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SAJAH, ISSN 0258-3542, volume 29, number 3, 2014: 38-48
Identity in architecture and art: Versailles, Giverny and Gyeongju
Bert Olivier
Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University,
E-mail: bert.olivier@nmmu.ac.za
This paper explores the different “identities” projected by the palace and gardens of Versailles, the
house and garden of Claude Monet in Giverny (France), and Mount Namsan in (South) Korea. It is
argued that the palace and gardens at Versailles are the embodiment of what Deleuze and Guattari
call “striated space” — a specic modulation of space according to lines of power that organise,
hierarchize or exclude. Monet’s estate, while not devoid of a subtle kind of striation, may be seen as
an exemplary instance of fusing it with “smooth space”, where the freedom of nomadic exploration
breathes a welcoming aroma in the midst of gentle spatial striation. Ranciére gives one another,
complementary perspective on Versailles with his evocative phrase, “the distribution of the sensible”,
which is the manner in which the extant world is organised, arranged, and ordered according to what
is visible, audible, admissible and sayable. In the 17th and 18th centuries this meant a hierarchy of
classes from royalty through nobility and the bourgeoisie down to the fourth estate, or proletariat,
whose absence from this elevated space is conspicuous in that they are not represented in the
artworks surrounding one. Compared to Versailles, the home of Monet is gentleness incarnate; here
the “distribution of the sensible” operates according to inclusion, not exclusion. What Ranciére
labels the art of the “aesthetic regime” is conspicuous here, in contrast to the hierarchical art of the
“representative regime” at Versailles. The paper focuses on the distinctive cratological “identities”
of Versailles and Monet’s estate, respectively, through the lenses of Deleuze/Guattari and Ranciére,
and then shifts to a different cultural context as a comparative case: the fusion of striated and smooth
space on Mount Namsan near Gyeongju, Korea.
Key words: architecture, art, identity, smooth space, striated space
Identiteit in argitektuur en kuns: Versailles, Giverny en Gyeongju
Hierdie artikel ondersoek die verskillende “identiteite” wat deur die paleis en tuine van Versailles,
die huis en tuin van Claude Monet in Giverny (Frankryk), en die berg, Mt Namsan, in (Suid-) Korea
geprojekteer word. Die paleis en tuine by Versailles is die toonbeeld van wat Deleuze en Guattari
“gelaagde ruimte” noem – ‘n besondere modulering van ruimte wat dit volgens magsbeginsels
van eksklusiwiteit en hiërargie organiseer. Ofskoon Monet se huis en tuin ook ‘n subtiele soort
“gelaagde ruimte” vertoon, smelt dit hier saam met “gladde ruimte”, waar die vryheid van nomadiese
eksplorasie hand aan hand gaan met die struktureringsfunksie van gelaagde ruimte. Ranciére bied
‘n alternatiewe perspektief op Versailles met sy suggestiewe uitdrukking, “die verspreiding van die
sintuiglike”, wat ‘n beskrywing is van die wyse waarop die wêreld volgens kriteria van sigbaarheid,
hoorbaarheid, toelaatbaarheid en beskryfbaarheid georganiseer is. In die 17de en 18de eeue het dit
die vorm aangeneem van ‘n klasse-hiërargie vanaf koninklikes en die edelstand tot die middelklas
en die proletariaat, waarvan die afwesigheid in die hoë ruimtes van Versailles opvallend is deurdat
hulle nie in die kunswerke wat ‘n mens omring verteenwoordig is nie. In vergelyking met Versailles,
word die tuiste van Monet deur vreedsaamheid gekenmerk; hier funksioneer die “verspreiding van
die sintuiglike” in terme van insluiting in plaas van uitsluiting. Wat Ranciére as die kuns van die
“estetiese regime” bestempel, is opvallend hier, in teenstelling met die “kuns van die representatiewe
regime” by Versailles. Die artikel konsentreer op die onderskeibare kratologiese “identiteite” van
Versailles en van Monet se huis en tuin aan die hand van Deleuze/ Guattari en Ranciére se teoretiese
invalshoeke, onderskeidelik, voordat daar op vergelykende wyse na ‘n ander kulturele konteks
oorgegaan word, naamlik na die sintese van “gladde” en “gelaagde” ruimte op die berg, Mt Namsan
naby Gyeongju, Korea.
