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Reception Theory of Architecture: ItsPre-History and AfterlifeTim GoughPublished online: 06 May 2014.

To cite this article: Tim Gough (2013) Reception Theory of Architecture: Its Pre-History andAfterlife, Architectural Theory Review, 18:3, 279-292, DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2013.889645

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TIM GOUGH

RECEPTION THEORYOF ARCHITECTURE:Its Pre-History and Afterlife

This paper investigates the implications of

reception theory for a possible theory of

architecture, not so much to construct such a

theory for today, but rather to show how we

are already beyond reception theory. Looking

at the work of Fish, Iser, Jauss, and de Man, an

argument is made that an architectural theory

could have been formulated on the basis of

reader-response criticism: this architectural

theory would be that of an affective

architecture, an architecture of affect, where

the interplay of subject and object becomes

the main focus of concern. This theory is

shown to be a sub-species of what Meillas-

soux calls correlationism, and a link is made

with the early written and built work of Le

Corbusier. The essay ends by considering a

radical afterlife for reception theory in the

deconstruction of the notions of subject and

object, which, according to the thought of

Deleuze, become after-effects of the differ-

ential movement of architecture.

Architectural Theory Review, 2013Vol. 18, No. 3, 279–292, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2013.889645

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In The Afterlife of Gardens, John Dixon Hunt

outlines in a few paragraphs a reception theory

of landscape, taking as his reference two 1960s

and 1970s theorists who commonly represent

the strand of literary criticism going by this

name.1 He mentions specifically Wolfgang Iser’s

notion of the Implied Reader2 and Georges

Poulet’s collapsing of the distinction between

subject and object.3 Aside from this brief

treatment, which, as Hunt’s title implies, deals

more with landscape than architecture

(although one of the implications of reception

theory is that a neat distinction between the

two should perhaps be avoided), references to

reception theory within architectural theory

are largely missing. This is in striking contrast

with some adjacent literary–critical move-

ments such as structuralism, post-structuralism,

and deconstruction. This lack of engagement

on the part of architectural theory can be read

as one symptom (amongst many) of a general

lack of engagement with the question of

reception in architecture. This is not to argue

that the time has come to belatedly resurrect a

reception theory for architecture, but it does

provide the excuse to review what such a

theory might have looked like and to show

both its antecedents and why it is necessary, in

our current situation, to go well beyond the

theoretical horizons established there.

The central tenet of any reception theory of

architecture would have been the following call:

collapse the subject–object divide. A literary

text, it was said, is never—properly thought—

an object, except as an after-effect. A literary

text is rather an event—the event of reading

that occurs in the interplay between the subject

(the reader) and the object (the text).

Reception theory was notable—unlike philos-

ophies which influenced it like hermeneutics

and phenomenology—for concentrating

almost exclusively on literary works of art to

the exclusion of visual art or architecture, but,

nonetheless, there is an admirable abstract

rigour to the theory, which allows its move-

ment to be transposed. Iser puts it thus: “The

poles of text and reader, together with the

interaction that occurs between them, form

the ground plan on which a theory of literary

communication may be built”.4 There is a

meaning to the literary text, but this meaning is

not (or not merely) passed across from the text

to the reader, rather “the meaning of the text is

something that he has to assemble”,5 and Iser

quotes Sartre approvingly, “art exists only for

and through other people”, because the

moment of creation is only an incomplete

and abstract moment.6 Likewise, Iser’s col-

league at the University of Constance, Hans

Robert Jauss, in his key essay, Literary History as

a Challenge to Literary Theory, quotes the Czech

Marxist theorist, Karel Kosık: “the life of the

work of art results ‘not from its autonomous

existence but rather from the reciprocal

interaction of work and mankind’”.7

For reception theory, a work—of architecture

as much as a written text, we might project—is

never primarily an object. A work is always a

work for someone, and the work occurs in the

reading that the reader carries out—it occurs

as an event. In relation to the literary work,

what reception theory wishes to counter is the

more conventional idea that meaning resides in

the text and is communicated, like a message,

across to the reader. Instead, meaning is an

event which only happens when the reader

engages with the text. This notion has a

number of implications in relation to a possible

reception theory of architecture. One would

have to ask initially to what extent architecture

is, or should be, read. Is the reading of

architecture an appropriate way of characteris-

ing either its reality or a critical approach to it?

If so, then the act of reading would have two

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possibilities: either architecture would be

regarded as a conventional text, the meaning

of which is to be read off as a message, or else,

more positively from the point of view of

reception theory, the meaning of architecture

would occur not as a message, but, rather, as

the interplay between people and place. There

is here the outline of a critique of post-

modernist architecture and its associated

theories, as exemplified by the early writings

of Charles Jencks,8 or the work and theories of

Venturi and Scott Brown9 for instance,

characterised as it was by a rather simple

notion of architectural meaning and its

“transmission” to and reading by those who

engage with buildings—a critique drafted

before the event, since reception theory pre-

dates postmodernist architecture and its

theoretical underpinnings.

