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This is perhaps an appropriate time to pivot and examine Gothic architecture as a foil to Modernism. In doing so, I hope to further highlight the productive faculty of Noise and draw out an ideology of design that embraces its facilities in an actualized fashion. Our discussion on Modern architecture emphasized, even in its attempted reduction, the irreducibility of Noise as an intermediary force, demonstrating its fundamental role in the production of meaning. In the following section, an investigation of Gothicism and Gothic architecture highlights a complete inversion of the Modernist logic, rooted in an explicit adoption and integration of Noise, rather than a reduction. Furthermore, a closer analysis of the formal logic of Gothic architecture will illustrate how, following Serres’ concepts, disorder and order are mutually entangled in the process of making. The Gothic methodology epitomizes Serres’ description of Noise as a boundless and infinite reserve of “possibility itself” (Serres 1995, 22), from which form (Sound) emerges. Gothic architecture and Gothicism by large is often pit against Modernism and Modern architecture as its antithesis. The popular and widely accepted variant of its origin myth details the conflation of the historical Goth peoples with German tribes who had “sacked Rome and overrun the old Empire” (Groom 2012, 31-32). Regardless of the true origins, the Goths were believed to have been the ones to have overcame and replaced the architecture and culture of the Classical Graeco-Roman civilization with their own set of values and edifices (Groom 2012, 31). In this sense, Gothicism and Gothic architecture was parasitic to begin with, disrupting the existing order to introduce a new one. The formation of Gothicism as one established in opposition to the cultural milieu of the Classical epoch resulted in the general association of the former with descriptors such as “monstrous and barbaric, wholly ignorant of any accepted ideas of sense and order” (Vasari in Groom 2012, 32). Gothicism was framed as immoral, representing treason against Classical order and harmony.
While Modernism is ideologically defined by its (supposedly) radical departure from tradition, the truth is much more complex. Jean Baudrillard advances this, revealing that Modernity is “never radical change or revolution, but always arises in implication with tradition in a subtle cultural play, in a debate where the two are hand in glove, in a process of amalgamation and adaptation” (Baudrillard, 70). Simply put, Modernism does not actually depart from tradition, it adopts the same values and recontextualizes them with a new coat of paint. This is well documented and seen all throughout Modern architecture, with the explicit appropriation of Classical ideals in symmetry as well as the ‘Golden Ratio’ of the Renaissance appearing in the work of giants like Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe (Payne 2018). Thus, while the Gothic historically symbolized a cultural aversion to Classicism and later the Renaissance, Modernism’s genealogical tie to the latter two paradigms makes its corresponding rivalry to Gothicism palpable. What’s more is that the lineage of Gothicism seems to have survived in cultural relevancy, with more recent genres and movements in art being theorized in close relation to Gothic sensibilities. Dani Cavallaro articulates the intersection between the Cyberpunk and the Gothic, outlining their shared themes in “decay, decomposition, disorder, helplessness, horror, irresolution, madness, paranoia, persecution, secrecy, unease, [and] terror” (Cavallaro 2000, xiv). In the literary context, these modalities are rhetorics used to depict and critique the social and political decline of Modernist capitalism and humanism (Cavallaro 2000, 166). What I am trying to say here is that Gothicism seems to be, in a quite literal sense, constructed by Noise on all levels. It is an inverted and skinless body concocted by chaos and disorder. Its aesthetics engage in a subversion of the status quo, parasiting Modernity to create in the place of its image a distorted form. This temperament can be studied throughout Gothic culture, true in its cinema, fashion, literature, etc. (put references). For our purposes, a closer look at Gothic architecture exemplifies an emergence of a design praxis that leans on and draws from the boundless reserves of Noise.
