Ornament and Order

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Jacques Soulillou

Essayist and art theoretician Jacques Soulillou offers a philosophical reflection on the crisis of ornament and fear of excess, suggesting that ornament has an ordering function. To this extent he proposes that ornament is necessary for order's appearance but does not itself have an ordering function, whereas the decorative is that which escapes or opposes the ordering system, indicating loss of an order's authority. For architecture ornament also reveals sexual differentiation through the ground plan, a distinction made from left to right and from upper to lower that coincides with social and hierarchical divisions found in traditional societies. Central to Soulillou's thinking is the shift from ornament as visual elaboration to understanding it as a catalyst of cultural upheaval and perpetual reordering.

What is the purpose of ornament? Above all, it has an ordering function. Not in the sense of putting a room back in order, for that would assume that order exists before ornament. If ornament has an ordering function, it is in the sense of allowing the order to appear, as one says that something appears in the light.

Ornament is primary not in the naive chronological sense, but because it does not superimpose itself on a pre-existing order, as accident on essence in traditional metaphysics. It might rather be order that is viewed as accident in relation to ornament. Among ornament's salient properties is a tendency to assume a polymorphous appearance, without hierarchy, without order, insofar as everything is potential material for decorating – flowers, bone, rock, glass, metal, plastic, paper, etc. – and that these forms are infinite in number.

If order requires ornament in order to appear, this ally may just as well turn out to be its most dangerous enemy. For ornament is essentially chaos that threatens to subvert order if the latter does not pay attention. With respect to ornament, order will always have to be on guard, so to speak. For example, what first attracts one's attention when walking down a street, or visiting someone, is this chaos in which the ornament seems to contribute nothing to order, but rather to disorder. In other words, the order that appears through ornament is at once lit up and flooded from all sides by the ornament's powerful illumination, at the heart of which order looks like an island of precarious stability.

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One of the formal means of preventing ornamental display from degenerating into chaos is by containing it in a more or less defined grid system (grille ou maillage). Without such a system, which we often notice implicitly in ornamental display – in particular on the superficies – the display would run off in all directions. In twentieth-century art, which has done much to eliminate all ornament, minimalism laid bare this formal substratum like no other movement before it. The absence (le vide) of the ornament is not nothing, it is the grid. However, when we reduce the ornament to its formal properties of symmetry and repetition, we have already surreptitiously introduced order into the ornament. To reveal itself, ornament has no need of symmetry and repetition, which form specific modalities of appearance, related to power in accordance with the double orientation of rationality and economy. Order, through the ornament, gives itself an air of symmetry and repetition. This signifies simply that it takes the path of least resistance, consistent with the objectives of power.

With the emergence of order in the ornament, it does not follow that the ornament has an ordering function in the obvious sense, as in the grid format of wallpaper or a carpet. The appearance can maintain its chaotic, disordered, anarchic character, even while forming a favourable context for the purposes of the ordering function. More than any other art form, fashion exemplifies this connection whereby the ordering function does not depend on the materials themselves, but in how they are used. The most common effect aimed at by this secondary ordering function could be characterized as distinction: the distinction of pure otherness as embodied by the famous photograph taken at the beginning of the twentieth century, showing a Melanesian man wearing a Kellogg's box by way of finery, or hierarchical distinction. So it is not by means of systematic presentation, in a grid for example, that the ordering function is realized, but rather through abundance, affectation, rarity. The convergence of the primary and secondary ordering functions, as can be observed in interior and exterior architecture, presupposes the constraint of an authority, primarily that of the sponsor.

The appearance of order in ornament is produced according to what I would call a ground plan (or original matrix), traversed by a double polarization: transversal in one respect, as in the male/female opposition, and vertical in another, as in the superior/inferior opposition. The latter may take on a sexual significance, but not necessarily. Expressed another way, sexuality and power are the forces which sustain the ground plan. Or, if one prefers: order initially appears through that feature of the ground plan where the sexual relation is intersected by the power relation. For if, in its horizontal axis, the ground plan refers to the inter-sexual differentiation of man/woman, the vertical axis is revealed by the intra-sexual dimension where the dominating male is opposed to the dominated male and, more generally, free man to the non-free.

