Fænomenologisk-æstetisk forståelse af rum

Jeg bringer her et uddrag, den første halvdel, af det paper, jeg for et par uger siden præsenterede til en konference i Pittsburgh. Jeg har udeladt den sidste del. Den største del af det udeladte omhandler begrebet atmosfære, som jeg allerede har skrevet om på denne blog. Den sidste del af det drejer sig om begrebet mindedness, som jeg forsøger at tænke som en betingende attitude eller før-intentionel baggrundsindstilling, som influerer den måde, vi som stemte subjekter oplever. Dette er udeladt, fordi jeg vil behandle det særskilt ved en senere lejlighed. Det, jeg bringer, handler om nærvær og fænomenologisk forståelse af rum.

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1. I would like to begin mentioning a discussion introduced by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. It is the understanding of an aesthetic dimension as proposed by Gumbrecht in his book Production of Presence. Gumbrecht talks about that there being more to experience than just interpretation. In doing this he tries to challenge the paradigm within prevailing hermeneutics that every phenomenon should be seen as an object for interpretation. If we look at the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, he is, agreeing with Gumbrecht’s observation about the dominance of hermeneutics. Vattimo writes: “That each experience of truth is an experience of interpretation is almost a truism in today’s culture.” (Vattimo, 1997: 5). But Gumbrecht wants point at the dimensions that are non-interpretative, which he calls the production of presence. He explains this concept, the production of presence, by referring to the German philosopher Martin Seel and his concept of appearence (Erscheinung), which Seel explains by referring to experience in an aesthetic perspective (Gumbrecht, 2004: 63). Gumbrecht says that “… objects of aesthetic experience (and here it is important, once again, to insist that I am speaking of “lived experience” of Erleben) are characterized by an oscillation between presence effects and meaning effects.” (Gumbrecht, 2004: 107). In other words it is Gumbrecht’s point that we (in the normal understanding of the aesthetic experience) fail to recognize the dimension of the presence production. (And this presence might, in part, be understood as the subject’s being presently aware in the situation taking an aesthetic attitude towards the world.) –
Gumbrecht is not unaware of presence and meaning being intertwined. He even writes: “For us, presence phenomena always come as “presence effects” because they are necessarily surrounded by, wrapped into, and perhaps even mediated by clouds and cushions of meaning.” (Gumbrecht, 2004: 106). But it is Gumbrecht’s point that the production of presence is generally neglected.
And I will now proceed, in more detail, to develop how I think presence effects could be understood in relation to our aesthetic experience of space and what could be called the intersubjective atunement to the architectonical space. It will be the development of a course inspired by Gumbrecht’s point towards an aesthetic-phenomenological understanding of space, rather than going further into the discussion Gumbrecht has introduced. One of the reasons for this is that Gumbrecht himself does not go into phenomenological details with regard to the presence phenomenon – he has the tendency to stay on the surface, just pointing out that there is something to investigate and positioning himself against prevalent hermeneutics (such as Derrida who he e.g. accuses for neglecting the presence phenomena).

2. I’ll begin this task by pointing towards some phenomenological aspects of space, which might be useful, when we want to understand the aesthetic presence in our surrounding architectural spaces. Some of the underlining key aspects in this paper for the thinking of space are: a) the dimension of time, b) the relation to the embodiment of the perceiving consciousness, and c) consciousness as embedded in the world.

a) [TIME] Phenomenologically, space can be seen as indebted to time (i.e. subjective time in contrast to the objective counting of time). Without temporal succession and temporality in connection to bodily movement, it is difficult phenomenologically to see how we could understand space as given in its three-dimensionality. The classical, phenomenological analysis of time made by Husserl expresses time exactly as being some kind of precondition for space (Husserl, 1966). This points to the importance of thinking time with space, a point which is also underlined by recent phenomenology, e.g. Sheets-Johnstone (in her The Primacy of Movement, 1999).
In connection to a phenomenology of space and architecture, this gives us a hint about the importance of regarding space dynamically, i.e. being aware of space as something that is experienced in and through movement. We are moving around in architectonical spaces, and phenomenologically we never experience a building from the theoretical and static point of view, as it is the case when space is designed on paper or on a computer. There are different aspects of this: one is the specific dynamic, i.e. that the subject is moving, directing, etc. in certain manners, when he or her experiences space. The other consequence is that when we experience a space we never do it without having entered the room in a specific way, having or lacking a sense of where it might lead us to – and other aspects might be added. My preliminary point is here that a space is not an isolated unit, but something in a context within a horizon of the moving and perceiving subjects.
The relation to time can be detailed a little: I am here developing the thought also presented by Husserl in his lectures over consciousness of inner time, but it is also a point that can be found in the work by Merleau-Ponty (1945). Both they speak about describing the present now, not as isolated points of present nows, but the present moment as a broad present now, including the sense of the just-past and the about-to-come, or as formulated in their terminology: in the presence experience the temporal structure consist in retention, primary impression, and protention. This temporal structure of the now underlines the above mentioned point that the way space is experienced is also dependent on what is behind the subject or around the corner, as just experienced. The same holds for the not yet-seen space or our expectations to what will come, how the spatiality will develop – e.g. walking into the next room.

b) [EMBODIMENT] I also think it is relevant to mention the connection to the body. As much phenomenological research has indicated, it is the moving body that is experiencing the space. It here becomes a phenomenological point that e.g. the human body is mostly moving around horizontally in a vertical position with the view most often directed horizontally, unless the architecture suggests us to do otherwise, e.g. by stairs, vertical lines like columns, long windows, elevators or the like, another example that, by the way, also points to the dependence of culture is exemplified in traditional Japanese housing. Here the human activity is being carried out one meter below what we do in the West, because they conduct live, eating, working, and sleeping at floor. –
I think these considerations indicate how architecture could be fruitfully regarded as the art of designing space for embodied conscious persons embedded dynamically in space. And I think this implies possibilities of manipulating, suggesting, and directing our view and bodily movements in the designed space. In this way designed space is not only to be understood as design of the superficial and visual, more fundamental it is the plotting of a course for the way to move around and behave in a room, in space, and because the norms of society are connected to our human behaviour, this ultimately points to architecture having the possibility to suggesting a part of how to live our life, which eventually brings in the ethically dimension in the aesthetic realm – it becomes a question about life practises.
I will lay aside how aesthetics touches upon ethics in what concerns its possibilities of suggesting how to behave, direct, and live in the designed space, and I then admit that there, of course, are more to the story of how we live our life than the designed objects and architectonic spaces; indiscriminately we could mention various sociological factors such as roles, codes, norms, traditions of the specific culture, and human physical adaptation through evolution could be mentioned, because it seems to give some ground condition for how human life is lived. I will leave this aside and proceed to the next, which is the understanding of consciousness as embedded in the world.

-M.C.L.