Objectification produces something that is no longer dependent on our thoughts about it. This is the inherent flaw of objectification, of architecture’s thesis: reality is independent of the mind. It is the difference between our designs and the objectification of our designs that allows us to distinguish reality; it is the difference between our designs and the objectification of our designs that is reality. Reality is the failure of design.
What if we abandoned design, architecture, and the modern project? What if we had no more suburbs or museums? What if we gave up thought and enjoyed music? What if we quit becoming and focused on being? After all, reality is the interesting part. What if we had 100% reality all the time? Would there be a reality? Would there be any difference?
There would be no reality because there would only be. Simple organisms have no concept of reality because there is no difference between thought and life, between becoming and being. It is the difference between becoming and being that allows us to realize being as enjoyable. It is our ability to become which separates us from simply being. It is our ability to be which causes us to search endlessly for a way to become an entity that can simply be. Thought necessarily includes the separation of self and world. And it is this separation which we wish to overcome.13
“If the prison is the generic form of architecture this is primarily because man?s own form is his first prison. ?man?s revolt against prison is a rebellion against his own form, against the human figure?. The only way for man to escape the architectural chain gang is to escape his form, to lose his head. This self-storming of one?s own form requires, in fact, an infinitely more underhanded strategy than one of simple destruction or escape.” Man must be dissembled; meaning must be dismembered. Bataille wrote, “Man will escape his head as a convict escapes his prison.”14
We escape our form by escaping our identity, by escaping our thoughts, by escaping our head. We overcome the separation of self and world by overcoming thought.
It is the abandonment of thought that allows us to see reality as it is: infinite. Without perception of time there is no time. There is only now and its web of interdependencies: Zen, immediate perception, apprehension and suspension, as in music, of now, of being, of immediate reality. And this results in direct interaction, materialization as conceptualization.15
Why is this level of direct perception of reality important to us? Have we not evolved away from the state of the dog and the small child? This state, and only this state, allows us to perceive reality as it is — this state includes the viewer as part of the now. This state provides the understanding, belonging, which allows us to feel and understand the now unlike any model can represent. Time is a continuous flow, a constant now. To experience this true time one must directly experience this ceaseless flow with immediate apprehension.16
Music exists in a continuous flow of the present and can only be understood with instant apprehension. When overcome with music, or emotion, or art, or life, we experience “complete mental silence,” the present is experienced directly. When listening to music there is no hidden meaning, rather “the music itself is the meaning.”17 It is with this apprehension that we “will see the material world melt back into a single flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming.”18 “There is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now“19
It is our ability to change the things perceived within the state of direct perception while exterior to this state that provides the paradox.20 Objectification is to cause to have reality independent of the mind. This is the mystery of creation: that from the mind we can create something independent of the mind. We can create from the state of thought something which can be perceived while in the state of direct perception. Does not creation necessarily include thought? Is not the only way to influence physical reality to be exterior to it? Is not the only way to affect a system to be outside of it? Is Zen creation possible? How could one begin to create without thought? Why would one create without thought? If Zen creation were possible, would it not only be a result, a product of being, a trace, pure expressionism?
