Architectural Collective Enunciation:
A Question of Forming Relays
Exhibition
02-23
April 2018
Architecture Theory
Chair
© TU Delft
The reign of ‘Starchitecture’ is over. Good riddance.
It has been buried together with the so-called neoliberal era that has dominated economic, political and social systems until (the financial crisis of) 2008. Uncannily, this turn roughly coincided
with the cataclysm of our old faculty building. We uphold the hypothesis that the contemporary trends in architecture have emerged as an alternative to the (st)architectural positions dominant
since the turn of the century.
To meet the ethical
challenge of the Anthropocene the architect’s role needs to undergo a fundamental change from that of a synaptic
visionary (a psychological subject whose private meanings and public expressions are crucial to understanding
her
work and its effects)
to a more humble yet audacious clinical/critical cartographer of the material-discursive realm. We propose to catalyse the transition by breaking the
bad habit of representationalism. In the words of Deleuze and Foucault:
At one time, practice was considered an application of theory, a consequence; at other times, it had an opposite sense and it was thought
to inspire theory.
…
In any event, their relationship was understood in terms of a process
of totalization. For us, however, the question is seen in a different light. The relationships between theory and practice are far more partial and
fragmentary.
…
The relationship which holds in the
application of a theory is never one of resemblance.
…
Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another
and theory is a relay from one practice to
another.
…
A theorizing intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness.
…
Representation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks. (Foucault and Deleuze, 1977)
Isabelle Stengers’s strategy of forming relays saves us from the totalizing and hence fatalistic teleological temptations:
The question can no longer be, then, one of commentary, rendering explicit what would have remained
implicit, clarifying or elucidating.
…
Rather it is about “consolidating” just a little more—always a little more—which
is to say, forming relays.
…
As it happens,
in regard to thinking
about life, it will be a question
of forming relays in the manner that A Thousand Plateaus struggles against the nearly irresistible slope that would transform the “voyage” of thought
into the destination, into the position
of its final definition, and simultaneously assign an end, in
the double sense of the
term, to thought. (Stengers,
2017), pp. 325- 338 (329).
Finally, we rely on
Karen Barad reinvigoration of the diffractive approach:
As Donna Haraway suggests, diffraction can serve as a useful counterpoint to reflection: both are optical
phenomena, but whereas the metaphor of reflection reflects the themes of mirroring and sameness,
diffraction is marked by
patterns of difference.
…
Haraway focuses our attention on this figurative distinction to highlight important difficulties with the notion of reflection as a pervasive
trope for knowing, as well as related difficulties with the parallel notion of reflexivity as a method or theory (in the social sciences) of self-accounting, of taking account of the
effect of the theory or the
researcher on the investigation.
…
Haraway’s point
is that the methodology of reflexivity mirrors the geometrical optics of reflection, and that for all of the recent emphasis on reflexivity as a critical method of self- positioning it remains caught up in geometries of sameness;
by contrast,
diffractions are attuned to differences—differences that our knowledge-making practices make and the effects they have on the world.
…
Crucially, diffraction attends to the relational nature of difference; it does not figure difference as either a matter of essence or as inconsequential: ‘‘a diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but
rather maps where the effects
of differences appear’’ (Barad, 2007).
The exhibition
diffractively relays five texts to eight diagrams:
Diagram 1 Diagram of Haircuts, based on ‘Axis thinking’
by Eno.
Text 1. Brian Eno, ‘Axis thinking’ (1993).
Diagram 2. Diagram of TU Delft Architecture Department Chairs, adapted
from Zaera-Polo’s diagram.
Diagram 3. Diagram of Architectural Landscape Today,
based on the ‘The full political compass diagram’ by
Zaera-Polo and Abascal. Text 2. Alejandro Zaera-Polo
and Guillermo Fernandez Abascal,
Diagram 4. Diagram of Aesthetic Values,
based on Wisdom as Moderation ( 1987) by
Hartshorne.
Diagram 5. Diagram of Beauty,
based on adaptation of Hartshorne’s diagram from ‘The Compass
of Beauty’ by Spuybroek.
Text 3. Lars Spuybroek, excerpt from ‘The Compass of Beauty: A Search for the Middle’
(forthcoming).
Diagram 6.
Diagram of the Four Domains of the Plane of Consistency, based
on Schizoanalytic Cartographies (1989) by Guattari.
Text 4. Félix Guattari, excerpt from ‘Architectural Enunciation’ (1989).
Diagram 7. Diagram of the Ecologies of Architecture, adapted
from Guattari’s diagram.
Text 5. Andrej
Radman, ‘Ecologies of Architecture’ (2018).