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In traditional societies ornament is revealed according to this plan: from left to right, without hierarchy, ornaments for men, ornaments for women; from upper to lower, with hierarchy, ornaments for the prince, the nobles, free men in general, and the slaves. Every anthropologist knows that, in this plan, order is anything but decorative. The decorative constitutes that which escapes the encoding that order practices on ornament, a kind of wild outgrowth that order seems unable to tame.

Thus Kant was justified in saying that a man abandoned on a desert island would not enjoy the pleasures of ornamentation. Why would he decorate a building or adorn himself, in a solipsistic situation where he is confronted with neither the inter-sexual differentiation, nor the intra-sexual differentiation of hierarchy? On the contrary, it is unlikely that this man (or this woman, but not both at once) could give himself unrestrainedly to any decorative pleasures. To ornament there must be two. Ornament is born under the gaze of another, as a flower blossoms under the light. It is the mark of socialization. This word 'mark' should be taken in the sense of something impressed (imprinted) on the flesh because, for epochs past, it is not the individual who appropriates the ornament but, on the contrary, the ornament that appropriates the individual with the purpose of assigning a place in a social or cosmic order. This explains why ornamentation has so often been inseparable from cruelty. One is reminded of what Nietzsche said about the creation of memory in The Genealogy of Morals. By means of a practice which is sometimes extremely cruel – of which our 'body piercing' is a distant ancestor, leaving ineradicable marks on the body – ornament has played a central role in the creation of memory. The performers of these 'ornamental' mutilations and deformations were able to find beauty in them. They were willing to be marked on their flesh by them, to ensure access to social individuation and desire (desire for the Other). This shows how the link between ornament and beauty, which seems self-evident, is intelligible only through the mediation of order. The ornament is beautiful, even as mutilation, if it registers one in an order with implicit or explicit laws. And this is equally true for the woman of ancient China whose feet have been bound, for the middle-class person who hangs a Warhol print in his living room, for the Western man of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wearing a wig, and for the Japanese noble staining his teeth black. Louis XIV, apparently, would never be seen without his wig, even at night. These are clear enough illustrations of the appropriation of the individual by the ornament.

However, for order to appear in the ornament, it is not enough that it monopolize it. It must literally produce it, and this production is not without a cost. Cosmetics are an economy of order, administering the ornamental costs to produce a symbolic yield. Kosméō in ancient Greek means 'I adorn,' 'I decorate,' and in doing so I produce order, I reproduce an order in initiating the appropriate expenses to honour a certain situation or figure. And all this happens at the same time: not just decorate, then order, or order then decorate, but decoder if I may so put it. This 'administration' has nothing to do

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with the economy of restraint in which the expense is incurred in function of an economic rationality, such as when an individual spends no more than he has. As an economy of order, cosmetics are a general economy in which the level of expense is set according to a symbolic rationality, in keeping with the status of the person.

‘A high social circle,’ says Norbert Elias in La Société de Cour, ‘obliges a member to own a house and ensure it is beautiful. Although bourgeois morality sees this as nothing but waste (“If he’s going to fall into debt, why doesn’t he lower his standard of living?”), it is in reality an expression of the ethos of lords.’ (… p 90)

Order can never ultimately establish itself because ornament works to undermine it. The history of relations between order and ornament is one of permanent combat, of constant eruptions. Order is obliged to not only re-found but also to re-establish the rules of hierarchy, to proceed to exclusions, to affirm precedents.

This permanent re-founding of order, behind which loom the stakes of power, results in the double movement of election and exclusion; it aims, through ornament, to reaffirm certain divisions, certain hierarchies judged indispensable to its perpetuation.

