Drawing on Borromini 

  
   
Gilles Deleuze in his book 'the fold - Leibniz and the Baroque' sees the notion of the fold as both a structural and metaphorical supplement to what he describes as the Baroque. He writes of 'Identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time, the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement' as the main strands of enquiry that he will follow dealing with this subject.

He continues . . . ‘the Baroque could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble and atomise when they crack down on an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of the shoreline. The curls and wisps of colour . . the depths of a tile of marble’. He paraphrases Proust . . . 'when we follow the ramifying and dilating branches of leaves piled in the concavity of the amber depths of a cup of tea’. Deleuze suggests that the ‘experience’ of the Baroque encompasses the idea and the physicality of the fold, the significance of the qualities the materials, and celebration of displacement and the worship of the non-parallel. These three items, the fold, the material and displacement will be the concepts I will be concentrating on in this note.
 

Deleuze does not see the Baroque as a style, but more as a function which produces endless folds which arrive from all directions and which exist in many styles. The Baroque does not invent things, it twists and twirls them, over and over on top of each other, to infinity. These folds flow without any definite plan and stretch out indefinitely. Matter is amassed according to a first type of fold, and organized according to a second. These conceptual imaginings are mirrored in a more prosaic description of what Wölfflin sees in architectural terms as 'Baroque tendencies'

widening of the floor    /      matter handled in masses or aggregates          /
        fewer perpendiculars    /       low and curved stairs that push into space    /  flattening of pediments         /       matter spilling over into space /        rounding of angles      /       limestone producing a 'spongy' surface          /       vertical forms  /

This note, this piece, this fragment requires as Heidegger might say, a temple. My temple will be Borromini's San Carlino alle quattro Fontane.

San Carlo was Borromini's first major commission. The order of the Discalced Trinitarians acquired the site in 1611 and building of the Church commenced in 1638 and the interior was finished by 1641. Due to financial problems the facade was not completed until 1682. In 1667, the year of Borromini's death, the ground floor only was complete. The building was completed by Borromini's nephew, Barnardo. One of Borromini's aims was to move away from a plan that developed from the motif of the Greek cross - a central area with associated secondary localities, to a concept of a space which seems continuous, flowing. This desire was partly fuelled by the Council of Trent's desire to stress the importance of the Holy Sacrament, which suggested a more intimate, theatrical space than a cross or oval supplies an answer to. It is here that Borromini constructed an elaborate geometric construction which provided so much comment and controversy at the time. Though Borromini was bound by the various geometrical conventions of the day, his novel ways of combining these produced in turn a novel and challenging architecture.
As the Renaissance rejected the Gothic's dependence on the technical possibilities of the arch and returned to the neo-Platonic orders of symmetry and proportion, Borromini began the movement away from the tyranny of the plan. Whereas the Renaissance architects had renounced the flying buttress and other Gothic qualities such as showy decoration, excessive height and the elimination of the wall in favour of stained glass, the Baroque architects now moved away from the renaissance occupation with the barrel vault and essentially vertically supported masonry. The walls of San Carlo consist of bays, niches and straights which combine to form a wall of movement. The columns, for instance, are set into the walls so that although they still perform strong supportive roles they never interrupt the horizontal flow. The walls are treated in a sculptural manner, and there is evidence to suggest that Borromini had studied at length Michelangelo's staircase in the Sistine Chapel's Laurentian Library. The altar too is 'furniture', a separate case : it is not allowed to arrest the circular motion. Borromini's drawings were lost for a number of years, and were only discovered in Vienna in 1935. Indeed Borromini was extremely secretive with his drawings, and only supplied masons with essential measurements. As it had been the basic tenet of architectural practice from Brunelleschi to Alberti that all buildings were constructed from geometric relationships, there has always been controversy over Borromini's plan of San Carlo. That this should be so is precisely due to the 'flowing' nature of the elevations, and without Borromini's drawings, there are difficulties in discovering the geometrical logic behind the plan with 'only' the building itself as evidence.
 

