Explication: Enacting death on the theater of stone

Imagine, then a theater of stone. Imagine architecture, its course from symbolic through classical to romantic,
turned into a circle. On one side of the circle stands the Tower of Babel, in which natural stone is replaced by
man-made bricks. On the other side stands the Gothic cathedral, made to appear as if it were not of stone. As
stone thus disappears at the periphery of the circle, it will be as if the curtain were opened revealing on stage,
at the center, the sole work in which stone decisively remains, the Greek temple. (Sallis 79)
Sallis sets up the majority of his article, "From Tower to Cathedral" explicating the Hegelian
recollection, but reinterprets it subtly through the hypothesis of stone, and at the very last moment turns the
argument on its head. In his writing, Sallis supports much of Hegel's philosophy, the dual lines of progression of
art, from symbolic to classical to romantic architecture. Sallis even spends time proving to the readers the
choices that Hegel makes on historical precedents in architecture. Along the way, however, Sallis scatters hints
of this overturning, questioning the premise of death and pastness of art. Ultimately he works into the reader a
basic understanding that death is but the other side of life, as easily flipped as sides of a coin, on a circle of the
theater of stone.
To discuss this overturning that exists from the first line of the article, one needs to refer to the last
paragraph of the article, in which Sallis left the reader with a curious "theater of stone." This theater, so lately
introduced to the reader, centers and synthesizes Sallis's argument around a stone that is not solid and inorganic
at all, but is constantly changing forms and communicating different materiality. Stone is the catalyst by which
to interpret Hegel's "death of art". Through the immateriality, distortion, non-stone qualities of stone present in
all stages of architecture, Sallis proposes that death is but a staged semblance, since death (as well as the
mobility of life) can never be fully captured, and that the power behind the spirit that moves exists, rather, in the
side-by-side duality of death and life inherent in the evolution of the use of stone.
As a "theater" of stone, Sallis refers back to the theater in which death is but a semblance of death
mentioned on page 70. Here Sallis reveals the precise term of death by which he interprets Hegel's death of art.
First, death is "nonpresentable;" and as such it is necessarily a semblance on stage. Furthermore, in the face of
death, life becomes ever more real and vivid. As demonstrated in Sallis's example from Much Ado about
Nothing, it is in death that Hero, the heroine, "shall come more moving, delicate and full of life." (71) The
mobility, the vibrancy, and the power of life is revealed in death. Thus Sallis uses theater as a way to refute the
finality of art's death, since in theatrics, death is but a semblance that will come to pass at the end of the circle,
and whose existence contrasts with life more vivid and moving.
How is this death related to stone? Sallis uses Hegel's definition to define stone, as the building material
of architecture, as "dead, inorganic nature" (38). However, stone is only dead as the contrast to life, if "life is
made the measure" (39). This death however, can be reinterpreted here, upon the reveal of the theatrical death,
as a mere corollary to the experience of life.
Indeed, Sallis hints that the experience of "dead" stone can only exist alongside life. He does so, by
using Hegel's experiences of glaciers in the Alps. Initially, Hegel was not impressed by the mountains. They
were boring, eternally dead, according to Hegel. Sallis would not have characterized the stone as properly dead,
however, but at the moment of life. The remarkable example of the waterfall encounter affirms this. It was the
outburst of water "through a narrow rock-cleft" that excited the soul (40). The experiences contrast the deadness
of the rocky mountains with the invigorated rock-cleft at the moment it holds the lively mobility of the water.
Indeed, rock is only truly dead when it is employed with supporting the gushing of water. Moreover, the
imagination cannot properly map the scene, and it cannot represent the full experience in painting, as nothing
quite captures the "eternal life, the powerful mobility" of the waterfall which was constantly changing (Hegel's
quote, 40). To Sallis, if the death of architecture is a mere semblance, and never properly presented, then
equally the mobility of eternal life of the waterfall can never be captured by art (70). The death of architecture
and the revival of the spirit through architecture, therefore, are engaged in a constant waltz of passing away,
swapping one for another in the history of the artistic experience.
