TIME, QUESTION, FOLD by Andrew Benjamin

The relationship between philosophy and architecture not only works to

position one in relation to the other, it also opens up the possibility that
one may already be figuring in and thus would already be present within
the other. It may be, for example, that architecture is already at work in
the structuration of its own presence within philosophical texts. [1] With
Deleuze's Le Pli [2] something else is being brought into consideration.
Here there is another philosophical possibility. More exactly, however, it
has, in part, already been brought in, and therefore the fold--also le pli --is
already present in contemporary architectural theory and practice. [3]
With this presence questions rise. What is it that is present? How is the
practice to be understood? Is this a case of architecture's adoption (and
therefore adaptation) of the philosophical? Within each of the questions
there endures the further question of the nature of the relation that links
architecture and philosophy. Relation is from the start ineliminably
present, and it is the precise nature of this presence--its being present-that will demand to be thought.
Questioning here can always proliferate and yet within the proliferation
what is maintained is the necessity to take up the fold's own architecture.
In other words what has to be given a specific place is the possibility of
the site as being that which may come to be architectural. (One difficulty
here, though it is a difficulty with far greater extension, is in giving
architecture, and with the architectural, sufficient specificity.) Working
with this text--to begin with Deleuze's text Le Pli --and thus tracing its
own architectural implications will entail following a two-fold strategy. In
the first place there must be the sustained attempt to extract that which is
present in Deleuze's formulation--reformulation perhaps--of Leibniz's
philosophy that allows for architecture, and in the second there will be the
attempt to locate that strategy within what can be called architecture's
opening. There different moments will continue to intersect and, in
intersecting, in their movement backwards and forwards, they will have
the effect of diminishing, and finally obviating ,the hold of prediction. With
the abeyance of prediction chance may play a constitutive role. It will have
a chance, finally.
In order to begin, a prevarication may be necessary. However, what this
prevaricatory move will involve is a redirection in which, if only
momentarily, philosophy returns to itself. It will not be a recovery--for
nothing has been lost, there will never have been an original saying--but a
return that sunders any real possibility of giving this 'itself' an essential
and thus unified statue. In the place of the substantive--philosophy as
having an essence that can be stated as such, even stated within an
attempt to reground or regroup essential thinking--there will be the
actative. In other words what will be essential is an activity, one which is
necessarily conflictual, and one which therefore resists the essential. What
this gives rise to is an opening in which any turning back has to be
rethought as a repetition that can never master of determine itself.
(Completion only endures as part of a metaphysical and in the end
nihilistic fantasy.) Philosophy is originally, thus, the locus of an enacted
conflict and therefore it will always have to be taken as originally complex.
[4] Moreover, and as a continuing part of that resistance, the history of
philosophy can be rewritten in terms of the affirmation and forgetting of
the effective presence of anoriginal complexity.