Sleutelwoorde: argitektuur, kuns, gladde ruimte, gelaagde ruimte, identiteit
A ‘method’ is the striated space of the cogitatio universalis and draws a path that must be followed
from one point to another. But the form of exteriority situates thought in a smooth space that it must
occupy without counting, and for which there is no possible method, no conceivable reproduction,
but only relays, intermezzos, resurgences. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 377.
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What is it that makes one feel at home in certain spaces, and somehow unsettled, out of sorts,
in others? To be sure, it could be the company you happen to be in, or the temperature, or
humidity, but here I am thinking particularly of the distinctive qualities of the spaces in question.
In no uncertain terms, these experiential qualities contribute to the likelihood, or lack of it,
of “identifying” with them, in other words, with the manner in which spaces are structured,
organized, textured or modally marked by certain of their features. What does this amount to?
The question regarding “identity” in architecture and art can be approached from various angles,
the most obvious one being the psychoanalytical one, deriving mainly from the work of Freud,
Lacan and Kristeva. Here I have chosen to avoid this “obvious” approach, and focus instead
on the fecundity of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, on the one hand, and that of
Jacques Ranciére, on the other.
First a methodological observation is called for, however. At a time when “discourse”
is the chief theoretical matrix for approaching and (linguistically) conceptualizing phenomena
from identity to power, it is salutary to consider that, while human beings are demonstrably
discursive beings – that is, their subjectivity is linguistically articulated – discourse is not
the only register in which this occurs. Even for a language theorist like Lacan (Lee 1990: 30-
60) two other registers, in an uneasy intertwinement with the symbolic (discourse), comprise
human subjectivity, namely the imaginary (the register of the ego or moi, and of images) and the
(enigmatic) “real” (that which surpasses the symbolizable as an “internal limit”; Copjec 2002:
95-96). These three registers arguably cover everything human beings experience – in the case
of the real in the form of what Lacan (1981: 55) calls a “missed encounter” – but taken at face
value they also hide aspects of non-discursive levels of experience, such as space, for example.
Because space is so often neglected in relation to questions surrounding identity, the present
investigation will concentrate on ways to approach this fraught question “spatially”, as it were.
What does this entail? In his penetrating study of (Post)Apartheid Relations (2013:
18-46) Derek Hook provides a paradigmatic instance of a space-oriented approach to issues
of identication. In his analysis of the ideological signicance of Strijdom Square, with its
gigantic, sculpted head of the politician (J.G. Strijdom), in Pretoria, during apartheid, Hook
focuses precisely on the non-discursive qualities of space. This enables him to demonstrate how
unconscious identications with certain spaces, or more particularly, places, are inscribed on
subjects’ bodies when they experience these with affective intensity. Drawing on the work of
Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre (two largely neglected voices in the French intellectual
tradition), Hook explores the link between specic places and “psychic investment”, thus providing
a way of understanding subjects’ subliminal identication with certain spaces, particularly at
an ideological level. In light of Lefebvre’s work on the socio-historical “production of space”
he points out that monumental spatial ensembles comprising architecture and sculpture might
be expressly interpretable through language, but not reducible to it. Hence Hook’s insistence
that discourse-analysis has its limits when it comes to comprehending the “inter-subjectivity of
(body-)subject and space”. This insight informs my approach to the question of identication
in relation to qualitatively diverse spaces in this article, although I shall pursue it in different
registers, namely those encountered in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and of Ranciére, as
indicated earlier.
Deleuze and Guattari’s characterisation of smooth space, as opposed to striated space is
evocative, and puts the observer in a position from where she or he can decipher experienced
spaces in a manner compatible with Hook’s non-discursive approach to spaces with which
individuals identify ideologically at an affective level (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 474-475):
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Smooth space and striated space—nomad space and sedentary space—the space in which the war
machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus—are not of the same nature. No
sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much
more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide
entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact
exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space;
striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the rst case, one organizes
even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously.
But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between the two spaces.
That there is such a distinction is what accounts for the fact that the two spaces do not communicate
with each other in the same way: it is the de jure distinction that determines the forms assumed by a
given de facto mix and the direction or meaning of the mix (is a smooth space captured, enveloped
by a striated space, or does a striated space dissolve into a smooth space, allow a smooth space to
develop?).
This description will provide part of the interpretive grid to be implemented in relation to
specic spaces in this article. In the case of Ranciére’s work (2010: location 499), the expression,
“the distribution of the sensible” will furnish interpretive direction in both an aesthetic and a
political-cratological sense. What this means, is that Ranciére thinks of the world of the senses,
which is rst and foremost also the “sensible” world of common sense assumptions, as being
“distributed” or “partitioned” along axes of power-relations, which may be (and in most cases
are) hierarchical, marked by “vertical” domination, and in others incline towards various
degrees of egalitarian relations. Hierarchical power-relations correspond roughly to Deleuze
and Guattari’s “striated space” while spaces which tend in the direction of equality correspond
more or less with mooth space”.