Reading could, on the other hand, be

considered an inappropriate way of conceiving

the way in which people relate to buildings—a

too-literal transposition of our approach to

texts across to our approach to architecture.

At the very least, a “reading” of architecture is a

partial means of interaction with it, perhaps

suited to the approach that a critic or historian

might make to the work, but less appropriate

for the everyday interplay which makes up the

life of buildings. This does not vitiate the insight

which reception theory provides, however; as

noted above, it operates at quite a high level of

abstraction and we are therefore free to retain

the structure, or structured movement, which

the theory gives us—viz. the relation between

subject and object—and avoid a “reading” in

favour of an act or event more appropriate to

architecture. This act or event would have a

range of possible names, corresponding

roughly to the degree of naivety, “authenticity”

or criticality with which the work is

approached: inhabitation, visiting, apprehend-

ing, beholding, acting as a tourist in relation to,

critically or historically appraising, and so on.

The strange position of architecture as

compared to other art forms would then be

foregrounded here: there is an inescapability to

architecture which does not pertain in relation

to the literary, visual, sculptural, or musical work

of art, which is one reason why the question of

the everyday becomes critical (either positively

or negatively) for architectural theory. There is

an element of choice, or a comparative rarity

(or both), in respect of our engagement with

other art forms: we choose to read a literary

work, we choose to read a book (even the

most banal example of one), or we only

occasionally habitually read a signpost, catch a

glimpse of a painting, or hear a piece of music.

Occasionally, that is, relative to our constant but

largely unreflective and uncritical engagement

with architecture, with buildings, or at least with

place. We are always already engaged with

buildings.

As Paul de Man points out, this question of the

everyday touches on the very idea of a “work”,

strongly defined. He notes that reception

theory avoids any recourse to an “essentialist”

notion of the work of art (or, we can say,

architecture). As he says:

The suspicion of essentialism arises

whenever the study of the production

or of the structure of literary texts is

pursued at the expense of their

reception, at the expense of the

individual or collective patterns of

understanding that issue from their

reading and evolve in time.10

The idea of a fixed canon of definitive works is

undermined in favour of a more “dynamic and

dialectical process of canon formation”,11 and it

is as part of this temporal dynamic that the

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question of the “everyday” nature of architec-

ture becomes an issue: what is remarkable at

one moment in history can become unremark-

able—everyday—in the future. De Man sees in

Jauss an acknowledgement of interlocking

frames of surprise, recognition, and indifference

over time, and uses the architecturally familiar

concept of figure and ground to elucidate:

just as the anonymous background of a

perception is general and non-

differentiated with regard to the

individual perception that stands

foregrounded and silhouetted against it,

the particular work, at the moment of its

production, stands out in its singularity

from the collective grayness of received

ideas and ideologies.12

As a good deconstructionist, de Man sees no

end to this process of the foregrounding of the

surprising new work within the frame of

existing familiarity, and characterises this as a

mise en abyme, a series of “abyssal frames that

engender each other without end or telos”.13

At the limit, de Man see the new work as

unreadable, and this lack of readability—a lack

which can be transposed to the radically new

work of architecture—becomes a sign of the

quality of the work: “at the moment of its

inception, the individual work of art stands out

as unintelligible with regard to the prevailing

conventions”.14 This unintelligibility, this radical

disjunction, and incommensurability between

existing conditions and the work—properly so

called—echoes that of Kuhn’s earlier Structure

of Scientific Revolutions, the influence of which

on the human sciences tends to be rather

underplayed.15 It is also prefigured in Alain

Badiou’s The Concept of the Model—extended

on later in Being and Event—where he notes

that the truly radical work of art “inexists” in

the current situation (the “encyclopaedia” of

extant knowledge)16 in which it is produced,

and introduces into that situation a new

“possibility of formalization”17 (Picasso, for

visual art, or Webern, for music, are his

examples) to which the subject has three

possible responses: reaction, indifference, or

faith.18 It is fairly straightforward to see these

issues in relation to the history of architecture.

If the rupture of modernist literature occurs in

1922 with the publication of James Joyce’s

Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, then we

can agree with Peter Smithson that the same

year represents a similar breach for architec-

ture:

