BEAUTY MEMORY ENTROPY

HISTORY AND THEORY

 

Beast and Beauty

Donald Kunze, Penn State University

 

ABSTRACT

The “inorganic” in art is not devoid of life. Rather, its entropy allows life to spring up in unpredictable, decentralized, and bizarre ways. In the opening scenes of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, the father stricken by a heart attack falls down onto the lawn he has just been mowing. The camera, instead of framing scenes of family distress, goes deeper into the lawn itself, showing insects teaming among the roots. Instead of “dead” we get the antipode of paternal ordering—a “super-organic” zero degree where matter–as–matter manifests its own empire of sense.

Can we say that “beauty” is a part of this “bestial” hyper-(in)organic resistance to death? Lynch’s camera goes from the father’s fall to bugs. With it, we fall from a hierarchical domus-tication to obscene micro-order, an “anti-house.” Is form’s destiny “the formless”? Do buildings carry their ruins inside, like Rosemary’s Baby?

Form against formless, bestiality against beauty, life against death presents a “forced choice,” and theory’s duty is to face this forced choice as such. Comedy bans the beast (Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête), but Tragedy’s antagonism forces us, like Lynch, to find life beneath/within death. This is the much misunderstood “death drive,” a concept that nearly wrecked the careers of Freud and Lacan. We must look closely at how they defended this idea. The compulsion to return to the “inorganic” is not a wish to die, rather it is desire as desire — desire for the Nirvana of “start over.”

I will argue that the fields of Beauty are strewn with debris; that we, surviving the disaster/decay that have rendered beauty into blackness, return to find a toy, a jewel, a photo. I will argue on behalf of the negative, as negative.

 

BIO

Don Kunze has taught architecture theory and general arts criticism at Penn State University since 1984 and continues to write, teach, and advise after his retirement in 2011. He studied architecture at N. C. State University (B.Arch.) and received his Ph.D. in cultural geography at Penn State in 1983. His articles and lectures have engaged a range of topics dealing with the poetic dimensionalizing of experience of boundary conditions. His book on the philosophy of place of Giambattista Vico studied the operation of metaleptic imagination and memory. His latest work is about the architecture of the dream and dreams of architecture.