23

Notes on Narrative Method in Historical Interpretation

K. Michael Hays

I have learned to think of History in a Marxist sense mental in the study of the architectural Imaginary
as comprising a constant becoming of modes of and Symbolic. The determinate context of a single
production. The present is a site contested by past building comprises all the technological, economic,
and future histories, the now being a set of traces juridical, and psychological forces that drive produc-
of the past and anticipations of future presents in tion in the city. And the conflictedly overdetermined
our social structure. This notion of History is even claims and demands placed on a building by society
more emphatic in the Althusserian-Lacanian sense - its patrons, its publics, and by the city - are both
of the Real as that which can never be known, has figured and repressed in its very form. Thus in the
no presence, but nevertheless is at the same time careful and close constructions of the historian,
‘produced’ by the Imaginary and the Symbolic. architecture appears as a precious index of the
History is the black hole you can never see but social fact, and of History itself.
which nevertheless controls the wobbles and trajec-
tories of all the things (like buildings and texts and The role of the historian is not principally to
cities and landscapes) that we historians and theo- describe buildings or architects, to produce biogra-
rists care about. History, the becoming of modes phies, explications, and specialised commentaries
of production, is determinant of all representations - though we do that, too. The role of the historian is
and how they do their work. rather to be concerned with the larger conditions on
which architectural knowledge and action is made
Theory takes history as its subject matter, and possible: with the multiple agencies of culture in
there can be no writing of history without theory. The their ideological and historical and worldly forms.
more theory, the more access to history. Theory is
the practice that produces concepts and categories I have come to think of history this way by study-
to map the Real of History. So the practice of theory ing architecture historiography - its great Hegelian
will ultimately have to deal with some version of the tradition and its own critiques of that tradition, not
Imaginary and the Symbolic, since in this schema, least among which is the work of Manfredo Tafuri.
these are the orders that attempt to manage and Writers of architecture history since the nineteenth
make sense of the Real. century have attempted to reconcile a materialist
understanding of history with the undeniably psycho-
Architecture is a primary exhibit in theorising logical, experiential effects of architecture. Trying to
History because architecture is the most complexly understand that tradition in turn led me to certain
contested and negotiated of all cultural representa- works outside of architecture, especially those of
tions and productions. Issues of perception, subject Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, and others of a
formation, language, image, and code are funda- ‘Freudo-Marxist’ tendency, to use loose shorthand.
1

Trans-disciplinary, Autumn 2007, pp. 23-30

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And trying to understand that body of work led me synoptic studies - those that treat an entire career,
to contemporary figures like Fredric Jameson who, for example, or an entire group movement as a
necessarily perhaps, also had to confront Manfredo single project - are in fact condensations of open
Tafuri. Therefore, while this set of notes may in fact narrative processes.
be nothing more than an outline of my own position,
they feel to me like inescapable conclusions. A fundamental problem of writing history is to
solve the dilemma: Any strictly empiricist account
I will suggest here that narrative is the privileged of history is impossible, and architecture can never
mode of exposition in historiography - of writing be understood as simply a copy or reflection of
history, writing the history of a discipline, a cultural historical conditions. Nevertheless, history is real
practice, and a medium. I am reminded, of course, and architecture is representational (even if not
that this suggestion appears just after a time when in any straightforward way). Narrative solves this
there was much said about that privileged place of dilemma, at once avoiding any reflection theories of
narrative, at least of the kind that assumes history is art and problems of verisimilitude and, at the same
something you can see, be a witness to, be present time, constructing a material basis for architecture’s
at. Most famously, Jean-François Lyotard made the representational function.
interdiction against any grand narrative and against
all totalisations. But we can accept Lyotard’s criticism We can enumerate a few features of narrative:
of the narratives of legitimation (indeed Lyotard’s 1. Narrative is a precondition for dialectical think-
own account is more of a report of their spontane- ing: a sense of necessity, even of necessary failure
ous decline than a call for their wilful destruction) - of closure, of ultimately irresolvable contradictions
and still insist that it is not contradictory to say that - is one of the hallmarks of dialectical thinking that
critiques of certain narratives can themselves be can be conveyed only through narrative. The owl
narratives, just as when Lyotard states that ‘every of Minerva takes flight only at dusk.1 Dialectical
utterance should be thought of as a “move” in a interpretation is always retrospective, always tells
game’, his statement is itself a move in a language the necessity of an event, why it had to happen the
game. Indeed, it is part of our problematic as histo- way it did. To do that, the event must have already
rians that we should try to accomplish the almost happened; the story must have already come to an
impossible task of thinking historiography itself as end. This last may seem obvious but it is important
a historical and ideological production in its own to add that such histories of necessity and of deter-
right, of thinking the historian as part of the process minate failure are inseparable from some ultimate
viewed. This is a task more complicated than any historical perspective of reconciliation, of some
objective apprehension of a merely external kind future, of the ‘end of prehistory’ in Marx’s sense.
of structure or influence or bias, such as we some- The past has to be written as the determinant of
times get from some less theoretical practices. the present so that the present can also be a past
for a future.
This issue of narrative does not usually concern
studies such as small-scale formal analyses of indi- 2. The writing of history can be thought as taking
vidual buildings or texts, though I think that narrative place within a series of cascading levels, which mark
does leave its traces even on those writing projects. a widening out of contexts. First, within the structure
Like critique, narrative practice is transgeneric, of an architectural signifier, the object of study is still
which is to say that even synchronic studies are construed more or less as the individual building or
tacitly narrative episodes in a larger story. And even project, events or situation, with the form as a signi-
 25

