ONE OR SEVERAL MASTERS ?
"Characters," from The Lancaster / Hanover Masque, 1980-82.
Pen and black ink, with some red ink on wove paper, 8 1/2 x 11 in.
    Collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal.
    Photo credit : CCA Photographic Services.
 
R.E. Somol
 
 
  1. This personality rapidly takes shape, an unknown but not an indefinite figure, a master builder, a Master of Lockhart, whom one equips with the attributes one feels should possess — an unsubverted integrity, an innate capacity, tastes which are uncomplicated and definite, an understanding of necessity.... But stubbornly, this ideally anonymous, quasi-medieval character whom one has educed refuses to take shape. The Master of Lockhart resists formulation as a myth. Indeed, was there one or were there several Masters ?1
  2.  
  3. haiduk or heyduck [G heiduck, haiduck, fr. Hung hajduk, pl. of hajdu robber] 1. A Balkan outlaw opposed to Turkish rule 2.  A Hungarian mercenary foot soldier of a class eventually given the rank of nobility and a territory in 1605 3. a livened personal follower; a male attendant or servant
  4. zanni [It, fr. It dial. Zanni, nickname fr. the It name Giovanni JOHN] 1. a madcap clown in masked comedy traditionally from Bergamo, Italy, usu. playing the part of a comic servant 2. stock servant characters in the Italian improvisational theater known as the commedia dell'arte who initiated the action of the play and produced comic impact based on repeated comic actions, topical jokes, and practical jokes, often directed against the smug, the proud, and the pretentious 3. one of two zanni who often played contrasting roles, the first clever and adept at confounding, the second a dull-witted foil
  5.  
  6. "The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing."... [I]f one might sometimes fiel that fox propensities are less than moral and, therefore, not to be disclosed, of course there still remains the job of assigning to Le Corbusier his own particular slot, "whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements.”2
  7.  
  8. hodge 1. an English rustic or farm laborer
  9. hodgepodge 1. a heterogeneous mixture often of incongruous and ill-suited elements
  10. Hodges, Tom S. 1. local Lockhart architect and builder responsible for many of the public buildings in Lockhart including the Dr. Eugene Clark Library (1889), the First Christian Church (1898), and the Caldwell County Jail (1908).
  11.  
  12. The Master of Lockhart is ninety-six today...3
 
