As if in response to this existential crisis, cinema invested space as a kind of character, freeing it from its function as “ground" for action and mining its “pure potential," its being as a “perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways." In the ASW, space becomes “a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible" (109). Matters are quite otherwise in the digital realm, where the problem is not how to reenergize disinvested space, but how to forge a connection between bodily lived space and the topological possibilities afforded by digital manipulation. Whereas the cinematic ASW emerges out of what is, in the end, a lapsed analogy between embodiment and spatiality, there is nothing similar to build upon in the case of the digital.
xxi. This is precisely why Eisenman insists that the processes of the machinic have no necessary correlation with the interiority of architecture. It is precisely what informs his characterization of the contemporary electronic era-and the central example of the fax-as autonomous from human interpretation: "noninterpretative vision" can and must be distinguished by the absence of any originary analogical correlation with human experience. As the experiential cipher of such an absence, noninterpretative vision is what makes framing necessary—framing, that is, as the activity of forging a supplementary analogy through the embodied activity of the receiver. As a figure for the production of such a supplementary analogy, the digital ASW helps explain how the body is capable of generating spatial experience from a purely intensive space, one without relation to any independent coordinates or external ground.
xxii. Indeed, in the expanded sense theorized by Cache, the body remains the "source" (no matter how occulted) for all derivative forms of (technical) framing, including those internal to architecture (e.g., the grid or the cube) as well as those external to it (the cinematic frame, the photograph, but also all the so-called "external texts," liquid crystals, brain waves, etc., to which Eisenman has had recourse in his recent work). In this respect, it is not without relevance that Eisenman's career can be understood as a progressive movement away from the cinematic metaphor to a notion of architectural framing that includes the body (embodied spacing). For an account of this movement, see R. E. Somol's "Dummy Text," the introduction to Diagram Diaries.
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