The word construction is supposedly a noun, but its definition is “the building of something,” the act of building, and/ or even “the style or method” of that building. Technically, what is constructed is also a construction, but the word is rarely used that way. Additionally, construction is something one does, or those guys over there are doing, or—in the parlance of careerist jargon—is something one is “in.” That which is being constructed is said to be “under construction,” which is my favorite semantic quirk of the word, because it suggests (by an association mediated by the word “under”) that what is important, or of value, in a constructed thing is that which is not immediately apprehensible: the materials, tools, time, energy, and people whose activity resulted in that constructed thing existing—all the stuff “under” the “surface.” Yes by this I mean “labor.”
One thing I have learned, in my experience as one who builds things, is that “the right tool for the job” is a real thing. By this I mean not simply that one needs X tool for Y task, but the satisfaction, the deep joy, the juissance of apprehending something that needs done, finding or realizing one has the tool that will accomplish it, then employing that tool in its doing. On some level I wish it were more complex than that, but I think its simplicity is what makes it so beautiful.
However I am not primarily interested in this, in the simple act of doing; nor am I interested in something like the “final product,” or that which is the object of the doing (I mean this in the sense that my personal impetus is not motored by a particular interest in that which is built, the way folks who are into, say, cars, are into cars). I mean I am interested in these things, just not as much as I am interested in the space ~between~ the doing and the (evidence of something having been) done.
I do not have a word or a term for this between space, and I’m hella reticent to even use the word “between” here. What I mean is the physical, material existence of certain things, things that are built or used or put together when something is in the process of being built, or is half-built—things that are often as substantial as that which we build toward, things like concrete forms or scaffolding.
Concrete forms are my primary and favorite example, both because I have experience building them, but also because of the play on words made possible by the term concrete, a term often used in critical theory precisely because it is this physical thing that is what that which is built consists of, that which we work with. The feeling of thinking and writing this parallels the right tool/ job affect mentioned above, and I’m further pushed into rapture when I realize that I’m thinking and writing about literal concrete as the literal content of the literal form of construction.
The weirdness of the word construction, as outlined in my first paragraph above, makes me feel like the word “construction” is a place-holder for a concept or a thing that we don’t, for whatever reason, have the language to properly isolate, describe or understand. It doesn’t seem to truly stick to any of the things we say it means or actually is, if that makes sense. Understanding it—the hazy set of meanings attached to the signifier “construction”— as being the beginning of some sense of that which is (something like) between the doing and the (being) done—an understanding demonstrated (not necessarily made clearer) by the act of forming concrete—has led me to believe that that which construction should (technically) attach itself to as ~actually~ meaning is the things that comprise the thing in the process of being done, thought about as a sort of end in itself, a “finished product.” That is construction. Not the doing, not that which is there once the doing is done, but that which is constructed in the process of construction. That is, construction is something like art, or an art; a construction is an artwork.