; but this may simply be a mask for Piranesi's refusal to inter- vene in the world: "This makes even more significant the fact that the Carceri and the Campo Marzio unequivocably attack 'language insofar as it is a mode of acting upon the world.' All of which means, conversely, to claim an absolute autonomy for that language. But, at the same time, it also means to cover over a disconcerting suspicion regarding the unfeasibility of such an autonomy.'"'6 It is, perhaps, worth pointing out that Tafuri's text (published in Italian in 1971) is itself marked by an intellectual climate in which it was understood that problems of form and meaning could legitimately be reduced to problems of language. But not all language constitutes itself as text. Derrida would argue against the possibility of even a dialectical res- olution, denying both the transparency of (discursive) language and the "residual margins of a positive presence."

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Yet, paradoxically, it is also Derrida who seems inclined to call to our attention the objectlike nature of the text, to examine its shape, its surface texture, and to trace its contours.

My strategy will be to approach the problem from inside, to address one of the many internal contradictions in Piranesi's work. It is clear that Piranesi has violated traditional notions of the internal consistency of an oeuvre. The question posed is one of "stylistic" inconsistency, but one that cannot be resolved in conventional art historical

terms. What conceptual framework could accommodate such dissimilar productions as the ornamental plates of the Parere su l'architettura (Opinions on architecture) or Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini (Various ways of decorating chimneypieces) alongside of the structural analysis of the Ponte Fabrizio in the Antichita romane or the methodical studies of hydraulic techniques at the Lago Albano? How to reconcile (or at least situate in some logical way) the willful eclecticism of the image with the rigorous planimetric geometry that seems to inform the structure?

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The place of ornament and its relation to structure is fun-

damental to approaching this question. Piranesi's disconti-

nuities and disjunctions cause uneasiness in the viewer less

by the exaggerated nature of the parts than by the way in

which they contravene the rules of their placement. As

early as 1938 Rudolf Wittkower called attention to these

inversions. Referring to the plates of the Parere, he

observed that Piranesi

reverses the traditional meaning of architectural structure in general and of the single parts. A pediment, on which the structural

emphasis of the building is usually laid, is degraded by him to a decorative detail; ornamental frames become structural features;

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columns in the same row are fluted differently and stand on framed panels instead of bases; even vegetable ornament which should grow upward is turned upside down.'7

Wittkower describes Piranesi's anticlassical operations in terms of an attack on the propriety of structure: the pediment is "degraded" to a decorative detail. The ornamental

(i.e., inessential) frame occupies the position reserved for the structure. The effect of these transgressions is anxiety

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and uncertainty - as well as a greater difficulty in "locat-

ing" the resulting assemblage.

Wittkower, however, minimizes the radicality of these

operations. On the one hand, he understands the text of the Parere as a process whereby Piranesi begins to disman- tle his own rules to bring his written discourse in line with his practical production: "Piranesi's Parere is an act of lib- eration from traditional fetters, and from the ideas with which the artist had grown up. His theoretical standpoint now conforms with his artistic purpose."'is On the other hand, he dismisses the novelty of the plates, preferring instead to see them as a return to strategies of transgression already tested within the classical canon: "In short we are faced with the principle of an earlier style, in which origi- nality and individuality replace an objective doctrine -

that of sixteenth-century Mannerism."19 Finally, he points out the continuity between theory and practice in the work that follows. In discussing the polemical text of the Cam- mini of 1769, Wittkower notes that Piranesi "asks for a

proper framing of all ornament." As Wittkower concludes, "This is a classicistic demand which in his own work he never fails to satisfy, however fantastic the result."20 The

ability of the frame to establish limits and control the violence of the ornamental is thus identified as essential to an architecture that would maintain itself within the classical tradition.

Wittkower refers to a specific passage in this text (the only one where "framing" is discussed), which is perhaps worth examining in detail. In the first part of the passage, Piranesi discusses the tendency toward eclecticism in ornament.

Let them have their will, for no curb ought to be put on the caprices of men, but then let them be executed according to the rules of art. Let Tritons and fish be placed on chimneys, if it be so required, but let them not so cover the frame as entirely to hide it, or take away its character. Let the architect be as extrava- gant as he pleases, so he destroy not architecture, but give to every member its proper character.

Immediately afterward, he proposes an analogy to the plas- tic arts.

Let the artist be free to drape a statue, or figure in painting, as he likes best, let him adjust the folds and garments with the greatest

variety he is able; but let it be always so that it may appear an human body and not a block covered with drapery.21

Ornament, like drapery, is considered additive, inessential. Further, it must be subject to control to preserve the "proper character" of that to which it is added. Ornament

proceeds not from necessity but from "caprices" or the

pleasure of the artist. Its position is described with precision - it is placed on or over a preexisting armature. The

body below the drapery, the structure beneath the ornament remains untouched. And in the case of the chimneypiece, it is the frame that mediates between architecture and ornament, preserving the support from the uncontrollable present in ornament.