Modern Architecture begins in 1922, for

that is the date of Le Corbusier’s villa at

Vaucresson and of Oud’s Cafe de Unie in

Rotterdam. Then begin the new forms in

architecture, forms from painting; Le

Corbusier’s form may be the child of a

single painting, one more or less

completely flat and heavily indebted to

the rectangle of the frame: Picasso’s Bottle

of Vieux Marc, Glass, Guitar and

Newspaper 1913.19

For Peter Smithson, Le Corbusier represented

a new possibility of formalisation in architec-

ture, which resulted from his faithful (in Badiou’s

terms) response to the earlier breach of

Picasso. In turn, there are architectural

responses to Le Corbusier’s new formalisation:

either a reaction against modernism or the

taking up of the new possibility of formalisation

which his work now offers. We could say that

as modernism becomes more familiar, the

reaction of indifference—which corresponds to

a certain withdrawal into the background—will

become more usual, and what was distinctive

and surprising becomes “part of the frame”,

part of the everyday; in Badiou’s terms, it is

“occulted”. At the same time, the new

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possibility of formalisation will be taken up, not

in its radicality, but rather as a style (the

international style), and it will then become the

critical task of later generations to “resurrect”

the original breach, the original trauma which

the radically new work represented. As Badiou

says, with typical pathos: “With regard to every

genuine present, one can rightfully hope that a

new present, by activating de-occultation, will

make that present’s lost radiance appear at the

salvific surface of a body”.20

There is a historical movement described here

of surprise followed by indifference, of fore-

ground becoming background, and then

perhaps being re-found as foreground again.

For reception theory, a similar movement

occurs, in a short timescale, internally in the

work, in respect of the time which the “reader”

or participant in the work spends in becoming

familiar with it. As Stanley Fish makes clear in his

rigorous article, “Literature in the Reader :

Affective Stylistics”,21 if the work is an act, not

an object—that is, in respect of literature, an

act of reading, in respect of architecture, an act

of engagement of some sort—then this act or

event necessarily has a temporal dimension, it

necessarily occurs over time. Fish’s theory is

exemplary in drawing out the precise impli-

cations of this in relation to the quality of the

event or act as a reading proceeds. He analyses

at length a number of short texts in order to

illustrate the point, including this from Pater’s

conclusion to The Renaissance:

That clear perpetual outline of face and

limb is but an image of ours.

and concludes:

but then the sentence turns on the

reader, and takes away the world it has

itself created. With “but”, the easy

progress through the sentence is

impeded . . . the declarative force of

“is” is weakened and the status of the

firmly drawn outline . . . is suddenly

uncertain . . . .22

Fish’s point is that just as over longer periods of

time, the response to individual works can

change from surprise (or foreground) to

indifference (or background), so within a

work or indeed an individual sentence, the

temporal sequence of event(s) generates

moments of surprise and unexpectedness.

The text does something we did not expect,

it brings us up short, or sets up a temporary

blockage,23 and this temporary blockage is part

of the potential strength of the work.

Again, there are a number of architectural

examples of this structure of surprise and

event, most obviously Le Corbusier’s prome-

nade architecturale, a term he introduces first to

describe in the Oeuvre Complete 1929–1934

the Villa Savoye: “In this house occurs a

veritable promenade architecturale, offering

aspects constantly varied, unexpected and

sometimes astonishing”.24 His description is

an architectural analogue of Fish’s literary

analysis, emphasising the moments of surprise

which act to foreground both a particular

moment in the movement around the building,

and to foreground the building itself, not so

much as a style or a new means of

formalisation, but as an event. But this basic

approach to architecture—an approach which

establishes something quite radical about what

architecture is—is already implied, one could

argue, in Camillo Sitte’s City Planning according

to Artistic Principles,25 and crops up again in the

rather underestimated book, Townscape, by

Gordon Cullen.26 In both of these books,

architecture and the city are conceptualised not

as a series of objects, but always already in play

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with those who come to exist in or inhabit

them. The city is revealed, over time, to a

human observer, and this revelation has

moments of blockage, intrigue, surprise, and

pleasure. Cullen gives the example of an English

town where one arrives unexpectedly on the

wrong side of the high street, having traversed

under it without having noticed it.27 It is a

mistake to regard the work of Cullen as merely

a brand of the English Picturesque—that is, as

proposing a theory of architecture related

essentially to the visual appearance of a

townscape.28 The ontological implications go

well beyond this, since the visual appearance of

the scene is regarded not in itself, but only as

one aspect (and not the most important) of the

dramatic event of architecture.29 Likewise, Le

Corbusier’s promenade architecturale is not a

theory of movement within architecture, since

this movement is only one aspect of the

broader issue of the “poetic emotion”30 which

he identifies as the mode of being of

architecture.

What these theories of architecture give us—in

an echo of Fish’s affective theory of literature—

are an affective theory of architecture and, at the

same time, an affective architecture. This we can

see quite literally in the Oeuvre Complete: Le

Corbusier presents an affective theory of

architecture at the same time as he presents

the building—Villa Savoye—which he has

developed as an affective architecture. What

is implied here is both an ontology and an

epistemology of architecture and what is

extraordinary about the development of Le

Corbusier’s work between 1915 and 1929 is

the interplay between the two. In other words,

a basic mobile structure of interplay is deployed

in two registers, on two ontological levels: on

the one hand, architecture itself is conceived as

such an interplay between people and place, an

interplay that can be spoken of as a promenade

architecturale; on the other hand, the relation

between architecture and the theory which

makes it possible/the theory which makes it

visible is also conceived and deployed as an

interplay, as a progressive event—one which Le

Corbusier outlines thoroughly in his publi-

cations of that time. What architecture is is not

an innocent question—that is, there are

different ontologies (and epistemologies) of

architecture, and it makes a profound differ-

ence which ontology is being deployed. It

makes a difference in terms of the possibilities

for architectural creation; without an affective

theory of architecture, the promenade archi-

tecturale of the Villa Savoye would never have

come into existence. And it makes a difference,

after the event, in terms of the possibilities for

architectural criticism and understanding.

