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Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (Notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille) Teresa Stoppani University of Greenwich Abstract Dry, light, impalpable, volatile, dust is somewhat less dirty than dirt. And yet it remains - physically and hygienically but also metaphorically - an ambiguous antagonist and an always present element of architecture. Dust physically attacks and alters the materials of architecture, while it is, in fact, partly made of architecture’s materials, through their wearing, weathering and ruination, from fragments, to debris, to powder. Always at work with and on the materials of architecture, dust alters their properties and produces visual and tactile modifications. Dust thus measures and occupies the distance between architecture’s image – its idea and representation - and its physical realization - construction and inhabitation. The workings of dust reveal the precarious and dynamic nature of architecture. And yet, dust is usually “invisible” to architecture. Only a material approach that reconsiders architecture beyond its established ideals and the fixity of its forms can “see” dust and read it as a dynamic agent of change. In George Bataille’s work the active presence of dust allows to “see” an architecture of becoming that questions issues of form definition and signification. A “dusty” approach to architecture’s materiality allows a breaking away from the established ‘architectural straitjacket’ (Bataille), towards a redefinition of form making in architecture as a negotiated and dynamic process.

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Teresa Stoppani Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture. (Notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille) Introduction How arid it is - how fertile it is how joyous it is - how sad it is Marcel Duchampi Dust is less dirty than dirt. Dry, deprived of wetness and greasiness, dust is light, volatile, mobile. It settles and accumulates, but it is then easily airborne again. Dust travels. It is, for this reason, heterogeneous. It collects and incorporates particles of different origin, bearing traces of its movements and whereabouts in – rather than on - itself, by exchanging parts of itself with its environment(s). It gathers and it leaves itself behind, constantly engaged in a mutual exchange with its place. Even in apparent total stillness, dust moves with gravity, and grows. Dust is form-less, it does not possess its own form, and it takes on that of its host, the nook in which it sits, the surface on which it is deposited. It is, in this sense, apparently passive. And yet, in this, it activates. In setting and settling, dust relieves. It relieves in the sense that it measures, increments and enhances set forms and surfaces while coating them; in covering and obliterating them it makes them more visible. It relieves in the sense that it sets free, it opens forms, increases them, opens them up to redefinition, growth or reduction (some dusts corrode). Dust is also multi-form, in that its form changes and exchanges constantly. It changes its shape according to the form and the dynamics (air movements) of its environment. It changes its composition and texture by constantly exchanging particles with its environment. It is open. It has no traceable beginning and no end. Dust is open and it opens. Pervasive and omnipresent, it penetrates everywhere. It knows no interior and no exterior. It has no boundaries. It does not transgress; it invades and pervades. For all these properties, for its per-formative openness and because it is incessantly at work, dust can be analyzed as a spatial index for a revised, and unsettling, reading of space in dynamic terms. In this sense, more than in relation to physical and hygienic concerns, dust is relevant in architecture, as it unsettles regimes of order, propriety, permanence, control, that have otherwise and so far characterized and defined the discipline.ii An unwanted and yet inevitable component of architecture, dust is left unaccounted for and therefore made invisible by official histories, erased from the space of representation, ignored or removed from the space of inhabitation. Removed, hidden everywhere in invisible crannies, polished away from the surfaces of architectural interiors, edited out from architectural representations, dust is made to disappear. To bring it back, to decide to see it, to look at it, means to expose uncomfortable and unresolved issues in architecture and in the urban that remain, like dust itself, silently but incessantly at work in the making (and undoing) of space: form and the undoing of it, boundaries both physical and intangible, their permeability and porosity, their faults. To consider dust in relation to architecture then opens up the larger question of what architecture is, once the systems of reference that characterize and define architecture are broken – pulverized.