Two countervailing spaces
In France one has access to many qualitatively different spaces. Two of these, which diverge
fundamentally as far as cratological spatial quality, or (in other words) power-related experiential
distinctness is concerned, are those of specic places at Versailles and Giverny. They are, in fact,
diametrically opposed, or mutually exclusive. The rst is the palace and gardens of Versailles,
known as the residence of a succession of French kings, of whom Louis XIV and Louis XVI are
probably the best known (the latter with his equally well-known queen, Marie-Antoinette, who
was beheaded nine years after her husband, in the wake of the French revolution). The second is
the house and gardens that used to belong to Claude Monet, the artist, (one of) whose paintings
gave the Impressionist movement its name.
The spatial differences between these two places are almost tangible, which should surprise
no one, given humans’ inalienable “spatiality”. While Monet’s house and gardens, including the
famous Japanese garden, with the Japanese footbridge that Monet painted several times, exude
a sense of peace and tranquillity, the palace at Versailles strikes one as the embodiment of the
“striated space” that Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 474-475) describe (above) — that is, a specic
modulation of space according to lines of power that organise, hierarchize, exclude or hem
in. In fact, compared to Versailles, Monet’s estate, while certainly not devoid of a subtle kind
of spatial striation, or the kind of gentle power that is peculiar to some kinds of art, including
impressionism, struck one almost as an exemplary instance of “smooth space”, breathing a
welcoming aroma. Monet’s paintings hanging in his house, as well as the layout of his gardens
allows for freedom of nomadic exploration on the part of visitors via multiple ways of traversing
them.
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Versailles
Arguably not even the most ornate Baroque buildings in Europe, or the most amboyant palaces
in China — with their penchant for red and gold — can boast such excessive opulence as (the
interior of) the royal palace of Versailles. In the face of striated space on this scale it is small
wonder that the impoverished masses of France launched a rebellion that eventually turned
into a full-scale revolution in 1789. Confronted with such an ostentatious display of nancial
wealth and political power, one is struck by the thought that, had the people of France in the 18th
century been familiar with the interior of Versailles palace, they would probably have rebelled
much earlier. Although it had started out as a mere hunting lodge used by Louis XIII in the early
17th century, about three hours on horseback from Paris, he eventually turned it into a brick and
stone palace, which was enlarged and completely transformed by his son, Louis XIV, who also
decided to move the royal court as well as the seat of government to Versailles in 1682. He may
not have read Machiavelli’s The Prince, but he certainly knew that you had to keep those who
might undermine your power close to you; within view, as it were. And without the benet of
having read Deleuze and Guattari, he knew what to demand from his architects and artists as far
as the spatial and visual embodiment of the striated space peculiar to the state was concerned.
Whether one approaches the palace from the direction of the gardens or from the city,
it addresses the spectator as striated, monolithic slabs with an air of austerity, but there is a
qualitative difference between the two approaches. The formal layout of the gardens makes
of them a homogeneous extension of the striated interior and exterior of the palace, but the
qualitative barrier between the palace and the city has the effect of relegating the space adjacent
to the latter to one of subordination. The palace therefore exemplies what was known in the
18th century as “absolute monarchy”; Franklin Baumer (1977: 96-116) goes as far as alluding
to the French king of this era as a “mortal god”. Louis XIV was called the “Sun King”, and
everywhere around this well-preserved palace the iconography – in sculpture, painting and metal
ornamentation – conrms his reexively glorifying self-conception, which is not unrelated to
the question of identity in relation to this hierarchical space.
As an aside I should point out that it is true that, if it had not been for this inated idea
of his own importance, the palace would not have been the repository of as much outstanding
art from the 17th and 18th centuries as it is today. Louis XIV died in 1715, and the further
embellishment of the palace continued under Louis XV and Louis XVI in the 18th century. The
latter and his family had to leave Versailles during the rst few days of the revolution in 1789.
Although French democracy was arguably born with the advent of the revolution, it was soon
followed by “the terror” in the guise of the persecution of everyone suspected of not having
the requisite amount of revolutionary fervour, and ironically it did not take too long before the
monarchy was reinstated, with King Louis-Philippe opening a museum dedicated to “all the
glories of France” in Versailles palace in 1837.