There is here a pre-history of a reception

theory of architecture. As noted at the outset,

reception theory seems barely to have

registered explicitly within architectural the-

ory—aside from John Dixon Hunt’s small book

on landscape—but this does not mean that the

concerns of reception theory have been

entirely ignored. Rather, these concerns arose

in architecture prior to literary reception

theory and without any noticeable influence

from one to the other (in either direction). Le

Corbusier, Sitte, and Cullen were some of the

few who form part of this pre-history.31 On the

other hand, it is important to clarify why certain

other strands of architectural theory do not

constitute such a pre-history, despite appearing

to engage at some level with the question of

the reception of architecture. We saw above

how the postmodern theories of Jencks,

Venturi, and Scott Brown do not have the

characteristics of a reception theory, since

although these theories posit someone who

“receives” something from the work of

architecture, this reception is pre-determined

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as the transmission of a meaning across the

subject–object divide. Likewise, it might be

argued that the phenomenology of Christian

Norberg-Schulz is essentially a reception

theory of architecture, were it not for the

fact that he filters this reception of architecture

through the Vitruvian triad of commodity,

firmness, and delight32 and, therefore, tends to

the essentialism of considering the production

or structure of the work as necessarily filtering

its reception—an essentialism which we saw de

Man warning against. For Norberg-Schulz, it

remains the case that any description of

architecture “has to be in terms of objects”.33

By contrast, other uses of phenomenology

within architectural theory, in the same

current as that of John Dixon Hunt, include

the writings of Juhani Pallasmaa, Joseph

Rykwert, Dalibor Vesely, Peter Carl, and

Alberto Perez-Gomez. These theorists, it

seems to me, on the whole avoid such

objectivism and essentialism and, therefore,

implicitly respect the central tenet of recep-

tion theory, albeit without explicit reference

to it. Significantly, they are influenced by the

work of the German philosopher, Hans-

Georg Gadamer, whose position in reception

theory is addressed below. The mark, there-

fore, of an architectural theory which can be

aligned with reception theory is not merely

that it takes into consideration how the

subject responds to architecture—many

theories have done that—but that this

response is allowed to constitute the primary

mode of being of architecture, unfiltered by

theories of the sign or considerations of

structure and composition. This is not to

imply that structure and composition are

irrelevant for architecture or architectural

theory, but rather that these vital aspects of

the work do not form the being of

architecture; they form the being of archi-

tectural production, which is a different thing.

In respect of these affective theories of

architecture—consistent with the concerns of

reception theory—I would argue that Badiou’s

notion of the model outlined above is shown to

be deficient. As we have seen, this notion

avows that the breach constituted by the great

work (that of Picasso, Webern, Joyce, Le

Corbusier . . . ) is a breach to be measured by

means of the “possibilities for formalization”.

What is key for Badiou is that a new possibility

for formalisation is opened and, in response to

this new possibility, those who follow can be

reactive, indifferent, or faithful. But, in its

formalism, the ontology of the work of art or

architecture implied here is resolutely objecti-

vist and opposed to any notion of an affective

work. This is of particular importance in

relation to architecture. If, on the whole, the

theorists of literary reception are fighting

against a naıve notion of meaning—that is,

that meaning somehow inheres in the text

itself, rather than being an eventful occurrence

of the involvement of the reader with the

text—then, by way of contrast, the theorists of

an affective architecture would need to fight

against a naıve notion not so much of content,

but of form—that is, the reduction of

architecture to, in essence, the question of

form, a reduction which can be summarised in

the following passage from Kant’s third critique:

In painting, in sculpture, indeed in all the

visual arts, including architecture and

horticulture insofar as they are fine arts,

design is what is essential: in design the

basis for any involvement of taste is not

what gratifies us in sensation, but merely

what we like because of its form . . . .34

Here, as in Le Corbusier—but to diametrically

opposed effect (and affect)—we see an

intimate connection between an ontology of

the work of art and architecture and an

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epistemology: Kant is telling us what architec-

ture, in essence, is—that is, he is laying out an

ontology of it. This ontology then tells the

artist/architect what it is that they are

creating—namely, a form—and this form-

creation is called “design”. Design, for Kant, is

nothing other than the manipulation of form. In

turn, the means of access to the work of

architecture or art—its epistemology—is

determined entirely and consistently in accord-

ance with that ontology, as a formal analysis.