It is difficult to tell what does not count in the work of John Hejduk, to distinguish the central focus from the peripheral, the totality from the vignette. While there are any number of subjects that draw immediate speculation in Hejduk's work, it is perhaps the subject as number that prevents these quick fixes from registering this impasse of accounting, for criticism is always anxious to frame its object and settle its debts, to believe that it has its subject's number.4 As Hejduk remarks in conjunction with the Accountant of Victims, "for each number there is a name." But the connection between subject and number can be imagined classically or otherwise, the difference between the subject thought as interiority, as an identity or unity (the number one), and the "subject" (if it can be called that anymore) as a function of exteriority, as multiplicity, as both more and less than one. A question difficult to answer in the case of  — "whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements" — is even more tricky and pointed in the case of Hejduk who has precisely and self-consciously figured Colin Rowe's alternatives of the fox and the hedgehog.5
    From his Texas House series to the more recent urban masques, Hejduk's work continues to investigate the relation of part to whole, the status or character of connection, the significance of number and numbering. His thirty-five-year "Theory of Accumulation," moving methodically from individual house to collective arrangement, begins with the early pedagogy of Texas and The Cooper Union that establishes the high modern series 1, 4, 9, 16 : the single square of four points, the four-square with nine points, and the nine-square with sixteen. As exercises in opposed spatial organization — the homogenous seriality of the foursquare (aa) and the hierarchically centered symmetry of the nine-square (aba) — this oscillating modernist and classical series has now been collapsed through the associative laws of Hejduk's Vladivostok, appropriately ending in its thirty-six-square cemetery (which operates as both four nine-squares and nine foursquares, and is thus exhausted by neither serial nor symmetrical assignments). It should be noted that this Theory of Accumulation is not merely additive, as Hejduk's reflections on unity, connection, and number have also found expression through the functions of subtraction (e.g., the fractional 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 Houses) and abandonment (e.g., New Town for the New Orthodox). In his architectural / aesthetic and political / social enunciations, everything counts without the necessity of adding up or making a difference; everything matters without being essential.
    It is this theme of dumb enumeration that marks Hejduk's deviation from the discourse of American high modernism as articulated by his early colleague and collaborator, Colin Rowe. If colin-rowe denotes the proper name of the grid, of classical-modernist definition and clarity, then Hejduk reads this mechanic of orthogonality obliquely, as in the "diagonal sciences" Roger Caillois advances in his own The Mask of Medusa from 1960.6 Even before his Diamond House series, Hejduk's "diagonal" reading operates in the first Texas Houses, where the grid of points, the structural members, are hollow containers for the mechanical systems, an elemental "hollowness" that progressively expands or swells to become the entire figure in the more recent work, exposing potential anthro- or zoomorphic viscera. While Rowe abstracts the column so that it emerges as the generic structural grid,7 Hejduk proceeds in an alternate direction, by specifying the column's sacrificial and militaristic character, revealing the animal and captive figures "trapped" within its classical ordination.8 From the hollow grid of columns to its becoming-animal or figure, Hejduk identifies multiple forms of domestication and occupation (in the colonizing sense of the imposition of order) as the center, the innards, of the most familiar architectural elements. In Hejduk's accounting, the detail emerges as the understudy to the city, and the suspicion arises that urbanism amounts to warfare conducted by other means.9
    The alternate treatments to which the column has been subjected (as either the mathematical grid that establishes the neutral field for plan geometries, or as the source for repressed narrative and vertical figuration) begin to chart Hejduk's complex relationship to Rowe and his version of high modernism. More generally, this instance of the column serves as an emblem for diverse attempts to correlate or align "architecture and language" in the postwar period, to establish the possibility (however contradictory that goal would become) for an architecture of both autonomy and heterogeneity against the modern rhetoric and experience of anonymous and homogenous "building." This academic and critical quest in postwar American architecture for autonomy and heterogeneity — or, again, identity and multiplicity — was seen to require the construction of the discipline as a self-conscious language.10 Thus, beginning in the late 1950s, diverse critics and practitioners (such as Rowe and Robert Venturi) came to invoke the historical metalanguage of Mannerism while at the same time pushing architecture in the direction of painting and poetry, the two privileged media in the discourse of high modernism and the New Criticism. Not surprisingly, these same models (poetry and painting) have remained in the work of Hejduk, though significantly no longer as discrete and external analogies from other disciplines but as cohesive and intensive anomalies. They serve as neither examples nor footnotes, but are inseparable (despite attempts by various critics) from the entire ensemble of production.
    Just as Hejduk's practices might be seen as continuous differentiations from the work of Rowe and Venturi, so, along another trajectory, they can be distinguished from the related reflections of Peter Eisenman. In fact, Hejduk's position seems to emerge as the complementary response to the extension and critique of Rowe's formalism found in Eisenman. In contrast to Eisenman's early search for the deep structure of the architectural langue, Hejduk enumerates specific utterances, performing architecture's parole, suggesting that there can be no abstracted ideal, no generalized theory of architectural meaning, divorced from its particular embodiment.11 Rather than pursue a codified language of architecture, Hejduk more accurately engages the writing of architecture, soliciting writing's potential for disaster, its aspects of materiality and contingency, its undecidable confection as both toxin and cure. His speculative and specified productions constitute a spec writing, of which it remains uncertain as to whether it multiplies and counts on risk, or contains, contracts, and insures against it. This uncertainty reflects the more fundamental aporia in Hejduk's work, for — while the systemic and fixed institution of la langue constructs itself precisely through its ability to separate the essential from the accidental, the typical (or typological) from the idiosyncratic — with the advent of parole, relevance and irrelevance become difficult to distinguish. This larger shift from syntax to usage (or grammar to performance) in Hejduk's mutation of postwar American formalism accompanies other movements : from plan to elevation, geometry to narrative, type to token, the proportional model to the anomalous, categorizing and distinguishing species to processes of speciation. Hejduk wittily plays on the mathematics and linguistics of formalism where numbers come to double as "figures," and letters as "characters."
    The traits of accumulation and speciation (or figuration and characterization) in Hejduk's thought can perhaps best be observed in the masques he has staged in (for) various cities. As suggested above, in place of the transcendental figure-ground gestalt of Rowe's planar collage urbanism, Hejduk substitutes the elevational pair subject-object, suggesting an experiential relation on the ground datum rather than a conceptual view from the air. Thus, rather than identifying with the mathematical and measuring concerns of geography, he situates his work within the artistic and descriptive tradition of chorography. This distinction dates hack to Ptolemy, who analogizes geographical plan-making of the world as the rendering of an entire head, while chorographic views of particular places are seen as the depiction of individual features, such as ear or eye. Moreover, chorography implies place, abandonment, and musicality,12 a triad of concerns repeatedly mixed in Hejduk's work, particularly as they emanate from his reflections on the "widow's walk," an architectural element that immediately provides both subject (character) and program (narrative). Again, it is only from a particular conflation of form, material, function, context, and subject that expression is possible, that words and forms can be seen to relate. In Hejduk's work, objects with the same name may have different forms in different cities, while those with the same form often have different names, thus revealing new traits.13 As demonstrated in, his continuing reflections on the otherness of the widow's walk, the Sea Captain's House in Vladivostok "looks like" Lancaster / Hanover's Music House more than its Widow's House, whereas Vladivostok's Musician appears more like the house of the Widow than that of Music. As elsewhere in Hejduk's work, the formal and structural logics of analogy and homology are at once solicited and frustrated.
    More importantly — and in contrast to the dominant reception of his work by his disciples or its consumption as an institutionalized ethic — Hejduk's obsession with renaming, staging encounters, and establishing instructions suggests that he is engaged in a practice of architectural nominalism, one where "the idea of an inscription replaces the idea of fabrication."14 More significant than the official institutional rhetoric of crafting the detail, then, is the act of signing the detail as a readymade, revealing its potential to vibrate through larger institutional and disciplinary mechanisms. If the detail is the understudy to urbanism in Hejduk's work, it is as it approaches the condition of the borderline. In distinction to both Aldo Rossi's analogous city and Rowe's collage city,  ventures a city of the anomalous.15 One result of this investigation of the borderline is an urbanism that oscillates between the conditions of synecdoche and spectacle.16 By focusing on discrete elements and details (e.g., awnings, balconies, water towers, smokestacks, stairs and landings, exhaust ducts, satellite dishes, etc.) Hejduk exposes the fragmented unit of architectural activity (the anonymous, machine-made, or "off-theshelf"), where the part stands in for the whole. Equally, however, Hejduk revisits an auratic vision of production, one which emphasizes gesture, passion, and the expressive symbolism of the hand, resulting in an organic totality, an ultimately bounded and composed whole. The question arises, then, whether Hejduk's concern with accumulation and number comprehends multiplicity and contagion, or merely sustains familial and contracted relations, whether or not it is contained by a humanist aesthetic and liberal-legal vision of individual to collective (and part to whole) articulations. These, of course, are political matters as well as aesthetic, and it is precisely in pursuing an explicitly political line of inquiry that Hejduk's speculations display a lineage similar to that of Rowe.17 In distinguishing his early work from his "first city plan"-the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought (1975) — Hejduk comments that the "first real shift in the work was political." As will be seen later, however, this political dimension was already present in his early study with Colin Rowe on the town of Lockhart, Texas, from 1957.
    At about the same time as the collaborative work on Lockhart, Rowe was examining the development of architectural vocabulary in the nineteenth century through aspects of "character" and "composition," terms that did not exist before the late eighteenth century and that had disappeared from architectural discussions by the time modernism was canonized in the I930s.18 For designers like J. B. Papworth, Sir John Soane, and Andrew Jackson Downing, character consisted of the subjective expression of the building's purpose and was located specifically in the elements or details of architecture — roof, chimney, porch, veranda. During the nineteenth century, character and composition were associated with the Picturesque tradition as a resistance to academic architecture and ideal types, a dispute which also exhibited a shift away from the work itself to its effect on the spectator. In part, then, one can begin to understand Hejduk's focus on aspects of both detail and "character" (i.e., the heterogeneous subject that is neither abstracted nor idealized) as an equivalent resistance to high modernism. In viewing Hejduk through the lens of the Picturesque, it becomes possible to relate his work to the contemporary practices of the minimalists, as Yve-Alain Bois has connected the work of Richard Serra, for example, to that same tradition, particularly in its concern with one-to-one scale, the avoidance of plan in favor of elevation, an emphasis on the temporal dimension, and the effect on the viewing subject as a species of performer.19 Like the minimal ("literalist") sculpture Michael Fried criticized for its unconscious biomorphism and its theatrical (and borderline or "between") status, Hejduk's "hollow" objects refigure the late 1960s debate between the roles of contemplation and participation.20 In addition to celebrating the figurative possibilities within elemental geometries and background tectonics, Hejduk's work operates between Fried's opposed, terms of art and objecthood, an uneasy terrain that restates the dilemma of unity (or the contained unique) and multiplicity (the dispersed iteration of the seemingly banal).
    While it is true that Rowe has been critical of the picturesque — especially in its postwar guise as townscape, which he has characterized as "sensation without plan" — there remains a major aesthetic and political point of contact between the picturesque and Rowe's collage urbanism. Just as the picturesque attempted to mediate tyranny and license (order and chaos) and produce the "third term" of liberty, so, too, Rowe's urbanism is a balance between structure and event (or scaffold and exhibit, which makes explicit his metaphor of the "city as museum") for which he appropriates at a crucial juncture, once again, a significantly political, and eminently "reasonable," model — that of the law : "it is the notion of the law, the neutral background which illustrates and stimulates the particular... which equips itself with both empirical and ideal... it is this very public institution which must now be gainfully employed in commentary upon the scaffold-exhibit relationship."21 For Rowe, the "elementary and enlivening duplicities of law" along with "the idea of free trade" serve as emblems for the "balancing act" of structure and event as well as the technique of collage. As forces opposed to his promotion of this legal-capitalist (i.e., contractual) economy, Rowe dismisses "accident" and "gifts of chance" which he associates with debtorship and theft, attributes of the unfortunate servant or the outlaw. Like the picturesque, Rowe's collage would contain chance and the accident, pulling back far enough to cover its risk and spread its losses. An insurance company for liberalism, postmodern collage (with its vision of heterogeneity as contained pluralism) ultimately maintains the arrangements of self and society. This political and legal theme — divergently extended in the later reflections on the city by Rowe and Hejduk — finds its first explicit site for articulation in the solitary, unrelenting landscape of central Texas and, not surprisingly, it is here aligned with the question of unified or multiple subjectivity.
    It is in Lockhart that Rowe and Hejduk find a specific "representative" of the American courthouse town, an urban type which itself was earlier adduced in their article as "a more representative illustration" of settlement patterns in the West than, for example, the mining town. Through layers of representation and exemplification, a typical situation is described that by necessity avoids the bizarre or the random :
 