The most significant figurehead of Gothic architecture is often cited to be English art historian and writer John Ruskin (Usher 2023, Spuybroek 2016, Schacter 2014). This proves to be fitting in our discussion as much of his views on architecture directly oppose those of Loos, going as far as to propose in Lectures on Architecture and Painting that “[o]rnamentation is the principal part of architecture” (Ruskin 1907, 88). Ruskin was a known partisan of Gothic architecture, with his enthusiasm shown most considerably in his book The Nature of Gothic. In this text, Ruskin outlines six key characteristics that, for him, define Gothic architecture: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance (Ruskin 1900, 4). In the following section, I will examine savageness, changefulness, and redundance using Serres’ framework of Noise in order to illustrate how Gothic architecture manifests a methodology of design that acknowledges and embraces the productive faculty of difference and disorder. While important, I have left out naturalism, grotesqueness, and rigidity as they are less relevant to our overall discussion. Additionally, I will choose not to obsess over the detailed description and analysis of aesthetic features and motifs as my intent is not to call for a contemporary revival of the Gothic in the formal or stylistic sense, but to extract from it a set of principles that can be applied to any context. Rotterdam-based architect and writer Lars Spuybroek has done a similar exercise in theorizing what he dubs a “Gothic ontology” (Spuybroek 2016), which we will frequently reference.
To begin, we must decipher what is referred to in the terms savageness, changefulness, and redundance. While the naming is less than terrific, savageness is the first of the six characteristics outlined by Ruskin and refers generally to the tendency for imperfection and error found in Gothic architecture. More specifically, Ruskin draws attention to the “wildness of thought, and roughness of work” (Ruskin 1900, 8) manifested in mistakes, imprecisions, and textures as “creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life” (Ruskin 1900, 7). Instead of condemning such attributes, Ruskin equates them to an expression of vitality and, as others have noted, a “material index of the making process” (Usher, 1135). He writes: but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone, a freedom of thought (Ruskin 1900, 13)
What is clear is that Ruskin views this penchant for error as a form of spontaneous freedom unlimited by a prescribed order. Thus, we can think of savageness as the allowance for the material occurrence of error in design. The next characteristic, changefulness, is the second characteristic Ruskin describes, referring to the capacity of variance exhibited in the design of Gothic architecture. Ruskin compares the contingency of elements found in the Gothic cathedral to the rational and repetitive symmetry typical of Classical and early Modern architecture, lamenting that “great art…does not say the same thing over and over again” (Ruskin 1900, 24 - emphasis original). Changefulness then is the “infringement of every servile principle” (Ruskin 1900, 25) present in traditional European thought, giving rise to a dynamic and fluctuating form “capable of perpetual novelty” (Ruskin 1900, 25, emphasis original). Changefulness is also closely tied to savageness insofar that spontaneity is conducive to variance as error calls for correction. We will revisit this shortly. The last characteristic we will discuss is redundance, and it is coincidentally also the last characteristic on Ruskin’s list. Redundance or redundancy is described simply as the excessive “accumulation of ornament” (Ruskin 1900, 56) found in Gothic architecture. Ruskin’s description of redundance is short, but makes clear that he correlates the surplus of ornament to the acknowledgement of the “fulness and wealth of the material universe” (Ruskin 1900, 56-57).