  
Fold 1

 
This centering on notions of curvature suggests to Deleuze a connection with Leibniz’s theory that the curvature of the universe is prolonged by three concepts - the fluidity of water, the elasticity of bodies, and the moving spirit as a mechanism. He gives a description of the universe which is compressed by an active force that endows matter with a curvilinear or spinning movement. This compression forces matter into the 'negative' space surrounding it, producing a maelstrom of vortices inside each other, each dividing each other towards infinity. Matter is spongy, porous, without emptiness - 'holes' contained within other 'holes'. The totality of the universe is a 'pond of matter in which there exist different ponds and waves.'
Leibniz's philosophy acknowledges myriad connections and series of concepts that are not held in a prescribed order or unifying system. Multiplicity and variety of inflections produce ‘events' or 'vibrations' 'with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples'. These do not move in a 'spiral [philosophical]' manner, but they radiate and disseminate 'in a geography of experience', so that we can imagine the movement of light and sound as 'folds' of ‘ethereal matter’ that ‘waft and waver’.
. . . . bending, folding ; anticlines, synclines - Deleuze invents the term geophilosophy to describe a conceptual activity of 'absolute deterritorialisation'. He describes this in figural terms, as ‘activity sliding on the surface of the world, as in a wave. A 'surfer'. The Geophilosopher rides the crest of turbulence, on the shoulders of the wave that diffuse the energy into the atmosphere’. This a development of Leibniz' s discourse on chaos, a portrayal of a subject swirling in a maelstrom of spatial doubt. This ensuing anxiety defines the individual body, and its elasticity and bending motions produce extension. The subject lives in and reacts to its own development as a series of folds.
From contemplating the natural world, Deleuze moves his attention to the application of these concepts in Art. He conceives of artworks composed of units that are neither logical or organic, that is, neither based upon pieces as a long unity or a fragmented totality; nor formed or prefigured by those units in the course of a logical development or of an organic evolution.
Deleuze rejects the existence of chaos, but describes what he calls Leibniz's 'approximations to chaos'. This would be the 'sum of all possibles,' that is, all individual essences in so far as each tends to exist on its own account. Leibniz's own thoughts were a synthesis of the Cartesian idea that matter was a continuous, homogeneous quantity, and that of the Atomists who conceived the world as being made from a combination of solid atoms surrounded by empty space. Various combinations give rise to the variety of the world. Their problem was to explain cohesion - why and how particular atoms attracted each other. The Cartesians' problem was to explain why the world consisted of different physical parts. Descartes' division of reality into two categories, thought (consciousness, as in beliefs, emotions, theories, perceptions) and extensions in space (shape, size, movement) and their manifestation in modes mirrors Leibniz's individual substances and dependent existences and the division of reality into collections and properties such as mental and semi-mental. in a physical sense, Leibniz's chaos would/might amount to depthless shadows, a vision at one with the Baroque, with its niches and protrusions and differences between interior and exterior space.
 
In a psychic form, chaos would be the undifferentiated saturation of the senses, a world where all information was of equal significance. Deleuze develops this argument further by linking Leibniz's theories of chaos to those of Whitehead’s notion of the idea of extension. Whitehead’s theory of extension is explained in a figural sense as the imagining of an object being so stretched so that it merges with its neighbouring object, and so on, so that the these objects can only be defined as being categories of each other.This has a connection to the concept of the fold and its dependence on the alterable, the changeable, the fickle, the flexible, the unstable, the unsteady, the vacillating. Extensions are always in movement. There is always change and modification. Components are taken out and others substituted. Permanence must always evolve from a state of flux, a hardening of the magma. Deleuze asks, 'is it the same flow, the same thing, or the same occasion?' the Object can be thought of as something passing through time, constantly gaining or losing material, or something that is unchanged by time, true or valid for all time, immutable.
This constitutes an infinite series. It is a vibration with the potential to cover every wavelength, every harmonic, and every visual and tactile coordinate. Any point in time or space occupies a point within this series. These vibrations are themselves composed of elements that have particular properties of size, and occupancy of space. Or timbre for instance, in terms of tint, tone, translucency, defraction. These also can enter on their own infinite series created out of their own unique qualities. They are measured in intensities. A third quality, one that mediates the indefinite or the demonstrable is the nature of the individual - one that has parts, and is a part, and whose parts have inherent features, and whose individuality is at the same time one of those parts. [dog = legs + body + ears + 'dogness'].
Whitehead sees the individual as a creative force, manifested through a growing together of initially separate parts or organs. It has collected and grown these through a prehension of the need for those qualities. Prehension signifies individuality , the person, the individual. 'the eye is a prehension of light'. Deleuze goes on to say that echoes, reflections, traces, prismatic deformations, perspective, folds are prehensions that somehow anticipate 'psychic life'.

The problem is not how to finish the fold, but how to continue it, how to bring it to infinity. It is not only because the fold affects all materials that it thus becomes expressive matter, with different scales, speeds and different vectors (mountains and waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain).

This essence rather than reality manifests itself in the expectancy of a repetition, an absence, change in the object repeated, but a changed 'slant' in the expectation of someone contemplating it. But repetition sets up an expectancy in the mind, the hint of the possibility of difference in the manner in which the two events repeat one another - or , rather repeat the same act or event to come.
 
