“But haven’t these forms led to a disappointing formalism that discourages initiative by penalizing risk, and turns the reign of the opinion of the learned into a principle of docile prudence in which the authenticity of research is blunted even before it finally dries up?”
From “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” Jacques Lacan

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[Cut to an opening sequence of James Cameron’s “Terminator”; wide roll pan left across apocalyptic urban war landscape. Fires burn in abandoned houses, and a distant sound can be heard of machines slowly rolling over rubble, twisted metal and dancing wires throwing sparks into sky darkened by industrial gases.]

As the last days of architecture loom, the final battle is waged between the principle contenders, the aphasic architects. The fate of desire hinges in the balance. The turmoil among the linguistic poles once seemed beholden to a destiny of infinite solitude in the depths of human mind now aggress one another at the built scale, the scale of architecture.

The Battle of The Metaphorics and The Metonymics…

[Jump cut. The Past]

Roman Jakobson, the Russian linguist or self proclaimed “Russian Philologist”, described language using two principles, the metaphor and the metonym; and six programmatic elements (functions), the emotive, connotive, phatic, metalingual, referential, and importantly the poetic. By definition, the aphasic allows us to examine the principles of the creative in its ability to affect the metaphoric or the metonymic poles, rendering the one submissive, the other assertive. In his theoretical near future the two poles continue to diverge. Fueled by the impetus of technology, it’s maximum reduction, efficiency and thirst for the now, the metaphorics grew strong. In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king; and so the aphasics, with their newly discovered talent, rose to a new position in society.

Their rise to power was slow, as change in architecture inevitably is. Only the metonymics perceived the shift for what it truly was. Not a shift as it were, as so many before us had struggled against in the past only to see our inventions cede into tradition, no… this was definitely a change not enlightened by precedent.

The metonymics, passive by nature were forced into the defense. Pushed to the outskirts of the city they brooded with plans and sections bringing the two poles together again. Their functions were set out, reconstruct the elements of a language and create a safe haven for the poetic, the message for its own sake, maximum redundancy, duration, experience.