What particularly interests me is the paradigmatic embodiment of political power in the
discrete elements that make up this palace and its enormous gardens and parks. I have already
mentioned the notion of “striated space” — space qualitatively marked by the imprint of power
— here, “absolute” power, which is imprinted in the many sculptures of the “sun king” on his
horse, or posing in regal paraphernalia in many paintings, usually dressed predominantly in red
(the colour of royalty; even people’s shoes were colour-coded at the time: red for royalty, blue
for nobility, etc.). At rst sight it seems obvious that identity, or processes of identication, to
be more precise, would happen exclusively by way of identifying with the variously framed
images of the king – a process persuasively described in Lacan’s analysis (1977: 1-7; see also
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Olivier 2009) of the “mirror-stage”, which comprises the foundation of all subsequent acts of
identication. To some extent this is no doubt the case: spectators “identied” with the image of
the king, not in such a manner that they experienced themselves as being in his position of power,
even vicariously, for a eeting moment (although such fantasies probably did occur in Louis
XIV’ time, and do so even today). Identication in this case would imply, rst and foremost,
an experience, on the part of the onlooker, of being placed in a position of subordination to the
king (represented by the images in question), insofar as the act of identication conrms the
unassailable authority of the king, simultaneously constituting the spectator as his relatively
powerless subject.
However, it is not only the large number of painted images of the king and of the queen,
either in the form of portraits, or surrounded by their courtiers or by ambassadors of other
countries, that afford the iconic means of identication for spectators. The non-discursive,
spatial register that Hook invokes (above) in his study of spaces of or for affective identication,
functions in this space where royal absolutism is elaborated in architectural terms, too. Hence,
while identication with representative images certainly does occur, the fact that this happens
in the broader context of an architecture which is exhaustively (and hierarchically) striated,
reinforces the mode of identication immeasurably. In the case of the various rooms comprising
the king’s grand appartement du roi, the sumptuously decorated walls and high ceilings (on
which the supposedly heroic actions of Louis XIV were depicted in the form of allegories based
on events which putatively occurred in the ancient world) comprise spatial surroundings redolent
with the feeling of expansiveness, reciprocally constituting the visitor as small and insignicant.
The non-discursive, primarily spatial identication which takes place under such circumstances
would unavoidably have interpellated the visiting nobleman or diplomat as a subject in awe of
the royal power of the “Sun King” – something which is unlikely to occur in the same way in our
secular, liberal democracies, except at the level of fantasy, perhaps. That subject-identity could
be constituted in this way is not surprising, if one reects on Deleuze and Guattari’s remark, that
(1987: 370):
Homogeneous space is in no way a smooth space; on the contrary, it is the form of striated space.
The space of pillars. It is striated by the fall of bodies, the verticals of gravity, the distribution of
matter into parallel layers, the lamellar and laminar movement of ows. These parallel verticals have
formed an independent dimension capable of spreading everywhere, of formalizing all the other
dimensions, of striating all of space in all of its directions, so as to render it homogeneous.
Accordingly, the architectural space(s) of Versailles – and the surrounding gardens and parks
may be understood as a continuum of this space – is recognizably homogeneous, as all striated
space is, and presents itself as a pervasive “space of pillars” which extends beyond the buildings
into the formal gardens. The metaphor of “pillars” is appropriate here – doesn’t an autocratic
form of government as instantiation of the “state apparatus” rely on an architecture of striated
space as ideological spatial “support” or “mainstay”? Interestingly, the presence of thousands of
21st-century tourist-visitors streaming through the palace on a daily basis with their cameras and
mobile phones could be seen as representing the incursion of nomadic, “smooth space” into what
used to be the striated space of monarchical rule, were it not for the fact that, as a premier French
tourist attraction, it exemplies what has today become the striated space of (here, French, but
ultimately international or global) capital — no one gets to enter the palace grounds without
paying a hefty entrance fee. It is justiable as being necessary to maintain the palace in pristine
condition, but it is also aimed at turning a handsome prot. Hence the cratological “pillars”
in question no longer coincide with the architecture of the Chateau Versailles, but are entirely
invisible or abstract in the form of the monetary values that encircle the globe.
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When I used the phrase, “representative images”, above, I had in mind Ranciére’s (Tanke
2011: 75-85) very specic sense of the term “representative”, insofar as it ts into the category
of what he calls the “representative regime of art”. The latter denotes the conception of art that
correlates with a hierarchically structured society (where tragedy is a “nobler” dramatic genre
than comedy, and paintings of great historical events are preferable to those depicting everyday
scenes), as opposed to the “ethical regime of images”, which proscribes the use of images in the
interest of a metaphysically structured society, and the “aesthetic regime of art”, which treats
all images as equal, and can therefore be described as a truly “democratic” conception of art.