The recall to the rock-cleft example shows the reader that it is not the water material that is sublime but
the juxtaposition between dead and heavy and the mobile, spiritual element that arises from the deadness that
captures the senses to the sublime. The contrast of death with life that propels the spirit experienced into the
next stage, something deeper, higher and transcendent, invisible, unimaginable. This contrast of stone and the
water defines the stone as past and dead, because the stone itself become necessarily dead in the (im)measurable
flow of life (39). In fact, as Sallis foreshadows on page 35, the returning specters of architecture do not haunt,
but come back fully as "reborn" and "resurrected." Certainly, the semblance of death will yield the recovery of
the actor at the end of the act, seemingly resuscitated from death's grasps. Looking back, moreover, it also
makes incredible sense for Sallis to establish that fact of life as that who "endures [death] and maintains itself in
it" (35). The spirit comes into being, therefore through the negativity of stone, through the denial of materiality.
The stone then takes on the meaning of the negative inside, which is the meaning of something outside
architecture itself.
The water coming out of stone is the way Sallis wants his reader to understand Hegel's meaning of the
pastness/death of art. Superficially, Sallis puts aside the comparison of nature to art on page 40 but actually this
example of the bursting water is alluded to again and again through his investigation of the stone as
architecture's building material, as signifier of its deadness. By the end of the article, the reader recalls Sallis's
example of water and stone, as a major example to understand death as only a precursor to a resurrected life, in
which experience of the negativity of architecture houses the truth of the spirit (41).
With this in mind, it becomes clear how the three stages of architecture are a part of a circle, in which
symbolic and romantic are linked up against the center stage of the classical. The circle is understood less as a
cycle, and serves more to illustrate the connection of the two ends, symbolic and gothic architecture, as being
similar to each other. They both deny the semblance of stone, which is to say, the semblance of death. In this
way, they also deny the full experience of the theatrical death-life. For this reason they are on the sidelines,
unable to achieve the full drama of the contrast that exists in the waterfall example.
The circle of the theater of stone also serves to refute the finality of the "end of art." Indeed, for Sallis
the passing of art is not the final death blow. He writes, "For that becoming-past-- the end of art, as it were -- is
no simple event that could be located on a linear time-scale, at some point in time where art would have become,
from then on, something past" (44). The circle of the theater, therefore, is Sallis's response to this linear
conception of death being the threshold to the past. Rather, death is made full through the "operative self-
transcendence" in the act of passing (45). Death is as much a part of the full performance as life is.
In the circle, Sallis pulls the ends of the architecture stages together, closing the connection between the
symbolic and gothic. This looping back explains why Sallis distinguishes between different distortions of stone
and why he chose to delay the discrepancy between stone and brick, and stone that does not look like stone until
the last two pages of the article. He waits until the last second to warp the linearity of Hegel's axes back on itself
into a circle. Suddenly it becomes obvious that the brick and sculpted stone are essentially same in nature in
their denial of the natural state of the stone. They both embody meaning of immateriality in a more active way
than the classical stone. Both kinds of architecture contribute to the disappearing act of stone (79), wherein
architecture leaves the stage, but only temporarily in the semblance of transcendence in death.
Thus when Sallis places the Greek temple at the center of the theater, it is precisely because the temple
best reflect the deadness of stone, and, as the reader now understands, the temple also take on the aliveness in
this state of stone. At this center, the stone is most itself, most dead, and most effaced of all its mutations in
brick (of the Tower of Babel) and sculpted stone (of the Gothic cathedral). Only at the moment when it becomes
deadened, unresponsive, and unexpressive of its own properties, does stone satisfy the full expression of the
interiority of the spirit. Only in the Greek temple does the stone fully act out the heaviness of its material and
contrast all the more the lively mobility of "water," which is the spirit.
Sallis's primary argument is that symbolic, classical, and romantic architecture are but actors on the
theater of stone. Each stage carry with it a particular materiality that directly implicates the expression of the
immaterial or spiritual. With this theater, Sallis questions the death of architecture as not being really dead as
defined by Hegel. That is to say, for Sallis, there is a way to bring architecture back to life through its very
death as assigned by Hegel. Sallis artfully reorients the text so as to give a new context to the Hegelian
recollection, repositioning the reader as audience to a circular stage of curtains and actors. The idea that the
meaning of architecture must be something outside of it, must be something living that contrasts its deadness --
something like the moving water bursting out from inorganic rock-- drives architecture to become moving in all
its heavy negativity. Architecture is past, Sallis would agree, but it is not a final act. And perhaps recognizing
that it is a theatrical death makes it possible for architecture to become alive and moving again.