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This paper explores this question by focusing on the insights offered by Georges Bataille’s brief and provocative texts on architecture. Bataille’s position on architecture can be fully understood only through an examination of his works that includes not only his more directly and explicitly architectural texts - such as those in which he addresses the discipline itself (‘Architecture’), specific buildings (‘Notre Dame de Rheims’), architectural metaphors (‘The Labyrinth’) or building types (‘Museum’, ‘Slaughterhouse’)iii – but also those which complement his view on architecture by considering the making of space and the definition or challenging of form – ‘Dust’ and ‘Formless’ (Informe).iv ‘Dust’ and the ‘Formless’ as proposed by Bataille indirectly expand the definition of architecture because they do not address the image of architecture or its edifice as building, but explore the space that architecture defines in open and dynamic terms. And while the ‘Informe’ has been examined in relation to art by Yves-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss,v and to architecture by Andrew Benjamin,vi a reading of ‘Dust’ in conjunction with the ‘Informe’ allows a further development of Bataille’s position on architecture in the sense of the dynamic. Writer, critic, philosopher, independent intellectual who operated outside academia and across disciplines to cultivate his multiple interests, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) had a difficult but productive relationship with the Surrealist movement and with the political left of his time. Challenging the society and culture in which he operated, Bataille’s texts offer a counter-reading whose subversive character does not consist in a demolition from the outside of established sets of values, but in a systematic and pungent exposé of their contradictions and intrinsic ambiguities. It is almost as if Bataille could see the invisible – what others could not or would not want to see - and endeavoured throughout his life to show it and narrate it. In Dominique Lecoq’s words, Bataille dedicated his life to ‘the experience of the impossible [and] relied on literature to transmit its sense’ (Dominique Lecoq).vii Bataille ‘sees’ dust and activates it as an agent of change, while modernity endeavours to remove it from the bourgeois interior and from the streets of the city and while the architectural Modernism proposes dreams of cleanliness, hygiene and total transparency.

Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, Genoa. Detail of a funerary sculpture (photo by T. Stoppani).

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Dust revolutions In her book Dust (2001), Carolyn Steedman writes on dust, history, memory, the archive. She writes mostly on dust and the historian, but she also tells stories of dust.viii It is here that, in passing (and closing), she muses on the bifurcation of meanings of the verb ‘to dust’, into ‘remove something, or […] put something there’ and ‘cleanse a place – usually a room in a house – of dust’ or ‘sprinkle something with a small portion of powdery matter, as in “to make dusty”’.ix Steedman offers of these opposite definitions a reading that holds them together in a tension in which dust ‘performs an act of perfect circularity’.x There is no dichotomy here, no ambiguity, no stasis. There is not even a conflict, but a continuous circular motion. What is most interesting here is that Steedman links the ‘act of perfect circularity’ performed by dust to the semantic circularities analyzed by Sigmund Freud in ‘The Uncanny’.

‘What is there to say about strange semantic circularities like these? – except perhaps, that they were most strikingly discussed by Sigmund Freud in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’ (1919), in a kind of psycho-philology […] in which the word for the utterly strange ‘leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’, where the unheimlich finally coincides with its opposite, the heimlich, the most familiar of things: a woman’s body … ‘the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning.’8 (All of this must be about narrative, and here with Freud – in the translation of Freud – the distinct possibility of a fairy-tale.) […] the Heimlich and the unheimlich do coincide; but not without a little labour on the part of the philologist-cum-psychoanalist. Whilst ‘dust’ on the other hand, verb transitive, just does it for you, all at once: to remove dust; to sprinkle with dust.’xi

For Steedman, dust bears in itself the semantic circularity that in Freud’s excellent example is constructed by the oscillation between the Heimlich and the Unheimlich, the word and its apparent opposite. In dust instead, oscillation of meaning that produces circularity is already contained within the word itself, that is, when dust is dusting, when it is activated as a verb. Far from a static debris to be removed or ignored, and intrinsically dynamic, dust can then be reconsidere in architecture as an agent of movement that questions form. Dust and Architecture Dust both shelters (coats) and infiltrates (corrodes) the materials of architecture; it alters its forms both visually and physically. Dust is, in fact, partly made of architecture’s materials, through their wearing, weathering and ruination, from fragments, to debris, to powder. Always at work with and on the materials of architecture, dust alters their properties, but the modifications it produces are not only visual and tactile. As it sediments layers in time, dust ‘relieves’. It takes measurements that are also construction (relief). It also sets the form free (relieves it) from itself and its given definition, adding and subtracting to and from it. Dust occupies and measures the distance between architecture’s image and its physical realization, the non-coincidence of its idea and representation, and construction and inhabitation. Dust brings to architecture that which is difficult to measure, control and represent: its constant change, decay and corruption [Fig. 1], or, in other words, time - what conventional architectural representations do not see. The workings of dust, placed between the representation of