In this respect, in the famous passage from Plato’s Gorgias, where Socrates expounds his theory of flattery (kolakeia), we are not always aware that the four categories of sophistry and legislation, dress and gymnastics, rhetoric and justice, cooking and medicine, coincide with other oppositions that assume not only moral but social significance. When Socrates says that dress (kommô = to decorate, which we could compare with kosméô) is a pernicious substitute for gymnastics, he is simply contrasting the natural with the artificial, or perversion with integrity, illustrating an opposition that, from ancient society to the beginning of modern times, is of fundamental significance: the opposition between a free man (eleutheros) and he who is not. When the sophist Antiphôn attacks Socrates in front of his students – all of them from a noble or wealthy milieu – he focuses on this fact: the philosopher does not have the dignified look of a free man; in summer and winter he wears the same coat and goes barefoot.

The character of he who is free cannot be dissociated in Greek language and thought from the exterior appearance and the ornamentation that goes with it. In Hegelian terms one might say that the appearance is the essence; there is no appearance which could conceal or contradict the essence. Eleutheros means ‘one who talks or acts like a free man,’ ‘one who is compatible with the station of a free man’ and also, speaking of the exterior aspect of certain animals, ‘of noble appearance.’ In the West, an entire genealogy is expressed in this opposition between the free and the not-free in the visual field. To begin with, there is the basic opposition between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts, the development of which produces the opposition between the arts (sometimes called

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'noble') and the applied arts, also called decorative. And when Kant says that art is that which is realized through freedom, this declaration – apparently exempt from all social considerations – carries in itself the age-old opposition between the free and the non-free.

Is the decorative unworthy of the free man? Does it reflect a servile origin or mentality? The problem is not so simple. In fact, if the opposition between the free and the non-free is a fundamental given of Western aesthetic judgement, the decorative will come to occupy the pole of both the free and the non-free. Thus in Kant the pure decorative gravitates toward the pole of the free inasmuch as beauty is not subject to the demands of a concept, as is the case, for example, with the beauty of a building. On the other hand, when Gleizes and Metzinger or Léger, and many others, posit the purpose of a work of decorative art as subject to a specific space, in contrast with a work of art whose purpose is free, the decorative is once again drawn to the pole of the not-free. The entire aesthetic of Ruskin or Wörringer is in the same way controlled by this opposition. For Ruskin, the ornaments produced by the artisans of the Middle Ages are beautiful because one can decipher in them the imprints of a free man. These imprints can no longer be discerned in the ornamental production of the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, or Romans – a production that, in its very perfection, betrays a servile origin. For Wörringer, abstract ornamentation, which can be traced back to a state of human evolution testifying to the submission of man before the forces of nature, is a clue to the enslavement of man, whereas the works of the ancient Greeks, through the realism of their representation of the human body, testify to the freedom and fulfilment of man. These constructions of Ruskin and Wörringer form veritable fantasies, raising fundamental questions which we can here only pose: Can one imagine the decorative outside the horizon which delineates the opposition of free and not-free? And this horizon itself, does it belong specifically to Western thought – an idea determined by metaphysics – or is it, on the contrary, an horizon encompassing all understanding of ornament?

Behind the opposition between free man and not-free stands another opposition, equally fundamental, between man and woman. It coincides with, without being fully reducible to, the opposition between the natural beauty provided by gymnastics (which was practised in the nude, needless to say), and the artificial beauty with all its accessories (attirail – which is one of the original meanings of the word 'ornament,' especially in Latin).

Book VIII of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria thus established an opposition between strong and pure ornamentation, which is said to go well with the orator's discourse (and the orator is always a man …), and that which is attached 'to the effeminate refinements' and 'the deceiving effects of make-up.' It renews, by displacing – and without entirely exhausting – the man-woman opposition. The feminine pole can in turn experience a new division opposing the 'woman without affectation' for whom 'simple beauty has no need to enhance itself with pearls, face powder, artificial whites and reds' (Cicero, The Orator

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XXIII), to the 'woman with make-up' and all her accessories. And to conclude (if it is ever possible to conclude with this process of division), these oppositions of status (free man/not-free) and sex experience a new displacement caused by the territorial opposition noted in rhetoric between atticism (Western) and the orientalism characterized by ornamental abundance, excess of show – in short, bad taste.