Derrida discusses at length this curious in-between status of the frame in his essay of 1974 "The Parergon," which

organizes itself around a reading of Kant's third Critique. Here the supplemental character of the frame acquires thematic importance. The third Critique, Derrida proposes, makes evident a lack, a shortcoming in its own arguments. But this gap is not to be filled up; within the economy of the supplement, reconciliation can only structure itself as

anticipation.22 The desire for grounded structure, which is fundamental to Kant's project, elicits an architectural anal-

ogy: "Here philosophy . . . represents itself as a part of its

part, as an art of architecture. It re-presents itself, detaches itself, dispatches an emissary, one part of itself outside itself to bind the whole, to fill up or to heal the whole which has suffered detachment."23 This process, in turn, begs another question: how to distinguish with certainty between intrinsic and extrinsic. "It presupposes a discourse on the limit between the inside and the outside of the art

object, in this case a discourse on the frame. Where do we find it?"24

Kant's text supplies this through recourse to a traditional term of philosophical discourse that will be reread by Derrida in its more literal (i.e., physical) terms: "Even what is called ornamentation (parerga), i.e., what is only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the com-

plete representation of an object, in augmenting the

delight of taste does so solely by means of its form. Thus it is with the frames of pictures or the drapery on statues, or the colonnades of palaces. "25 Derrida cites this passage

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from the third Critique, which presents itself as a kind of a key, but a key that only creates new dilemmas: "A parergon is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected to and cooperates in its operation from inside."26 Thus the parergon supplements a lack in the work itself. It makes the work possible but is not itself part of the work. It is something secondary, for- eign to the work (hors d'oeuvre).27 Yet it collaborates in the realization of the work. It would seem to thematize itself around Kant's first example, the frames on pictures, but the others are problematic as well.

Referring to the case of the drapery on statues, Derrida asks, if the parergon is that which is added to compensate for a lack within the system it augments, "what deficiency in the representation of the body does drapery supplement?"28 This leads to the entire problematic of inscription in a milieu, the difficulty of distinguishing a work from its ground, and it underscores the futility of detaching the frame, of separating out the detachable from the integral: "The parergon is distinguished from both the ergon (the work) and the milieu; it is distinguished as a figure against a ground. But it is not distinguished in the same way as the work, which is also distinguished from a ground. The parergonal frame is distinguished from two grounds, but in relation to each of these, it disappears into the other."29 The frame has depth and thickness, but its incomprehensi- bility emerges with the attempt to detach it. This creates certain difficulties.

The dialogue of Piranesi's Parere turns precisely on the

question of the detachable. If ornament is that which can be detached without affecting the structure, what is left after the inessential has been taken away? This is the thrust of the argument of Didascolo (generally understood to represent Piranesi's voice). By ironically taking the demand of his adversary to its logical end, he subverts the purist argument; he demonstrates that it is based on a premise that there exist some intrinsic criteriA' that would rigorously dis-

tinguish between the ornamental and the structural.

Let us now observe the inside and outside walls of the building. S. . Now I ask you, what holds up the roof of the building? If the wall is supporting it, then there is no need for the architrave;

if the columns or the pilasters are holding it up, then what exactly is the function of the wall? Please choose, Protopiro, what do you want me to knock down, the walls or the pilasters? You do not answer? Well, then, I will destroy everything. Cast it aside. Please note, then, buildings without walls, columns, pilasters, friezes, or cornices; without vaults; without roofs; space, empty space; bare countryside; tabula rasa.30

This empty prospect corresponds negatively to what lies hidden in the purist position: the arbitrary and institutional nature of "natural" law.

This would also confirm Derrida's intuition that it is in the realm of the architectural that "detachment" is most violent: "But in the architectural work the representation is not structurally representational - or it is, but according to a detour so complicated that it would undoubtedly dis- concert anyone who wanted to distinguish, in a critical manner, the inside from the outside, the integral from the

detachable."•' Therefore not only is it - as represented by Piranesi - an impossible choice, but, by pressing the issue, a kind of internal economy is revealed whereby any removal threatens to destabilize the entire system. Given the fundamental role that the architectural metaphor plays in philosophy, this seems a serious, not to say structural, flaw.

Considered in this light, the ambivalence of the plates that accompany the text of the Parere is symptomatic. Wittkower goes so far as to say that they represent bad examples, excesses to be avoided.32 What Piranesi has done, it seems to me, is to make the frame thematic -

having fully comprehended its ambiguous status between structure and ornament. The frame moves from a peripheral to a central position in Piranesi's work, and it takes on a complexity that undermines its status as a stopgap against the excesses of ornament. Frames are superimposed on other frames and structure is understood as one more frame. The compositional rules are absent or contravened; the only constant rule is the presence of the frame itself.

But these are not Piranesi's most radical images, nor his oddest, nor most eclectic. Their displacements occur in two dimensions only. The combinations of the Campo Marzio are more scandalous; the spatial complexities of the

87

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17. Le Corbusier, Villa Schwob, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 1916, main

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Carceri d'invenzione (Prisons of invention) are more chal- lenging. Their importance is rather that they state the thematic that is to underlie the rest of the work. The "apparent absurdities" of Piranesi's ornamental excesses in these "marginal" plates turn out to have a constituent role." Under a thematics of the frame, the "stylistic" inconsistencies are dissolved. The framework that might link the eclectic plates of the Parere to the typological delirium of the Campo Marzio or to the meticulous technical reconstructions of the Ponte Fabrizio is contained within the contours of the project itself. The insistent demand that the work be framed and situated is revealed as a paradigmatical instance of the means of classical rationality turned back upon itself. This is recorded in the convo- luted profiles of the plates of the Parere as much as in the elaborate play of borders in the Campo Marzio. The diver- sity of these manifestations only reflects an internal tension

warping and twisting the frame, releasing a measure of the violence inherent in the act of framing.