Diagram 8. Diagram of TU Delft Architecture Department Chairs, based
on the Ecologies of Architecture
Diagram.
References
Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Maller and Meaning (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007),
pp. 71-72.
Eno, Brian, ‘Axis thinking’ in A Year with Swollen Appendices (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 298- 302.
Foucault, Michel and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’ in Donald
F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans. (Ithaca,
NY:
Cornell University Press,
1977), pp. 205–207.
Grosz, Elizabeth, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press,
2017).
Guattari, Félix, ‘Architectural Enunciation’ in Schizoanalytic Cartographies, Andrew Goffey, trans. (London: Bloomsbury, [1989]
2013), pp. 231-239.
Hartshorne, Charles, Wisdom
as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way (New York: State university of New York
Press, 1987).
Radman, Andrej, ‘Ecologies of Architecture’ in Rosi Braidotti
and Maria Hlavajova, eds., Posthuman Glossary (London: Bloomsbury
Academic, 2018), pp. 117-120.
Spuybroek, Lars, ‘The Compass
of Beauty: A Search
for
the Middle’
in
Maria Voyatzaki, ed.,
Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman
Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
Stengers, Isabelle, ‘Thinking Life: The Problem has Changed’ in
Jami Weinstein and Claire Colebrook, eds., Posthumous Life: Theorizing Beyond the Posthuman (New York : Columbia
University Press, 2017),
pp. 325-338 (329).
Zaera-Polo, Alejandro and Guillermo Fernandez Abascal, ‘Architecture's ‘Political Compass’: A Taxonomy
of Emerging Architecture in One Diagram’, https://www.archdaily.com/801641/architectures- political-compass-a-taxonomy-of-emerging-architecture-in-one-diagram
Zaera-Polo, Alejandro, ‘Well into the 21st Century: The Architectures of Post-Capitalism?’, El Croquis 187 (2016), pp. 252-287.
Axis thinking
Brian Eno
(An appendix from: Brian
Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices (London: Faber and Faber, 1996),
pp. 298-302.)
An axis is a name for a continuum of
possibilities between two extreme positions: so the axis between black and
white is a scale of greys.
I can illustrate this
idea by applying it to the description of haircuts. [Diagram 1]
Rather than only being able to say of someone’s
haircut that it is, for example, masculine or feminine, we’re as likely to want
to say that it’s quite masculine, or quite feminine, or unisexual – somewhere
in the middle. When we do this, we acknowledge that the sexual possibilities of
haircuts don’t just fall squarely at one or another of the polar positions –
masculine or feminine – but somewhere on the wide range of hybrids between
them. In fact we would feel constrained if we couldn’t make descriptions in
these fuzzy, hybrid, terms.
If you were trying to describe a particular
haircut, however, you’d probably want to say more than ‘It’s quite feminine’,
or some other comment about its gender-connotations. You might also want to
locate its position along other axes – for instance along the axis neat <–> shaggy – ‘It’s slightly shaggy’ or ‘It’s very neat.’ If that then
gave you enough descriptive language to say everything you could imagine ever
wanting to say about haircuts, you could locate every example you ever met
somewhere on a two-dimensional space – like this sheet of paper. So you could
make a kind of graph – masculine <–>
feminine on one axis, neat <–> shaggy on the other. On this graph, which is a simple cross in 2D
space, any point represents a particular position in relation to the four polar
possibilities:
masculine <–> feminine neat <–> shaggy
I call each of these points a cultural address.
I could equally well call it a stylistic address. It is the identification of a
particular point in stylistic space, a ‘possible haircut’.
Those four terms still constitute an
impoverished language in which to describe most haircuts, and to describe a
wide range of possible haircuts we would need several others: natural <–> contrived, rebel <–>
conformist, wild <–> civilised,
futuristic <–> nostalgic, businesslike <–> bohemian.
Each of these polar pairs defines another axis along which any particular
haircut could be located. And each of these exists as a ‘dimension’ in the haircut space, which now becomes multidimensional and no longer easily drawable
on a sheet of paper.
We shouldn’t forget that
each of these poles has no absolute and for-all-time meaning but is also in its
own slow motion, stretching the axis of which it defines an end-point this way
and that. A really natural haircut, for example, is no haircut. But when we use
the term ‘natural cut’ we don’t think of someone with shaggy locks hanging over
their eyes, but of someone who went to the hairdresser and said something like,
‘Can you make it look sort of natural – a bit windswept?’, as opposed to
someone else who said, ‘Can you do me a nine-inch beehive?’