Ranciére therefore gives one another, complementary perspective on Versailles, highlighting
the hierarchical implications of the “representative” character of the artworks in the palace.
Whether it is a portrait of the Sun King and his entourage, or an allegorical painting depicting
Louis XIV as a mythical hero performing heroic deeds, or (in the War Room) a painting of the
king on the battleeld, accompanied by his ofcers, while wounded soldiers look up at him for
succour, this is truly the “representative” art that Ranciére writes about – the art that nds its
exemplary objects among royalty and nobility, and in a kind of fusion of historical and mythical
events, depicted in idealising images that show a blind spot for ordinary, everyday social reality.
This interpretation of the art at Versailles is enriched in the light of his evocative phrase,
“the distribution of the sensible” (referred to earlier; Ranciére 2010: location 499), which is
the manner in which the extant world is organised, arranged, and ordered according to what is
visible, audible, admissible and sayable. The “representative regime” of the arts instantiates one
such “distribution of the sensible” insofar as this “distribution” changes in every era according
to the parcelling out of social spaces by the dominant powers of the time. In the 17th and 18th
centuries (specically in France) this meant a hierarchy of classes from royalty through nobility
and the bourgeoisie down to the fourth estate, or proletariat, whose exclusion or absence from
this elevated space is conspicuous in that they are not represented anywhere in the artworks
surrounding one (except in the paintings collected in the War Room, where they feature as
soldiers ready to die, dying, and having died, for the king). In other words, the proletariat was
pretty much invisible, and inaudible, until they made themselves heard in the clamour of the
revolution, which was a disruptive manifestation of what Ranciere calls “equality”, the gist of
the political. Violence by itself would not qualify as a manifestation of equality in the sense of
a quasi-transcendental political category (that is, as the condition of the possibility, as well as
the impossibility of the political; of its possibility and its ruin, simultaneously); as Ranciére
(2010: location 523; 1999: 22-23) reminds one, the assertion of equality, in principle, must be
accompanied by the logos, or the assertion of the ability to speak, no less so than those in power.
Giverny
Compared to Versailles, the home of Monet at Giverny is gentleness incarnate; here the
“distribution of the sensible” operates according to inclusion, not exclusion. What Ranciére
labels the art of the “aesthetic regime” – which instantiates “equality” in terms of artistic object-
choice, style and medium, with no privilege accorded to any particular variety – is conspicuous
here, in contrast to the hierarchical art of the “representative regime” at Versailles. Accordingly,
Monet’s paintings, replicas of which are everywhere in the house (the originals being stored
elsewhere for preservation purposes), are of owers, trees, mountains, ordinary people; that is,
objects of interest selected from the endless spectrum of what offers itself to artists, and not as
dictated by conventional rules — as it was the case in Monet’s day by the French Academy of
Fine Arts, from which artists like Monet broke away.
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His love of Japanese prints, which adorn many of the walls in his house, reects his
openness to the world around him, and simultaneously testies to the fundamentally organising
function of the “aesthetic regime”, which does not privilege any artform above any others, in
his oeuvre. The famous Japanese footbridge in his garden, rendered with loving attention to
the detail of a particular “impression” in several of his paintings – with the consequence that a
“dialogue” of sorts ensues between the real bridge and the redoubled bridge(s) in the paintings
– is a particularly poignant case in point. Even if spectators were unaware of the cultural
provenance of this type of bridge, its unusual shape would strike one’s vision as something that
binds the two banks of the stream together by means of a charming cultural artefact that does no
violence to the stream or surrounding trees and owers. On the contrary, in Heidegger’s (2001:
150) phrase, the bridge “…brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The
bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream”. It is true that Heidegger was talking
about a different bridge, but his phenomenology of its being applies to Monet’s bridge just as
much.