This insight might be extended. The marking of a bound- ary, the establishment of a frame appears to be a preoccupation specific to architecture. Territory, precinct, and enclosure are fundamental terms in architectural specula- tion. The "architectural" is continually displaced to the periphery and the empty frame marks out the space of use and allows participation. Piranesi's particular insight is to have discovered a latent tension between the figural and the frame. The complexity, the incompleteness, and finally the emptiness of his frames would seem to confirm this. Nor is it insignificant that one hundred fifty years later the empty frame would take on iconographic significance for the modernist project.

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assemblage 10

Program: Montage of Attractions The madness consists only in the piling up, in the juxtapositions which explode the very foundation of the objects' customary 'possibility,' a madness which groups objects into a system of arches which 'go out of themselves' in sequence, ejecting new arches from their bowels; a system of staircases exploding in a flight of new passages of staircases; a system of vaults which continue their leaps from each other into eternity.

Sergei Eisenstein, "Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms," 1947

Eisenstein enters Piranesi's work by means of a comparison in sequence. He begins by describing the first image:

It is a Piranesi etching. It is part of the series Opere varie di Architettura.

And it is called Carcere oscura . . .

I am now looking at this etching on my wall.14

His reading will result in the uncovering of a latent formal tension, an "explosion," an "ecstatic transfiguration." Con- firmation is found in a second image, plate XIV of the Carceri: "The scheme which we devised - turns out to actually exist . .. Piranesi's second etching is actually the first one exploding in ecstatic flight.""

This collapse of the dissimilar into the similar has been achieved through precise formal and critical analysis. Eisenstein systematically locates the dynamic potential embedded in the fixed architecture of the earlier image. The disembodied memory of the first etching persists in the second like an afterimage. Here as elsewhere, he plays upon the literal meaning of the Greek root of ecstasy: "going out of oneself." In fact, the topological uncertainty of this phrase is to mark the terms of the analysis itself. Disjunction is found inside of the image, to be set in motion, "dissolved" from within, in order to disrupt the stasis: "these arches can undergo an 'explosion' within their own form."36 All elements of the transformation are present in the initial image; they are transposed and reconfigured, but nothing is imposed from without. Piranesi's formal language of fragments and disjunctive adjacencies is situated in a dialectical relation to the principles of classical solidity.

19. Piranesi, Carcere oscura (Dark prison). Plate from Prima parte di architetture e prospettive, 1743.

20. Sergei M. Eisenstein, diagram of Piranesi's Carere oscura, ca. 1947

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91

assemblage 10

22. Eisenstein rehearsing Gas-Masks in the Moscow Gas Factory, 1924

To underline the cinematic nature of these operations would be tautological. Eisenstein applies to Piranesi's images the terms of his own discipline, and more than that, his own practice. Eisenstein sees Piranesi in terms of montage. He sees the entire series of the Carceri as "dis- continuous fragments of a single sequence."•" Montage has a highly specific meaning for Eisenstein: "Montage is the stage of explosion of the movie frame. . . . When the tension within a movie frame reaches a climax and cannot increase any further, then the frame itself explodes, frag- menting itself into two pieces of montage."'s The parallel to his analytical method is clear: formal tension within the frame, the explosion of the frame, the multiplication of the formal possibilities in the fracturing of the frame. In this way, the explosion of forms in both the film language and in Piranesi's Carceri is made to seem an inevitable result of internal tensions and contradictions.

But there is a limit point, an impasse in the system of formal transformations: "One stone may have 'moved off' another stone, but it has retained its represented 'stony' concreteness."19 The first stage of the transformation -

from the Carcere oscura of 1743 to the plate from the Car- ceri of 1760 - concerned itself primarily with structural displacements within the framework of the space represented. Eisenstein asks, "Is it possible, after a relatively short first stage with its dissolution of forms, to foresee and discover through the second stage - which is already exploding the very objects of depiction - . . . one more

'leap,' one more 'explosion,' one more 'spurt' beyond the limits and dimensions and thus, apparently, the 'norm which in the last variant of the Carceri exploded completely?"40 Eisenstein asks, in effect, for an exploration of the new formal possibilities opened by this analytical construct.

The next stage would have to explode the means of representation itself: "What is left to explode - is concreteness. A stone is no longer a stone, but a system of intersecting angles and planes in whose play the geometrical basis of its forms explodes.7"'4 Eisenstein's careful use of language reflects his awareness of the mediation of representational conventions. He does not confuse the thing with its representation. But, following on this awareness, he notes that

the dismantling of these conventions is not to be accomplished within the limits of this work (this despite a careful analysis of certain perspectival distortions - a telescopic effect that collapses depth and foreground, creating profound dimensional ambiguity). Here as elsewhere, Piranesi upholds convention in order to contravene or subvert it, but not to overthrow it. The disintegration of realist convention into its autonomous geometrical components remains "a leap beyond the limits of this opus.'"42

Tafuri has pointed out that this attempt to reconcile realist and avant-garde practice corresponds precisely to Eisen- stein's own position, especially if understood in its particular political context.4 It is unsurprising therefore that the analysis should produce this parallel. Eisenstein's critique has become operative in the work itself. It is careful not to transgress its own limits. The representational structure accommodates the newly discovered formal dynamism in order to preserve its own intrinsic structure.