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architecture and its edifice, reveal its precarious and dynamic nature. This becomes relevant in contemporary design practices where the drawing is animated in digital simulations and the form of architecture is constantly renegotiated in relation to the requirements of inhabitation and the performance of materials over time. If dust is traditionally ‘invisible’ to architecture, a material approach to architecture, beyond its established ideals and the fixity of its form, can ‘see’ dust and its agency of change. Activated as a verb and an action, dust (dusting) becomes in Bataille’s work an agent of change, of a revolution. Revolution here is to be intended both as movement – as a reading of architecture in material and dynamic terms - and as subversion of the established orders which architecture hosts and represents. It is here that George Bataille’s texts on ‘Dust’, on ‘Architecture’ and on the ‘Informe’ converge. In ‘Dust’ (Poussiere) in particular, dust actively challenges given economies of order and exposes an architecture of becoming that questions the definition and signification of its form. Beyond the mathematical and the biological, beyond logic and disgust, a ‘dusty’ approach to architecture’s materiality allows a dynamic breaking away from the established ‘architectural straitjacket’xii that Bataille dismantles in his work.

Sleeping beauty doll 2003 (photo by T. Stoppani).

Poussiere

The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust […]. Dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates. When plump young girls, "maids of all works", arm themselves each morning with a large feather-duster or even a vacuum cleaner, they are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivists of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor. […]xiii

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In Bataille’s ‘Dust’ (Poussiere) entry for the ‘Critical Dictionary’ of Documents, Sleeping Beauty’s palace, frozen in still life, is not immune from the invasion of dust. The organic life of the palace is not interrupted forever, it is not yet destined to a process of irreversible mineralization, rather, it is suspended. While life stays dormant, architecture is still subject to time, dust and its movements. Sleeping Beauty and her long death-like slumber in a crystal coffin [Fig. 2] are ideal sites for Bataille's provocative definition and ‘breeding’ of dust.xiv The crystal coffin enclosing an embalmed ideal of beauty offers the perfect opportunity to write of a dust which exists and desecrates Architecture but is never seen in architectural representations – a substance whose presence is perceived by the senses but is intentionally and systematically erased by reason and its narratives. Sleeping Beauty collects dust, but nobody before Bataille’s exposé has ever wanted to see it. Here the semi-dead beauty is not only a passive receptacle of dust, but becomes, involuntarily, the locus for a challenge to what defines architecture as such, beyond its utilitarian purpose – that is, form and beauty, or, as Denis Hollier’s study of Bataille’s relationship with architecture states, ‘whatever is aesthetic about it.’xv The perfect crystal-clear case and its prototypically beautiful content instigate a revolution of dust, that will spread to cover all, not only architecture proper, but the whole reference system that supports it. Dust will ‘begin to gain ground over the servants, invading the immense ruins of abandoned buildings, of deserted dockyards’.xvi The question that this invasion of dust opens up is then: what is architecture, if and when it is divested from the system of references and the ‘artistic supplement’ (Hollier)xvii that differentiate it from building? For Hollier, architecture, conventionally defined by its ‘artistic supplement’, is only the ‘general locus of representation’ ‘in a process of semantic expansions’ of architecture to the ‘other than itself’’.xviii And yet, the invasion of dust litters the representation of architecture and breaks it free (relieves it) from its network of references. The semantic circularity of dust, oscillating between making and undoing, identifies ‘dusting’ as a performative agent at work with and on the materials of architecture. It is the work of dust that breaks architecture’s continuity with other disciplines, knowledges and sets of values, and returns it to its own specificity in material terms. This is not the instauration of the autonomous and repetitive architectural model versus the open and referential architectural type that Hollier considers,xix but a new practice of architecture that privileges its process of making over the definition of its form (repetitive or mimetic). The irruption of dust in Sleeping Beauty’s palace brings in it the informe, intended not as an absence of form, but as a per-formative process of form-making that knows no origin (type, plan or model) but works with the given – the ‘ruins of abandoned buildings, of deserted dockyards’ and more. Bataille’s architectural revolution is not the tabula rasa of Modernism that sweeps away the past or blankets over the existing. It is a movement of change that originates and erupts from within to subvert the established.