And
there is another complication: the resonances are quite local culturally. A man
with very short hair in East London in 1985 would be assumed potentially dangerous
and ‘hard’. The same man in San Francisco would be thought gay.
And if we look more closely
we see that many of the things that we would consider single qualities of hair
are actually themselves multi-axial spaces. To describe hair colour, for example,
needs much more detail than dark <–> light. It needs an axis of
redness, an axis of greyness, an axis of colour homogeneity, an axis of shine.
What strikes you as
interesting when you begin thinking about stylistic decisions (or moral or
political decisions) as being locatable in a multi-axial space of this kind is
the recognition that some axes don’t yet exist. For example, with hairstyles,
as far as I know, there is not a dirty
<–> clean axis. That’s to say,
your hairdresser isn’t likely to ask you, ‘How dirty would you like it?’ It’s
still assumed that there is no discussion about it: the axis has not been
opened up. We would all want it ‘as clean as possible’.
Peter Schmidt used to talk
about ‘the things that nobody ever thought of not doing’. A version of this
happened in clothing fashion. There was recently a style – variously described as non-fit,
un-fit and anti-fit (the name didn’t stabilize) - which was to do with people
wearing clothes that exist at the never-before-desirable end of the newly
discovered axis well-fitted <–> badly fitted. These
clothes were deliberately chosen to look completely wrong. This was way beyond
baggy, which was a first timid step along that axis. Baggy implies the message
‘These are my clothes, but I like to wear them loose.’ Non-fit says, ‘These are
someone eIse’s clothes’ or ‘I am insane’ or ‘I cannot locate myself’ or ‘I
don’t fit.’
With punk, a brand-new axis
opened up: professionally cut <–>
hacked about
by a brainless cretin. As often happens, this
appeared (and was intended) to be an anti-style style, and was shocking because
we had never previously considered the possibility that the concept ‘style’ and
the concept ‘hacked about by a brainless cretin’ could overlap one another. But,
as usual, the effect was not to overthrow and eliminate the idea of style but
to give it new places in which to extend itself. ‘Hacked about by a brainless
cretin’ became not the death of hair-styling but the furthest outpost of a new
continuum of possible choices about how hair could look.
This
is a transition from polar thinking – the
kind of thinking that says, ‘It’s either this or it’s that’, or ‘Everything
that isn’t clearly this must be that’ – to
axial thinking. Axial thinking doesn’t deny that it could be this or that – but suggests that it’s more
likely to be somewhere between the two. As soon as that suggestion is in the
air, it triggers an imaginative process, an attempt to locate and conceptualize
the newly acknowledged grey-scale positions.
I am
interested in these transitions –
these moments when a stable duality dissolves into a proliferating and unstable
sea of hybrids. What happens at such times is that all sorts of things become
possible: there is a tremendous energy release, a great burst of
experimentation. Not only do the emerging possible positions on this new-born
axis have to be discovered and experienced and articulated: they have to be
placed in context with other existing axes to see what new resonances appear.
A good – and undigested – example of this
process is the (apparently temporary) demise of state communism in Eastern
Europe. It’s extraordinary that when the Berlin Wall came down everyone assumed
that the whole world was about to become one big market economy running on the
same set of rules. What happened instead was that the old dualism communism <–> capitalism
was revealed to conceal a host of possible hybrids. Now only the most ideological
governments (England, Cuba) still retain their fundamentalist commitment to one
end of the continuum: most governments are experimenting vigorously with
complicated customized blendings of market forces and state intervention.
An example of such a
complicated blending is defence spending, which allows a government nominally
committed to ‘market forces’ to have at its centre a completely intact command
economy within which It can direct the flow of social resources.
The period of transition is
marked by excitement, experimentation – and
resistance. Whenever a duality starts to dissolve, those who felt trapped at
one end of it suddenly feel enormous freedom – they can now redescribe themselves. But, by the
same token, those who defined their identity by their allegiance to one pole of
the duality (and rejection of the other) feel exposed. The walls have been
taken away, and the separation between inside and outside is suddenly gone.
This can create wide-scale social panic: vigorous affirmations of the essential
rightness of the ‘old ways’, moral condemnation of the experimentalists, ‘back
to basics’ campaigns, all the familiar signs of fundamentalism.
Essentially, cultures wish
to be able to control, or at least channel, such excitements and panics,
turning what could be chaotic uncertainty into a power either for revolution or
for consolidation. This is normally mishandled. Hostile propaganda campaigns
are good examples of fundamentalism at work: they are designed to push the
concepts of friend and enemy to extreme and unambiguous positions, and to
cement a complete and unvarying identification between two different axes: us <–> them,
friend <–> enemy.