Tafuri assigns to this operation of legitimation a reactionary status. In its "anxious search for historical antecedents capable of justifying the theoretical compromise between representation and autonomy of formal structure," the avant-garde, "deprived of its utopian potential and of its ideology . . . can only fall back upon itself; it can only explore the stages of its own development. At best, it may recognize the ambiguity of its own origins. "4 Piranesi's "subjectivity" - along with the (negative) utopian impulse - has been jettisoned. Tafuri criticizes Eisenstein for not advancing the terms of the critique beyond those set by the Russian formalists. He points out the incongruity of Eisen- stein's comparison of Piranesi with Picasso and Cezanne, characterizing it as a desperate search to situate his own work within an unfolding history of the avant-garde. The very self-consciousness of this move makes it suspect, a knowing cooption of "history" by the avant-garde. And it compromises the terms of the analysis itself: only a critique that goes beyond the formal, Tafuri argues, would be capable of radicalizing and multiplying the ambiguities of Piranesi's production.

I would suggest two provisional strategies for mobilizing some of the contradictions of Piranesi's work. In this context, the rewriting of "program" centers around a proposal

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to reread the classical: not as a seamless, closed, and internally consistent text, already ended, but a system in which the apparent order conceals the arbitrariness of its foundations and rules - fictions of order that can be reread and reordered. Piranesi's equivocal relationship to classical authority is taken as a privileged starting point.

The first strategy would embrace the problem of origins, linking it back to Piranesi's own speculations. No problem is more typical of Enlightenment thought, and Piranesi's position clarifies his ambivalent relationship to this intel-

24. City fragment, the mechanical garden

lectual milieu. The story of origins that Piranesi recounts, in response to Le Roy, Winckelmann, or Laugier is well known: The Egyptians invented a massive, stereotomic architecture that was passed on to the Etruscans and brought to perfection by the Romans. The Greek contribu- tion is minimized, relegated to the margins. Yet, like a repressed memory, the marginal returns obsessively. In the Parere, Didascolo is made to say, "A purist rebuked the Romans for having corrupted the architecture of the Greeks; Piranesi had to make them see that the Romans, on the contrary, being unable to heal the scars of an archi-

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tecture infected at its roots, nonetheless embraced it, and tried to mitigate its rules."'4 The original is thus already contaminated. The resigned acceptance of this loss allows no other conclusion: to "ground" architecture in this manner is futile. For Tafuri, Piranesi's answer effectively undermines the idea of a return to origins: "If the very foundations of the language are recognized as precarious, then there is no point in seeking any 'salvation' in the return to their original state." But the critical moment also contains within it an additional mandate: "To build on those precarious bases, 'infected at the roots,' is a tragic duty."46

To recuperate and redeploy the "negative": out of the crisis of form emerges both the loss of freedom and the clarifica- tion of new possibilities. If the play of opposites will never dissolve into similarity (as Tafuri has shown), then what remains for criticism is to sharpen and exaggerate those differences. "Art is fundamentally ironic and destructive," Viktor Shklovsky has written, "It revitalizes the world. Its function is to create inequalities, which it does by means of contrasts."'4 Shklovsky's coupling of destruction and revitalization underlines the paradox of the modernist critique of formal categories. Only by dismantling the structure can that structure hope to survive. "Estrangement" reconstructs the perception of the world. Shklovsky contin- ues, "New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms." This might be compared to Eisenstein in his essay on theater "Montage of Attractions." "The weapons for this purpose are to be found in the leftover apparatus of the theater.'"48 But today, a "countermemory of the modern would have to include that which has been made peripheral by the institutionalization of the modern; therefore this project proposes, instead of an outright rejec- tion of classicism, a subversive reuse of its discredited strategies. This "illegitimate" use of exhausted principles attempts to bypass the closure of the modern. The absence of a margin - the privileged ground of the modernist critique - is thus acknowledged. This "unconscious" use of the modern next to the classical operates in full awareness of their mutual loss of meaning. The negative will have to be deployed simultaneously from within and without. To appropriate the words of Blanchot, "Certain people have

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discovered something beyond this: [architecture] is not only illegitimate, it is also null; and as long as this nullity is isolated in a state of purity it may constitute an extraordi- nary force, a marvelous force."49

The second strategy takes the problem of origins and turns it inside out. For Piranesi, the question of the origin is already historical. It is thematized around the figure of the ruin and the fragment. The "speaking ruins" both collapse and accentuate historical distance. They provide the only possible access to the past; at the same time, they are the sign of its absence and the measure of its incomprehensi- bility. Georges Teyssot has pointed out that repetition and synecdoche are fundamental to the idea of classicism. 5 Alberti's well-known phrase may be taken as axiomatic: "Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse.""51 This idealized internal coher- ence promotes a kind of theoretical reversibility. If the smallest detail is known, the entire composition can also be known. Synecdoche "authorizes the part to represent the whole.""52 But to uphold this consistency, the classical language must not only maintain a perfect transparency but also remove itself from historical contingency: classicism's "eternal beginning." And just as the process assumes reversibility, it also assumes repeatability. But this kind of "scientific" confirmation is precisely what Piranesi's practice calls into question.