The illegitimacy of the façade also questions the exact state of play at the end of the repetition - whether or not that at the end of the repetition, everything recommences with the first stage. There is a third happening in the repetition, the appearance of the 'for itself'. The first two states only repeat something that appears for itself in the third stage, where this 'thing' repeats itself. This continual dividing that Deleuze talks about can be discussed in temporal terms too. The present is the repeater, the only presence that can accept/include action. The past is repetition itself, fixed, only offering itself up for distortion. The future is that which is repeated, having subordinated the other two, stripping them of their individual freedoms and directions. But as the Baroque façade continues its indefinite progress [or at least journey] across its own façade, pixel by pixel, reliving and reforming its own visage as it does so, the imagination retains the image of the previous case as the new one appears. It is able to gather cases and compress their memory into states of being which give off a particular 'aroma'. Not in the sense of memory or reflection, merely as a synthesis of time - time in the sense of the repetition of instants which constitute the present. The nature of the past and the future is also alive in the present - contained in the contractions of their own diminution. The façade is the scene of all these repetitions, rhythms, displacements and disguises, their divergences and decenterings. It is the arena in which they unfold and indoctrinate one another.
 
 

Fold 2
 
plan (plæn) n.
a detailed scheme, method, etc., for attaining an objective.
a proposed, usually tentative idea for doing something.
a drawing to scale of a horizontal section through a building taken at a given level. Compare ground plan, elevation an outline, sketch, etc
(in perspective drawing) any of several imaginary planes perpendicular to the line of vision and between the eye and object depicted.
to form a plan (for) or make plans (for).
to make a plan of (a building).
to have in mind as a purpose; intend.[C18: via French from Latin planus flat ]
 
contrivance, design, device, idea, method, plot, procedure, programme, project, proposal, proposition, scenario, scheme, strategy, suggestion, system. blueprint, chart, delineation, diagram, drawing, illustration, layout, map, representation, scale drawing, sketch. arrange, concoct, contrive, design, devise, draft, formulate, frame, invent, organize, outline, plot, prepare, represent, scheme, think out. aim, contemplate, envisage, foresee, intend, mean, propose, purpose.
 
 
The definition of the word plan contains contradictions inside itself. On the one hand there is the notion of the detailed scheme, method, etc., for attaining an objective, and on the other hand the notion of the proposed, usually tentative idea for doing something. Instead therefore of the ‘definition’ being a place of unquestioned stability and unquestioned authority, is becomes a place of conflict and discrepancy. Plan A. Plan B. This discrepancy suggests to me a line of enquiry that I will later be applying to San Carlo, and eventually to my own visual commentary on the building and its relation to these ideas.
Initially this notion rotates around the sententious – the litigious, quarrelsome need for the plan to control the building – as if supplying the foundations weren't enough, there is this unspent desire to control ‘all the way up’. The Baroque will always go against this nature, so the first floor will always be a place of conquest, indecision, and temper. There is a frontier between plan and action. Somewhere there [out there, beyond the locus] is the place where plans become action. This must also be the place, the same place, where there is a leakage backwards : where actions in themselves reinvent themselves as plans. There is a drama unfolding here . . . . .  

The plan of the plan   /    the onset of a repetition      /      the difference in temporal activity between planning and 'the plan'     /       The plan as in the scene of manners, the construction of a rhetoric of servility that its very sententiousness destroys        /       the plan as both a 'static' force and a 'dynamic' force         /       can anything be purely a 'plan' ? Can it stay as a plan indefinitely?       /      planning begets the 'plan' , which returns to the idea to planning        /       The notion of frontiers and the parergon, the notion of the frame around the plan which protects and at the same time negates the plan itself   /      The construction of a plan as the result of 'the work'. e.g.. the 'plan' is in a sense a conclusion [ the introduction / preface argument ]      /        the plan therefore is figural too. It is seen to follow, and therefore takes on a historical and critical nature which a true 'plan' could never have.

The plan is an aesthetic. It has no interface with action. [But it must have some historicy, it must have the kernels of other plans.] There can never be a 'new plan'. A plan will have as part of its own plan a palimpsest.

. . . . . . . . Viewing the plan

It is a blank, not part of the thing itself, but the thing itself can not exist without it. The art, the 'thing', points back to the plan. Plan. A proposition : a sentence [sentenced, convicted].
The presence of the plan : the ongoing repetition needed to continually keep the plan 'planning' . The plan, and the planning, may develop into cliché. The plan as a stupidity : a faux-naïf expression of an intent which is at once limited in its scope - namely, its extent of movement from the topos. The perception of the plan inside the art object. The notion of the plan as a sublime in which the rendering is its deterioration. This rate of descent of death. But the necessity of the 'next'. Planning for the plan. The 'plan' can never begin. There is no 'before the plan'. The plan as an arena of conflict between the demands of composition and organisation
 
. . . . . . . The plan assumes a sense of continuance, an unfolding of an idea. The repetition inside the plan escapes, egresses in the form of the fold, which in turn generates alternative plans, lets in the idea of the baroque . . . . . . . These lines constitute the ‘planning’. They are not a plan, in the sense of a blueprint, but they do communicate the information that will be discussed, and at the same time leave the possibility of the plan being something that may evolve with the material, that at any one moment in time the plan, as it then exists, will be different from any other plan that previously called itself by that name, for word Plan contains contradictions inside itself.