It is only within this formal Kantian scheme that

Badiou thematises what occurs when a work

breaches the preceding comfortable pre-

conditions of thought. What occurs, according

to him, is a new possibility of formalisation—

that is, the scope for creativity lies within the

formal realm.

Le Corbusier, however—and no doubt, with

him, the other examples of the trauma of the

new (Picasso, Webern, Joyce . . . )—is more

radical than is dreamt of in this philosophy, for

the movement of his work is precisely away

from a formal notion of architecture to an

affective architecture, over the period from

1914 to 1922. This movement can be quite

clearly plotted, from project to project, in the

Oeuvre Complete. The breach that he instigates

is not within form, but beyond form.

In his book, Brunelleschi, Lacan and Le Corbusier,

Lorens Holm speaks of what he terms the

literal trauma which Le Corbusier experienced

on the Acropolis: “One of the great encounters

in the history of architecture was Le Corbu-

sier’s encounter with the Parthenon in 1911”.35

This trauma occurs (and not only for him)

because:

The Parthenon makes a proposition

about space and time . . . this continual

return to the object, this look outward

that is also a reflective look back, which

threatens architecture because it unravels

distinctions between viewer and viewed,

subject and object, object and space.36

What this passage says is that the preceding

notion of what architecture is—the Kantian

notion of architecture as form, as an object

set neatly over and against a subject—is

threatened, indeed overturned, by virtue of a

destruction or deconstruction of the distinc-

tions between subject and object. The

movement of this deconstruction is the

same basic movement we see in reception

theory: the location of the reality of the work

not in the object, but in the elision of the

distinction between the object and the

subject.

This remains contested ground, both in

architectural theory and in philosophy. Perhaps,

the clearest and broadest exposition of this

contest is represented by Quentin Meillassoux

in After Finitude—An Essay on the Necessity of

Contingency.37 Meillassoux, a pupil of Badiou,

holds that philosophy, post Kant, is a philosophy

of what he names correlationism: the view that

all reality is reality for the human subject.

Correlationism holds that to think something is

to think something and, therefore, that there

can be no independent reality to which we

have access without that reality being co-

determined by the subject. For the correla-

tionist, it is not possible, in thought, to get

around the back of thought to an absolute

position (roughly consonant with what Stanley

Fish terms an essentialist position, as we saw

above). But Meillassoux, along with Badiou,

wishes instead to think the absolute. He aims at

the thinking of something essentially uncorre-

lated to the subject—that is, the thought of the

autonomous.

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Correlationism is initiated by Kant, for whom, as

noted in the first critique, “representation is a

priori determinant of the object, if it be the case

that only through the representation is it

possible to know anything as an object”, soon

followed with the assertion that that is indeed

the case: “Now all experience does indeed

contain, in addition to the intuition of the

senses through which something is given, a

concept of an object as being thereby given, that

is to say, as appearing”.38 For Kant, objective

reality is not independent of concepts and our

representation in thought of the object is

indeed determinant of it. Objective reality is, in

other words, intrinsically correlated with the

subject.

Meillassoux identifies two strands of correla-

tionism: weak and strong. Kant’s correlationism

is weak because although objective reality is

necessarily correlated, there does exist an in-

itself, a reality distinct from and independent of

the subject. It is just that, for Kant, we have no

possible access to this in-itself: “the true

correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself, is not

known and cannot be known . . . ”.39 To ask

what this in-itself is is nothing but asking what

this in-itself is for us and is, therefore, to be

caught within the correlationist circle whereby

what is thought is co-determined by thought.

The strong correlationist goes one step further

and dissolves all notion of the in-itself. For the

strong correlationist, there simply is no reality

outside of the correlation of subject and object,

which implies, in turn, that the correlation is

primary.40 For Meillassoux, strong correlationism

means that “only the relation between subject

and object remains, or some other correlation

deemed to be more fundamental”.41

According to After Finitude, strong correlation-

ism pervades twentieth-century philosophy

and is fostered and exemplified in both the

analytical and continental tradition by Wittgen-

stein and Heidegger (following Husserl’s

phenomenology), respectively. For the former,

the world is the totality of facts, which consist of

states of affairs (i.e., combinations of objects),42

yet “at death, the world does not alter, but

comes to an end”. As for the latter, Meillassoux

writes in a long footnote:

Heidegger’s debt to phenomenology—a

debt he never entirely discharged—

seems to have driven him towards a

highly problematic “correlationism of

finitude” wherein the world and our

relation-to-the-world, man and nature,

being and its shepherd, are construed as

fundamentally indissociable terms,

destined to “subsist” or (perhaps?)

perish together.43

To return to the question of architecture and an

affective theory of architecture, whilst, on the

one hand, Kant, in the third critique, sets out a

resolutely formalist ontology of the work of

architecture, he also provides philosophy—and

architectural thought—with the resources to

overcome this formalism—this resource Meil-

lassoux names “correlationism”. It is a resource

which he opposes in the name of a supposed

realism and it is a resource which the theorists

of reception—Fish, Jauss, Iser, de Man—take up

in the specific field of literary theory. And, as

the above quotation outlines, it is a resource

which finds one of its most characteristic

realisations in phenomenology, which, as Jauss

and Iser make clear in their writings, is one of

the bases on which their reception theory is

founded.

