I write here about architecture's status as a domain of cultural representation. I am not primarily concerned with architecture as the art of building per se; nor do I consider it as a profession. Rather, I examine architecture as a way of negotiating the real, by which I mean intervening in the realm of symbols and signifying processes at the limit of the social order itself-that is, architecture as a specific kind of socially symbolic production whose primary task is the construction of concepts and subject positions rather than the making of things. It is thus an architectural impulse or attitude that I seek to characterize, and a certain kind of attention is needed to detect it: specialized theoretical techniques and methods must be brought to bear on this subject. Nevertheless, I hope to suggest too that the architectural impulse is part of daily social life and its wideranging practices. Architecture comprises a set of operations that organize formal representations of the real (although I will have to complicate that formulation), and hence, rather than merely being invested with an ideology; by its creators or users, it is ideological in its own right-an imaginary "solution" to a real social situation and contradiction (as Louis Althusser's take on Jacques Lacan puts it); that is what is meant b)'. its "autonomy. "1 Understood in this way, architecture's effects-the range of conceptual and practical possibilities it both enables and limits-as well as the irreducible affects it presents are a precious index of the historical and social situation itself. I am concerned here with the effects and affects as well as the facts of architecture.
If ontology is the theory of objects and their relations-a structure within which being itself max be given some organization- then, I believe, art (generally) and architecture (especially) can and do operate ontologically:. Architecture is fundamentally an ing:uiry into what is, what might be, and how the latter can happen. Architecture is one way of attaining the verb "to be."