The plan can now be thought of as being between the high and the low. Parts of the plan can also exist at different levels. The plan now has volume, real space inside itself. Different elements of the plan - the oval, the cross, the octagon - can be imagined to have different degrees of influence at different heights. This creation of independent levels of influence gives rise to the notion of alternative foci of stress and repose which alter the shape, the 'grain' of the work. What is the basis of this argument between the high and the low? Structurally the high is always indebted to the low. The plan is always the Plan. It is always the disciplinarian. the foundations will always be present at the discovery of the building, from the present forward to antiquity. It always has an authority in that is recognised as the signature of the building where any storey [ historia, picture, and the Latin narrative {story}] plan would seem counterfeit and a location for a scene of deceit. It is this indebtedness to the ground plan, this continual grievance [the tear stain running down the facade] and jealousy between the two that results in the distrust and lack of confidence which manifests itself in their mutual surveillance. This surveillance is the epitome of contemplation, it has no action in itself, it is always hidden [veiled], it has no action itself, things are done through it. An interpreter, a spokesman, a representative that causes understanding between the low and the high. Having no language of its own, the "truchement" causes meaning in one idiom to be comprehended in another medium - what in Greek was called metaphorein, to carry over from one to the other.
As Deleuze sees the Pyramid as an 'event', so can Borromini's action of in/venting be thought of as an e/vent of pleating, a folding of pushing back, of the opening of a hole, of creating a texture of possibilities. For it is the way the material is folded that constitutes this texture. This supporting event, the supporting, the mutuality inside [the folds of] the supportive, shifts inside itself, vibrates - but not as in a state of flux though - they are always separate, their dependence in their separateness. They shift inside the fold, and as they do so [need to do so], they become the gauze of the fold, the secondary and the main event at the same time. Counterpoint, invention {making up the falsehoods, the fabrications} [the three part invention]. Retrograde. Inversion. But like any invention [chromatic / fantasy] the repetition always alters the narrative. Moving outwards from the chapel's centre, the plan reads as an octagonal star facet whose stem ends describe an oval : moving inwards the chapel reads as an oval modified by a cross with an octagon defining its centre.
                
. . . the resultant oval prefigures the oval of the dome. The dome enters the plan. The event of the plan. The objectives of the geometric construction are threefold. The discovery of the oval, which will locate the dome. The location of the octagon - which will in turn locate the support system. and the fixing of the points of entrances to the four chapels. These holes belong to the same pictorial vision. The fold pushes backwards into the four side chapels [where it is refolded, repeated, reverberated by these conches]. The manner of this folding creates the consistency and grain of the building. The nature of the thing is defined less by its distinct psyche or temper than by the style which makes them inseparable inside their folds. The manner of the folding distributes the light, disseminates the colours and the concavity and convexity of the trembling textures which give the forms their coherence. The nature of the event is present too in the nature of the variance of these textures, those layers, strata, densities which form and reform the fold. But the fold is never repeated exactly, for the nature of the fold is only a temporary conceit, and even the same conditions are themselves conditioned by the effect it produces. Hystereris/ husterosis / husteros - the coming is always deferred. From these hesitations rises the façade. Pure theatre. But not pure in any way in terms of itself. Pure in its striving for the higher ground, the higher point, which surveys the folds below, and contemplates their origins, and can only accept these in terms of explanations, not secrets, not composite parts, but in a projection, a miss[vei]le. San Carlo also pre-exists in terms of a concept before and during its geometric construction. The geometry reinforces and makes redundant the concept as it is drawn.
 

        s                             
s       t      o     r     y
        o
        r
        e
        y
 
        . . . the Baroque invents . . . . . .
invention too as in the making up of falsehoods deceits, deceptions, dissimulations, inveracities (rare) mendacities, perjuries, prevarications, untruths, lies, misstatements, stories (eventually, as we have seen, storeys), untruths, fibs, fictions, and fabrications. Fabrication. The inventing of the fabric of the building, its fabrication through its physical making, and at the same time of its making, the fabrication of its own rhetoric, conceit and repetition. The narrative of its being. As the now-invented leaks its own artifice, the baroque confirms, legalises, the artifice/artificiality in the-thing-invented, its 'two part invention' - the counterpoint of plan and elevation, of interior and exterior.
 
