Woolf’s description of the house slowly dissolving reveals a desire to engage with entropy, similar in many ways to how dust has been described architecturally as a spatial index for dynamic readings beyond registrations of building or form. In ‘Time Passes’ the house becomes the narrator of the passage of time, not as an internal and intuitive Bergsonian duration – as in other parts of the novel – but as an external and material poetic account of matter. The house becomes an assemblage of insentient apparatuses that scrutinize it internally and register entropy. If dust unsettles established orders of permanence and control, Teresa Stoppani then claims that engaging in a way of thinking that notices dust as a transitive verb – dusting, meaning both removing through cleansing and sprinkling with pulverised matter – implies a radical approach to architecture that questions existing official histories or institutionalized spaces of representation, and demands new systems of reference. 5 Dust as agent of performative change that forces time to be brought into the architectural realm, may desecrate architecture – perhaps the reason why it has been consistently removed from representational systems – but it also activates a relation between ‘making and undoing … at work with and on the materials of architecture.’ 6 Dust exerts both external and internal pressure, that is, it both accumulates on architecture and breeds from within. An architectural practice that notices dust in the ways suggested by George Bataille, is one that engages more honestly and openly with entropy by registering materiality across different stages of integration and disintegration. 7 *
Woolf’s narrative of the house is activated by light, both cosmic and electric. The sun dictates the opposition between diurnal stillness and nocturnal chaos, and it varies seasonally. We are allowed into a world of entropy witnessed through the insentient ‘eye’ of the house and the help of a rhythmic lighthouse beam. The lighthouse, both distant and present throughout the novel, pulsates light into the house – two short beams and a longer one – allowing it ‘to scrutinise’ its own interior. It is through light that Woolf describes dust sedimenting, both chemically and geologically. 8 Light photons also accumulate on the surfaces inside the house as they lose energy and sediment in materials weathering through bleaching or fading. Woolf describes the house as an architectural condition that exists in between states of matter, in between still being solid and already disintegrating into particles. Light helps diffuse boundaries across scale and it expands the threshold between the dusty interior and the much wider territory it connects with, to the point when it stops being any of those specifically, or in fact, acquiring the possibility of becoming any of those at any given moment. The expanded threshold becomes a porosity of light, waves and particles. 9 It is something not quite architecture anymore but not yet geology either. 8 The properties and qualities of light help Woolf examine in detail the dust particles in suspension and observe their eventual deposition in layers that coat the house itself. In chemistry, this tendency for particles in suspension to settle out of the fluid that keeps them in fluctuation and come to rest against a barrier is called sedimentation. In geology, the definition of sedimentation differs; it often refers to the opposite of erosion and it involves actions of building up in layers or horizons. 9 When zooming out of To the Lighthouse to look more widely into Woolf’s work, it becomes possible to relate some of her literary devices with significant discoveries in physics throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it is not uncommon to read about the relations between Woolf’s stream of consciousness and Einstein’s relative space-time continuum. Woolf was a contemporary of Einstein. The Theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out , was published a year earlier. She was very much attuned to the scientist’s revolutionary ideas, mainly through her friendship with Bertrand Russell. In To the Lighthouse , more specifically, the architectural space is revealed through light and dust, engaging even if in a free, literary sense, to the wave-particle quantum model. There is a significant number of scholars who assert Woolf’s tangible and premonitory relationship to the wave-particle model that came to define quantum physics throughout the century, in anticipation of the physicists themselves, like Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, or Schrödinger. It is precisely this duality of qualifying matter according to the wave-particle quantum model that Timothy Morton attributes to the qualities of architectural space described in ‘Time Passes’. See Paul Tolliver Brown, ‘Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse ’, in Journal of Modern Literature , Vol. 32, No. 3, 2009. pp39–62; and Mark Hussey, ‘To the Lighthouse and Physics: The Cosmology of David Bohm and Virginia Woolf’, in New Essays on Virginia Woolf , ed. Helen Wussow. Dallas: Contemporary Research Press,1995 pp79–97 For a more thorough explanation of how Morton engages with Woolf’s novel, see Timothy Morton in conversation with Tom Wiscombe, in Sci-Arc (2016), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2lbtwd3KZU.
5 Stoppani studies convergences between Bataille’s 1920s texts ‘Dust’, ‘Formless’ and ‘Architecture,’ all three included as entries in his 1920s ‘Critical Dictionary.’ Teresa Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille),’ in The Journal of Architecture , 12:4, 2007. p437
6 Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions,’ 441.
7 See Georges Bataille, ‘Critical Dictionary,’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica. London: Atlas Press, 1995. pp35–36; 42–43; 51–52
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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