  1. [T]his is a town dedicated to an idea, and its scheme is neither fortuitous nor whimsical. The theme of centralized courthouse in central square is — or should he — a banal one. And it is in fact one of great power....Here it is the law which assumes public significance; and it is around the secular image of the law, like architectural illustrations of a political principle, that these towns revolve. In each case the courthouse is both visual focus and social guarantee; and in each square the reality of government made formally explicit provides the continuing assurance of order....Urbanistic phenomena they palpably are, but they are also the emblems of a political theory. A purely architectural experience of their squares is therefore never possible. Within these enclosures the observer can never disentangle his aesthetic response from his reaction as a social animal.22
 
It is with regard to this theme of the political theories and implications of the city, the polis, that Rowe and Hejduk have continually returned over the succeeding thirty years in their urban thought, twin practices that form a real debate over the liberal-legal vision of the city and modernism. While Rowe would emphasize the reasonable, judicious, orderly, and decisive aspects as the preconditions for an exemplary urbanism, Hejduk has recovered other traits with very different political, social, and formal implications. Only now is it possible, perhaps, to foreground the awnings, power lines, "angelic" streetlights, and cruciform telephone poles in Hejduk's Lockhart photographs, to appreciate the potential for a peripheral and residual vision; only now is it possible to account for the central courthouse squares, jails, and water towers that have come to populate several European cities, to understand the generative potential in the dossier of Lockhart and reconfigure it as a description of Hejduk's later characters avant la lettre :
 
  1. The first view of the town affords the characteristic visual competition. In approaching from the south the dominant intricacies of courthouse silhouette struggle for attention with the aluminum painted spheroid of the water tower; and a concentration of interest upon either is further disturbed by the appearance to the right of a small castellated building of curiously Vanbrughian profile. A toy fort, brick and machicolated, partly Romanesque and partly Italianate, evidently the jail, its disarming self-assurance sets the mood for the entire town.23
 
At the time, Rowe and Hejduk associated Lockhart and other Texas courthouse towns with French bastides (medieval towns built for defensive purposes and credited them with presenting "minor triumphs of urbanity." With slight inflections, these cues can be seen to exhaust Hejduk's preoccupation with number, subject, and the city : namely, the medieval, the practices of warfare and siege, and the chance for a minor urbanism. In each case there is a dissociation from Rowe's legalistic model.
    In their work on Franz Kafka, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari list three characteristics of a minor literature : 1) "language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization"; 2) "everything in [it] is political"; 3) "everything takes on a collective value."24 First, language is "deterritorialized" through an intensive usage, a kind of arte povera, where one acts as a foreigner in "one's own" tongue, a situation that Deleuze and Guattari associate primarily with the recognition of "impossibility."25 It is the experience of just such an impossibility that repeatedly blocks and prompts Hejduk's work at both the architectural and urban scales, condemning it (or enabling it) to proceed through fits and starts. Confronted with a New England site surrounded by old shinglestyle houses, for example, Hejduk finds he can neither produce something new nor copy in an historicist or modern manner.26 More to the point with respect to a minor urbanism, Hejduk remarks : "I don't believe that there has been any really creative or essentially new town planning or city planning since the nineteenth century. This is the first time I've become interested in town planning, with the knowledge, let's say, that I have the real sense that it's an impossibility."27 In dating the last viable urban project at the end of the nineteenth century, Hejduk provides a clue as to how he will confront the impossibility of urban visions. Rather than promoting the ideal permanence (and real obsolescence) of the White City, Hejduk's traveling circus — the rides, Ferris wheels, sideshows, and games of chance — will take its cue from the temporary events and distractions of the midway.
    Here, the carnival aspects of Hejduk's nomadic troupes (troops) reverberate with the second criterion of a minor practice. In advancing an argument for the political space of a minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari explain, "its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it."28 As in various masquerade traditions — e.g., the mumming plays of England or the commedia dell'arte of Italy — Hejduk employs stock characters to elicit a cross-section of society, at once highly particularized and de-individuated through stylized object-forms (masks), which eliminate the organized faciality of liberal, individualist politics, as well as through the specific improvisation of the company at a given performance through which traditional scenarios are enacted (masque). As this traditional opposition between form (object) and function (performance) is mutated through the homonymic collapse of mask / masque, the liberal contradictions that came to identify postwar modernism (and which were highly articulated by Rowe) are elided and rearranged by Hejduk. In a sense, before any cultural practice or form (e.g., architecture or the city) could be rendered political, it first had to be purged of its liberal psychology and economy. In order to counter the way in which modernism had been made safe for liberal capitalism since the 1930s, Hejduk revisits pre-liberal "mixed" forms to advance an other possibility for modernism,29 it being no coincidence that cultural expressions such as the commedia dell'arte could not withstand the rise of bourgeois legalism any more than could the monarchy or the city as an independent political entity. As the development of a political chorography in Hejduk becomes incompatible with the plans of liberalism, a new form of (extralegal) subjectivity must be imagined as well.
    In addition to manifesting an engagement with "impossibility" and the political, Hejduk's work also stresses collective expression, a trait that Deleuze and Guattari explicitly associate with the "passing" of the master: "in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that 'master' and that could be separated from a collective enunciation."30 As suggested earlier, Hejduk's practices constitute a continuous reflection on the impossibility of originality for a generation "twice removed" from the "masters of twentieth-century architecture."31 For Hejduk, these masters (Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies) completed their work in a panoramic sense, leaving for Hejduk (and presumably his generation) the minor task of becoming a winged insect :
 