The inside and the outside        
 

The infinite fold separates or moves between matter and soul, the façade. This face itself hides a duality , a bogus [two faced] pretence as the dupe of the interior, its 'bold face' giving rise to doubt in its 'surface dressing'. The façade demands that 'reflections', 'echoes', 'doubles', and 'souls' overcome 'equalities', and 'cycles'. There is no 'exchange system' in use - 'theft' and 'gift' are the only currency. Doors and windows - folds within a fold. Jean Rousset defines the Baroque as the severing of the facade from the inside, and talks too of the risk of 'explosion' caused by interior decoration. The façade always thrusts itself forward while the interior internalises.
.
and the closed room, the outside and the inside.                
                        
 
inflection - the word is changing within itself too. This inflection has its own inside and outside, its own façade and i/anteriority. This scene of modulation of the fold's voice in pitch or tone or timbre [grain] helps to deflect the fold, to encourage its curving around, its curvaceousness, its progress from inflectere, to curve round, to fleecer, to bend] and from concave to convex or vice versa, continually stopping to emit points of inflection, stationary points on a curve at which the tangent is horizontal or vertical and where tangents on either side have the same sign.
 
This line of inflection is actualised in the soul but realised in matter, each one on its own side. Such is the baroque trait: an exterior always on the outside, an interior always on the inside. An infinite 'receptivity', and infinite 'spontaneity': the outer façade of reception and the inner rooms of action. Up to now baroque architecture is forever confronting two principles, a bearing principle and a covering principle. Conciliation of the two will never be direct, but necessarily harmonic, inspiring a new harmony: it is the same expression, the same line, that is expressed in the elevation of the inner song of the soul, through memory or by heart, and the extrinsic fabrication of material partitions, from cause to cause but, justly, what is expressed does not exist outside its expressions.
 
 

 
The high and the low      -       the perfect accord of severing

Initially, 'i', inside the initial, the initial ness of the initial - Already the fold is awakening. The initial, the capital offence, answerable by the guillotine/ hymen/ scoring,/ 'knowing the score' [ARTFUL] neither eventful, in the sense of quantity, full of events - the repetition of events is the event, but the event is always upstaged [in the full spatial meaning] by the next event. Previous to the severing is the marking out, the decisions made each side if the cut, the imaginary stories that unfold (without drawing to attention that word) with each notion of the action. cutting nor non-cutting, cutting or non-cutting wherever, this scoring, [scoring out - deleting or cancelling by marking through with a line or lines; cross out] previous to the fold, but suggesting and demanding a territorial assessment followed by the mapping out, the scoring such as in the full score, with all the parts appearing on separate staves vertically arranged. scoring, cutting also harbours a grievance. What is the basis of this argument between the high and the low? Structure-wise the high is always indebted to the low. The plan is always the Plan.
 
For the lower has in turn its guilt complex. The hierarchy of low and high with its complementary law and punishment. The resolution of tension is achieved through the division into two levels, the two floors being of one and the same world (the line of the universe). The façade-matter goes down below, while the soul-room goes up above. The infinite fold then moves between the two levels. But by being divided, it greatly expands on either side: the fold is divided into folds, which are tucked inside and which spill onto the outside, thus connected as are the high and the low.
 
As Deleuze here describes Baroque ‘tendencies’, I now want to revisit the scene of these arguments and to see how the underlying questions and anomalies discovered in [out of ] the structure of San Carlo by Steinberg can find an egress, some form of relief, in a new construction of my own invention. In other words how these findings by Deleuze out of Leibniz can re-fold themselves and regenerate the 'event', The object of this new work will to act as a ‘panser’, a bandage, a surveillance.
 
 

 Fold 3

To restate /refold Deleuze

Deleuze sees the notion of the fold as both a structural and metaphorical addendum to what he describes as the Baroque. He writes of 'Identical traits existing as constants within the most diverse environments and periods of time, the proliferation of mystical experience, the birth of the novel, a fragility of infinitely varied patterns of movement' as the main strands of enquiry that he will follow in dealing with this subject. He continues . . . ‘the Baroque could be located in the protracted fascination we experience in watching waves heave, tumble and atomise when they crack down on an unfolding line being traced along the expanse of the shoreline.'

Leo Steinberg's analysis of San Carlo suggests to me that the possibility of Borromini‘s reluctance to disseminate his ‘plans’ may well suggest the possibility of gaming in his desire that his [paper] plans would not be common knowledge, and that the structure itself, the stone, would not itself mark out the true origins of its geometry. So from the very beginning [before even the preface/introduction had been written] there has existed some thought of a sense of mystery – Deleuze’s ‘proliferation of mystical experience’ – a notion that he connects with the notion of narrative.