Here this will mean that the project announced in Deleuze's Le Pli can be
taken as part of a wider and perhaps more generalizable possibility within,
and thus for, philosophy (a possibility effaced once it begins to form part
of the fetishism of the proper name). In recognizing this as an opening,
what, consequentially, then come to be sanctioned are differing
movements, moments in which critique and the advent of the philosophical
take place. Instead of enacting the modernist fantasy, one which is already
inscribed as much in philosophical texts as in architectural programs, of
the absolutely new beginning--the radical and complete differentiation,
metaphysical destruction--what emerges as central is relation. The actual
meaning of relation is of fundamental importance. Two elements need to
be noted here.
In the first place, relation involves the recognition that what cannot be
precluded are connections and interconnections. There can be no absolute
differentiation. The recognition of the primordiality of relation is evident,
for example, in Walter Benjamin's assertion that what cannot be
eliminated from either the object of interpretation or the historical object
is the possibility of their having an 'afterlife' (Nachleben). Indeed it can be
argued further that the ineliminable linking of 'life ' and 'afterlife' is a
specific thinking of relation. [5]
Benjamin's is a position--a position allowing for a type of generality--that
seeks to maintain the primordiality of relation while holding to its
centrality beyond the conception of historical totality that is at work within
the Hegelian tradition. Both Benjamin and Deleuze can, in this sense
therefore, be read as part of that generalizable move (a move amounting
to another possibility for philosophy, though equally another possibility for
architecture). In the second place, and more specifically, Deleuze's work
on Leibniz can itself be taken as a thinking of relation. The fold is a
relation. Indeed, its being a relation will allow for the question of how
apposite a thinking of relation it is. The question of how apposite this may
be as a thinking of relation is itself given within the bounds set by the
incorporation of critique into this particular advent of the philosophical.
Furthermore the possibility of there being an inherent division within
relation would work to indicate that relation, both as a term and as
strategy, resists the hold of essentialism. Essentialism would entail a
simple formalism that takes relation as a given, and as such would deny
the inherent plurality within relation itself. Replacing the essential and the
formal will allow for unpredictable relations.
Deleuze's reading of Leibniz not only links Leibniz to a divergent tradition
that has always maintained the centrality of the multiple---thereby
implicating his (Deleuze's) own project in that tradition--but goes a step
further by identifying the conditions in which 'we' (nous) are found as in
some already described or identified by the process at work in Leibniz's
philosophical writings. Leibniz emerges therefore as a philosopher for
modernity. This will not be a Leibniz read within the will to truth but a
Leibniz whose work is allowed to connect. One which therefore, following
Deleuze's own precepts, is given space: 'We remain Leibnizian, even
though it is no longer the accords which express our world or our text. We
discover new ways of folding as new envelopes, but remain Leibnizian
because it is always a question of folding, unfolding, refolding [parce qui'il
s'agit toujours de plier, dplier, replier ]'. (p. 189)
It is the commitment advanced in this passage that maintains the critical
dimension within the reading of Leibniz. (Critique is a relation which is

inextricably linked to the need for judgement arising out of the

impossibility of a universalizing synthesis.) What this passage also
introduces, and it is a theme whose introduction will be central to any
undertaking concerning either Le Pli or more generally philosophy's other
possibility, is time. If it is 'always a question of folding, unfolding,
refolding', then how is this 'always' (toujours) to be understood? Not only
is there the commitment to this as a description of activity in general-perhaps a Deleuzian De rerum natura --it will be with this repetition that
time will insist. Here specifically the question will concern the time of this
'always'. It should not be thought that this word provides no more than a
trivial addition. In allowing for a certain flexibility within translation, it can
be argued that the 'same' possibility is also at work in the important
philosophical confrontation between Plato and Heraclitus. It is a
confrontation--one, given its translation, that sets the limits of
philosophical modernity--in which not only does time figure, but more
emphatically time will provide the actual possibility of confrontation itself.
This is, of course, a time that is necessarily interarticulated with modes of
existence. Time and existence, while always plural, are nonetheless made
all one word necessarily inter-connected.
Heraclitus, according to Aristotle, describes the soul as reon aei (always
flowing). [6] Moreover, in the Cratylus Plato describes the essential being
(ousia) of the form; the specific instance is 'beauty', as being of necessity,
aei estin oion estin (always the same as itself) (439d). The term 'always'
(aei) figures twice. And yet what the same word designates is two
fundamentally different ontological and temporal set-ups. On the other
hand the Platonic demands an ontology of statis in which the problem of
presentation is fundamental and which works therefore to determine the
productive limits of the system. Moreover what is unthinkable in Platonic
terms is the co-presence of instantiation and becoming. And yet it is
precisely this possibility that characterizes the Heraclitean formulation. For
Heraclitus presentation is not precluded by an ontology and temporality of
becoming. What needs to be added, though this will be an addition that
takes Heraclitean concerns beyond the range of the fragments, is that
what has the quality of the Heraclitean 'always' is not located within the
general frame of representation, and therefore the issue is not whether or
not it is possible to represent the all--that which is given to be
represented--in its totality. It is a general description of a fundamental
ontological and temporal condition. It is possible to suggest that when
Leibniz defines the monad in terms of force and then goes on to establish a
distinction between the form taken by a monad at a specific instance--the
monad's 'perception'--and the monad's own substantial presence defined
in terms of 'force' (vis) what is being rehearsed is precisely the ontological
and temporal possibilities that inhere in Heraclitus. A similar state of
affairs also pertains to the nature of the distinction between 'appetition'
and 'perception' (compare Monadology 15). [7]
In sum, what continues to be present in Heraclitus and in Leibniz, present
in contradistinction to the Platonic heritage, is the possibility of the
initial--thus anoriginal--co-presence of that which is ontologically and
temporally different. (Reworked, it is, or course, this possibility that
Deleuze finds in Leibniz.) Moreover it is a co-presence that opens up the
possibility of another take on complexity--that is, an approach to
complexity in which the complex depends upon ontological and temporal
difference. Returning to the theme of representation, what this means here
is more significant than the melancholic celebration of the negative. In
other words, there is no inherent limit within representation to which