I have chosen to discuss these three principles in detail for the reason that I believe they are inherently linked and mutually inform one another. Serres’ thinking in the texts Le Parasite, Genese, and Hermes assembles a clear framework for us to use in our discussion. That is to say, savageness, changefulness, and redundancy demonstrate the interrelated concepts of parasite, negentropy, and noise respectively. For Serres, as it is for scholars of information theory, redundancy is an “isotropic multiplicity” (Serres 1992, 116), a repetition of something that, when pushed to the limits, produces clarity, stability. This is not the same redundancy that is meant by Ruskin; Gothic redundancy is more suggestive of an excess, an infinite increase in complexity. This is made obvious in his explicit denouncement of the Classical repetition of elements, such that the Greek temple is essentially unchanging repetition, an ‘isotropic multiplicity’ of Doric, Corinthian and Ionic columns (Ruskin 1900, 23). For Serres, isotropic multiplicity is equivalent to homogeneity, absolute order (Serres 1992, 117). For us, it is what we have called Silence. No, redundancy in the Gothic cannot be such, as Ruskin clearly addresses it as “the rude love of decorative accumulation” (Ruskin 1900, 56, my emphasis), ‘rude’ alluding to excess and superfluity. How do we make of this? I suggest, while Gothic redundancy is a repetition of sorts, it is a turbulent repetition, a repetition that is consistent only in its in-consistency. I approach this in three parts. First, ornament in the Gothic is not to be understood as a supplementary addition to the rest of the building. Rather, it is conceived of inseparably from the structural elements, merging the two as one. Scholarship surrounding Gothic architecture shows that this has been widely studied. Irenee Scalbert notes the way in which the rose motif of the window seen in the Sainte Chapelle “demonstrates that the distinction between structure and ornament does not apply to gothic” (Scalbert 2016, 76). Similarly, Lars Spuybroek highlights the dual properties of both structure and ornament expressed in the figural ribs that proliferate Gothic architecture (Spuybroek, 57). Thus, when Ruskin speaks of ornament, we can reasonably speculate that he is essentially speaking of a greater portion of the entire building. Second, building upon this, if we are to take savageness seriously, the inclination for error and idiosyncrasy in Gothic architecture would logically affect the redundancy of ornament (and structure), and thus the broader assemblage of elements within the building. This is not to say that there would be no cohesion, but that its uniformity would be imperfect and riddled with subtleties. And lastly, it is also commonly suggested that the design of Gothic buildings were collaborative efforts, rarely authored by a singular architect and often completed without plan and section (Scalbert 2016). This only reinforces the inevitability of inconsistency and error in redundancy. All of this points to the conclusion that Gothic redundancy is one of irregularity and not reiteration. Thus, I would like to consider it as akin to a stock, an inventory of recurrent but discrete parts that can be called to action - to use Serres’ words, “a formless fount of forms” (Serres 1992, 18). This is the role of Noise, which is not unanticipated, as we have already discussed the intermediary function of ornament previously. If Modernity fooled itself into a false immediacy through the reduction of ornament to invisible and disguised forms, the Gothic engages in the inverse. Redundance is the opposite of reduction. The Gothic ornament, in all its redundancy, is closer to Bolter and Grusin’s hypermediacy, which Macs Smith employs to describe the effect of a heterogenous layering of media on a wall (signs, posters, graffiti) until “it becomes impossible not to see that mediation is going on” (Smith 2021, 78). To run the point to the ground, Serres frequently illustrates his understanding of Noise by using the image of the sea, citing the etymological relation between noise, nausea, and the nautical, and stating that “[w]e never hear what we call background noise so well as we do at the seaside” (Serres 1992, 13). Ruskin employs a similar metaphor, comparing any monotony of elements found in art and architecture to the sea (Ruskin 1900, 26). We can assume that he is referring to redundance here as this is a monotony that he notes is intermingled with and perpetually broken in the Gothic by variance (changefulness) (Ruskin 1900, 28). In this sense, we can think of changefulness as a kind of emergence emanating from a sea of redundancy. It has been noted by many authors that the figural elements in Gothic architecture display a live capacity to stretch, contract, and adapt to other elements as they intersect (Spuybroek 2016, 33, Scalbert 2016, 93). What this means is that we can furthermore view redundancy as a reservoir of sorts, a stock of elements that contains in itself x number of possibilities. It forms a system. Savageness (spontaneous error), then, inflicts error, introducing disorder and agitating the system. It is parasitic, it is an external force that, while welcomed, is not prescribed. The parasite is both generative and corrupting (Serres 1982, 16). With it, the possibility latent in the reservoir is activated. Redundance is passive Noise where savageness is active (parasitic). Now we revisit our