Figural Underspecification: Change and Stability

The important thing is that one must be free to have many myths – many stories. Someone who, together with all other human beings, has and can have only one myth – one story – is in a bad way.
...............................................................................................................Odo Marquard

Damn a people who cant [sic] handle or be handled
by more than a single God. Those slaves, those wisps.
.....................................................................George Bowering

Because metaphysical claims are fundamental, they must apply to all objects across all times. While this might mean that all buildings "exist" in the same way, it does not mean they all operate meaningfully in identical fashions. Their meanings, while based on the never changing essential nature of reality, exist as the related structure between that condition and the ever-changing human perspective and organization of it. Buildings are born within their originating context; the endlessly complex background of their original conceptual and physical setting. However, that context is constantly evolving and buildings quickly find themselves in changed situations. The fundamental character of a structure allows it to transcend such change within the range of its potential. However, sometimes the landscape changes to the point that existing forms can no longer maintain their meaningful participation. There is, therefore, a need to build a character capable of providing a multiple range of possible meanings.

Figural underspecification utilizes the potentially broad range of meaningful complexity which can be ‘built’ into a form. “Underspecification,” a term borrowed from linguistics, denotes a design which does not stamp a singular “correct” pattern upon its form. Instead, the components which comprise its formal potential are under-designated such that they do not coerce an unequivocal formal reading. Traditionally fixed codes are stretched so that they entertain a potential of ambiguity, allowing them to apply to new situations without the need for a completely new formal creation. It remains important that the overall code not be overly compromised in the process. Here it is a question of what is the appropriate balance and rate of progression at which a form needs to retain some degree of recognizable government. If meaning is to be at all comfortably achieved, the past (1) (established institutions and conventions) in some form is indispensable. A fully new discourse drawn from the saturated openness of the present is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to fulfil. Perhaps Arnold Schoenberg’s work sits at the furthest possible edge from the past. His invention of twelve-tone or serial composition for atonal music remains a rare example of a creation based on an originary rejection. (2) By establishing a structure of unity and coherence for atonality, he radically challenged the inherited foundations of musical sense. However, even in such a violent revolution, Schoenberg, and this may almost sound nonsensical, did not challenge “musicality” itself. It is a musical language nonetheless. It opposes the exclusivity of the chromatic scale, the exclusivity of thirds in building harmonic combinations, and even the requirement to resolve dissonance into consonance; but in doing all of this it reinforces these issues as the ultimate components of musical argument. In other words, he systematically enforced the negation of tonality (a refusal of a single tonal centre), but in so doing, by guaranteeing their equality, he supported the centrality of the singular tone itself.

What Schoenberg did do was to largely compromise the inherited code. The resulting challenge of this act remains. His negation of the past was to such an degree that its doctrine has never achieved its full resolution. Schoenberg himself questioned whether it was fully possible to put into practice. Theodor Adorno, an enthusiast of Schoenberg, acknowledges the degradation of meaning which was atonality’s ultimate sacrifice. “It dies away unheard, without even an echo. If time crystallizes around that music which has been heard, revealing its radiant quintessence, music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. [. . .] Modern [atonal] music sees absolute oblivion as its goal.”(3) Such is the fate of extremity. But I think that the real lesson, one even Schoenberg accepted, is that we cannot create without the past any more than we can by slavishly adopting it in toto. Except for the chimera of creation ex nihilo, invention and adaptation “. . . [depend] upon an act of double-recognition, of both a model (even if we cannot name it) and the [ ] transformation of it.” (4) This is definitive of the Classical use of figures, and illustrates how figuration is a metaphor for creative presentation and representation. The idea of underspecification can now be seen as merely an analytical drawing out of the essence of figuration itself.

In the case of underspecification, when trying to establish a meaningful formal compliance to unstable conditions, the question becomes one of where the model is to be accepted and where it begs to be transformed. Sometimes the inertial force of tradition, like the character of the city, alone propels its continued adoption, and major misfits between form and functionality are required to fuel change. While radical transformations must often be restricted to limited (small) aspects of the whole, it is equally the case that “. . . the most rigidly deterministic conceptions of the world are the ones which generate in the individual will an urge to move forward, as though will and free choice can only be effective if they carve out their openings against the hard rock of necessity.” (5) This after all is at the very definition of individuality. It is the locus of each and every subject, and therefore a general characteristic of humanity and all its cultures. The need for movement, against either the conventional or the normal, is rooted in the conceptual misalignment between subjectivity (ultimate finitude) and objectivity (ultimate inclusive infinitude). We can go so far as to say that such operations are what sustain subjectivity . . . its need to forever identify itself against its world; even if that world is the matter by which this is accomplished.

This is why it is critical to open the range of meaningful readings and the valency between them. (6) Works which behave polyphasically in their form, create a space of autonomy for subjective awareness. (7) By virtue of one meaning, from another, and vice versa (and multiply so, in criss-cross fashion, by further interferences), persons gain a form of freedom. Monophasic works oblige the subject to recognize a single meaning. Whereas the subject-object relationship is static it tend towards atrophy. Such work is dangerously restricted in its identity because of a lack of internalized non-identity. In other words, the freedom which accompanies non-exclusivity equals multiplicity. It involves the separation of the powers, already potential in a patterned object, into a manifold of formal aspects; aspects which are therewith left up to individual determination. The building is polysemous but only so far as human desire demands. Here again we see the forces of the individuality of subjects at work. By allowing a figure to recognize its inherent ‘landscape’ qualities, its internal compound elaboration; figural underspecification enhances the individual’s freedom of experience. By being formed so that certain strong readings cannot fully specify how it is encountered, a building is free to be understood, or even used, in a number of different ways. A re-investment by architecture in the potential of figural processes offers the hope of letting go of the conservative constraints unnecessarily imposed upon the figure . . . allowing it to accommodate both order and disorder. By shaping the limits of underspecification, formal adaptability over a range of potential contextually driven changes becomes possible.

(1)The past here stands for the ‘already determined,’ if we can even speak in such strong words.
(2) I am indebted to the formulation of atonality in Bruce Murphy, ed., Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 1996): 61.
(3) Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973): 133.
(4) Donald Mitchell, The Language of Modern Music (London & Boston: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1993): 97.
(5) Italo Calvino, “Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste,” in Why Read the Classics, trans. Martin McLaughlin (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1999): 110.
(6) I am indepted to the analysis of Odo Marquard for these thoughts. See the section entitled “Monomythical and Polymythical Thinking,” of his essay “In Praise of Polytheism,” in Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies (esp. page 93).
(7) polyphasic a. (OED, paraphrased): commonly used to describe an electronic design which simultaneously supplies or uses several different alternating currents which share the same voltage but are out of phase (the particular stage of their periodically recurring sequence of charges). [f. POLY + PHASE]
More generically, polyphasic describes a form which simultaneously carries several different sets of ‘information’ which share the same ‘language’ but exist in separate phases of the structure. As such they can be ‘picked-out’ by a reading which is in phase with their diffence. (note: one of the denotations of the word phase in the OED is: “3. (Chem.) Physically distinct form of matter that can be present in a system.”)