Through this endless process of displacement one comes close to that which no longer resembles a logic of ornament – centred on the idea of order – but to what looks like a logic of the decorative, which would refer to the very spacing between these pairs of opposites incessantly dividing and displacing themselves. One could say that the logic of ornament, as the illuminated space at the heart of which order appears, serves to establish oppositions (man/woman, free/not-free, appropriate/inappropriate, etc.), whereas the logic of the decorative serves to displace and endlessly re-divide them, by intercalating additional terms.

These ancient debates are not foreign to the debate about modernity. Even the post-war polemic opposing Abstract Expressionism to what was called the School of Paris cannot be understood except in reference to this play of oppositions that we have just evoked: Abstract Expressionism proclaiming itself as the pole of virility in opposition to the decorative mannerism of the School of Paris, the new West in relation to a decadent, effeminate orientalism.

With the socio-economic changes experienced by Western societies since the end of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the ground plan underwent ever greater distortions. Although the man-woman opposition did not experience fundamental changes (the sartorial image of nineteenth-century man seems, on the contrary, to go one better in the abandonment of showy ornamentation), the opposition between free man and not-free gradually lost its meaning. While the social hierarchies did not disappear, their borders no longer seemed so rigid, so insurmountable. With the decline of the aristocracy, their gradations seemed less pronounced. All this resulted in the fact that other strategies, related to other discourses, were forced into operation, since the old oppositions could no longer be relied upon.

Reason was one of the new tools to be promoted in this context. It was new not only with respect to order, but in the way it was used to justify the precedence of a certain type of ornamentation. For the first time the rationality of the ornament was asserted outside all consideration of 'class.' Thus it was no longer said that ornamentation admired by workers was in bad taste because it was of an inferior class, but because it was not 'rational.' While princes or aristocrats could declare ornaments beautiful and in keeping with order – because they were linked to their past – this strategy of re-founding proved impossible for the middle class to put into operation. Authority still faulted it for

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founding an order which drew its legitimacy from the very status of that which it affirms through the ornament. As a result, there occurred a detour of rationality, which gradually emerged in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century. It reached its apogee in the modernist architectural movement, with which one was to associate design. The rational re-founding of ornament aimed at preventing subversion of the new order, based on presuppositions outside the system itself, by summoning up a supra-rationale, historically legitimized as only an aristocracy could do it. The rationality of the ornament was to impose itself not only in coercive fashion, but on the basis of an authority whose principle lay within itself.

This is the coup d'état attempted by the reformers of the applied arts and the architects after them. For in effect, this movement, which took as its object the totality of the visible, first belonged to these 'minor' arts. But the coup d'état was doomed to failure, because what these upholders of the new pretended to forget was that no rationality could found ornament, which was anti-rational in its essence. On the other hand, despite its chaotic character, ornament could be exploited by rationality to establish its will to power.

Where, then, can the decorative be situated? Is it not simply another way of referring to ornament, or does it have its own specificity? Two things can be said in this regard. First, in conformity with the double movement of selection and exclusion that accompanies the continuous re-founding of order, the decorative is situated on the side of that which is an object of exclusion: dress and rhetoric in the Gorgias for example. From this perspective the decorative appears as the eternal double of ornament, which the latter agrees at regular intervals to denounce, to prevent it from threatening order.

We have seen that, in appearing in ornament, order produces oppositions: the man's body enhanced by gymnastics/the woman's body enhanced with accessories; the body of the prince or noble enhanced with the apparel appropriate to their station/the ordinary man's body adorned with simple apparel, etc. But these oppositions, which appear natural, are not self-evident; they require a continuous call to order. Their bare foundations demand a work of consolidation, insofar as the new oppositions appear to displace and weaken those in place. For example, we saw that we cannot simply oppose man and woman with respect to ornament, for there are women who are modest in their use of finery, just as there are men whose conduct is more typical of women, etc. And with a single blow, the whole structure seems extremely fragile. We are definitely in front of a facade, but it is full of cracks. It appears to be ordered, but there are outgrowths almost everywhere. Like a phantom, the decorative always walks in the tracks of ornament, which it doubles and ends up blurring. From which comes ornament's call to order: 'Down with the decorative!' In facilitating the appearance of order, ornament simultaneously betrays it, by failing to prevent the proliferation of the decorative along the very trails it had opened through these fundamental oppositions.