I noted above that, on the whole, the theorists

of literary reception found it necessary to

oppose their work to those who argue for a

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naıve access to meaning, whereas an affective

theory of architecture would on the whole

need to fight against a naıve formalism. The

opposite is also the case, although to a lesser

extent: Stanley Fish also opposed his affective

theory of literature to a formalist approach44

and Jauss to Levi-Strauss’ structuralism (i.e.,

formalism),45 and in architectural theory, the

outworkings of an affective theory of architec-

ture would, by contrast, need also to oppose

naıve—or not so naıve—notions of meaning in

architecture. We have already met one such

notion above in postmodernist architecture—a

representative of the naıve notion of

meaning. But the phenomenological notion of

meaning—a notion which Meillassoux correctly

regards as essentially correlationist—also

requires to be deconstructed, and it is at this

juncture that we will see an afterlife of

reception theory, an afterlife which in fact

posits a yet more radical break with content

and form, subject and object, than is implied

within that theory.

There may be a good reason why literary

reception theory never gained traction in

architectural theory: one of the key philoso-

phical references for Iser and Jauss is the work

of Hans-Georg Gadamer, who stands in the

tradition of hermeneutics and phenomenology

and who was a pupil of Heidegger. Gadamer

had already, in his 1962 magnum opus, Truth

and Method, outlined a more general ontology

of the work of art (of all types, not just or even

especially literature).46 This post-Kantian

ontology used the notion of play to explain

the nature of any work of art. For Kantian

aesthetics, play occurs within the work and

within the creation of the work, but, for

Gadamer, this notion of play is generalised and

opened out so that the work of art is the

play between subject and object. Although Iser

and Jauss (the latter a pupil of Gadamer)

undoubtedly go beyond Gadamer in their

concentration on the literary text, in their

avoidance of (the rather conservative) Gada-

mer’s notion of a canon, in their suspicion of

tradition which Gadamer foregrounds, and in

some of their discussions of the nature of

historical understanding, their basic ontological

premise remains consonant with his notion of

the interplay between subject and object. And

from the point of view of architectural theory,

Gadamer had already, in Truth and Method,

considered architecture and indeed raised it

from a peripheral position to the centre of his

concern:

one sees that the forms of art which,

from the point of view of the art of

experience, are peripheral, become

central: namely, all those whose proper

import points beyond them into the

totality of a context determined by them

and for them. The greatest and most

distinguished of these forms is

architecture.47

A correlationist or affective theory of archi-

tecture already had a firm basis in the work of

Gadamer, a philosopher who—unlike recep-

tion theory, and a decade before it—explicitly

referred to architecture. Therefore, although,

as indicated above, there are undoubtedly

lessons that architecture could have learnt from

reception theory, the basic ontological move

had already been made and acknowledged as

relevant to the discipline.

And it is in Gadamer, strangely enough given his

rather conservative approach and his lack of

engagement with contemporary art and

architecture, that we find perhaps the first

and clearest hint as to a further radical break—

this time, with reception theory itself, with the

overarching notions of content and form and

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subject and object. For at a certain point in

Truth and Method, Gadamer goes beyond the

traditional notion of play that one will find, for

instance, in Callois48 and Huizinga49 towards a

more radical, groundless conception: “The

movement of play as such has, as it were, no

substrate”.50 What does this groundlessness of

play imply?

Firstly, that at this point, the subject–object

interplay inherent in reception theory, in

Gadamer’s hermeneutics and in phenomenol-

ogy, can, at the limit, be radicalised in the

direction of Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida

deconstructs the basic tenets of phenomenol-

ogy in his work in the early 1960s and, in his

seminal essay, “Structure Sign and Play in the

Discourse of the Human Sciences”, which

established his reputation in the United States

in 1967, makes clear what this radicalisation of

play entails:

And it plays without security. For there is a

sure play: that which is limited to the

substitution of given and existing, present

pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also

surrenders itself to genetic indetermination,

to the seminal adventure of the trace.51

Secondly, that in respect of any correlationist

theory of the interplay of subject and object, it

is the terms of this interplay that are called into

question. If reception theory and its ante-

cedents have taken the step of evaporating

objectivism in the name of the interplay

between subject and object, then a theory of

architecture which goes beyond reception

theory makes another traumatic break. This

break takes the form of the play without

substrate that Gadamer briefly mentions; it

takes the form of the unsure play that Derrida

outlines; and it does this by refusing to play with

pre-existing pieces. What are these pre-existing

pieces that must now be avoided? Surely,

nothing other than the categories of subject

and object. In respect of architecture, what

must be thought, according to this movement,

is movement itself, a movement and relation

prior to the terms—subject and object,

inhabitant or visitor and building—on which it

was thought this relation was grounded.