fier and an architectural concept as its signified. singular substance about which different things can
The architectural sign, then, is the unit made up of be written, and multiple perspectives generated. It
these two components. Second, the architectural then requires theoretical work to show that the two
sign is understood at a higher level as the signifier contradictory things are related - the one implied
of a set of concepts that organise our understand- by the other in some unexpected way. To present
ing and experience of the architectural sign. We architecture as the unexpected symbolic resolution
can use Althusser’s term and call this a theoretical of a conflicted social situation is perhaps the histori-
problematic. The architectural sign together with its an’s greatest intellectual thrill.2
theoretical problematic produces and is produced by
a particular ideology. That ideology is itself a kind of To understand architecture as a symbolic reso-
imaginary map of a socially symbolic field. Perhaps lution of a social situation suggests that the deep
this is not an inaccurate way of understanding the problem of contradiction is representational, which
fundamental role played by architecture in Fredric is thus also related to narrative. Contradiction is the
Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping, which may step just before representation: The historian shows
be understood here as the provisional totalisation a situation in a conflicted moment; a response is
of an imaginary, ideological form and the social fact anticipated and doubt about a possible resolution
that is its ultimate referent. On this view, the ultimate is raised. This is also where we insist that it is the
horizon, to return to our previous formulation, is the formal-aesthetic dimension that does social work,
Real of History itself [fig. 1]. that in the very folds of the aesthetic object the social
contents are richly operative. Then the historian
The structure should be read forward and back- triumphantly shows how architecture both ‘solves’
ward at the same time. Which is to say that History the contradiction (even if the ‘solution’ is a negative
is both the unrepresentable absent cause of the one of sublimating or suppressing the very exist-
‘superstructural’ activities such as architecture and ence of the contradiction in architecture’s form).
cognitive mapping, even as History is produced by
the same such Imaginary-Symbolic cultural activi- I shall refer to my own paper on Mies van der
ties and practices. Rohe’s Seagram Building as an example. In that
paper I argued that Mies’s much discussed abstrac-
3. Such a model of architecture and history is tion should not be understood as an absence of
dependent on a perspective that reads the work of representation or figure, but rather the contrary: it
architecture against a context or situation recon- is the achievement of the limit condition of repre-
structed or rewritten as having latent contradictions, sentation at a certain moment in time, the moment
so that the historian then has the ability to interpret of the explosive expansion of consumer culture.
a given work of art as a provisional ‘solution’ to that Henri Lefebvre articulates for us this new condi-
situation. Implicit here is the construction of a history tion as a kind of space that is produced as it is
of architecture in terms of a series of situations, consumed - abstract space. ‘Thus space appears
dilemmas, and contradictions, in terms of which solely in its reduced forms. Volume leaves the field
individual works, styles, and forms can be seen as to surface, and any overall view surrenders to visual
so many responses or determinate symbolic acts. signals spaced out along fixed trajectories already
laid down in the “plan”. An extraordinary - indeed
Understood this way, the construal of contexts unthinkable, impossible - confusion gradually arises
and situations construed as contradictions is between space and surface, with the latter deter-
productive in the long run. A contradiction is really a mining a spatial abstraction which it endows with a
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Signifier (Form)
------------------------------- Architectural Sign
Signified (Concept) ------------------------------- Ideology (Imaginary)
Theoretical Problematic ------------------------------- Cognitive Mapping
Social (Symbolic)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HISTORY (Real)

