dialectical images
If we look into an image of phenomena, then the phenomena would consist of the present moment (we can give credit to the rigour of architectural conventional practices and “objective” representation of photography) and the what-have-been*, which is the trace of the object, that indicates its belonging to the origin of the ghosts, supporting the narrative of either The Salt March or the slides, or both. The figurative relationship between the past, the present and the future within architectural representation can be described through Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical image. Elaborating Benjamin’s idea, Gerhard Richter speaks of such an image as a way to find correct distance and right point of view to the object, to ‘fathom the truth of that idea or object’ (2006, 145). As Richter suggests, the truth for Benjamin constitutes itself, when the right distance and perspective angle is found through the aberration of dialectical image, ‘one cannot distinguish between an aberration and a non-aberration and when one has taken leave of the delusional belief that it could be possible to decide once and for all whether an aberration or a non-aberration signals a triumph or a failure’(155). This impossibility of distinguishing one from another liberates the reading from homogeneity of conceptual framework, thus the truth comes across as something that ‘never fully yield itself to us’ (154). Here we can speculate, that the truth is a ghost, that the ghost also never truly yields itself, as being haunted does not mean to see the ghost, but to glimpse the outline of the ghost, being challenged by the question ‘was there a ghost’ ultimately giving a confirmative answer. Simultaneously, we can say that the concept of truth is an ultimate ghost of Gandhi, who named his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The dialectical image then might be applied as a methodology and a representational code in order to arrive at the tectonics of ghosts.
The essence of the dialectical image is in the figurative relationship between its objects. As the objects appear within a frame, the edges of the objects begin to interplay and blur within the figures of the allegorical and the present. In architectural representational code that can be seen as a play between the rigour of the line and the extent of the shadow. A ghost is not a ghost anymore, if we can point out at it and say ‘this is a ghost’, but, we can only point out at the image and say ‘I think there is something there, something different than now and here, but rather a trace of something else’. From this perspective, architectural representation does not speak of architecture as something that is there, instead, something that might be or might have been, which can only be encompassed through the dialectics of architectural representation, where an interplay of objects draw a line between phenomenal and objective representations. We aim to establish the relation between the haunted and the ghost, which is between an architectural design project and the narrativity, within which lays the framework. To do so, we are using aberrations within our projects to create an interplay of what is, what have been and what is yet to be, framing the narratives of Ahmedabad in order to arrive at the architectonics of the Slides and The Salt March.
*The concept of an image, as a representation of what is now and what have been comes from Gerhard Richter, “A Matter of Distance: Benjamin’S One-Way Street Through the Arcades,” Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, ed. B.Hanssen (London: Continuum, 2006). That lays out the fundament for thinking of our drawings as a dialectical image.