  1. I am like a fly that comes in and says, "OK, here is one aspect that has been left out, yet which has great potentiality, it should be wrapped up”....All my work has been completing pieces. Corb should have done a Diamond House. So and so should have done a Wall House, but didn't. in other words, the panoramic views of the great architects, which are panoramic, they didn't conclude. And I come like a fly and fill in the pieces, the logical pieces, then they are cleaned up.32
 
In developing this minor territory, this fly space between the categories of fox and hedgehog (as two proper forms of master), Hejduk's practice approximates that of Henry Adams, whose own form of antimodernism (or dispute with the Protestant liberalism of his wellestablished paternity) likewise led him to the medieval, the primitive, the childlike, the celebration of feminine qualities, and the cult of the Virgin. Moreover, the model of Adams's Education seems to be repeated in private and public forms by Hejduk, with the autobiographical Mask of Medusa and the more institutional Education of an Architect. In both instances, a medieval, guild-like knowledge, politics, and subjectivity emerge that come to dispute the terms of the so-called formalist (or liberal proceduralist) modernism of Hejduk's one-time collaborator, Colin Rowe.
    In many ways, the city exists as the battleground in this dispute between medieval and liberal visions of society and politics.33 Liberalism constructs its vision of the world on the basis of complex (but articulate) contradictions, mediated by the neutral instrumentality of "the law." As a corollary to this principle, the liberal vision is opposed to intermediate entities or associations that would exist between the individual and the State. In contrast, medieval practice relied on associations (e.g., corporations like cities, towns, churches, and guilds) that operated precisely between and in excess of individual and State, event and structure, the exclusive duality on which liberalism would stake its claim for freedom, rights, and security. In the medieval community, the ideas of the autonomy of the town and its citizens were merged so that there was no imagined fundamental contradiction "between personal property rights and town sovereignty rights," between freedom and security, "the town as a collection of individuals and the town as a collective svhole."34 Thus, the medieval city exists as a different species (or species of difference) that is reducible neither to a prior collection of individuals nor to the post-facto creation of the State. While liberal visions emphasize an abstract equality (with its objective "reasonable man" standard present in Rowe and his source, Karl Popper), pre-liberal visions of community count on differences of caste or status among its members, but these differences are nonetheless dissolved in the singular functioning or performance of the "pack," an entity often conditioned by martial or violent means. While the medieval city has been characterized as existing under "a permanent state of siege," it also tended to mix what liberalism has posited as distinct spheres : the political (with its now diminished public life) and the economic (an increasingly far from equal realm of privatization). As Gerald Frug argues, it is this artificial distinction within liberalism that has contributed to the powerlessness of contemporary cities.
    Based on the radical subjectivity of value, the goal of liberalism (as its name would suggest) is individual liberty, an ideal middle term existing between tyranny and license, or totalitarian structure and anarchic event. In contrast, a minor practice wagers only on a line of flight, a becoming, a way out (like the Ape in Kalka's "A Report to an Academy"). As in the medieval city, one set of jurisdictions are escaped (deterritorialized or decoded), only to be replaced by a different set (reterritorialization), a politics of continuous movement, perpetual performance, which will never dream of ultimate liberation via the structure of the law. In this way, Hejduk's figures of speech have escaped the judgment and execution of formalism; urban parolees, they are no longer confined, but not quite free, either. They have simply found a way out. In the Masques, there is an involution, a becoming or exchange of figure and ground, as a collection of interventions establish a new territory, a heaving plane of consistency, that will expand, contract, and move on. Unlike the diverse urban analyses of others (e.g., Rowe and Manfredo Tafuri, as well as Rem Koolhaas's reflections on New York) where the structured grid establishes the precondition for the freedom of form, in Hejduk the figure precedes its disposition; it has no structured or static position but only a loose set of scenarios. Still, the precise valence between traits of occupation and deterritorialization remains unmeasured. What is more certain, however, is that given the fusion of liberalism and the modern in postwar discourse, Hejduk's "way out" consists of grafting the medieval with surrealism to salvage historical avant-garde procedures and paradigms that had been devalued if not obliterated within the canons of high modernism.
    In their discussion of the state apparatus and the war machine, Deleuze and Guattari identify two figures with the former bureaucratic organization : the jurist-priest and the magician-king. While the liberal-legal reading of Rowe outlined above places him within the "jurist-priest" type (the commentator or critic), conventional accounts of Hejduk, by his critics and followers alike, tend to characterize him as a "magician-king" (the heroic poet). While any such attribution is never simply right or wrong, the near universal acceptance of this view has obstructed other potentialities within the work. Regardless of whether the pair Rowe-Hejduk is elaborated as complicit (in terms of sharing a mannered humanism) or oppositional (as a debate between the formalist and the phenomenological), it is precisely the identity of the pair that frustrates further development. If one is to advance another project from Hejduk's chats, one must extrapolate from what he simply shows and tells. Hejduk's spec writing — e.g., the emphasis on materiality, refiguring and iterating background tectonics and details, the parole aspects of the event, the politicization of program, the dissolution of subject-object relations, etc. — at least sustains the possibility for an escape from the legality or conjugality of the pair toward the promiscuity of the double.
    What begins as a nascent mode of promiscuous affiliation in Hejduk's work (an implicit trajectory aimed at the borderline), however, often supports subjectivity, interiority, and the propriety of form in many of his would-be successors. At every turn, the chance for a minor practice appears to have been defeated : through a fetishization of materiality that supplants a real interest in the specificity of materials; the triumphant celebration of a renewed phenomenological subject in place of the continued dismantling of any discrete notion of subjectivity; the construction of an heroic category of the genius-master rather than the weakening of the status of author through the "vita minor"; the symbolic and mythic interpretation of form that displaces its potential to recharge context through its own disappearance; the embodiment of ultimate meaning in narrative instead of its usage as an index of contingency and event; a dependence on the logic of the body, proportion, and analogy that avoids an engagement with the borderline and the anomalous; an architecture and urbanism of the colon where the relation of one to many is never one too many. In place of the all-too-loyalist reception of Hejduk, then, an improper alternative might be warranted, one which would impair the conjunction of Rowe and Hejduk (or the state dialectics of jurist-priest and magician-king), one that could speciate or germinate Hejduk's production, bastardizing it if necessary, in order to avoid its being rendered still-born.
    The political and aesthetic distinctions drawn earlier between Hejduk and Rowe — along the lines of the medieval and the liberal, the avant-garde and the high modern — were never quite of the same order, were somehow always disproportionate. They never truly formed a pair, their functions never ideally split between the speaking-critic and producing-architect, at least in the case of Hejduk who (like other practitioners of his generation, if in a somewhat different idiom) collapsed these distinct categories which were themselves constructs of the liberal reception of modernism. It is in this way that the dialectical relations of state space-the striated roles of jurist-priest and magician-king — are inadequate with regard to Hejduk, the effects of whose work may now be more productively aligned with the nomadic space of the war machine. As a third figure of inequivalence, it is the "warrior-outlaw" who is associated with this smooth space within the schema of Deleuze and Guattari.35
    It is Hejduk's war machine, then, that descends upon several European cities in its eastern sweep from Venice to Vladivostok, at once a force of occupation and deterritorialization that would momentarily subvert the juridical and royalist poles of the state and political sovereignty. Of course, since Vitruvius, the "education of the architect" has always included a knowledge of the construction of military machines for siege and assault (machinery being one of the three departments of architecture for the classical theorist, along with the "art of building" and "the making of time-pieces," an area covered by Hejduk with his Clock / Collapse of Time built in London). Beyond this tradition, however, Hejduk's masques, his movable and hollow "gifts," bear a more than passing resemblance to the figural construction of Epeius, wheeled into the city by day as an offering and evacuated by night as an apparatus of Finally, the affects of the war machine connect with two principles developed earlier in Hejduk's work : the establishment of a minor science or practice, and the project of reimagining the relationship of number and subject. While the number of the State is linked to metric magnitudes in order to gain mastery over matter (to divide and possess), there exists an other kind of number, the autonomous "numbering number" that operates in the war machine :
 