Fig. 1: The Real of History

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half-imaginary, half-real existence.’3 4. Within a narrative structure, periodisation is a

technique that allows epistemic access to histori-
My argument in the Mies paper is that the abstrac- cal differences in a situation, allowing articulation of
tion of Seagram’s empty plaza and glass curtain what can appear as an undifferentiated mass or a
wall is an architectural figure - a symbolic resolu- bunch of incoherent differences. But periodisation is
tion of the contradiction of Mies’s desire to maintain an initial move, not a final one. We should not think
the fullness of aesthetic experience and the actual, in terms of uniform periods and radical breaks but
practical impossibility of aesthetic profundity in the rather more nuanced shifts, making the placement
context of total reification. Mies’s abstraction of of the specific work in the historical field every more
surface is both the consequence and perfect repre- complex and differentiated.
sentation of consumer capital and a profound refusal
to accept the complete dissolution of the traditional The case of the Seagram Building is an example
aesthetic experience. I quote myself: of small-scale periodisation. The materials for
Mies’s optical surface were already present in his
The crucial move of Mies is to pose abstraction as early skyscrapers in Chicago. The specific case of
at one and the same time the ultimate achievement Seagram was made possible by a series of events
of reification - the separation and neutralisation of - those related to the emergence of the new appara-
the full range of experience being the precondition tus of surface perception, like the television screen,
of abstract thought - and a historically new expe- magazine advertising, and large billboards - whose
rience, the only possible experience adequate results were seized on and ‘detourned’ toward
to everything we have lost in reification. Here I specific ends. These events take centre stage only
circle back to the epigraph with which I began: art retroactively, and retroactively can be understood
must submit to reification in order to preserve the as the pre-history of the form that was to follow.
possibility of something more true. What results in
the Seagram building is a series of transductions Thus does narrative history involve the narration
whereby abstraction changes its nature as it passes of the necessity of the outcome. Althusser puts this
from the social to the aesthetic and back again. The point in terms of contingency and necessity:
plaza at Seagram is perhaps the first pulling back
from the alienating life of the metropolis, and the Instead of thinking of contingency as a modality of
assertion of the architectural surface as the support or an exception to the necessary, one must think
for that space is commensurate with that withdrawal. necessity as the becoming-necessary of contingent
At this point, however, reification is borrowed back encounters.5
from the social in the form of the volumetric ready-
made of the high-rise building and, even more, in 5. The technique of dialectical reversal is related
the perception of the abstract surface. Then, in a both to the perception of necessity and contin-
final moment of transfer, reification appears as gency, and to the situational character of narrative.
the experience of abstraction. By producing the This can take many forms. In the work of Tafuri, for
abstract, architecture acquires a means to escape example, it usually takes the form of showing the
that same status, to refuse to become a mere thing physical and social city as the Other of the build-
among things. Abstraction - the pure sound of the ing, then showing that the outside of the practice
Sirens, the organising absent presence - is the of architecture itself - understood in an expanded
maximal limit of the avant-garde. 4
sense as including urbanism and city planning and
territorial management - is the vaster totality of the
 28

economic system, the ‘last instance’, as Althusser the totalisation is an absent structure rather than
put it. So the great European urban projects of the something that can be grasped empirically or even
1920s like the Siedlungen in Berlin, Frankfurt, and analytically. Like History, the totalisation is not avail-
Vienna, for example, come up against their other able for representation. And yet we must strive to
in the seemingly ‘extrinsic’ obstacles of financial narrate it.
speculation and the rise of property values that ulti-
mately causes their absolute failure and an end to In particular, I have in mind the Sartrean termi-
their utopian vocation. nological version wherein ‘totalisation’ is opposed
to a hypostatised and inert ‘totality’ to become the
In the Seagram example, the appearance of correlate of ‘praxis’ itself. That is, the reified ‘prac-
abstraction is itself a dialectical reversal insofar as tico-inert’ is to totality as praxis is to totalisation,
Mies’s abstraction arises out of what Lefebvre called the last being understood as a ‘developing activity
abstract space and also appears as the negation of which cannot cease without the multiplicity revert-
the same. ing to its original statute… The activity attempts the
most rigorous synthesis of the most differentiated
6. The technique of mediation or transcoding is one multiplicity’.6
of the best lessons from theory: to cross or shift an
interpretive code or analytic term from one domain By totalisation I do not mean a normative unity
to another, testing one against the other, finding the imposed by architecture or the historian on a situ-
limits of each, causing each to interpret the other. ation where none actually exists; nor do I mean
In the Seagram example, surface is the mediating that the particular must everywhere represent the
term and figure, which is operative in the popular general. A totalisation is not a unity. I have in mind,
cultural perceptual apparatus and in the curtain rather, a discontinuous finitude in which seemingly
wall, but operative in different ways. discreet and compartmentalised events and images
are made to relate to one another in concrete and
The mediatory function releases unnoticed material ways, or better, are made through a medi-
complicities and commonalities between different ating figure to be seen again as relating to one
items or events that were thought to remain singu- another, since they were never really separate to
lar, divergent, and differently constituted. Mediating begin with.
among different discourses has sponsored a rich
literature that addresses itself to a whole range of We can think of the early Miesian plan grid and
practical issues - the role of the unconscious, the reiterative steel frame, together with the serialised
socially constructed body, ecology, the politics of facade as the spatial figure adequate for an entire
spatial relations, and more. range of modern experiences, from the standardisa-
tion and mass production of Henry Ford’s assembly
7. Totalisation is meant to function as a prescription lines, to Fredrick Taylor’s labour processes and
to strive constantly to relate and connect, to situate workshop organisations, to the reification of Georg
and interpret each object or event in the contexts Lukács’s modern labourer. In the Seagram building
and conditions of possibility that enable it and limit that grid is morphed into an optical surface, a new
it. Of course, this is practically impossible; totali- mediating figure that also includes the surface of
sation must remain an aspiration of the historian, the billboard, the surface of television, the surface of
not an accomplishment. The aspiration to totalise abstract space itself. This example suggests a way
leads us back to the problem of representation, for in which an architectural figure can carry the idea
 29