Beyond the block of stone there is the sentence, the discourse of the building [the building of ]. Borromini’s first contact with architecture was in his work as a mason, originally when working on St. Peter’s. The shaping and smoothing of stone so as to allow them to meet each other in exactitude. Also, in fact, the meeting of geometry and the real world – marked figurally by the ‘irrational angle’ of the intersection between Via delle Quattro Fontane and Via Venti Septembre at Quatre Fontane. Here before the geometry materializes, the purity of a geometric construction is compromised by geography . . . is this too touched by Deleuze’s geophilosopher? It is the street that initially gains the controlling interest. The worldly interrupts the Holy. Circumstance challenges order. The pure line of the draughtsman and the action of the builder. The drawing [the scene of the artist] is enlarged/translated, with all that entails, to that of the full-scale plan [the scene of the mason] The first act is to create the foundations, to move in the opposite direction to heaven. The building can then rise, and San Carlo rises as a double.

The hymen of the exterior contrasts with the moulding of the interior. Of marble and stucco. Of precomposition and improvisation. For the inside the structure needs only to be a rough approximation. There is the stucco, the skin to be added, the material that will compensate if necessary, and will ‘point’, articulate the geometrical form of the art object. As San Carlo rose, the arabesque nature of the ‘spaces-in-between' were improvised. The resolution of the complex three-dimensional curves, in many cases not to be repeated, were undoubtedly arrived at ‘in the building of’. So in San Carlo’s, Borromini’s improvisatory geometry was mirrored in its forming. Indeed, the surfaces suggested in the plans were possibly constructed through improvisation. So San Carlo even as it rises from the ground begins to compromise its own plan, to see itself in the form of a narrative escaping from the sententiousness of its plan. But for the narrative [itself] to exist [to be built] there must be some notion of a plan, there must exist a hierarchy of instances. Perceiving the building is not just ‘following the story’, but is also about recognising its construction, 'arranging' the structures vertically and horizontally, inventing metaphors between these two, and also between those other two, the inside and the outside.

These instances sow the seed of ‘being’, of again, the ‘thingliness’, the seed of the narrative - something that will come to fruition later in the convention of a ‘functional unit’. Everything about/in the building is functional - even if it were seemingly to strive for the opposite. But these blocks are not necessarily ‘structural blocks’. They do not necessarily coincide with a material - the stone, the stucco, but may coincide with other forms - psychological forms - behaviours, intentions, emotions. The language of ‘standing’ is not the same as the language of articulated language. The ‘standing stones’ form a narrative : they are independent of linguistic units – intersections, constructions, lengths. Indeed, the two languages don’t necessarily need to share the same ‘points’ in metaphorical or geometrical senses. At the commencement of the gaze of San Carlo there are created, through necessity, the Functions, the cardinal points, which inaugurate or conclude an uncertainty, a space, a relationship of spaces. They do not necessarily appear 'dramatic' but entail some uncertainty. There is some 'risk' in these spaces. The spaces can be decorated – but this ‘decoration’ must not force a change of direction. These are in effect catalysers. As Cardinal functions move the narrative on: catalysers effect the surface, the qualities of the stone/stucco.

Further factors bearing on the [apparent] ‘movement’ of the stone are ‘indices’, the pointers, signallers which diffuse and disseminate the 'psychological state', and create the gift of 'identity' and 'atmosphere'. It is in their gift too to invite the activity of deciphering, of development of its own interior critique. And in the centre, central to requirements are the animants, the agents of the sententia, who locate the thing in time and space, bring knowledge, serve to authenticate the referent. These Functions, Catalyses, Indices and Animants organise and charge the space and surfaces that are San Carlo.
The animants bring forward the question of syntax. How are the different units put together to form a narrative? What are the rules? How do they relate to each other? The nature of the narrative causes a confusion between consecution and consequence, temporality and logic. There is a problem with time here. Between time as a reality - the tale must be rooted in temporality - and another time, the contrast between a concept such as tragedy (defined by the unity of action), and one of historical narrative (plurality of actions and the unity of time). It is this folding that allows logical time and chronological time to coexist, to produce a new sense of time that is expanding and contracting inside its own momentum. The re-construction of San Carlo aims at a structural description to the chronological illusion of its own narrative, in the sense that time only exists as a semiotic system - true time is mimetic. San Carlo’s narrative functions as a series of sequences. These sequences portray themselves as ‘points of choices’ . Places, spaces, times, durations where choices are made. Views expressed. Decisions made. A scene of tension, of boundaries, of edges. These sequences are always […] framed. Named, Signed and of course copied and counterfeited. But these stones must have no antecedent and no consequent. Sequences are moments of 'risk' - the narrative can take off in various different directions. several sequences can be woven in to each other - they move in counterpoint. These only halt when there is a break in a higher level, where they draw their meanings.
there can be actions [forms] without characters[stone] - but not characters [stones]without actions [forms]. Later, the character - who might only have a name - acquires a place, a position in the structure, later a psychology constructed from their function and position [importance] in the building [of] . The stones [characters ] are essential tools to carry 'action' in the narrative - can there be narrative without 'characters'? . . . but . . . these 'characters' cannot be classified or described in the sense of 'persons'. They are participants rather than beings. And these participants must, as part of this game, submit themselves to rules. Firstly to those of derivation – of relationships and hierarchies, and secondly to rules of action – the transformations of these relationships. Stones are [cast] in opposites - Donor/receiver, helper/opponent. The definition of the stone is always judged in relation to the participation in a sphere of actions - desire, communication , struggle.