allusion is being made. It is not a question of a grounding impossibility--an

ineliminable negativity--determining thought and action; at work here is a
different possibility. This other presentation of the impossibility of
representation should be linked to time. In other words, all that there
could be is not present and thus not given in one and the same moment to
be represented. Again this should not be taken as the negative--a type of
presentational via negativa --but rather a distancing from the evocation of
presence that is demanded by the posited, even if already putative,
coextensivity between form and function. This coextensivity--a set-up
inhabiting both philosophy and architecture--is important because of its
temporality. What it presupposes is that all that will have happened will
have taken place in one and the same time; what is given is given once and
for all. However, with the possibility mooted here there is a different
regime of time. Initially it works within the opening of the intended
coextensivity of form and function, a coextensivity which while definitional
of certain modernism is also there throughout architecture's history as
characterizing the building's 'arrangement'. Furthermore it is the
reworking of this coextensivity--a reworking in which function is retained
while the necessity of its expression is held open--that marks what has
been identified above as architecture's opening. Moreover this opening will
eschew a simple displaying and confusing of styles; such a manoeuvre
would in the end amount to the ornamentalization of ornament. The
jumbling of genre and style leading to style's indifferent relation to
function while including what was identified as the ornamentalization of
ornament also needs to be understood as involving time. Time, the time of
the architectural post-modern, involves a progress in which nothing occurs
or changes presented within the temporality of fashion. Here, in
contradistinction to the temporality of the post-modern, there is the
affirmation of a different temporal scheme: another regime.
It is this different regime of time that, it can be argued, is discovered by
Deleuze, for example, in his treatment of the Leibnizian infinite. The link
between the Baroque and the infinite plays a significant role in Deleuze's
reading. He takes considerable care, quite rightly, in distinguishing
between the Cartesian and the Leibnizian philosophical positions. What is
fundamental to the Leibnizian is the nature of the co-presence of the finite
and the infinite: 'The actual infinite in the finite ego [moi], this is exactly
the position of equilibrium, or disequilibrium, of the Baroque.' (p. 119)
Again, a similar structure of thought--a structure marking out the copresence of the different--will be identified by Deleuze in the discussion of
the monads. Furthermore it is also there in the deployment of
the[[dotaccent]] language of architecture in his reformulation of what is
taken to be the Baroque structure of Leibniz's text Essais de Thodic.
Deleuze identifies it as a text which responds, par excellence, to the
general criteria of the Baroque narrative [rcit]' (p. 82). He then goes on
to describe the text in the following terms: 'It is an architectural dream; an
immense pyramid which has a summit, but no base and is constituted of an
infinite number of apartments of which each one is a world.' (p. 82)
In broad terms that which can be drawn from these differing formulations
is the co-presence of infinite and the finite, the limited and the unlimited,
as well as how their insistent presence is to be understood philosophically
and architecturally. It is this possibility that is also at play in the
description of the fold. However, not only is there this co-presence, there
is in addition the image of complexity. Complexity is the fold that as it is
unfolded opens up further folds, which in being unfolded reveal further