point from earlier - savageness catalyzes changefulness. Ruskin alludes to the idea of imperfection as the impetus for invention and variance, using a vignette of two glass cutters to explain his point. Modern glass, he writes, is “true in its form, [and] accurate in its cutting” (Ruskin 1900, 17), but a strive for precision sacrifices the cutter’s capacity to invent. In contrast, the old Venetian glass cutter cuts clumsily, but his imprecision leads him to invent “a new design for every glass that he [makes]” (Ruskin 1900, 18). The first system is stable, there is no Noise, it is not much of a system at all and produces nothing; “[i]t is information-free, complete redundance” (Serres Hermes, 100) (here Serres is referring to the definition of redundancy used in information theory). The second system is Noisy, it is full of possibility in entropy. Combating the Noise, reversing it, the Venetian glass cutter attains new order, a moment of meaning, Sound. In Hermes, Serres uses the term negentropy to describe the moments of information or “pockets of local orders” (Serres hermes, 75) that emerge out of Noise, which I have chosen to call Sound in earlier sections for the sake of simplicity. Here I will use the original term as it is necessary to discuss some other ideas of Serres previously unused. I argue that the logic of changefulness is essentially the negentropic outcome of the Gothic system; spontaneity (savageness) disturbs the system until it is forced to reorder. Scalbert indicates that the design of Gothic architecture is elaborated in its making process (Scalbert 2016, 93) which is tied closely to Ruskin’s notion of changefulness to the extent that in its description he details what can only be understood as a mutation that occurs as the building comes to need it. He writes: “whenever [the Gothic] finds occasion for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty” (Ruskin 1900, 28). This can only be ascertained as the result, or rather the self-correction of spontaneity and the inevitable error it accelerates. Therefore changefulness is not variety for variety’s sake, but an outcome, a rational signal that emerges at the other end through the passage of Noise. Ruskin confirms this, writing: The variety of the Gothic schools is the more healthy and beautiful, because in many cases it is entirely unstudied, and results, not from mere love of change, but from practical necessities (Ruskin 1900, 28)
The effect of changefulness is, without a doubt, the generation of new order, Sound. However, it is equally important to understand that Ruskin observes this as a continuous occurrence, never sustaining itself for long before it begins to variate once again. He emphasizes the ‘perpetual novelty’ of changefulness rather than a static one, such that the forms seen in the Gothic “are changeable to infinity” (Ruskin 1900, 25). Spuybroek similarly observes the following behaviour of changefulness:
Since changefulness is a highly coordinated system of movements, of figures channeling force and balancing with other figures, it tries to include everything, but only up to a point, when the pattern starts to crack, which does not mean the system is failing but that the pattern is reorganizing itself on another scale. (Spuybroek 2016, 63-64).
In other words, the effect of changefulness is rational as much as its being is fleeting and unstable. What I mean to say is that it is a phenomenon. Its stability is quickly interrupted by parasites (savageness), reverting it back to Noise and it tries all over again to variate and restabilize. But this is precisely how Serres registers the relationship between order and disorder. As Lilian Kroth points out, “Serres makes it unmistakably clear that he sees order and the rational as the exception, not the rule” (Kroth 2023, 25). Sound is the phenomena to Noise’s ontology. Serres portrays his understanding of order as “negentropic islands on or in the entropic sea” (Serres hermes, 75) - localized territories of Sound poking out from a sea of Noise. We can now understand changefulness as operated by three concurrent logics: 1. a dynamic self-correcting reflex triggered by active Noise (savageness), a reversal of error so to speak, 2. directly emerging out of a reservoir of redundant possibilities (redundance), and 3. is fleeting in its stability, sustaining only until it is re-triggered by error, starting the process again. All three are mutually informative and necessary for changefulness to occur, which is fundamentally the emergence of new form. In savageness, changefulness, and redundancy, the Gothic system demonstrates the broader inquiry of this entire thesis - how Noise, and by extension difference and disorder are not degenerative but in fact productive and constitutive of new meaning, or Sound. The purpose of this section was not call for a stylistic revival of Gothic architecture, but to glean, from an analysis of its formal logic, principles of design that offer an alternative perspective on the relationship between disorder and order that seem to be largely misunderstood in the contemporary context. Disorder and order cannot simply be understood as antithetical, despite the dominant Modernist logic of binaries that buttress this notion. Instead, as this thesis has hopefully shown, they are two forces dynamically entangled in a constant flux, equally necessary in the process of making, whether that concerns the social, cultural, or formal(architectural) spheres.