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Little Briar Rose. Wood engraving by Byfield, based on Ludwig Grimm’s design. From German Popular Stories and Fairy Tales, as Told by Gammer Grethel. From the collection of MM. Grimm, revised translation by Edgar Taylor (London: George Bell & sons, 1888).

Informe Like dust, the ‘Formless’ (In-forme) is, in Bataille, operative, defined by its task (to form, forming) rather that by its form (or lack of it). Like dust, the informe should be read here as a verb – to in-form, to give form to, to put oneself into a form, to find a form, but also to question it, escape it, modify it, etcetera. Incidentally – matter has a form, and it is in the informe that the dynamic dimension of its variation is included.

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. […]xx

Performative, of both a making and an unmaking of form, ‘Poussiere’ is sister of the ‘Informe’; it produces it with its circularity, it does it and undoes it with its dustings, it hosts and fosters the formless. Like the informe, dust threatens the clear-cut form of the crystal coffin, the order of architecture, and the very structure of society that it represents. Dust softens and conceals the form of the stereometric volume; its thick layers compromise the transparency of the glass, obliterating and at the same time reconstituting the material of the casket – never still, dust builds up changing tracings of time that

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obliterate the sharpness of form of the sealed coffin and annul its claim to eternity.

If for Bataille the project of architecture ‘throws time into the outside’,xxi dust inscribes time and produces a trace of duration in the frozen palace, on and around the architecture of the coffin (tomb, monument, architecture), and perhaps even on its content (are we really sure that Sleeping Beauty is not getting a bit older, a bit less beautiful, in her sleep?). Dust turns the container of idealised perfection – tomb or palace – into a collector and instigator of that which is other, the informe: time, and with it memory and forgetting, waste and entropy. From here dust spreads contagiously to claim other forgotten, unused, unnamed spaces – no longer the woods surrounding the palace, but the dormant spaces of the city, those ‘immense ruins of abandoned buildings, of deserted dockyards’ of the urban peripheries.xxii

And, in the very moment when she felt the prick, she fell down upon the bed that stood there, and lay in a deep sleep. And this sleep extended over the whole palace; […] round about the castle there began to grow a hedge of thorns, which every year became higher, and at last grew close up round the castle and all over it, so that there was nothing of it to be seen. […]xxiii

There is no crystal coffin in the brothers Grimm’s version of the Sleeping Beauty, ‘Little Briar Rose’ (Dornröschen) tale. [Fig. 3] There is perhaps not even dust accumulating in the palace where Rose – such the name of the Grimms’ Sleeping Beauty - lies asleep. The whole palace sleeps, slowly swallowed by a very much alive and growing thorny hedge, the organic living envelope of a collective apparent death. Inside, everything is still. – But is it? The thorny bush that re-clads and infiltrates the palace is made of the overgrowth of the very same roses that the sleeping beauty had so much loved, and that had given her her name. Is she it? Are they one in the same? Is she the organic dust that seems to protect the palace but is actually eating away at its fabric and the institutions it represents (the tyrannical regime of the evil stepmother) to transform the palace and bring about a new regime? The transformative power of the tale is to be found here not in the awakening produced by the intervention of an outside force (the King’s son) but in the internally generated movement of a never-still sleep. The reference to the tale of Sleeping Beauty also appears throughout the work of Walter Benjamin (whose files Bataille had received, hidden and preserved as librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris). Susan Buck-Morssxxiv maps the recurrence of the reference to Sleeping Beauty in Benjamin’s writings, first in an early contribution for the student journal der Anfang (‘Das Dornröschen’, 1908), then in the preface of the Trauerspiel study (1928) and in the essay on ‘Surrealism’ (1929, the same year of Bataille’s ‘Poussiere’). In Benjamin’s ‘Das Dornröschen’ the awakening of Sleeping Beauty is seen as the crucial moment of the tale and it occurs as a surprise introduced from outside, a role that the young Benjamin advocates for the Jugendbevegung movement. In Benjamin’s later references to the tale the moment of awakening is appropriated as a tool for a conscious reactivation of history by breaking its continuity. Benjamin’s interpretation of the tale evolves in time, from the effect of a surprise from the outside, to a conscious and instrumental internal awakening, to the specific role of such awakening as a challenge to established histories. The dust that covers Seeping Beauty does not concern Benjamin directly, but his reading of the fairy tale parallels his change of focus in the definition of the Passagen-Werk.xxv In its early definition the project ‘was to evoke history in order to awaken its readers from [dream]. Hence the title for [it] in this early stage: “a dialectical Fairy Scene.” Benjamin was intending to tell the story of Sleeping Beauty once again.’ [Buck-Morss] xxvi The definition of the project then evolves in a social and Marxist direction: ‘Benjamin’s original