  1. These numbers appear as soon as one distributes something in space, instead of dividing up or distributing space itself. The number becomes a subject. The independence of the number in relation to space is a result not of abstraction but of the concrete nature of smooth space, which is occupied without being counted. The number is no longer a means of counting or measuring but of moving : it is the number itself that moves through smooth space. There is undoubtedly a geometry of smooth space: but as we have seen, it is a minor, operative geometry, a geometry of the trait.... Geometry as a royal science has little importance for the war machine....The number becomes a principle whenever it occupies a smooth space, and is deployed within it as subject, instead of measuring a striated space. The number is the mobile occupant, the movable in smooth space, as opposed to the geometry of the immovable in striated space.36
 
    Hejduk's masques, the distribution of entities which occupy without counting, produce a directional rather than a dimensional space. In a related military metaphor, Hejduk has fashioned a kind of "stone soup" urbanism. Like the soldiers in that fable (where roles of guest and host are exchanged), Hejduk has provided the recipe and the stone, word and form, but these vague attractors or connectors will serve only as a mute index of their inadequacy if abandoned in the abstract. Existing conditions in the city (contexts, programs, events, subjects, objects, etc.) are the "real" ingredients, and the success of the fable depends on whether the insertion of what largely amounts to an urban placebo (or is it a pharmakon ?) can transform behaviors, institutions, and ways of seeing, and whether new means of deciding what counts can be developed.
    As the war machine infiltrates the city limits — between the dominant (major) axes of the political, proliferating series of becomings — so too Hejduk's masques compromise the borders of the architectural. Traditionally, the category architecture has constituted itself on the basis of satisfying a double negation, namely that it is not-urbanism (which is without site or structure) and not-sculpture (which is without function). Additionally, architecture is seen to be "bigger" than sculpture and "smaller" (or less numerous) than urbanism. Hejduk's constructions, however, emerge as a positive exhaustion of this dichotomy since they can be provisionally framed under all three discourses and scales, sculpture-architecture-urbanism. His arrangements actually exceed the collapse of object, setting, and subject provided by minimalism, and refuse the dream of an existentially integrated beholder maintained by many of its more phenomenologically-minded advocates. In Hejduk, the exchange among forms, functions, and subjects is continuous and monstrous. His work soberly maps a condensed genealogy where professions become proper names which in turn designate structures (e.g., as in the line carpenter, Carpenter, Carpenter Center, or for that matter, cooper, Cooper, Cooper Union) while at the same time proposing a condition where one would assume the (pre)occupations or the characteristics of one's inhabitation, and vice versa. In the near-dark milieu of several European cities, Hejduk's masques serve as switching mechanisms, providing the opportunity for an exchange, aflutter. Outside the jurisdiction of identification where form, subject, context, and function are distinct, the masque event-forms enable the reading of a new aggregate, one without organized parts that construct determinate wholes, the kind of singularity Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a haeccity.
 
  1. Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a panse: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o'clock is this animal ! This animal is this place !37
 
    As a political and social model of connection, of course, the recognition of haeccity has existed only as the nightmare of liberalism given that the assemblage it envisions escapes the categories of the one (the individual / event) and the many (the State / structure). Previously permitted only in the fascinated warnings of horror and science fiction films, this "invasion of the subject snatchers" constitutes Hejduk's urban proposals and "cross-over" spaces, an architectural becoming of subject and object in the manner that pets and their owners are said to come to resemble one another. Hejduk's urban tales begin in 1975 — with his "first urban plan," the New Town for the New Orthodox, and his assumption of the deanship at The Cooper Union — and are reminiscent of a film from the same year, Roman Polanski's The Tenant, where the actor-director, a Kafkaesque clerk, evolves with his new apartment, "becoming" its previous female occupant and disappearing into its walls, ultimately reenacting, twice over, her jump from the window. Here, a becoming-other ends in suicide, or a potential suicide brings about a becoming-other. Perhaps more than any other figure, then, it is the House of the Suicide that occupies the borderline of the liberal polis and subjectivity, the limit condition of a becoming, a line of flight merely rehearsed by the angels and other hybrid species of Hejduk's spec-writing machine.
    Avoiding the logic of contradiction or dialectics (of subject and object, function and form), the experience of haeccity in Hejduk's work marks the end of pluralism and an identity-based politics. Consequently, it potentially ventures a form of collage or model of alliance quite opposed to the high modern form canonized by the legalism of Rowe, with its organizational balance between structure and event. And it is these two forms of collage that allow the postwar desire for autonomy and heterogeneity (or identity and difference) to be reassessed, for it is ultimately around opposed conceptions of this desire that the diverse politics and aesthetics of Rowe and Hejduk have revolved. For Rowe, heterogeneity or difference can only flow from a prior autonomy or previous identity. This begins to explain the proliferation of parity within Rowe's work, for here a "difference" (like right and left) is only conceivable as the fallout of a previous identity, the pain In this model, difference often operates through the tone of nostalgia (for a lost or broken totality, a tone familiar to those advancing the "city as museum"). In one reading of Hejduk's work, however, the possibility is maintained that difference can precede autonomy or identity horizontally, that differences are in a state of becoming identical (e.g., the surrealist encounter of the sewing machine and umbrella or the exchange of the wasp and the orchid) through the construction of a singularity (or a haeccity) that lacks the liberal-humanist articulations of part-to-whole. Here, difference (and the heterogeneity of the city) may exist as the house of the amnesiac, always in the process of becoming something else in conjunction with something else. Hejduk obviates the need for choosing between Rowe's pair "singular substance" (the space of the king, the hedgehog) and "heterogeneous elements" (the space of the jurist, the fox), by developing a third species, the fly (or flea) that infects both figures and dissolves their categorical difference (itself founded on a previous "being," the raven, Corbu) in a singular plane of consistency and affect. In any case, "filling in" to abandon is quite different than preserving in order to memorialize. But, despite all clues to the contrary, it is the latter reading to which Hejduk's work has been largely subjected and contained.
    Earlier it had been suggested that a series of institutional discourses had neglected the minor initiatives in Hejduk's production and captured his reception for various established interests (briefly, a craft fetishism, the subject of phenomenology, the authorial master, mytho-symbolic form, narrative embodiment, and a proportional humanism). While the varied uses to which Hejduk's thought and production have been put by the still "major sciences" of architecture and urbanism are instructive to catalog — a case study in how a subtle and almost arid critique of such institutional forms can nevertheless emerge as their ideal model — there remains an oversight that unites all these major forms of reception, and for which Hejduk himself may share some complicity. Each of these reconstructions has taken him all-too-seriously. Like the commedia dell'arte, the effects of which were dependent upon the laughter provoked by the juxtaposition of the sublime with the banal, the Hejduk-effect requires its own outburst. As a parole practice it cannot be satisfied with diagramming the joke (as with the geometry of the fold), but must produce the sound. It is significant that in Kafka, too, the element of humor has been overlooked, and the discussion of this by Deleuze and Guattari is illuminating in the case of Hejduk as well :
 
