The term ‘paysageite’ translates uncomfortably, as ‘landscapicity’, making preferable the use of the French original. It is a term that Deleuze and Guattari invented, perhaps playfully, to suggest a means by which to understand the way in which a mind can aspire to a condition in which it is taken over by wandering concepts. Rather than seeing the ‘self’ as composed of certain essential concepts, there is an image of the self being re-made as it comes into contact with new concepts and takes them up, perhaps in due course only to move on from them and take up others. This type of nomadism (wandering from one world of concepts to another)34 is seen by way of the image of oneself as a landscape, being overtaken by crowds of nomadic peoples – swarms of ideas – who visit, and move on.35
As an image of what has happened at Stonehenge, this makes for a complex extended simile, as Stonehenge as a focus of Salisbury Plain is, already, literally a landscape, and we have no need of metaphor to take it as such. The image was proposed as a way of conveying a state of mind – a state of continuous development and change – to which one can aspire. In a mind formed by such an ethos, the story of Stonehenge becomes exemplary, as its being overtaken and reshaped by various cultures becomes an image of how to respond and adapt to changing circumstances, an image of growth and development.36 If we are looking at Stonehenge as a living being, then it remains alive by being taken over by swarms of ideas of magic, Romans, Vikings, Druids, in turn, not all at the same time, and sometimes to return. The biography of the building then turns into a story that exemplifies the Deleuzeoguattarian project of desertification. ‘We are deserts’, said Deleuze:
but populated by tribes, flora and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouraging others to prosper. . . . The desert, experimentation on oneself, is our only identity, our single chance for all the combinations which inhabit us.37
The experimentation on Stonehenge is a matter of cultivating the different ‘takes’ on it, and articulating them, and using the example as a model for one’s personal development, as one actualizes new aspects of one’s personality on coming into contact with new groups of people and ideas. Stonehenge is a well-developed desert.
This kind of development is well articulated in the story of Stonehenge, because the building has travelled so far through time. (By the way, it has travelled backwards as well as forwards – over the 1,000 years since Geoffrey of Monmouth it has aged by perhaps 4,000 years, in a series of non-linear jumps, with each cultural territorialization.) That development is not yet at an end. This kind of biography of a place, cuts across established methods of writing architectural history, which tends to concentrate on new buildings, examining the forces that brought buildings into being, whether they be socio-political types of force, or fashionable trends in the decorative arts of the time. From the Renaissance onwards, when we have better records of what individual architects thought and did, it is possible to go some way towards establishing a strong link between the architect’s intentions and the form of a particular building, and this is likely to be clearest when the building is new. There is, perhaps, a tendency to see the originary meaning as the ‘true’ meaning of the building, and this is the meaning for which we reach when we see the building as a work of genius. However, there are many more buildings where the designer is either unknown to us, or who does not seem to matter so much. Those where we do take the trouble are exceptional, not normative. Moreover, the tendency to see the important moment in a building’s life as when it was new, means that important moments from later in the building’s life do not seem to be as legitimate a part of an analysis of the building, but only anecdotal.
This kind of problem is particularly acute when the buildings have become old enough to outlive not only their architects but the age in which they were produced. The idea of historical ‘periods’ does not serve buildings particularly well, if we confine ourselves to knowledge of only the period in which the building was produced. Monuments can, and do, survive civilizations. Moreover, they sometimes have an important afterlife, long after the fabric of the building has disappeared. (The hanging gardens of Babylon are still well known in name, and sufficiently evocative to lend their name to at least one restaurant that would like to sound romantic.) A historian’s adopted ‘period’ may be brief when compared with the life-time of a building, and institutional demands for specialist expertise can discourage the development of analyses that work across different periods, which can have all the complications of trans-disciplinary work, without any of the kudos.
Michel Foucault used the term ‘episteme to mean the body of knowledge that would be ‘taken as read’ in a given age – the underlying principles of knowledge that the people living in a given culture at a given time would be unable to question, because these principles would be so obviously true that one would look right through them.38 They would be invisible, and one would not see the refractions that they made as refractions, but as direct unmediated contact with the objects of knowledge. In Foucault’s analysis there are a few such epistemes, marking out the ages of mankind, but the idea can be fused with Nelson Goodman’s ‘worldmaking’ in order to envisage smaller cultural groups with their own micro-epistemes.39 Always there is the possibility that the differences between one such micro-episteme of personal experience might be only infinitesimally or insignificantly different from another, and one would ordinarily neglect such differences. On other occasions the differences will be significant, and then one can use such ideas as the heterotopia or misprision as outlined above. Two or more individuals who share an episteme and who compare notes, will be able to use, uncomplicatedly, a language of ‘objectivity’, and be able to persuade one another of the possibility of neutral points of view. The main point to be made here, though, is that a building’s architecture is never fixed in it as a component of the materials or the work of construction. It is always a volatile spirit, flowing from conception to inception, from misprision to misprision, and with an afterlife in reputation and myth. A ‘biographical’ account of the life of a building and its architecture will aspire to sketch an outline of such a line of development and will need continual revision for as long as the building is remembered and plays a significant role in heritage and imagination. Other kinds of account, that see an initiating moment of the building’s life as all – important, certainly have a role to play, but they are like moments of dramatic crisis, rather than a whole biography. Most of our biographies of buildings cover little more than the time between conception and birth.