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conception, a politicized version of Sleeping Beauty as a fairy tale of “awakening”, retold along Marxist lines, was intended to “set free the huge powers of history that are asleep within the ‘once upon the time’ of classical historical narration.”xxvii The awakening here is the breaking moment that interrupts historical continuity and is populated by the debris of history, those ‘small, overlooked motifs in the historical sources that explode it.’xxviii In Benjamin these are not only critically interpreted but also ‘dialectically “constructed”, as “historical objects,” politically charged monads, “blasted” out of history’s continuum and made “actual” in the present.’xxix It is this force of the blast of history, this breaking and disruptive challenge, that Bataille’s disturbing revolutions of dust of implement in architecture.

Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, Genoa. Funerary sculpture (photo by T. Stoppani).

Architecture For Bataille architecture as untouchable symbol - the tomb or monument that inspires awe and respect in Adolf Loos,xxx is but the expression of social oppression, or an ‘architectural straitjacket’.xxxi

Architecture is the true nature of societies, […] In fact, only society’s ideal nature – that of authoritative command and prohibition – expresses itself in actual architectural constructions. Thus great monuments rise up like dams, opposing a logic of majesty and authority to all unquiet elements; it is in the forms of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak to and impose silence upon the crowds. […]xxxii

It is on this ‘Architecture’ that ‘Dust’, be it made of airborne particles, sprinkled powder, unplanned and uncontrollable growth, or vitriolic words, performs its task. [Fig. 4] In this sense Bataille’s readings of the museum as weekly social purifier and aesthetic transformer of visiting weekend crowds,xxxiii and of the temple – but read ‘church’ - as a ritualized slaughterhousexxxiv are part of the operative strategy of the informe of which dust is a dynamic part. The museum becomes a container and displayer of visitors rather than works of art, a showcase of humanity momentarily liberated by daily worries and

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chores: ‘The galleries and objects of art – writes Bataille - are no more than a container, the contents of which is formed by the visitors […]. The pictures are only dead surfaces […].’xxxv The ‘Slaughterhouse’, beyond its economical and practical supply purposes, is recuperated to the rituality and the violence of early forms of religion: ‘The slaughterhouse is linked to religion in so far as the temples of bygone eras […] served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing.’xxxvi Bataille’s reading of these institutional architectures (museum, temple, slaughterhouse) looks well beyond their established and linguistically codified forms and façades. Focusing instead on the discontinuous and dynamic inhabitation of these spaces as a flow and movement, he questions their function and social role. The afflux and ritualized movement of the weekend crowds is what animates, activates and “feeds” the museum, its true content. The transit and processing through the slaughterhouse performs a violent ritual whose bloody sacrificial aspect links it to the origins of religion and sacred architecture. In both cases, specific movements reveal the true nature of these spaces, beyond their architectural definition. In ‘Dust’ (Poussiere), dust itself performs the movement and it is its uncontrolled accumulation that defies the control of form and questions its definition.