folds. What this means is that there can be no real beginning and, usually,
no real end. The nature of inside and outside is recast by the complex fold.
And yet of course within the movement there are real states. Static actual
existence is not precluded; rather, it is to be thought as an interruption
and thus as an eruption out of movement. In emerging, the static--the
actual--reveals, allows itself to be uncanny, by enjoining new relations.
The position of a necessary complexity works to reposition the Leibnizian
conception of complexity as fundamentally removed from the Cartesian.
The nature of the divide between them must resist the easy conflation
often provided by the complacency of history within which Descartes and
Leibniz are equated and linked by virtue of their forming part of the
Rationalist philosophical movement.
For Descartes the complex consisted of an amalgam of simples. (A 'simple',
for Descartes, is the object of 'clear and distinct perception'. It is therefore
a posited entity that is absolutely self-referential and admits of no further
reductions. The geometrical equivalent is the axiom.) The Cartesian
complex therefore could always be reduced to its constitutive parts and by
regenerating the complex it could be understood. Understood totally in its
totality and thus able to be represented as such. It is self-evident that the
Cartesian construal of the relationship between the simple and the
complex is structured by its being articulated within the problematic of
representation. Nonetheless, the important point here is time. All that is
there to be given, thus all that comprises the complex, is given at one and
the same time. While the complex may not be able to be comprehended in
one moment, it is nonetheless complete in its enactment; it is enacted
completely. The reduction of the complex to its constitutive parts is a
movement which, in Cartesian terms, has no effects. In other words,
further complications are not added in the act of reduction. Here is the
contrast. The Leibnizian conception must involve that which can never be
absolutely unfolded since the monad unfolds infinitely. The infinite and the
finite are co-present in their difference and thus allow a joining-up that
can never be reduced to a particular form at the present. The impossibility
of this reduction occurs because what it is that is present comprises two
different temporal orders, each with its own possibilities. Prior to
returning, albeit briefly, to this two-fold temporal order it is vital to take
up what has already been identified as architecture's opening.
The initial and disruptive element of this opening is, ironically, its
conserving nature. What is held in place--though it is a holding that may
allow what is held to be questioned--is function. The nature of the function
is questioned and possibilities opened up which were not hitherto
accessible, by allowing the necessity of a specific enactment to be held in
abeyance. And with it in holding to the specific function as a question, the
process and thus the disruptive continuity of questioning is maintained.
Opening the relationship between form and function gives rise to a specific
and strategic question. If the link loses its coextensivity what, then, will be
at work in the opening? It is thus that the question of how the relation
between form and function is to be taken, and enacted, arises. It is a
question that defies the teleology and the temporality of prediction. With
the abeyance of prediction and thus with the absence of a necessary
relation between form and function chance will come to figure. The
necessary retention of a commitment to a form of function--a form that in
functioning questions the nature of that function--precludes the utopian
while maintaining architecture's critical dimension. In the practice of
contemporary architecture the fold has found a place in that opening. In
writing about Eisenman's Rebstockpark project--a project deploying

folding--John Rajchman notes: 'In Eisenman's words: " one must make
present in a space its implicit 'weakness' or its 'potential' for reframing".
The principles of his perplication are then that there is no place and no
space that is not somewhat "weak" in this sense, and "weakness" is
imperceptible prior to the point of view that one normally has of the space
or the place. [8]
Time and the fold can therefore be taken as working together in the
question. The question, however, is linked to the function. It is the
necessary ground of questioning. Libeskind's extension to the Jewish
Museum, while not taking up the fold as such, utilized the structure of a
question, indeed a plurality of questions. The questions that endure
concern the presence of absence, presenting that which resists
representation, Berlin's own relation to a now past Jewish presence within
it; other questions are possible. The questions, rather than
ornamentalizing the building, to be seen as additions, faades, etc., can be
taken to provide the building's actual structuration. The structuration
enacts questioning by resisting any provision of definite answers, while at
the same time maintaining, in a questioned form, the possibility of
representation, display and thus the work--a work reworked--of the
museum. Its being this complex and thus its having this complexity occur
at the same time. At the same time therefore it resolves and does not
resolve. At the same time therefore it is both finite and infinite. It is
precisely this possibility that Deleuze has identified in Leibniz as a
possibility for philosophy in which ontology and the question remain as
central and which architects have used--though it can always be achieved
in other ways--to inscribe the time of questioning into the fabric of the
building. It will be the inscription of time that will sanction, on the one
hand, the use of different geometric configuration, while on the other it
will link the presence of the building to another conception of the present.
In other words, allowing time the priority usually accorded to space will
cause both the building and the historical space (thus the historical time)
it inhabits to be rethought. This rethinking will, in turn, demand those
philosophical adventures which are, in part, at work in Deleuze's Le Pli .
The final question that must be considered is where this situation leaves
architecture's relation to philosophy. Again, it may be that the ultimate
point of connection is that both work to conserve. Architecture, in order to
endure as itself, must work to house and thus to shelter. What this means
is that architecture cannot be conflated with its language--present as
architectural images or metaphors within philosophical or theoretical
texts; it must have form. Accepting this necessity, architecture's
inescapable constraint, need not close down the question of form. Form,
however, will always be mediated by the immediate specificity of function.
Neither function nor housing nor shelter can be raised as though they exist
in themselves. The presentation of function --its being housed in a certain
way--is always inscribed within a network, of values and relations of
power. This network has a mediating connection to form, since it will
always come to be articulated by the form itself. In other words what is at
work here is the complex interconnexion that conserves architecture-allows for the repetition of its telos --while accounting for the form of its
presence. The same presentational procedures also mark the philosophical.
A specific conclusion can be drawn from this state of affairs. In taking up
architecture from within the self-conserving place of philosophy, and in
architecture's own work with philosophy, it is the conflation of practice
with language that will need to be examined. While not denying he
materiality of language it remains the case that the materiality of