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Historically, with respect to Europe, the need for a call to order was felt most urgently in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hierarchies, which appeared to guarantee the stability of the ground plan, were no longer tenable, and leaks began to appear almost everywhere, especially in the idea of propriety, which was gradually emptied of all meaning. The conditions were thus ripe for another logic to emerge, one which would no longer be a logic of the organization of the visible as in the case of ornament, but a logic which could be called spectral, doubling the first.

The spectral logic of the decorative emerges when the logic of the ordering function of the visible is no longer able to halt the re-dividing of the founding oppositions, endlessly displacing them. One of the classic calls to order that sanctions this displacement is the denouncement of the excessive use of ornament. Each time this denunciation appears in ancient or modern texts this call to order involves positions of power. The denunciation is paradoxical inasmuch as we know that, from the point of view of the general economy, the excess is a requisite condition for the logic of order to endure. It would be pointless for order to appear in the ornament if it had to deprive itself of the possibilities of excess, which is why the ornamental expense is exclusively thought of in terms of legitimate or illegitimate, in keeping with a certain status. Ruskin, Gombrich and many others, including Norbert Elias, have clearly shown that excess does not have any meaning – except perhaps a blasphemous one! – in the religious context, and that there were never enough ornaments, neither in quality nor quantity, to pay homage to the divinity (the original meaning of ‘magnificent’ does not refer to beauty, but to the largesse of the expense).

The idea of excess is a perfect indicator of this connection between the logic of ornament and the spectral logic of the decorative. From the viewpoint of the logic of ornament, the evaluation of excess only makes sense in relation to the general economy, according to which it acquires legitimacy, predicated on the worth of the consignee or the sponsor. In other words, nothing appears to be excessive. At the core of this logic, the denunciation of excess appears more or less directly from the call to order, that order rest on the hierarchies of legitimacy in the ornamental expense. The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert is one of the last great Western texts to recall this – at the very moment it had run its course.

The second point is that from the moment the markers of the ground plan began to loosen, to unravel, the seemingly self-evident connection between ornament and order had to justify itself. Though presenting themselves as ‘rational,’ these justifications constantly betrayed the strategies of power which passed through them, forcing them to stigmatize as ‘decorative’ whatever got in the way of the creation of a new ornamental order. What strikes us when we examine the ornamental artifacts of the reformers of taste in the applied arts of the nineteenth century is that, although supported by rationality,

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they are no less weighted with ornament than those that they put on trial. These new strategies of the ordering function of ornament provide an insight into this paradox – the invisible character of the decorative, in the sense that I never verify visually the rationality of the reformer’s discourse. I simply observe two different orders of ornament, one of which calls the other too decorative. This ‘too decorative’ does not refer to a set of visually verifiable signs, but to an internal organization of the discourse, consigning to the decorative whatever opposes it in its hegemonic strategy. The decorative is the invisible mark of the crisis of ornament, which results from the loss of authority of an order whose ‘justice’ does not depend on rationality to make its views prevail. Thus when rationality claims to dictate the rules of ornament and it turns out it lacks the means – the illusion that design still upholds, for those who believe that the armchair of Mies van der Rohe is more ‘rational’ than a Bergère Louis XVI – the Pandora’s box of the decorative is opened. (… p 99)

Jacques Soulillou, ‘Ornament and Order’, trans Mark Heffernan, Bernie Miller and Melony Ward (eds), Crime and Ornament: The Arts and Popular Culture in the Shadow of Adolf Loos, YYZ Books (Toronto), 2002.

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