One day or another, it is true, dust, if it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over the servants […] and in this distant epoch nothing will remain to ward off nocturnal terrors, for lack of which we have become such great book-keepers.xxxvii

While Bataille’s architectural entries for the ‘Critical Dictionary’ unsettle and empty the notion of function in architecture, dust as a strategy of the informe works as the agent of the questioning of form and of propriety in architecture. In this way architecture is destabilized. The circularities of ‘dust revolutions’ are embraced to question the obvious, to turn the evident inside out, to produce reinterpretations by exposing that which is already there. This dust is not the dirt that obliterates, trans-form, makes other, alienates, but a process that works from within. It collects and incorporates, gathers and leaves behind, constantly reworking the given. It is this movement - of physical dust in space, of questioning knowledges and cultural givens in relation to space and its significations - that opens forms, challenges functions, redefines architecture from form-defining social repository of meaning to an incessant process at work in the making (and undoing) of space, forms, functions and their relations. Bataille is the one who chooses to see it, as part of his project to experience and transmit the ‘impossible’.

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i 'This is the domain of Rrose Selavy / How arid it is – how fertile it is – how joyous it is – how sad it is / View taken from an airplane by Man Ray - 1921.' Inscription on Man Ray's photograph 'Elevage de Poussiere' (Dust Breeding) (1920) of Marcel Duchamp's 'La Mariée Mise à Nu par ses Célibataires, Même' (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) [The Large Glass] (1915-1923) [Schwarz, cat. no. 404]. The photo is reproduced in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2000), cat. no. 382, p. 684. ii On the idea of propriety in architecture see C. Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998), and in particular chapter two ‘What Is Proper to Architecture’, pp. 30-61. iii G. Bataille, ‘Architecture’ in G. Bataille, M. Leiris, M. Griaule, R. Desnos et al., Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Critical Dictionary (London, Atlas Press, 1995), pp. 35-36. G. Bataille, ‘Notre Dame de Rheims’ in D. Hollier, Against Architecture. The writings of Georges Bataille (Cambridge Mass. and London, The MIT Press, 1989), pp. 31-31. G. Bataille, ‘The Labyrinth or the constitution of beings’ in Inner Experience (Albany, SUNY Press 1988), pp. 81-93. G. Bataille, ‘Museum’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 64. G. Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 72-73. iv G. Bataille, ‘Dust’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 42-43 and ‘Formless’, ibidem, pp. 51-52. v Y.A. Bois, R.E. Krauss, Formless. A User’s Guide (New York, Zone Books, 1997). vi A. Benjamin, Architectural Philosophy (London and New Brunswick NJ, The Athlone Press, 2000). vii D. Lecoq, ‘Georges Bataille’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, Encyclopaedia Da Costa, Appendix III, Biographies, p. 158. viii C. Steedman, Dust (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001). See in particular Chapter 8, ‘The story of the dust’, pp. 157-170. ix Steedman, p. 160. x Steedman, p.160. Steedman continues to elaborate on this idea of circularity, to oppose Dust – the circular, the always-there characterized by ‘not-going-away-ness’ (Steedman, p. 165) -, to Waste – the linear, the perishable of dissipation -, although she makes no reference to either Walter Benjamin’s or Georges Bataille’s works on this. ‘This is what dust is about; this is what Dust is: what it means and what it is. It is not about a surplus, left over from something else: it is not about Waste. Indeed, Dust is the opposite thing to Waste, or at least, the opposite principle to Waste. It is about circularity, the impossibility of things disappearing, or going away, or being gone. Nothing can be destroyed.’ (Steedman, p. 164). ‘Dust – the Philosophy of Dust – speaks of the opposite of waste and dispersal; of a grand circularity, of nothing ever, ever going away.’ (Steedman, p. 166). xi Steedman, pp. 160-161. The quote in Steedman’s text is from Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, standard edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud, 17 (London, Hogarth Press, [1919] 1955), pp. 217-56. xii Georges Bataille, ‘Architecture’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 36. xiii G. Bataille, ‘Dust’ (1929), in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 42-43. xiv I refer here to Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920), a photograph of the ‘breeding’ of dust on Marcel Duchamp’s Grand Verre (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) in Duchamp’s studio. The caption of the photo reads: ‘This is the domain of Rose Sélavy / How arid it is - how fertile it is / how joyous it is - how sad it is / View taken from an aeroplane by Man Ray – 1921’. xv ‘Architecture refers to whatever there is in an edifice that cannot be reduced to building, whatever allows a construction to escape from purely utilitarian concerns, whatever is aesthetic about it. Now this sort of artistic supplement that, by its addition to a simple building, constitutes architecture, finds itself caught from the beginning in a process of semantic expansions that forces what is called architecture to be only the general locus or framework of representation, its ground. […] Architecture, before any other qualifications, is identical to the space of representation; it always represents something other than itself from the moment that it becomes distinguished from mere building.’ D. Hollier, Against Architecture, pp. 30-31. xvi Bataille, ‘Dust’. xvii Hollier, p. 31. xviii Hollier, p. 31. See full quote in note 15 above. xix Hollier, pp. 34-35. xx Bataille continues, ‘In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.’ Here I have used the translation revised by Yve-Alain Bois in Y.A. Bois, Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless. A User’s Guide, p. 5. See also ‘Formless’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 51-52. xxi ‘Harmony, like the project, throws time into the outside: its principle is the repetition through which ‘all that is possible’ is made eternal. The ideal is architecture, or sculpture, immobilizing harmony, guaranteeing the duration of motifs whose essence is the annulment of time.’ G. Bataille, Inner Experience (Stony Brook, State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 56. This is the translation slightly modified by Yve-Alain Bois in ‘Threshole’, in Formless. A User’s Guide, pp. 186-187. Bois notes that dust is one of the inscriptions of time, ‘semiologically speaking, an index. In this it is like photography, but its trace is of duration.’, Bois, Krauss, Formless, p. 226. xxii G. Bataille, ‘Dust’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 43. xxiii J. and W. Grimm, ‘Little Briar Rose’, Complete Fairy Tales (London and New York, Routledge, 2002), p. 204. xxiv S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge Mass. and London: The MIT Press,