Zones
of Pragmatic Deceit are the social and mental inventions that exist to
lubricate the friction between what we claim to stand for (i.e. simple polar
pictures) and what we actually have to do to make things work (i.e. navigate
over networks of axes). These two are often quite different, as situations
change much faster than the moral constructions that are sup posed to describe
them.
A good example of a ZPD is
the American consulate in Antigua, which has an elaborate system of deterring,
or at least preconditioning, black people entering the United States by
subjecting them to bizarre humiliations in theoretically routine matters such
as getting a visitor’s visa.
The
machinery of this humiliation is highly evolved: after several hours’ queueing,
applicants arc required to address the ever-sneering, never-interested staff
through a thick glass panel which has a small hole 3 ft from the ground. Since
the staff routinely feign inability to hear or understand what anyone is
saying, shrugging their shoulders and making to walk away to rejoin the
interminable conversation they were having before, applicants are soon forced
to their knees so that they can talk up through the
little slot. This induction into American society sets the right tone: instead
of ‘Bring us your poor, your sick ... etc.’, it’s ‘On your knees and beg.’
This
system exists because America –
like Britain, which has evolved other forms of immigrant humiliation – is committed ideologically to
the concept of open borders, but is increasingly worried by the prospect of
huge immigrant communities, and has no new language (other than that of
failure) in which to discuss a reassessment of position. This is the difficulty
with polar thought systems: they offer only two possible options.
You could say that the
evolution of culture is the gradual rethinking of the whole matrix of axes: the
discovery of new ones, of course, but also the careful tailoring – trimming and
extending – of existing ones. For instance, the axis of ‘possible human
relationships’ used to extend from ‘total slave’ to ‘absolute ruler’. Fewer
cultures are now willing to accept either of those extreme polarities as part
of their vision of civilized behaviour, so you could say that this particular
axis has been effectively shortened –
focused down – to
a narrower range.
What
characterizes fundamentalism is a set of extremely narrow axes that allow
almost no movement, no experimentation. And liberalism is perhaps the attempt
to keep the axes as open as possible without incurring complete social
fragmentation. The importance of symbolic behaviours like art and religion and
sexual fantasy is that they allow us to experiment symbolically with new and
even prohibited positions on the axial matrix – experiments that may be inconvenient, dangerous and
divisive in ‘real life’.
Architecture's ‘Political Compass’:
A Taxonomy of Emerging Architecture in One Diagram
Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Guillermo Fernandez Abascal
(An excerpt from: https://www.archdaily.com/801641/architectures-political-compass-a-taxonomy-of-emerging-architecture-in-one-diagram)
Observing the architectural landscape
today it’s clear that the type of work which is currently ascendant,
particularly among young practices, is very different to what came before the
financial crisis of 2008. But what, exactly, does that architectural landscape
look like? In an essay titled “Well into the 21st Century” in the latest issue
of El Croquis, Alejandro Zaera-Polo outlined a 21st-century taxonomy
of architecture, attempting to define and categorize the various new forms of
practice that have grown in popularity in the years since—and as a political
response to—the economic crisis. [Diagram 2]
The categories defined by Zaera-Polo
encompass seven broad political positions:
1) Activists, who
reject architecture’s dependence on market forces by operating largely outside
the market, with a focus on community building projects, direct engagement with
construction, and non-conventional funding strategies;
2)
Populists,
whose work is calibrated to reconnect with the populace thanks to a
media-friendly, diagrammatic approach to architectural form;
3)
New
Historicists, whose riposte to the “end of
history” hailed by neoliberalism is an embrace of historically-informed design;
4)
Skeptics,
whose existential response to the collapse of the system is in part a return to
postmodern critical discourse and in part an exploration of contingency and
playfulness through an architecture of artificial materials and bright colors;
5)
Material
Fundamentalists, who returned to a tactile and
virtuoso use of materials in response to the visual spectacle of pre-crash
architecture;
6)
Austerity
Chic, a kind of architectural “normcore”
(to borrow a term from fashion) which focuses primarily on the production
process, and resulting performance, of architecture;
7)
Techno-Critical, a
group of practices largely producing speculative architecture, whose work
builds upon but also remains critical of the data-driven parametricism of their
predecessors.
As a follow-up to that essay, Zaera-Polo
and Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal set out to apply the newly-defined categories
to the emerging practices of today with a nuanced “political compass” diagram.
They invited practices to respond to their categorization in order to unveil
the complex interdependencies and self-image of these political stances. For
the first time, here ArchDaily publishes the results of that exercise.
