In an age when architectural practice committedly engages with the geological impacts of human-induced action, stories like Woolf’s may expand in their possibility to narrate the anxiety of having to live tangled amongst planetary existential crises, which intensify and complicate sea level rise, pollution, erosion, and socio-environmental injustice. These narratives may also talk about the possibility of retrieving to some state of humility, one where it matters how stories are told, and how they productively reconstruct the world every time they are told. 17 One could argue that Woolf’s stream of consciousness in the novel – which in ‘Time Passes’ becomes more of a stream of unconscious consciousness – reveals an idea of architecture that verges on the geologic. 18 By steering away from conceptions of architecture as material organizations to come closer to poetic accounts of matter, we may also become more attuned to thoughts that notice and engage in productive transitions of living indeterminately.
Woolf notices dust as a labour of the mind in its process to recover from depression. She works through material (dis-)organizations and humble matter as a way of engaging with the world. The process may help thinking of an architecture that can help address our indeterminate times and refine an ethics of matter that begins to explain how matter comes to matter, that is, an ethics engaged with productive reconfigurations of matter, and how it ‘feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’ 15 Woolf’s architectural condition is not just reconfigured in space or time; it reconfigures the spacetime it activates both inside and outside the house. Noticing is a set of decisions of how the process is registered and how it may be continuously reconfigured. In traversing across scale – from the dust speckle on the windowsill to the vastness of the ocean illuminated by the lighthouse beam – noticing becomes a way of ‘knowing [that] is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility.’ 16 It suggests the need to be accountable for the marks it causes and the entanglements it chooses to notice.
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15 Karen Barad, “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”, interviewed by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies , eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Open Humanities Press, 2012. pp48–70 See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007
17 Haraway quotes what she considers to be an important lesson from social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with). … It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories. Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. quoted in Donna J. Haraway, SF , 4. The author makes a similar argument in relation to the experience of Manhattan’s environmental phenomena in Tiago Torres-Campos, ‘Duck and Cover: Experiencing the Anthropocene in 21st Century Manhattan’, in Pidgin Magazine , Issue 27. Princeton: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2020. pp132– 147 18 In To the Lighthouse , light enables both the stream of consciousness and, one could argue, a correlated state of mind that will be here called a stream of unconscious consciousness.
16 Idem, p52
TIAGO TORRES-CAMPOS s a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He co-edited ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ (2022) and completed a PhD in Architecture by Design, through which he explored architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic. www.cntxtstudio.com
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