Piranesi asserts that from a single stone he can reconstruct the entire edifice. He must assume as his starting point the theoretical axioms of synecdoche and repeatability. With- out this basic confidence in the regularity of classical principles he would be paralyzed. But the machine cannot be depended upon to run smoothly. Doubts and imprecision compromise its workings. How, for example, can this assuredness be reconciled with the statement in the Parere that "there is no building, among the ancient ones, whose proportions are the same as another's and there are also no old buildings that have the same columns, intercolumna- tions, arches, etc."" Here as elsewhere, opposed principles coexist in Piranesi's practice. The discrepancies found in the ideal model are made to participate in its reconstruc-

tion. "The ancients," he writes, "transgressed the strict rules of architecture just as much as the moderns."54 The variation of the parts is inconsequential.

Piranesi has incorporated contingency - in the form of the baroque principle of variety - into the working fabric of the classical idea. This explains his assertion that there is "one and only one style of architecture that we follow. How much longer will we refrain from admitting that to vary the ornament is not the same thing as creating a new order?""55 But Piranesi's refusal fully to recognize these contradictions is telling as well. If his discourse is internally disjunctive by design, "order" is displaced and evaluated in abstract terms. It can no longer hold together the perfect transparency and repeatability of the classical.

In the Campo Marzio the seamless manner in which the known fragments of the past have been integrated into the whole composition attests to an overriding principle. The internal correspondence of the parts to one another - rather than the "truthfulness" of the parts themselves - allows these fragments to be inserted at a meaningful point into the larger order of the project.56 Piranesi has invented a compositional language in order to make sense of the fragment. These fragments disappear into the composition not because their fragmentary nature has been concealed or covered over, but because they have themselves rede- fined the rules for "fitting in." The whole and the parts submit to the same geometric rules. Piranesi demonstrates that, through the multiplication of the simple, the rationality of geometry can describe both the indecipherable fragment and the fully realized composition. But the arbitrariness of the combinations suggests that, given those rules, the permutations are endless.

The plan confirms this. The assurance of repeatability contained in the classical principles of regularity is entirely pervaded by contingency. Geometry is understood here for the first time as "instrumental," but this instrumentality undercuts the rational principles that underlie it. The critique of formalism turns back on itself, uncovering the mechanics of an endless chain of combinations that is by itself unable to constrain the combinatory mechanisms. The "useless machines" of the Campo Marzio turn out to be self-perpetuating.

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27. "System of the Labyrinth," model showing fragment of the Piranesi plan

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28. "System of the Labyrinth," detail of model

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36. "System of the Labyrinth," view of model

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Notes 1. Joseph Rykwert, The First Mod- erns: The Architects of the Eigh- teenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (Prince- ton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), or Manfredo Tafuri, The

Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant- Gardes and Architecture from Pira- nesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), are only the most obvious

examples, to which might easily be added the writings of Georges Teys- sot. Foucault, especially the Fou- cault of The Order of Things, would seem to be behind much of this work. Tafuri's chapter on Piranesi in The Sphere and the Labyrinth, "'The Wicked Architect': G. B. Pi- ranesi, Heterotopia, and the Voy- age," as well as the passages in his Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luiga La Penta (Cam- bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), have been fundamental in the for- mulation of my approach to this project.

2. Rykwert, The First Moderns, 370.

3. The phrase is Rykwert's, ibid.

4. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 15.

5. Alain Robbe-Grillet, "From Realism to Reality" (1955), in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 165.

6. C. B. Piranesi, Campus Martius

antiquae Urbis (Rome, 1762); reprinted, with an introduction by Franco Borsi, as Il Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma (Florence: Co- lombo Ristampe, 1972), chap. 1, p. 3. It should be noted that the volume in which the project for the

Campo Marzio is published is something of a mixed bag. Piranesi apparently began the large site plan, the grande pianta, in 1757. John Wilton-Ely suggests that the Campo Marzio should be understood as the final (fifth) volume of Le antichita' romane (Rome, 1756), and should thus be seen in continuity with the earlier archaeological investigations (Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi [London: Thames and Hudson, 1978], 73). Like the earlier volumes, the Campo Marzio contains historical texts, reconstructed plans, and views of the "raw material" - the ruins, often with later accretions stripped away. But the detail and elaboration of the site plan, the perspective reconstructions consistent with the plans, as well as the sequential maps of the historical development of this zone are all unique to this volume. Therefore, in this case, it makes sense to speak of the "project" for the Campo Marzio.

7. Piranesi, Dedicatory letter to Robert Adam, Campo Marzio.

8. Note, for example, the wall that forms the lower border of the large site plan. This corresponds more or less accurately to the course of the Servian wall erected in the sixth century B.C. and rebuilt in the fourth century B.c.

The historic center of the city, the Forum, the Palatine (site of the legendary foundation of Rome), all lie within the walls, to the south of the Campo Marzio, and outside of Piranesi's drawing. This zone is rendered as a blank on his plan. But, further, during the first and second centu- ries A.D., the city expanded beyond the Servian wall, encompassing much of the area of the Campo Marzio. In 271 a wall, known as the Aurelian wall, was erected. This wall also appears in Piranesi's plan. It does not, however, function as a

border, but becomes an internal incident in the plan; it occupies, as far as that is possible, the center.