architecture and thus its mode of being present are different. While both
philosophy and architecture are inextricably bound up with those
constraints that hold and thus conserve the specificity of each, their
concrete determinations drive them apart. And yet while they are apart-distinct from each other--they can come to be linked, and therefore in the
link they both form a part of a similar mode of thinking, since each will
sanction a critical stand that is constrained to work while holding to the
identity in question. The interplay of apart/a part means that running
through both philosophy and architecture is the centrality of time. Initially,
time is the repetition of the same, a repetition which, while conserving,
sets up the site of an intervention in terms of which what will come to be
repeated will be that which occurs again for the first time, an occurrence
which brings another time into play. This latter determination figures both
within and as the concrete instantiation of questioning.
In moving between philosophy and architecture they remain apart and as a
part of the complex work of repetition. The logic of apart/ a part, its being
at work simultaneously in all its aspects, is, here, architecture's change.
The work of this logic is not the hinge of oscillation; it is the infinite folded
into the finite: the fold is opening.

NOTES

1. This paper is adapted from a work in progress--Ornament and Space: Relating

Philosophy and Architecture -- to be published by Edinburgh University Press. Part
of the book will involve a detailed treatment of Mark Wigley's arguments concerning
the relation between architecture and philosophy. Wigley's formulation of the
architecture/philosophy relation figures in those opening questions and
formulations.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991). In subsequent references
to this work, the page reference is given in the text.
3. See, for example, Folding in Architecture, Architectural Design special issue no.
103, edited by Greg Lynn, 1993.
4. The following discussion presents in truncated form some of the arguments I
have developed in far greater detail in The Plural Event (London: Routledge, 1993).
An important part of the strategy there, as here, is to give this original complexity
an ontological formulation. The point of such an undertaking is to indicate that the
complexity in question does not involve an amalgam of simples that could ever be
further reduced, but rather that there is complexity ab initio . In order to identify
this other origin the term 'anoriginal' has been used. In sum, what it seeks to name
is this complex possibility.
5. I have tried to develop this aspect of Benjamin's work in 'Time and Task:
Benjamin and Heidegger on the Present', in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy, edited
by A. Benjamin and P. Osborne (London: Routledge, 1993).
6. I have tried to develop this interpretation of Heraclitus in 'Time and
Interpretation in Heraclitus', in Post Structuralist Classics , edited by A. Benjamin
(London: Routledge, 1988).
7. See the discussion of Leibniz in The Plural Event.

8. John Rajchman, 'Perplications: On the Space and Time of Rebstockpark', in

Unfolding Frankfurt (Frankfurt: Ernst & Sohn, 1992), p. 36. Rajchman's is by far the
most philosophically acute description of this project.