  1. There is a Kafka laughter, a very joyous laughter, that people usually understand poorly It is for stupid reasons that people have tried to see a refuge far from life in Kafka's literature, and also an agony, the mark of an impotence and a culpability, the sign of a sad interior tragedy. Only two principles are necessary to accord with Kafka. He is an author who laughs with a profound joy, a joie de vivre, in spite of, or because of, his clownish declarations that he offers like a trap or a circus. And from one end to the other, he is a political author, prophet of the future world because he has two poles that he will know how to unify in a completely new assemblage : far from being a writer withdrawn into his room, Kafka finds that his room offers him a double flux, that of bureaucrat with a great future ahead of him....and that of a nomad who is involved in fleeing things in the most contemporary way....Never has there been a more comic and joyous author from the point of view of desire; never has there been a more political and social author from the point of view of enunciation.38
 
In Hejduk as in Kafka, laughter and the political are intimately related. Moreover, both laughter and politics were precisely the terms repressed in the liberal-modernist reconstruction of architecture and urbanism after the war. To advance a post-legal practice of the city and modernism, to reinvigorate the polis, the politics of laughter must be reconsidered. It is as one of the few sustained reflections on this problem in postliberal imagination that Hejduk's masques have contributed, realigning the postwar concerns for autonomy and heterogeneity. To the contemporary repertoire of design concerns and procedures, Hejduk has offered an early version of an architectural animation, both as the pursuit of non-static effects and the use of cartoon techniques. While his attempt to specify the abstraction of program through performance may ultimately be more committed to ritual than event — a project that would remain to be taken up by his successors with their investigations of the post-narrative possibilities provided by cinema, video, and hypertext — his singular crossing of the medieval-alchemical and avant-garde-surrealist agendas has redirected the imperatives and humors of architecture : namely (if not literally), to inform objecthood and to animate matter. Among his generation, then, Hejduk emerges most fully as a hinge figure — precisely through his nominalism — in establishing the preconditions that would enable a later neo-avant-garde to move from the semiotic critique of the first generation (his own) to a more direct practice of institutional projection. In the near-dark of the twentieth century, the nomadic space of the "warrior-outlaw" figure might now more accurately be characterized as belonging solely to the madcap-brigand, zanni-haiduck.
 