of a real social situation within itself as a constant of effects. This requires sentences that strive to hold
reminder, like a phantom limb that has been surgi- contradictory concepts together.
cally amputated but nevertheless emits a constant
reminder of its non-existence. To put it a different way, the practice of writing I am
proposing would be a force that thickens the situa-
We must recognise here, of course, that through tion, slows thinking down, that keeps something of
its very success in so modulating and focussing our the human mystery that stands opposed to a text
perception of the situation, the totalising process that is too packaged and easy.
also survives in the form of reified categories that
should be understood as an obstacle to spontane- It is at this point that we should also recognise
ity and heterogeneity. Perhaps any totalisation must that no method or tool of interpretation should be
end up being transformed into its own representa- discarded offhand. In other words, the least interest-
tion, as Sartre said, ‘just as the unity of a medallion ing way to intervene in a debate over techniques of
is the passive remnant of its being struck.’ interpretation is to declare one of them right and the
others wrong. Almost any technique has some local
8. I have listed a few of the attributes of narrative validity, some possibilities as well as limitations,
method. I will close by saying something about the and depending on the project, a variety will have
particular form I believe that narratives must take. to be tried out and combined. What is most needed
While it is certain that new modes of analysis and is openness and flexibility of mind, and generosity
exposition should be constantly explored, the funda- of spirit.
mental work of the historian is writing.

I would like to attribute to the writing of history a

certain programmatic difficulty. First, writing should Notes
sink itself into the unnaturalness of the work of 1. G.W.F Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. by S.W.
writing history, of the hermeneutic situation, of the Dyde (Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus, 1996). An excellent
historicity of the historian and the written-ness of account of historical necessity as theorised by Fredric
historiography. Of all the techniques, this is perhaps Jameson is Steven Helmling, The Success and Failure
the most difficult: thinking historiography as a histor- of Fredric Jameson (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).
ical and ideological production in its own right. It is 2. Claude Lévi-Strauss interprets art as such a symbolic
also a matter of thinking the positive side of ideology resolution. See especially Structural Anthropology
as well as the negative, at the same time, of under- (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
standing that ideology makes things possible as 3. Henri Lefebvre, T
The Production of Space, trans. by
well as closes things down. Second, history should D. Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), p.
be written so that something - some final resolution, 313.
some mystery - remains something out of reach. We 4. K. Michael Hays, ‘Abstraction’s Appearance (Seagram
should be suspicious of a thesis that de-mystifies Building)’, in Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an
too much, that makes the architecture under analy- Avant-Garde in America, ed. by R. E. Somol (New
sis look easy. The reader should be asked by the York: Monacelli, 1997).
writing, instead, to constantly think another side, an 5. Louis Althusser, ‘Le courant souterrain du matérialisme
outside, an external face of the apparent concepts, de la rencontre’, in Écrits philosophiques et politiques,
which can never be visible or accessible but which 1 (Paris: Editions Stock/IMEC, 1994), p. 566.
we must vigilantly reckon into our sense, in the form 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans.
 30

by A. Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976),

p. 46.

Biography
K. Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architec-
ture Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School
of Design. Hays received his Master of Architecture in
Advanced Studies from MIT in 1979, and a PhD at MIT in
1990. He was the editor of the architecture journal Assem-
blage (1986-2000) and of the readers Oppositions and
Architecture Theory since 1968; he has written about Mies
van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Hannes Meyer,
as well as contemporary architectural theory.