In fact, Monet’s house and everything it contains, together with his garden, embody the
“aesthetic regime”, and therefore instantiate an aesthetic model for true democracy — everything
is treated with equal attention, love and gentleness, which pervade the aesthetic space(s)
concerned, and this effectively prevents a hierarchization of any kind. Versailles, by contrast,
represents a model of what Ranciére (2010: location 499; Tanke 2011: 42-43) calls “the police”,
a symbolic constitution of the social according to hierarchies of exclusion. It is interesting to
note that the French “absolute” monarchy may be long gone, but in its place today, as noted
above regarding the rule of capital in Versailles as privileged “tourist space”, we have an equally
ruthless, globally extended, dominant power that perhaps deserves the epithet of “absolute”
more than Louis XIV did. (As historical events showed, “absolute” was a misnomer in the
Sun King’s case; it will inescapably prove true of globalized capital, too, as of all contingent
historical phenomena.)
How does identity – or rather, identication – work in the aesthetic surroundings of
Monet’s home? To be sure, it is no less subject to the striation brought about in the space of
tourism as subdivision of the space of capitalist power – one pays an entrance fee to imbibe
the aesthetic space at Monet’s house as in the case of Versailles. Hence exclusion of those who
cannot afford the entrance fee operates at both sites, and already contributes to a sense of identity
inseparable from global consumerism. But while striated space as architecturally articulated
at Versailles is conducive to identication in terms of the relation between unquestionable
power and subordination – where the lingering imprint of the “Sun King’s” “absolute” rule
is still discernible by 21st-century visitors, and may even be apprehended by some in its new
incarnation as the superimposed rule of global capital – Monet’s art-rich house and garden
display a different kind of striation. One could even discern elements of spatial smoothness
there, considering Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 474-475) observation, quoted earlier, that the
two kinds usually appear in an admixture of sorts, and one that is not stable, but oscillates
between smooth space invading striated space and vice versa. Smooth space, they further point
out (1987: 380-381), is the space of the nomad, as opposed to sedentary striated space, which
belongs to the migrant, among others. Because of its walls and garden paths, Monet’s house and
garden constitute striated space, and one visits this locale as a “migrant”, but the countervailing
force of nomadic, smooth space asserts itself in the fact that its layout and inviting aesthetic
qualities encourage one to “distribute” oneself in this space, wandering “aimlessly” like a nomad,
without the teleological burden of the migrant. Hence, at a non-discursive, affective spatial level,
the identication to which entering this space is conducive, is that of the nomadic wanderer,
45
temporarily freed from the constraints of striation, which one therefore surpasses from within.
Small wonder that one gets the impression that visitors are loathe to leave, and roam or amble
through the extensive garden into the house and back again, stopping intermittently to admire a
ower, lean on the Japanese footbridge, or gaze (appropriately) at an impressionistic painting.
“Impressions” seem to characterize such quasi-nomadic behaviour, so that one could perhaps
speak of “impressionistic” identication in this singular place, stretched between striated and
smooth space.
Gyeongju, Korea
When visiting (South) Korea with a view to investigating the area where some of the oldest
Korean cultural artefacts are to be found, one’s destination(s) should include the famed city of
Gyeongju, two hours South-East from Seoul by rapid train. I used the word “famed” deliberately,
given the city’s reputation as an “open-air museum” — walking through the city one comes
upon many huge mounds of earth that just happen to be the ancient burial sites, or underground
burial chambers, of Korean royalty dating back more than 10 centuries. In Gyeongju one gets a
rst taste of Eastern, specically Korean, “spirituality” when wandering through the grounds of
Anapji (Wild Goose/Duck) Pond, where the royal residence known as Eastern Palace, was built
during the reign of Silla King Munmu in 647 CE as a “pleasure garden” (Paxton 2013: location
5587). The way that the buildings, the vegetation and the “pond” nestle in one another’s embrace
adumbrates the more all-embracing sense of “connectedness” that awaits one elsewhere in the
country.
A visit to the Gyeongju Cultural Museum is likely to reinforce the feeling experienced
at Anapji Pond. Walking from one hall to another, overawed by the rich cultural history of the
Korean people, one’s sense of having a “western” identity is relativized in the face of a very
different set of cultural markers for judging personhood. Most literate people are aware of the
fact that the Roman Empire lasted for centuries, but it is unlikely that many westerners know
about the “golden” Silla kingdom on Korean soil that lasted almost 1000 years (from 57 BCE to
935 CE), with Gyeongju being its capital city continuously for most of that time (Paxton 2013:
location 5100). As a measure of the level of Silla civilization, it is informative to note that the
gold artefacts discovered in the royal burial chamber in Gyeongju are the Korean counterpart
of those found in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen. From the existence of these
artefacts used by people of royal rank one can already infer that ancient Korean society was no
less marked by hierarchical power relations than any western society. This is apparent in light of
Ranciére’s notion of power relations as something aesthetically as well as politically inscribed
– in fact, the aesthetic has direct political import, and vice versa (Ranciére 2007: 560), along
the axis of the “distribution of the sensible”. Art structures the world of political affairs, and
political actions leave their imprint on the manner the social world is perceived, and therefore
also on the arts. The gold artefacts from the Silla burial chambers are no exception to this rule;
they represent an index of the supreme political and cultural power of the Silla royal class, and
therefore carry within them the memory traces of ancient striated space.