The philosopher who announces this new

possibility most clearly is Gilles Deleuze.

Already, in his early book, Logic of Sense, and

taking up the Leibnizian notion of multiple

worlds, he had spoken of the battle as an event

with many participants, the occurrence of

which transpires outside the conscious activity

and mind of those participants:

If the battle is not an example of an event

amongst others, but rather the Event in

its essence, it is no doubt because it is

actualized in diverse manners at once,

and because each participant may grasp it

at a different level of actualization within

its variable present . . . . But is it above all

because the battle hovers over its own

field, being neutral in relation to all of its

temporal actualizations, neutral and

impassive in relation to the victor and

the vanquished, the coward and brave;

because of this, it is all the more terrible.52

Reception theory is open to the conventional

objection that, if the nature of architecture (or a

literary work) occurs as the interplay between

subject and object, then are we not therefore

trapped into the situation where there are as

many architectures (or books) as there are

subjects? What Deleuze’s philosophy does is to

acknowledge this point, as Leibniz does before

him, as a positive thing and conceive of the

world as essentially and from the outset

multiple. It is from out of this multiplicity that

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something like a battle can occur and exist, but

the mode of existence of the battle is not that

of a singular object, but rather of something

that subsists through the multiple. The battle

hovers over the battle-field (and the warriors),

just as, for F. Scott Fitzgerald, the party hovers

over the ballroom (and the dancers). Likewise,

we can conceive of architecture as an Event

“hovering over” the participant or participants

who inhabit their milieu.

Equally importantly, the status of the partici-

pant and the milieu is re-thought by Deleuze.

His philosophy is a philosophy of the multiple,

but also one of difference—and difference

thought not in terms of identity (as philosophy

has always had it), but on its own terms, as

difference prior to identity.53 This means that

the identity of something like the participant

or subject on the one hand, and that of the

milieu or work of architecture on the other, is

not foundational: the ontology of architecture

does not derive from pre-existing things, pre-

existing identities. Rather, the difference

between these “things”—the mobile and

multiple interplay between them—is “founda-

tional” in the sense that these things, these

identities of subject and object, only happen as

an after-effect of that movement. This

differential movement is what I will name as

“architecture” and, with this, an ontology of

architecture is proposed, whereby architec-

ture can be thought from out of its own

relations, instead of in terms of the prior terms

of subject and object.54

This, I suggest, constitutes the possibility of a

radical afterlife of reception theory. If reception

theory can be said to be relativistic in the sense

that it deals with the relation between subject

and object and places that question above an

objectivist theorisation, then its afterlife trans-

forms the notion of relation into something

primary, something prior. Just as Deleuze’s

response to those who worry about multiple

interpretations of a single work is to turn the

multiple into an essentially positive and primary

idea from which the singular is derived, so his

response to those who worry about relativism

(and who remain silent as to what their

absolute consists of) is also to conceive of

relation as primary, as positive, rather than as

something derived from its terms. The terms of

the relation come afterwards, and this means

for architecture that its ontology is one of

difference, of multiplicity—a difference and a

multiplicity that are to be celebrated as its

positive possibility.

Notes

1. John Dixon Hunt, The Afterlife of Gardens,London: Reaction Books, 2004, 15–16.

2. See Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From ReaderResponse to Literary Anthropology, Baltimore, MD:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989;Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response, Baltimore, MD: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1978; Wolfgang Iser,The Implied Reader, Baltimore, MD: The JohnsHopkins University Press, 1974. (All these bookswere originally published in German andtranslated by Iser himself.)

3. See Georges Poulet, “Criticism and the Experi-ence of Interiority”, in Richard A. Macksey andEugenio Donato (eds), The Structuralist Contro-versy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences ofMan, Baltimore, MD: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1972, 56–72.

4. Iser, The Act of Reading, ix.

5. Iser, The Act of Reading, ix.

6. Iser, The Act of Reading, 108. The quote is fromJean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature, trans.

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Bernard Fretchman, New York: PhilosophicalLibrary, 1949, 42–43.

7. Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History as aChallenge to Literary Theory”, in Hans RobertJauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, trans.Timothy Bahti, Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 1982. Quoting Karel Kosık, DieDialektik des Konkreten, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,1967, 140, English translation: Dialectics of theConcrete: A Study of Problems of Man and World,trans. Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt,Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976.

8. See, amongst other works, Charles Jencks, TheLanguage of Post-Modern Architecture, New York:Rizzoli, 1977; Charles Jencks, Post-Modernism,The New Classicism in Art and Architecture,NewYork: Rizzoli, 1987.