San Carlo, the cross, the meeting point of donor and  beneficiary. I : you.
 
 
The narrator, the listener/reader. Is the author the narrator? To what extent does Borromini ‘donate’ San Carlo? Who is the donor of the narrative? For the narrative emanates from the person[author] [Borromini], but there is an endless interchange between the 'personality' and the 'art'. What Borromini is attempting is to construct a rift between the narrator as an impersonal consciousness, knowing everything of his characters, limiting his narrative to what the characters know or observe as if the characters were the senders of the narrative. Narration receives its meaning from the world around it. Outside of narration there are other systems - sociological, economic, ideological, and other elements, historical facts, behaviours etc. San Carlo gives these stones a 'situation' - a space in which their narrative is consumed. But Borromini constructed a very modern space for his Church – one where author meets narrator, where a play exists within a play, an epistolary space of endless palimpsests.
 
. . . there are two processes involved in Borromini’s building. Articulation and segmentation produces units, and integration   gathers these units together to form meanings. There is a duality here - of articulation and form, and integration and meaning. The form of narrative is displayed in two powers – the expanding and amplifying [folding] of its signs over the length of the building, and the inserting of ‘expansions’ into these distortions. These may seem 'outside the frame', but an attribute of narrative is the ability/need to include 'deviations', where the units of a sequence are broken up by the insertion of units from other sequences. A situation where parts of the narrative radiate in different directions. Situations seemingly existent/reactive may be separated by other events in the narrative. The building therefore begins to assert its own ‘time’ [event] . It begins to exist in its own time, its own invented time, its own ' logical time', as distinct from a 'real' time outside its frame. But these time zones can never be completely separated, there is always a passageway between them, each of them is capable and has the responsibility of gifting time to each other. This suspended time, this . . . . . . 'suspense', is a form of distortion too, a folding in on itself and a subsequent ejaculation of its spirit [gifting birth]. In these sequences there is room/time for - delay and renewal - anxiety and pleasure, the 'yearning', the 'pleasure' of the eventuality . . . . 'a game of structures made by representing order as fragility'. This separation also results in 'gaps', which can be filled with . . . . ‘waiting’
        
A feature of the Baroque is the fragmentation of intention between the lower level and the higher level. The reasons for these fractures are often complex and consist of many incidents on many levels, which in turn need an organisation to enable them to relate together. . . . . an Isotropy – a multi-directional unity of meaning, a quality instilled [in the stucco] which gifts itself, its isotropy, to the level below. The architecture of isotropy is not' regular' - simple-complex -classical therefore, but already Baroque in its intentions. The Isotropy carries within itself the dyslexia, a self perpetrating co-ordination , a seeming lack of ‘muscular co-ordination’, resulting in instability, erratic movement, a trembling which augments itself into the two levels, the high and the low, the perfect accord of severing. It is the 'surfacing' of these various units from different levels at different times that gives the building its forward momentum, its imagination, its narrative freedom, its ability not to be 'hemmed in' by its own language. The fold therefore traces the building’s narrative from the phone, the merest detail, to the rhetoric of the cupola, and then traces a return path through all its little sentences. It is this fold , this Force which constantly redirects the paths of geometry and narrative to split and collide between these two storeys. The creativity of/in San Carlo’s language is therefore situated between two codes, the linguistic and the translinguistic. The ‘Art Work’ is a matter of statements of detail where imagination is mastery of the code. San Carlo’s narrative therefore does not 'represent' but presents a continuum of Events not necessarily in a mimetic order. The 'reality' of a sequence lies in the logic of its construction. The origin of a sequence is the need to vary repetition, to escape the Platonic copy and cliché. The excitement of the narrative is not in the 'action', but the discovering of the veiling of the form (and the fractured temporal relation between the two) inside its very own mimicry. The sequence is not the observation of reality but the substitution of repetition with variety – the impossibility of repetition and cliché that is created by the gravitational imposition of the fold. San Carlo’s narrative demonstrates how this imposition displays a higher level of meaning than the content of the story – the stones, the plan, the form, eventually, the work.
Let us consider in more detail the notion of this word, this word in itself, the Form. Plato would only accept evidence that was 'eternally' true, i.e. not merely the result of observations of the world. Nothing in the sensible world could actually qualify as an object of knowledge, for experience is founded on information collected by the senses. It was Plato's view that humans understood eternal forms before they were born. He sees Forms as being more substantial than eternal objects, but relates the two notions together in terms of hierarchies, in the sense of the archetype and the copy. These copies are kept in ‘space’. The artist, craftsman, architect, copies these in different places, therefore creating many things from the same form [printing / moulding / casting ].
 Heidegger in his essay ‘The Origin of the work of Art’, restates and then develops Aristotle’s Theory of Forms. Take a block of granite: there is a form, the block, and there is the substance, the granite. Form determines the distribution of the matter in space, resulting in a particular shape. But with an object such as equipment [tools, say], the shape is not made by a prior distribution of matter: on the contrary, form controls the arrangement of the matter, and also selects the matter, and its arrangement. The relationship between form and matter is dictated by the usage, the tool-like qualities of the object, and this 'usefulness' is not something that can be added at the end. The 'usefulness' is paramount. A made object is self-contained, but its shape has not taken place by itself, like the granite. The tools, like the art-work, is constructed. But Heidegger then links these two notions by suggesting that art has a 'self-sufficient presencing' that has a similarity with the granite. Tools therefore are half art-work: they have 'thingliness', but they lack the self-sufficiency of the art-work. Tools have a position between 'thing' and work.
For Heidegger 'Works' are 'things'. There is a 'thingly' element in works of art. [colour in painting, stone in sculpture]. But the work is more than the 'thingly'. It has an artistic 'nature': the aesthetic value is superimposed on it by our subjective views of it. The artwork is a thing that is made, but it says something other than the 'thing' itself, an allegory, a symbol [gk, symballein - to bring together]. It is the 'thingly’ feature of the work that the artist 'makes' by his labours. For in San Carlo there are 'things' that show themselves [lengths, spaces, materials] and there is the 'thing in itself' - things which do not appear [proportions, relationships]. Heidegger’s 'thing' therefore designates everything that is not nothing. This ‘thing’, this ‘form’ is something around which properties are assembled: the core of things. This 'core' was something at ground level . . the plan. Something already there, something approaching the sententious. It is these properties such as colour and texture that give things their consistency and quintessence, their sensuousness. This matter is encapsulated in the ‘Form’. The Form has a consistency of matter: it is formed matter: it is what we see in something. But this thing-concept applies to nature and tools, not to Art. The thingly element in Art is the matter of which it consists.
                        Specific use            self-contained
mere thing                                              *
equipment                       *                       *
artwork                                         
 