 
1 Colin Rowe and John Hejduk, "Lockhart, Texas," Architectural Record (March 1957) : 205.
2 Colin Rowe, Collage City (Cambridge : The MIT Press, 1978, 1988), 92. Earlier in this text, in his dispute with Disney World's "packaging" of Main Street, Rowe    returns to Lockhart as an example of the authentic, the real thing: "The Greek temple, the false Victorian facade, the Palladian portico, the unused Opera-House, the courthouse sanctioned by the glamour of Napoleon III's Paris, the conspicuous monument to the Civil War or to the Fearless Fireman, these are the evidence of almost frenzied effort, via the movingly ingenious reconstitution of stable cultural images, to provide stability in an unstable scene, to convert frontier flux into established community" Ibid., 46 and 182, note 13. In contrast to Rowe's celebration of the "desperate" structuring-event as a guarantee to a community of liberalism (i.e., a balance between the desire of the people and the reason of science), the event-figures of Hejduk's recent urban proposals seem to wager on the frontier flux of a temporary occupation.
3 John Hejduk, in "Texas," in The Silent Witnesses and Other Poems (1980), reprinted in Mask of Medusa (New York: Rizzoli International, 1985), 111.
4 Paradoxically, this is especially true in the case of Hejduk, where the determination of what counts by critics and commentators is made categorically : i.e., it is all essential; it is all frivolous; he is important, but not the work; the institution is significant, but not him; the drawings are central, but not the building; the early work is serious, and the more recent a sham, etc. From the tendency of most criticism, it would appear that making distinctions and evaluations — particularly along the simplest categorical lines (subject, genre, technique, period) — is least problematic with respect to Hejduk's production.
5 Besides its early appearance in his illustrations for Aesop's Fables, the fox-figure in Hejduk's work can be seen in the Conservation Office, Cemetery of the Mothers, Building for Juries, Town Hall, and Angel Watcher. Hedgehog attributes are displayed in the Chinese Consulate, Chief of Police, House of the Suicide, and Scare-Crow House.
6 Caillois argues that, given the dominant system of classification, attempts "to relate phenomena belonging to different 'kingdoms' and consequently to different sciences" are condemned to being marginalized, and suggests as an example of such a transverse approach the potential desire to study "winged creatures," a topic of some interest to Hejduk. See, Caillois, The Mask of Medusa, George Ordish, trans. (New York : Clarkson N. Potter, 1964), 10, originally published as Meduse et Cie (Paris : Libraire Gallimard, 1960). Caillou continues : "Man, by a thousand triumphs, by eluding a thousand cunning traps, has unquestionably classified the attributes of the natural world into a system at once the most fruitful, the most rational and the most exact. But this arrangement by no means exhausts all the different possible combinations. It ignores the 'diagonal' relationships in nature which occur in those domains apparently least related....Science has been the less able to countenance them since, by definition, they cross boundaries between disciplines." Ibid., 12. Caillois's postulate of a "diagonal science" appears to share characteristics with the "minor sciences" of Deleuze and Guattari. Like Hejduk, too, Caillois seems to be interested in exploring non-essential properties, hot traits that matter nonetheless.
7 In "The Chicago Frame," Rowe argues that "without stretching the analogy too far, it might be fair to say that the frame has come to possess a vaine for contemporary architecture equivalent to that of the column for classical antiquity and the Renaissance. Like the column, the frame establishes throughout the building a common ratio to which all the parts are related..." In The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge : The MIT Press, 1976), 90. These linguistic and arithmetic themes of analogy, ratio, and proportion rely on the functions of the colon : and the series column, colon, Colin. This exchange of column and grid is further discussed and diagrammed by Rowe in his analysis of Michelangelo's facade for San Loreozo, where he suggests that a "skeletal organization" of columns, pilasters, string courses, and architraves "might be seen as contributing to the existence of a grid." Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, "Transparency : Literal and Phenomenal...Part II," Perspecta 14 (1971) : 293. In a final "reading" of Michelangelo's now gridded facade (numbered 10m), Rowe succeeds in transforming San Lorenzo into Corbusier's Villa Savoye.
8 See, e.g., George Hersey's The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (Cambridge : The MIT Press, 1988) where he traces the history of columns as prisoners, columns that "may be thought of as containing, and even sealing in (as if they were sarcophagi), human figures." Ibid., 80. Earlier, he discusses the "echinus" (a part of the column capital) which is shown to connote several objects composed of "compound curves broken into spines or projections," such as the sea urchin. "Echinus" also names the hedgehog.
9 This relates to Paul Virilio's "minor" school of thought on urban planning that understands the city as the result of war and its preparation rather than the effect of commerce. Virilio and Lotringer, Pure War (New York : Semiotext(e), 1983), 3. At a later point in the discussion, the comment is made that "cinema is war pursued by other means," thus establishing a connection between the city and cinema, both existing as the bastards or simulacra of war.
10 In general, the two primary contemporary devices or techniques for the exploration of the linguistic capacities of architecture have been the grid and collage, both of which have ties to Rowe and his progeny, beginning with essays on the "Ideal Villa" and "Collage City" While the grid has been largely associated with the condition of autonomy, collage has emerged as the analogous model or emblem for heterogeneity. Nevertheless, there is no natural, necessary, or privileged connection between these relations : e.g., collage may be deployed for effects of autonomy (and this begins to account for the diverse ways in which collage has been recovered in the postwar situation, by both historicist postmodern and neo-avant-garde practices), while geometry increasingly serves as the site for the heterogeneous. Similarly, whereas traditionally the grid (and geometry) has been seen as "descriptive" and collage as "narrative," there are also attempts today to involve a "descriptive collage." The two procedures of grid and collage are also ambiguously associated with Rowe's distinction between "structure" and "event," as will he suggested later.
11 Although I only became aware of the comment after reading Peggy Deamer's paper for this volume, a form of this parole / langue distinction has been more poetically rendered by Daniel Libeskind : "Masque space stands to architectural space as does a meal to a menu." In Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, op. cit., 12, note 3. Having overlooked this text initially I have returned to Libeskind's introduction to find a prescient observation, a question of both the anomaly and the servant, which has come to inform (after the fact of its being written) what will follow : "What then is one to think of an anomaly : of an architect who refuses to enter into anyone's service and who remains aloof from the duties of a vassal ?" Ibid., 9.
12 Etymologically, Chor- and choro- derive from the Greek choras, meaning "place" or "clear space," but interestingly are also akin to cheros, indicating abandoned or bereaved. While choro in some contemporary Romance languages (such as Portuguese) has connections to weeping, crying out, or wailing, it also denotes a dance band, or musical piece in the style of Brazilian folk music.
13 E.g., the Painter of Vladivostok, the Old Farmer's House of Lancaster / Hanover, and the House of the Eldest Citizen in Berlin.
14 Thieryy de Duve, "Echoes of the Readymade : Critique of Pure Modernism," October 70 (Fall 1994): 73. For more onde Drive's explication of Duchamp's nominalist practice, see Pictorial Nominalism : On Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to Readymade (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Not surprisingly, many of Hejduk's advocates and recruits mistake the project of nominalism for a new essentialism, just as they in turn supplant inscription with an overemphasis on fabrication, thus inevitably leading to the call for a new ontology of architecture as well as to the the series of small compromises which end in the destitute call for "design-build," a capitulation to economic convenience that masquerades as political resistance. To put the matter somewhat differently, it may be more productive, at least for the argument advanced here, to chink of the detail in diagrammatic rather than tectonic terms. This may account for the discomfort or disappointment, expressed by supporters as well as critics, toward the built manifestations of Hejduk's projects as "realized" by his followers.