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1989), p. 34 and note 58 p. 388; W. Benjamin, 'Das Dornröschen' (1908) in R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhauser, eds., Gesammelte Schriften, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972-), II, pp. 9-10; W. Benjamin, 'Der Surrealismus' (1929) in W. Benjamin, 'Surrealism', in P. Demetz, ed., Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Schoken Books, 1978), pp. 177-192; W. Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977). xxv W. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), translated by H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin (Cambridge Mass., London: Belknap / Harvard University Press, 1999). xxvi S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 34. xxvii S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 49. The quote is from W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, V, p. 1033 (0°, 70). xxviii S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 95. xxix S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 221. I have proposed a reconsideration of Benjamin’s historical project in relation to forms of making in contemporary architecture, through a close reading of the image and material of ‘dust’ in his work in T. Stoppani, ‘Dust Projects. On Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk and some contemporary dusty makings in architecture’, The Journal of Architecture, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity’ (A. Benjamin C. Rice eds.), 2007. xxx 'When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six foot long and three foot wide, heaped up in a rough pyramid shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. That is architecture.' Adolf Loos, 'Architektur' (1910), Sämtliche Schriften, Adolf Loos, vol. 1 (Vienna and Munich, Herold Verlag, 1962), p. 302. xxxi G. Bataille, ‘Architecture’, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 35-36. xxxii G. Bataille, ‘Architecture’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 35-36. xxxiii ‘ […] every Sunday the throng flows into the museum, like blood, and leaves it fresh and purified. […] it is within the crowd that the play, the flashes, the shimmerings of light technically described by the authorized critics take place.’ G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 64. xxxiv [ ‘The slaughterhouse is linked to religion in so far as the temples of bygone eras […] served two purposes: they were used both for prayer and for killing. […]’ Georges Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 72-73. ] xxxv G. Bataille, ‘Museum’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, p. 64. xxxvi G. Bataille, ‘Slaughterhouse’, Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 72-73. xxxvii G. Bataille, ‘Dust’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica, pp. 42-43.