" Ma "

Going back through stacks of LRBs finding articles that had passed me by.

Having just been reading Heidegger on The Work of Art, these paragraphs seem timely ...


"With the ma we reach the theoretical heart of Isozaki’s historical and architectural investigation. It is a category in which he has had a lifelong interest, having designed a Paris exhibition on the topic in 1978. It was an exhibition he was characteristically unwilling to repeat in Japan itself for some twenty-five years in the apprehension that it would give aid and comfort to a nativism or Japan-ness to which he was opposed and against which this whole book is an argument. Still, the ma is clearly enough itself (literally) one of those ‘ancient Japanese phonemes’ which has no Western equivalent and which must therefore argue for the existence of precisely that East/West gap on which the various culturalisms thrive. Indeed, we can ourselves only convey it negatively: thus, it is not nothingness, but it is not something either. Can the notion of relationality which has everywhere in the West begun to supplant the old Aristotelian conceptions of substance be of any use here? Yet relationality scarcely conveys the negative or destructive component of the ma, for Isozaki at least partly associated with ruins and rubble. The ma also designates for him a primordial unity of time and space which we can only mystically approximate. He himself borrows a dictionary entry: ma ‘originally means the space in between things that exist next to each other; then comes to mean an interstice between things – chasm; later, a room as a space physically defined by columns and/or byobu screens; in a temporal context, the time of rest or pause in phenomena occurring one after another’.

The category of the ma then echoes an archaic or sacred concept, namely that of the niwa or empty bounded space which awaits the visitation of the gods: a profoundly ambiguous place which can either mean Entzauberung – the death or disappearance of the divine or of meaning – or the promise of its reappearance (a promise never invalidated by its turning out to be a broken one). In this, the ma would not so much fall into that range of contemporary appeals to the mythic (from Beuys and Pasolini on down), nor betray a filiation with some Heideggerian or etymological return to primordial social experience. Rather, it could also count as one of those moments in which the groping for new concepts and new categories of a historically original experience of spatiality in late capitalism, in globalisation and postmodernity, intersects with a form from the past and recognises in it a possible response to its own new needs and urgencies. The new category must still be marked with otherness, since we do not really have it yet concretely; it remains part of a utopian language of which we glimpse only the external face of its articulations and expressiveness. But that otherness is no longer national, cultural, racial or ethnic; for in globalisation Japan no longer exists in the old national or culturalist way.

(Fredric Jameson in a review of 'Japan-ness in Architecture' by Arata Isozaki,
translated by Sabu Kohso LRB 5 April 2007)

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Finished 'Rings of Saturn'. I'm revising my opinions on Sebald ...