15 Hejduk's investigation of the detail is couched exactly in terms of this issue of the borderline, a calculation that permits awnings to be used but not shutters. In some eases a material or alehemical transformation allows an element to be deployed, as in the steel verandas of the Texas Houses that "become something else." As Hejduk states, "I'm not certain of the borderline. And that's my question..." Mask of Medusa, op. cit., 130, note 3. Here, the themes of uncertainty, the borderline, and becoming converge. As borderline instances are approached and multiplied, an irregular landscape of the anomalous is produced, that which deviates from the general rule, outbids analogy, and resides on the other side of the law. This exorbitant alliance of the borderline with the anomalous is explicitly taken up by Deleuze and Guattari : "Sorcerers....use the old adjective 'anomalous' to situate the positions of the exceptional individual in the pack. It is always with the Anomalous, Moby-Dick or Josephine, that one enters into alliance to become-animal....The anomalous is neither an individual nor a species; it has only affects....It is a phenomenon, but a phenomenon of bordering. This is our hypothesis : a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in 'intention.' If you change dimensions, if you add or subtract one, you change multiplicity....That the anomalous is the borderline makes it easier for us to understand the various positions it occupies in relation to the pack or the multiplicity it borders, and the various positions occupied by a fascinated Self" Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 244-245. It is thus the anomalous that provides a clue to out-maneuvering the liberal antinomies of individual and collective, identity and multiplicity. It is this extralegal functioning of the anomalous that exists as "the cutting edge of deterritorialization." Ibid., 244.
16 These terms are borrowed from Benjamin Buchloh, who uses them to characterize the oppositional tendencies within the history of modernist painting. See "Gerhard Richter's Facture : Between the Synecdoche and the Spectacle," Art and Design (1989) : 41-45. Buchloh's distinction is very close to the "centrifugal" (scientific and fragmented) and "centripetal" (spiritual and organic) attitudes Rosalind Krauss identifies as the dual possibilities contained within the use of the grid in modern art. See "Grids," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge : The MIT Press, 1985). For Krauss, "The work of Mondrian, taken with its various and conflicting readings, is a perfect example of this dispute. Is what we see in a particular painting merely a section of an implied continuity, or is the painting structured as an autonomous, organic whole ?" Ibid., 19. In extending the "cubist analogy" of Rowe and Slutzky, Hejduk significantly moves to the rotation of Mondrian's "diamond" canvases as a source for his early work. For Hejduk, "modernism ends with Mondrian." Mask of Medusa, op. cit., 36, note 3.
17 This despite Rowe's more widely discussed and understood connection to Eisenman's investigations (their likely disagreement over formal conclusions notwithstanding). In other words, while Eisenman elaborates and transforms Rowe's techniques of formal abstraction, Hejduk develops his practice as a political enunciation, which always constituted the other aspect of Rowe's reflections, and the one largely neglected by Eisenman. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, however, that Eisenman's anti-liberal critique of Rowe's modernism — in contrast to Hejduk's pre-liberal critique — has too often been dismissed or misunderstood as being simply apolitical, not least by the architect himself
18 See Rowe, "Character and Composition; or Some Vicissitudes of Architectural Vocabulary in the Nineteenth Century," in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa, op. cit., note 7. While the following discussion will suggest the implicit theme of "character" in Hejduk's work, it would perhaps be possible to make a similar connection to the work of Frank Gehry as a parallel reflection on "composition" as evidence of their related dispute with postwar modernism. Like Hejduk, Gebry, too, seems preoccupied with "the isolation of parts" as an American phenomenon. Whereas Hejduk's early domestic schemes geometricize, parody, and attenuate the functionalist bubble diagram (pulling the elemental event-pieces along an infrastructural corridor), Gehry's residences seem to result from a figural sculpting of the bubbles — where for each shape there is a function (as in Hejduk) — which are then pushed together to compose a community.
19 Yve-Alain Bois, "A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara," October 29 (Summer 1984) : 32-62.
20 In this way, Hejduk's work can be seen as complicit with diverse attempts by other members of the neo-avant-garde (e.g., Venturi, Eisenman, Libeskind, etc.) to register their new professional role as "architect-critic." Hejduk's particular manner of figuring this collapse of interiority and exteriority entails establishing a series of dual characters and functional relations such as observer and participant, watcher and inhabitant, witness and victim. For an initial discussion of this theme see "My Mother the House," in Fetish (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), esp. 61, and, "RE : The Subject of Disappearance," in Anyone (New York : Rizzoli international, 1991) : 128-129.
21 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, op. cit.: 146, note 2.
22 Rowe and Hejduk, Lockhart, Texas,"op. cit.: 202-203, note 1.
23 Ibid.: 203-204
24 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka : Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16-17. Technically, a minor literature can operate only within and through a dominant language, and is therefore more accurately a minor usage of a major code, and thus has a parole aspect. They reprise the three traits briefly as: "the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation." Ibid., 18.
25 For example, Kafka's writing serves as the index of a specific impasse for the Jews of Prague : "the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, and the impossibility of writing otherwise." Ibid., 16.
26 "And how are you going to put a new house in there ? So I cannot copy and put an old house style in there, it's not my nature. So then I can't put a modern house there.", Mask of Medusa, op. cit., 131, note 3.
27 Ibid., 85. Since "the New Town for the New Orthodox," his first explicit commentary on town planning (a future perfect cemetery, a will-have-been abandoned city),  has continued to pursue this impossibility. For a quite similar prognosis (which illustrates a second form of minor practice) see Rem Koolhaas's introduction of his La Defense project : "I won't talk as an architect, but as a planner, in other words, as someone representing a discipline that no longer exists." "Gridding the New," in Anywhere (New York : Rizzoli International, 1992), 154.
28 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, op. cit., 17, note 23.
29 As pre-operatic and popular mixed media, the masques combined theater, dance, mime, acrobatics, and magic. Moreover, as "minor" practice, each charactertype spoke his or her own dialect (the ambiguity of words providing one cause for the misunderstanding that might direct the narrative), while regional events of the day would often instigate satirical and critical commentary. The important thing to note here is that it was precisely the argument against mixed or multi-media that was used to defend a limited conception of modernism ("art as such") by postwar critics like Michael Fried : "what lies between the arts is theater." See "Art and Objecthood," reprinted in Gregory Babcock, ed., Minimal Art (New York : Dutton, 1968), 142. For Fried "theater" (i.e., the art form produced by the minimalists which required a "beholder") was at war with modernism, as quality and value within the postwar canon of high modernism could only obtain within a discrete and autonomous medium. Significantly, Fried indicts surrealism along with minimalism duc to its "theatrical" (i.e., boundary displacing) aspirations and effects, conditions that were antithetical to the postwar (or, for the purposes here, liberal) reconstruction of modernism. Not surprisingly, then, Hejduk's particular repetition of historical avant-garde propositions repressed within modernism entails a related pre-liberal political model: thus, his now readily explicable hybrid of "medieval surrealism," which he relates to a peculiarly futurist sounding slogan, "a metalizing of the universe." Mask of Medusa, op. cit., 122, note 3. Beyond its futurist overtones, however, Hejduk's metallurgic project connects his work to the aspirations and forms of knowledge pursued by the alchemists.
30 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, op. cit., 17, note 23. It is this "scarcity of talent" that necessitates an intensive usage of given forms, and that Deleuze and Guattari claim "allows the conception of something other than a literature of masters." Ibid.
31 See, e.g., Hejduk's opening text in Mask of Medusa, op. Cit., 26, note 3, which follows the brief parable "The Fox and the Goat."
32 Ibid., 129-131.
33 For more on this debate and an extended consideration of the following discussion, see Gerald Frug's comprehensive and suggestive study in "The City as Legal Concept," Harvard Law Review 93 (1980) : 1057.
34 Ibid. : 1087.
35 In describing the "warrior" figure, they write, "he is like a pure and immeasurable multiplicity, the pack, an irruption of the ephemeral and the power of metamorphosis .... He bears witness, above all, to other relations with women, with animals, because he sees all things in relations of becoming, rather than implementing binary distributions between 'states' : a veritable becoming-animal of the warrior, a becoming-woman, which lies outside dualities or terms as well as correspondences between relations. In every respect, the war machine is of another origin than the State apparatus." Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, op. cit., 352, note 14.
36 Ibid., 389, emphasis added.
37 Ibid., 263.
38 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, op. cit., 41-42, note 23.