If exploring the city of Gyeongju on foot allows one to imbibe the distinctive spirit of
this corner of Oriental culture to a certain degree, it may prove to be but a pale version of what
awaits one when ascending Mount Namsan, a few kilometres outside the city. Here a tangible
sense of “oneness with nature” asserts itself – not in any mystical way (although someone
sensitive to the mystical aspects of experience may well be privy to such an experience in these
mountains), but precisely because of the specic “distribution of the sensible” by the unique
46
intertwinement of nature and culture. What one witnesses here is indeed “intertwinement” and
not mere juxtaposition of cultural artefacts and natural entities like trees and rocks.
The way in which space has been modulated in the great churches of Europe sometimes
allows one to get a sense of the “spirituality” that it engenders, even now, in a visitor – centuries
after the demise of the theocentric world of the Christian Middle Ages. In the mountainous region
around Gyeongju on the Korean peninsula one encounters something comparably “spiritual” –
in fact, Mount Namsan is truly suffused with what one can only describe as a pervasive sense
of spirituality. But there is a difference between these two experiences, phenomenologically
speaking. Upon entering a Gothic church like St Vitus cathedral in Prague, one’s “spirit” is
directed upwards, towards what medieval Christianity believed to be the direction of heaven,
simultaneously uplifting one’s being. This is signicant, because for Christianity what matters
is the immortal soul, which is virtually synonymous with spirit, and whose “home” is located in
an otherworldly realm. This axiological (value-) prioritisation of the soul above the body in the
spatial design of the cathedral — its characteristic “distribution of the sensible” — explains the
fact that, from the moment of entering such a Gothic cathedral, your gaze is directed upwards
along the verticals to the vault, high overhead. One’s spirit soars, metaphorically speaking, and
one experiences it almost tangibly in those hallowed spaces. Interestingly, the ipside of this
is the countervailing awareness of what one might call “demonic” forces surrounding these
churches, attributable, perhaps, to the ever-present array of gargoyles hovering above one on
the building’s exterior. After all, in addition to their technical-practical function as water-spouts,
gargoyles simultaneously represented and (supposedly) warded off evil.
The experience of “spirituality” is very different in the Eastern spaces of Korea and Japan,
however. Mount Namsan in Korea, with its beautiful rocks and forests, breathes spirituality,
not least because of the many Buddhist shrines, statues and rock engravings dotted all over it.
One moment you would be climbing up a steep slope to where the trail vanishes on a ridge, and
the next you would gasp with astonished surprise when you cross the ridge and come face to
face with a seated Buddha smiling benevolently at you despite its stony, centuries-old features
(in most cases about 1400 years old), with one hand in a giving gesture and the other lifted
reassuringly. Here it is not otherworldliness that impresses itself on the receptive visitor, but
a paradoxical transcendence-in-immanence: the manner in which cultural markers or signs in
the form of images engraved on, or carved into, or out of rocks function to impart a sense of
“spiritual” meaning to the mountain space. By “spiritual” I mean that it instantiates the fusion
of nature (the mountain) and culture (the engravings and sculpted images, usually of Buddha
gures), bringing about something qualitatively different from the spaces of Gothic church
interiors. In the case of the latter, the striation of the space is one of vertical, spiritual hierarchy
and divinely sanctioned authority, as articulated in the form of an encompassing architectural-
cultural edice or work, imposed on the natural landscape, instead of being fused with it. By
contrast the mountain spaces in the East (specically Korea), while also partly striated, were no
doubt smooth space before the presence of human beings brought about a striation through the
appearance of mountain paths and the creation of images and sculptures inscribed on the very
“esh” of the mountain. The difference is therefore that the striation is not unilaterally impressed
upon the natural landscape, but is somehow interbraided with what one still experiences as the
co-presence of smooth mountain space as one negotiates the mountain paths (that sometimes
tend to merge with the qualitatively heterogeneous landscape) on foot. This is made more
comprehensible in the light of Deleuze and Guattari’s observation (1987: 371):
47
Smooth space is precisely the space of the smallest deviation: therefore it has no homogeneity, except
between innitely proximate points, and the linking of proximities is effected independently of any
determined path. It is a space of contact, of small tactile or manual actions of contact, rather than
a visual space like Euclid’s striated space. Smooth space is a eld without conduits or channels. A
eld, a heterogeneous smooth space, is wedded to a very particular type of multiplicity: nonmetric,
acentered, rhizomatic multiplicities that occupy space without ‘counting’ it and can ‘be explored
only by legwork.’
