Dalibor Vesely - The Latent World of Architecture

The Latent World of Architecture

Vesely addresses the preunderstanding of world as a latent world (p. 83), that is potentially articulated and structured, and whose relationship to its visible manifestation is not immediate. The reciprocity between this prearticulated level and its visible articulation dwells within the very ontological difference that has been discussed previously. Such reciprocity is a schematic constituent of phenomena of continuity and metaphoricity, that have been constantly described throughout the primary tradition of Christian humanism in the nature of being and becoming. Vesely thus enters the core of the question of representation in terms of its coming into the level of visibility. In the sequence of Vesely's argument, the subject of visibility becomes then, of itself, problematic in nature as it intakes a background of potential articulation.

According to Vesely, "the horizon of visibility displays a synthesis of the prereflective experience and of the achievements of reflection insofar as they preserve ontological continuity with the visible" (p. 85). On the other hand, the rise onto the explicit level of visibility primarily seems to express the problem of representation in terms of what is kept from the prereflective world. This could perhaps be seen as a consequence of the traditional concept of inner representation as relating to an external reality. Vesely challenges this concept of representation, and widens it as a spectrum that ranges from the explicitness of our world down to implicit levels of articulation. Consequently, the term reality is restricted mostly to certain types of representation (e.g. virtual reality) that view reality as something extrinsic (pp. 308-315).

Vesely's concept of representation, however, takes place in terms of a communication between a wide range of levels; whereby the question that concerns representation also concerns the truth of representation, a question that has been amply developed by modern hermeneutics. In this domain, the visible world conveys a kind of knowledge of the prereflective levels of articulation that also jeopardizes the epistemological status of the visible. As we have seen, contrary to empiricist belief, the visible world by itself does not constitute an epistemological ground (pp. 84-86). Instead, our epistemological ground is constituted by features such as orientation, physiognomy, and the relative position of things with regard to one another; and it is from these features that a provisional ground comes to be constituted as regards spatiality. This ground is not a still point of reference. On the contrary, by ground is here meant a source and stream of references. This means that the explicit horizon of the visible, tangible world is the most explicit form of embodiment we have, but such a narrow horizon we can only take as a point of departure if we want to understand the rest of our world that is largely beyond visibility. This also means that the visible holds a very important part as a symbolic representation of our world, enabling us to see and imagine beyond the visible.

Finally, this means that we construe our knowledge of 'world' largely on the basis of invisible, implicit references which are only symbolically re-enacted by the visible realm. The level of visual representation may perhaps be compared to the level of more explicit verbal articulation as regards the implicit, preverbal domain of knowledge. Just as visual representation, verbal articulation has the power to emancipate from the given world, and the freedom to convey any meaning. This is a power bestowed upon representation, allowing it to withdraw from its original symbolic domain, thus establishing a tension between the instrumental nature of representation and its larger symbolic field.