9. See, of course, Robert Venturi, Complexity andContradiction in Architecture, New York: TheMuseum of Modern Art Press, 1966; andRobert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and SteveIzenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1972.

10. Paul de Man, “Introduction”, vii–xxv, in HansRobert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception,trans. Timothy Bahti, Minneapolis, MN: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1982, x.

11. de Man, “Introduction”, xi.

12. de Man, “Introduction”, xiii.

13. de Man, “Introduction”, xiii.

14. de Man, “Introduction”, xiv.

15. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of ScientificRevolutions, Chicago, IL: University of ChicagoPress, 1996.

16. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. OliverFeltham, London: Continuum, 2005, 400. Thewhole of this section, entitled Veracity and Truthfrom the Standpoint of the Faithful Procedure:Forcing, is relevant here.

17. Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model, trans.Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho,Melbourne: Re.Press, 2007, 91.

18. Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds, trans. AlbertoToscano, London: Continuum, 2009, 63.

19. Peter Smithson, Conversations with Students, ed.Catherin Spellman and Karl Unglaub, New York:Princeton University Press, 2005, 20–21.

20. Badiou, Logic of Worlds, 66.

21. Stanley E. Fish, “Literature in the Reader :Affective Stylistics”, in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.),Reader–Response Criticism, Baltimore, MD: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 70–100.

22. Fish, “Literature in the Reader”, 77.

23. See also Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process”,in Jane P. Tompkins (ed.), Reader–ResponseCriticism, Baltimore, MD: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1980, 54–55, where he citesRoman Ingarden’s negative notion of blockage,pointing out that, in fact, it should be regarded asa positive possibility of the work.

24. Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, OeuvreComplete 1929–1934, Zurich: Les Editionsd’Architecture, 1995, 24. For an in-depthdiscussion, see Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier andthe Architectural Promenade, Basel: Birkhauser,2010.

25. Camillo Sitte, City Planning according to ArtisticPrinciples, trans. George R. Collins and ChristianeCrasemann Collins, New York: Phaidon, 1965.

26. Gordon Cullen, Townscape, London: Architec-tural Press, 1965.

27. Cullen, Townscape, 215.

28. John Macarthur places the townscape move-ment directly in the picturesque tradition; seeJohn Macathur, The Picturesque, Oxford: Routle-dge, 2007.

29. For discussions around this issue, see The Journalof Architecture, 17, no. 5 (October 2012), guestedited by Mathew Aitchison on the topic oftownscape.

30. Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans.Frederick Etchells, London: The ArchitecturalPress, 1927, 199.

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31. In addition, we could point to Choisy, who,together with Sitte, famously influenced LeCorbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, particu-larly the reading of the Acropolis; andChristopherAlexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein,A Pattern Language, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1977, although Alexander and colleagues’theory tends to get obscured at this stage in hiscareer by his belief in traditional solutions.

32. See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions inArchitecture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965,104.

33. Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture, 86.

34. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans.Warner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,1987, 71.

35. Lorens Holm, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier :Architecture, Space and the Construction ofSubjectivity, London: Routledge, 2010, 184.

36. Holm, Brunelleschi, Lacan, Le Corbusier, 185.

37. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude—An Essay onthe Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier,London: Continuum, 2008.

38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans.Norman Kemp Smith, London: MacMillan, 1929,125–126 (A92–93, B125–126).

39. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 74 (A30, B45).Note that for Kant (as Meillassoux hints in afootnote), there is a distinction between theknowledge of something and the ability to thinkit. Knowledge is the stronger position. We canthink, as he says, “whatever I please, providedonly that I do not contradict myself ”; we canthink the thing itself (which must therefore benon-contradictory), but we cannot know it.

40. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 36–37.

41. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 37.

42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophi-cus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness,

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, 5 (1.1–2.01).

43. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 137. The Heideg-ger quotation is from a letter dated 11October 1931 to Elizabeth Blochmann inMartin Heidegger—Elizabeth Blochmann. Brief-wechsel 1918–1969, ed. Joachim W. Storck,Marbach am Neckar : Deutsches Literatur-Archiv, 1990, 44.

44. Fish, “Literature in the Reader”, 80.

45. Jauss, “Literary History as a Challenge to LiteraryTheory”, 40.

46. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans.William Glen-Doepel, London: Sheed andWard, 1979.

47. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 138.

48. Roger Callois, Man, Play and Games, trans.Meyer Barash, Chicago, IL: University of IllinoisPress, 2001.

49. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Boston, MA: Beacon Books,1971.

50. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 93.

51. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in theDiscourse of the Human Sciences”, in Writingand Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, 292.

52. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lesterwith Charles Stivale, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990, 100.

53. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,trans. Paul Patton, London: The Athlone Press,1994.

54. For a discussion of the question of autonomy inarchitecture and its relation to such a differentialontology, see Tim Gough, “Architecture as aStrong Discipline”, in Architecture and Culture, 1,no. 1 (November 2013), 16–37.

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