9. Plate XLIII, for example, is a view of the Tomb of Hadrian (later the Castel Sant'Angelo), depicted as

though it had fallen into ruin and no further building had taken place.

10. For example, Piranesi has accurately reproduced the Septa Julia from the fragment of the Sev- eran marble plan (the forma urbis), but has relocated it to a site adja- cent to the Servian wall. He has translated the figure of the septa to a site along the Via Lata and then accommodated the site to the idio-

syncracies of the figure represented in the marble plan. Other transpo- sitions and departures are noted in the commentaries on the Campo Marzio in G. B. Piranesi: Drawings and Etchings at Columbia Univer-

sity, exhibition catalogue, ed. D.

Nyberg (New York: Avery Architec- tural Library, 1972); Michael McCarthy, in "The Theoretical

Imagination in Piranesi's Shaping of Architectural Reality," Impulse 13, no. 1 (1986-87), charts in detail Piranesi's "misreadings" of the

archaeological record in the case of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella.

11. Tafuri, Architecture and Uto-

pia, 16.

12. Man Ray has described this

photograph as follows: "In the far corner near a window stood a pair of trestles on which lay a large piece of heavy glass covered with intricate patterns laid out in fine lead wires. It was Duchamp's major opus: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. . . . I suggested to Duchamp that I pick up my camera, which I had never taken out of my place and photograph his glass. . . . Looking down on the work as I focused the cam-

era, it appeared like some strange

landscape from a bird's-eye view. There was dust on the work and bits of tissue and cotton wadding that had been used to clean up the finished parts, adding to the mys- tery. This, I thought, was indeed the domain of Duchamp ... Since it was to be a long exposure, I opened the shutter and we went out to eat something, returning about an hour later, when I closed the shutter. I hurried back to my basement and developed the plate - I always did my developing at night, not having a darkroom. The

negative was perfect" (Man Ray, Self-Portrait [New York: Little Brown, 1963]; cited in Man Ray: The Photographic Image, ed. Janus and trans. Murtha Baca [Wood- bury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1980], 180).

13. Peter Buirger has noted this

convergence of seemingly opposed principles in twentieth-century avant-garde work, citing Adorno (Aesthetic Theory) to the effect that "the progress of art as making is

accompanied by the tendency toward total arbitrariness. . . . The

convergence of the technically integral, wholly made work of art with one that is absolute chance has been noted with good reason." (Buirger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984]).

14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pan- theon, 1973), xvii. Foucault refers here to Raymond Roussel: in a work such as Roussel's Locus Solus, the neutral (narrative) field supports a series of episodic fragments of intense individuality, each one drawn and described in minute detail, barely held together by the

ground they share. A further com-

parison is suggested by Leo Stein-

berg's use of the term "flatbed

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picture plane" to describe a change in the conception of the picture plane in American art of the 1950s. He notes that the picture plane no

longer refers to a window opening out onto the world but rather to an

all-purpose surface, a screen, upon which may be depositied any manner of material of the world - actual or representational: "The flatbed picture plane makes its sym- bolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards - any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed - whether

coherently or in confusion." By referring to the flatbed printing press, Steinberg signals that it is the horizontality of this surface that is crucial: "no longer an analogue of a world perceived from an upright position, but a matrix of information conveniently placed in a verti- cal situation" (Steinberg, "Other Criteria," in Other Criteria: Con- frontations with Twentieth-Century Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972], 82ff.).

15. Tafuri, The Sphere and the

Labyrinth, 30. Tafuri's remark, and his broader project of characterizing Piranesi's relationship to Enlighten- ment thought under the notion of

"negative utopia" (including his ambivalent relationship to the "authority" of classical architecture), might be contextualized by comparing it to the following passage from Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno: "For subjectivity, reason is the chemical agent which absorbs the individual substance of things and volatilizes them in the mere

autonomy of reason. In order to

escape the superstitious fear of

nature, it wholly transformed objective entities and forms into the mere veils of a chaotic matter, and

anathematized their influence on humanity as slavery, until the ideal form of the subject was no more than unique, unrestricted, though vacuous authority" (Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten- ment, trans. John Cumming [1944; New York: Herder & Herder, 1987], 89-90).

16. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 34. See also p. 38: "Inasmuch as it is - despite everything - an affirmation of a world of forms, the Campo Marzio, precisely because of the absurdity of its horror vacui, becomes a demand for language, a paradoxical revelation of its absence." On the other hand, Maurice Blanchot has written, "Trust in language is the opposite - distrust of language - situated within language. Confidence in

language is language itself distrust- ing - defying - language .. All this is justified on the condition that it (recourse and refusal) be employed at once, at the same time, without belief in any of it, and without cease" (Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1986], 38).

17. Rudolf Wittkower, "Piranesi's Parere su l'architettura," Warburg Journal 2 (October 1938): 156.

18. Ibid., 157.

19. Ibid., 156.

20. Ibid., 157; see also Rykwert, The First Moderns, 280.

21. C. B. Piranesi, Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini (1769), in C. B. Piranesi: The Polemical Works, ed. John Wilton-Ely (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972), 2-3 (Piranesi's pagination).