In terms of the “distribution of the sensible” the space peculiar to Gothic church architecture is
of an unmistakeably hierarchical (if ultimately otherworldly) kind, while the mountain space in
the East (in this case in Korea, although the same holds for the mountain space around Kyoto,
Japan) displays a much less hierarchical quality by virtue of the intertwinement of nature and
culture, “spirituality” (in the sense of a distinctively human “presence” through artefacts)
and materiality. Primarily, regardless of the signs of human interaction with nature, these are
mountain spaces that embrace you with a welcoming Gaian gesture, drawing you close to them
without any feeling of being suffocated.
It is not difcult to understand why this particular mountain (Mount Namsan) attracted
Buddhist adherents, inviting them to adorn nature with images of the Buddha, which they
believed was ubiquitous throughout nature, anyway. While the Christian cathedrals elevate
the spirit, infusing it with a feeling of being ethereal, these spaces do not propel the spirit
“heavenwards”, as it were; instead, it is as if “spirituality” is diffused throughout the mountain
landscape: the streams, rocks, trees and even the human visitors to this place of refuge are
imbued with it. It is this-worldly, not otherworldly like the spirituality of Christian spaces. It
therefore functions therapeutically by divesting the receptive visitor of cratologically structured
aspirations, inducing a sense of tranquillity and stillness instead, as one walks along the mountain
paths or rests in the shade of the forest trees. As in the case of Monet’s art-pervaded house and
garden, the kind of identity that is congured on the visitor’s part via their identication with a
domain that is a blend of striated and smooth space, is consonant with Ranciére’s notion of the
subject of the aesthetic regime, or (in political as well as aesthetic terms) of “equality”, without
hierarchy or subordination to dominant interests, as in the case of Versailles.
A concrete example of such a therapeutic experience of the “distribution of the sensible” in
the space of Mount Namsan would probably be conducive to understanding what was described
above. On one’s way down from the peak one comes upon something that draws the awareness
of pervasive “spirituality”, or “oneness” of nature and being-human, together like a beautiful,
intricate knot in a tapestry. At rst hidden by a thick curtain of leaves, it suddenly emerges into
one’s eld of vision like an unexpected, unwelcome visitor who has unwittingly spoilt one’s
daytime reverie — a feeling that is soon dissipated, however. It is a modest little structure — two
houses at right angles to each other, overlooking the undulating, cascading waves of leaves and
trees below them. A hermitage, where a wrinkled old lady offers one green tea and gestures into
one of the two houses that happens to be a Buddhist temple, resplendent with a golden Buddha
gure and oriental paintings adorning its walls. Drinking one’s tea and looking out towards the
sea of green below, it would not come as a surprise to be overwhelmed by the feeling that one
could happily spend the rest of one’s life there, in the bosom of the mountain spirit, untroubled
by the everyday worries, chores and irritations that punctuate an ordinary working day in the
striated space of a world dominated by economic and political power-struggles.
48
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As an undergraduate student, Bert Olivier discovered Philosophy more or less by accident, but has
never regretted it. Because Bert knew very little, Philosophy turned out to be right up his alley, as
it were, because of Socrates’s teaching, that the only thing we know with certainty, is how little we
know. Armed with this ‘docta ignorantia’, Bert set out to teach students the value of questioning,
and even found out that one could write cogently about it, which he did during the 1980s and ‘90s
in opposition to apartheid. Since then, he has been teaching and writing on Philosophy and his other
great loves, namely, the arts, architecture and literature. In the face of the many irrational actions on
the part of people, and wanting to understand these, later on he branched out into Psychoanalysis
and Social Theory as well, and because Philosophy cultivates in one a strong sense of justice, he has
more recently been harnessing what little knowledge he has in intellectual opposition to the injustices
brought about by the dominant economic system today, to wit, neoliberal capitalism. His motto is
taken from Immanuel Kant’s work: ‘Sapere aude!’ (‘Have the courage to think for yourself!’) Nelson
Mandela Metropolitan University recently (2012) conferred a Distinguished Professorship on him.
