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Summary of Rights of Retreat

 The article is aimed at understanding how information impacts us as is evident from the line ‘Information, as such, may be morally neutral but it is certainly not inactive.’ This article also signifies how we protect ourselves from information that may oppose our beliefs and how we tend to exclude alien perceptions. Through the characters in J.K. Huysmans’ Against Nature, we see Des Esseintes who only surrounds himself with things that reaffirm his beliefs. He wished to remove himself from seeing humans toiling in Paris between four walls or trying to scrounge for money. He populated his new habitation with things he admired. His style of living was conserved but at the expense of losing contact with the outside world.

This is just an example of how people eclipse certain aspects of the chaotic universe to generate moments of calm in an otherwise confused existence. This tendency is manifested in certain disorders such as sensory aphasia, amnesia neuroses and schizophrenia. At times, humans attempt to manipulate their external world, instead if influencing their internal state. The focus of this article is how one adjusts the nature around them to suit their whims. They can do so in two ways: retreat and exclusion.
Retreat allows one to severe connections and live like hermits. A life accompanied by fasts and prayers but in itself being a preparation. The planning of such kind of lifestyle emerged with organized monasticism. The solitude and antiquity of hermits is recreated in the Charterhouse with some architectural props in which a wall is built around each monk to form a small garden. It resembles a densely packed nest of isolated individuals. Here, the architecture reduces the possibility of human contact. All self-isolation requires participants to retreat to individual autonomy. Through extending this philosophy, a mantle envelops the inhabitants in a familiar landscape, a place to practice our ideological practices.

The Great Wall of China is a manifestation of the principle of information exclusion. It served as a shield against voices of alien culture. It was never a success from a military point of view but served as an excellent tool to raise the hands of the nation to cover their eyes. Yet retreat doesn’t always lead to weakening of social bonds as the people isolated from the outside world, united by their condemnation of the present, begin to live according to their crafted illusions. This meta-reality rivals with a once-resistant reality. This is the nature of reflection, grace and solitude also.

Intellects in the West have always championed the causes of unity. Rosseau even said that some people ought to be forced to be free, which meant that they should be forced to do the right things. Such an organization gives rise to an isotropic civilization where everyone works towards the same goal. Ideas of the nature of things are built into the structure of surroundings which justifies one’s own beliefs.

Exclusion is a way to change the shape of society. This is evident in the body of politics that hermetically aims to seal off rebellious and distasteful parts of society. Much energy is devoted to eliminating the acts which are not socially accepted. Thus, human beings will enclose those whom they find offensive within walls without any remorse. They intend to exclude the knowledge and sensation of the most disturbing influences by erecting a barrier between himself and his objects of dissatisfaction. The barriers are set up on grounds of what are called aesthetics, an attempt to mask the ugly.

Walls are simply not a barrier of transferring energy, but prevent entropy of meaning and preserve the concept of our dream world. This dream world could be personal or universal, as accepted by the whole society. Walls are the armour we erect to preserve our personal integrity.

Thus, architecture offers a tool for humans to construct walls and present images that they prefer, instead of the ones that actually exist.

Still, humans have been unable to create a wall that completely eclipses the reality outside. The things we are enclosed with end up determining our interests and passions.

In 1830s, Millbank Penitentiary was redesigned to prevent the communication between convicts in cells. Thus, in the Age of Reason, the main efforts put to terminate all forms of communication between people of dangerous character. Vice was a contagious disease of the spirit and was thought to increase when associated with other like minds. Another example is the Wakefield asylum where inmates were closed off from each other to prevent the worsening of their condition due to those more clinically insane. The asylum was elevated on a plateau to provide a view of the scenery, in an attempt to soothe the unstable mind. This is an example in which architecture is a means for the fabrication of a synthetic geography and used for the involuntary improvement of the human mind.

Both the methods, retreat and exclusion, can be considered as defeats. In the past few years, we have not seen the vision of a young paradise but a symbol of human failure to console with entropy. 

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