22. Jacques Derrida, "The Parer-

gon," trans. Craig Owens, October 9 (1979): 3-40. Kant, Derrida

points out, has artificially separated

the faculty of judgment (the third Critique) from the critique of pure reason. This is a provisional move for Kant, because in a perfect meta- physics the separation would be unnecessary. But, as Derrida notes, "it is not yet possible. There is as yet no possible program outside the critique" (p. 6). That is to say, there is no possible program of pure philosophy, outside of its individual parts, capable of subsuming all of the separate members in an affirma- tive system. Therefore: anticipation, "detachment," provisional separation. The reading of "The Parer- gon" is structured around these separations as well as strategies to rejoin the parts. "The abyss elicits analogy - the active recourse of the entire Critique - but analogy succumbs to the abyss as soon as a certain artfulness is required for the analogical description of the play of analogy" (p. 4). This shuttling back and forth, the construction and deconstruction (and reconstruction) of analogy will characterize the reading developed here.

Mark Wigley has warned of the

danger inherent in a too-easy translation of the terms of deconstruction to architecture. "It is a reading that seems at once obvious and sus-

pect. Suspect in its very obvious- ness. Deconstruction is understood to be unproblematically architectural" (Wigley, "The Translation of Architecture, The Production of Babel," Assemblage 8 [February 1989]: 7). My reading owes some-

thing to Wigley's ideas and is devel-

oped with a full awareness of the

traps that exist in such a com-

parison. For example, Derrida

foregrounds the architectural meta- phors, playing upon their physical- ity as a way of dismantling the abstraction of philosophical discourse. To return these terms - the frame, the parergon - unprob-

lemmatically to the realm of the visual and the physical would be, then, to lose the fluidity, the analogical character of the writing, in a simple illustration. On the other hand, within the terms that Derrida has established, there is a need to point out the parallelism and to interrogate its suspect affinity. This kind of work seems necessary if we assume, as Wigley does, that deconstruction problematizes architecture as much as philosophy.

23. Derrida, "The Parergon," 7.

24. Ibid., 12.

25. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1952), 85; cited in Der- rida, "The Parergon," 18.


27. Hors d'oeuvre is often cited as the most literal French translation for parergon. It might also be noted that the criticism leveled by Pierre- Jean Mariette against the work of Piranesi is stated in similar language: "There is no composition that is not full of superfluous ornament, and absolutely hors d'oeuvre (Mariette, "Letter ...

" Gazette de

l'Europe [4 November 1794]; cited in the introduction to C. B. Pira- nesi, "Thoughts on Architecture," trans. M. Nonis and M. Epstein, Oppositions 26 [1984]: 5).


29. Ibid., 24.

30. Piranesi, "Thoughts on Archi- tecture," 11.

31. Derrida, "The Parergon," 22. This theme of the supplemental character of ornament is a constant in the theory of classical architecture. Alberti, for example, writes, "Ornament may be defined as an auxiliary light and complement to beauty. From this it follows, I

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believe, that beauty is some inherent property . . . whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional" (Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988], 156; also see the discussion in the "glossary" on "Beauty and Ornament," 420). 32. Wittkower, "Piranesi's Parere su I'architettura," 148.

33. Richard Rorty has remarked, following T. S. Kuhn, that "when reading the works of an important thinker, look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask your- self how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer, . .. when these passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning" (Kuhn, The Essential Tension [Chi- cago: Chicago University Press, 1977] xii; cited in Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1979], 323.

34. Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Pira- nesi, or the Fluidity of Forms," Oppositions 11 (1977): 85.

35. Ibid., 91.

36. Ibid., 88.

37. Manfredo Tafuri, "The Dialec- tics of the Avant-garde: Piranesi and Eisenstein," Oppositions 11 (1977): 74.

38. Vladamir Nizhny, Lessons with Eisenstein, ed. and trans. Ivor Montagu and Jay Leyda (New York: Hill & Wang, 1962), 124; cited in Tafuri, "Dialectics of the Avant- garde," 74.

39. Eisenstein, "Piranesi," 94.

40. Ibid. Here, as elsewhere, there

is an unmistakable sexual undercur- rent to Eisenstein's descriptive language (already suggested by the insistent repetition of the word "ecstasy"): "I ponder what would happen to this etching if it were brought to a state of ecstasy, if it were brought out of itself." This is present in his films as well (cf. the cream separator in The General Line), but escapes comment by Tafuri.

41. Eisenstein, "Piranesi," 94.

42. Ibid., 95. Eisenstein's careful maintenance of "limits" might be contrasted to Dziga Vertov's (earlier) manifesto: "Seen by me and by every child's eye: / Insides falling out. / Intestines of experience / Out of the belly of cinematography / slashed / By the reef of revolution, / there they drag / leaving a bloody trace on the ground, shuddering from terror and / repulsion. / All is ended" (Vertov, "From the Mani- festo of the Beginning of 1922," in Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson and trans. Kevin O'Brien [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984]).

43. Tafuri, "Dialectics of the Avant-garde," 79. Although never explicitly stated, Tafuri implies that Eisenstein's analysis, written in the late 1940s, is the result of compromises with Stalinism and social realism.

44. Ibid.


46. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 42.

47. Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimen- tal Journey: Memoirs 1917-1922, trans. Richard Sheldon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 232-33. The parallel between Shklovsky and Eisenstein - collab-

orators and friends - is well docu- mented. Frederic Jameson has pointed out some of the shared theoretical concerns in The Prison- House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 61. Regarding the hidden "modernity" of traditional works, he writes: "Are we to assume that all forms of art exist only to 'bare their own devices,' only to give us the spectacle of the creation of art itself, the transformation of objects into art, their being made art? (But in that case, only so-called modern art has any value, or rather even traditional art is really secretly modern for Shklovsky in its essence)" (p. 83). The search for historical antecedents in eighteenth-century work, on the other hand, has a close parallel in Shklovsky's reading of Laurence Sterne's novel of 1760: "Tristam Shandy thus takes its place, for the Formalists, as a predecessor of modern or avant-garde literature in general: of that 'literature without subject matter'" (p. 70). This aspect of Eisenstein's affinity with Shklov- sky would tend to undercut Tafuri's assertion that Eisenstein's appropriation of Piranesi as predecesor represents a retrogressive attempt to reconcile realism with the avant- garde. Is not the "defamiliarization" of the traditional in itself a more radical project than the careful delimitation of a closed precinct of the "modern" or the avant-garde?

48. Sergei M. Eisenstein, The Film Sense, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jova- novich, 1975), 230.

49. Maurice Blanchot, "Literature and the Right to Death" (1949), in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis, (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 22. It should be no surprise that Blanchot refers here to surrealism.

50. Georges Teyssot, "The Anxiety of Origin: Notes on Architectural Program," Perspecta 23 (1987): 94.

51. Alberti, Ten Books, 156.

52. Teyssot, "The Anxiety of Ori- gin," 94.


54. Piranesi, Dedicatory letter, Campo Marzio.


56. The close parallel between the method of the archaeologist and the psychoanalyst (pointed out by Freud, and elaborated by Carl Schorske in "Freud and the Psycho- Archeology of Civilizations," Sky- line [December 1981]: 28-30) could be extended here. The patient presents to the analyst a picture of the past characterized by incompleteness: memory traces, fragments of dreams, all mixed up with the ob- sessions of present-day life. The interpretive task of the analyst is reconstructive. From these fragments a complete picture is to be constructed: a whole in which every dream fragment is revealed as "a psychical structure which has a meaning and which can be inserted at an assignable point in the mental activities of the waking life" (Sig- mund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey [New York: Avon, 1965], 35). But the rules for this reconstruction, while having as their outcome a complete explanation, are in themselves characterized by ambiguity. As Freud wrote in his essay of 1910 "The Antithetical Sense of Primal Words," "Dreams show a special tendency to reduce two opposites to a unity or to represent them as one thing. Dreams even take the liberty, moreover, of representing any ele- ment what-ever by the opposite

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wish." The ambivalence of the dream thoughts, the difficulty of

disentangling latent content from manifest content all point to a broad interpretive license. The uncertainty of this has led Wittgen- stein to remark, "He wants to say that whatever happens in a dream will be found to be connected with some wish which analysis brings to light. But this procedure of free association and so on is queer, because Freud never shows how we know where to stop - where is the

right solution" (Wittgenstein, Lec- tures and Conversations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967], 42). Setting aside the literary interpretation that has connected Piranesi's imagery with dreams (De Quincey and so on), there can be found, in Piranesi and in Freud, a

process of reconstruction from fragments, artificially constructing a framework within which the fragments make sense, while at the same time admitting a fundamental uncertainty in the terms of the process itself. Freud's methodological caution would seem to apply as well to Piranesi: "Our first step in the

employment of this procedure teaches us that what we must take as the object of our attention is not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content" (The Interpretation of Dreams, 136).

Figure Credits 1, 5, 7, 26, 29. C. B. Piranesi, Campus Martius antiquae urbis (Rome, 1762); reprinted as Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma, with an introduction by Franco Borsi (Flor- ence: Colombo Ristampe, 1972).

2-4, 8, 11-16, 23-25, 27, 28, 30- 36. Drawings and constructions by Stanley Allen.

6. Man Ray, Self-Portrait (New York: Little Brown, 1988).

9. C. B. Piranesi, Parere su l'architettura (Rome, 1765); reprinted in C. B. Piranesi: The Polemic Works, ed. John Wilton-Ely (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972).

10. C. B. Piranesi, Le antichita romane, 4 vols. (Rome, 1756).

17. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jean- neret, Oeuvre compete 1910-1965 (Zurich: Editions Girsberger, 1967).

18. C. B. Piranesi, Diverse maniere d'adornare i cammini (1769); reprinted in C. B. Piranesi: The Polemic Works, ed. John Wilton-

Ely (Farnborough: Gregg, 1972).

19. C. B. Piranesi, Prima parte di architetture e prospettive (Rome, 1743); plate reproduced in Ian Jon- athan Scott, Piranesi (London: Academy Editions, 1975).

20. Sergei M. Eisenstein, "Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms," in Man- fredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

21. C. B. Piranesi, Carceri d'invenzione (Rome, 1760-66); reprinted in John Wilton-Ely, The Mind and Art of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978).

22. Jay Leda and Zina Voynow, Eisenstein at Work (New York: Pan- theon, 1982).

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