Heidegger asks a question
‘With what essence of what thing should a Greek Temple agree?’
and follows this with
‘Who could maintain the impossible view that the Idea of Temple is represented in the building? And yet, truth is set to work in such a work, if it is a work’
Heidegger paints, he sculpts this Temple before our very eyes, but at the same time as he builds this image, he questions its foundations, its right to lie on the earth . . .
This Temple in a building
. . it is not representational, it is not a model, it is not an imitation . . . . . Heidegger separates the building, the form, from its function, its toolness . . . . .
a Greek Temple portrays nothing.
It simply stands there in the middle . . . . Standing there, the building rests on the rocky ground . . . . . . . The Temple's firm towering makes visible the invisible space of the air. The Temple rests on the earth.
Then Heidegger adjusts himself. Adjusts his aspect. He resists the notion of the Temple coming to rest on the surface of the earth, but renames the surface, the planetary earth as the shelter earth, the earth that creates, supports, gives life to the arising structures and then gives them shelter when they return [ to the fold ]. The World and the Earth are contestants in this field. The world displays its clarity and openness, the earth conceals, shelters, attempts to draw the world into itself. The Temple straddles both worlds. The frontier bisects it, masking for a time its progress [a place of respite, the customs post?] The rising and the waning of the star-temple creates the unfolding of the foldliness, the foldly, the foldly returns to the fold [ly]. The Temple work standing out there on this earth opens up a world and at the same time sets the world back again on earth. And whereas in the case of fabricating equipment e.g. an axe, the stone is used, and used up, disappearing into its own usefulness [and the material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists vanishing in the equipmental being of the equipment], the Temple does not cause the material to disappear. It displays it. It allows it to be seen. The Temple is in the earth : rises above it : descends back into it. It promotes, displays the earth : it allows the earth to speak, to be seen. The Temple presses downwards and shows its heaviness to the earth. The earth though cannot be destroyed: the earth is always 'closed up': it is 'self-secluding'.
The Temple. This Temple. The event of the Temple. The Temple in motion. Heidegger talks about motion : rest is the opposite of motion and only what is in [has been] in motion can rest. Rest can include motion : there is a rest which includes an inner concentration of motion, inside of which exist a multiplicity and variety of inflections which produce 'events' or 'vibrations' with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples. These do not move to a rational or 'philosophical' plan, but they radiate and disseminate in a topography of experience composed of units that are neither logical or organic, that is, neither based upon pieces as a long unity or a fragmented totality; nor formed or prefigured by those units in the course of a logical development or of an organic evolution.