During the last decade, there has
been a growing interest within the architectural debate about the possibility
of a political re-engagement of the discipline, a subject which had been
remarkably absent from the disciplinary debate since the 1970s, but which seems
to be back in the spotlight.
Based on the political categories
outlined in the text “Well into the 21st Century,” published
in El Croquis 187, and deeply inspired by the infamous diagram from Charles Jencks in Architecture 2000, we set out to make a
synchronic map of contemporary emerging architectural practices.
We have selected 181 world-wide
emerging practices, which we have located on a dial where the political
categories were laid out, trying to set their adjacencies with some sense of continuity.
Starting from the Techno-critical, we move clockwise to the Technocratic, then
to the Cosmopolitical, then to the Austerity-chic, Activists and then to the
Material Fundamentalists, Constitutionalists, Historicists, Revisionists,
Skeptics and finally to the Populists.
Methodology
We mapped the emerging architectural
practices following their estimated political inclinations inside a circular
field comprised in the dial. While there was an interesting adjacency between
the different political categories, and we could place them nicely around the
circular field, some of them had to be placed in less evident adjacencies.
The difficulties of locating the
practices are evident: some of the practices were often bridging non-adjacent
categories, so they were difficult to locate. Practices are not homogeneous and
sometimes shift positions between projects and sometimes, between partners. We
nevertheless tried to place every one of the emerging practices that we thought
were significant on the map, to the best of our judgment, which is obviously
limited. This is Version 0.1, so we will hopefully do later iterations where a
different mapping technique could be used, further categories added or more
precise information about the practices can be included.
Then we asked all practices for a
self-assessment, so we could see the deviation between our estimated location
and their desired one. We sent the practices a list of the political categories
and the empty compass, deleting the names of the practices that we had located,
so they could position themselves without being affected by the proximity of
other practices, or by our own hypothesis about their location.
We asked them to position themselves
on the map: the closer they locate to the outer border of the compass, the more
orthodox they consider themselves in respect to the neighboring category; the
closer they go to the center of the circle, the more hybridized they would
consider themselves.
Analysis of
Data
1.
101 practices entered
into the self-assessment (56%).
2.
50% of the
practices placed themselves graphically. The other half seemed to be more
comfortable with a verbal description of their position in respect to the
categories.
3.
15% matched
almost exactly our hypothetic location.
4.
20% located
themselves close to our hypothetical location, mostly tending toward the center
or toward neighboring categories.
5.
20% placed
themselves in a different location, with a general tendency toward a more
central, hybridized location, many of them pointing towards the
“Cosmopolitical” category.
6.
10% set
themselves in an opposite area.
7.
5% said that
they do not fit into any of the categories, and proposed alternative categories
for their own practice. “Utopian” and “Pragmatic” are some of the requested
political grounds which were not available.
8.
5% wanted to be
into two categories or in overlaps which were currently unavailable in the map.
9.
Less than 5%
suggested different positions for each of the partners.
10.
5% asked for a
change of their political location after seeing our full compass hypothesis.
11.
Less than 5%
distributed their projects over the map saying every project has a different
political stance and there is no overarching political stance in their
practice, as it is related to the specific situation of the project.
12.
Less than 5%
were happy with any location we gave them.
13.
Less than 5%
described their practice according how they approach each category.
14.
Less than 5%
provided specific coordinates of their location or suggested that a more
precise geometrical diagram could simplify their answer.
15.
5% expressed
interest but did not send any answer.
16.
5% showed
gratitude for including them but refused to participate because of being
extremely busy or because they considered the experiment inadequate to capture
the profession, irrelevant, or they thought the categories were subjective,
imprecise and disputed.
Conclusions
There is a logical reluctance in the
practices to accept our categorization. Given the current resurgence in
politics in architecture, we expected emerging practices to have a more
ideological stance to practice than the previous generation. Instead, we
noticed a general refusal to take a clear stance. Perhaps our categories were
not sufficiently varied. Some practices requested the category “Utopian” which
was missing from the reference text, and the categories on offer. This was
particularly true of those in the categories of the Activists and the
Populists. We had excluded Utopianism simply because we do not believe any of
the practices included can be considered truly utopian. We do believe there may
be Utopian practices in architecture today but rarely within the selection of
practicing architects which we have adopted for our analysis.
There were several requests for a
“Pragmatic” label, as if Realpolitik was still alive and well within the
emerging generation, despite the general claim for a more “engaged”
architectural practice. We had deliberately avoided Pragmatism as a political option,
as it was one of the most common claims of the previous generation of
“neo-liberal” practices, and it appears to imply a lack of a strong ideological
conviction as a driver of the practice. However, several practices appear to
reclaim pragmatism as a political stance, even referring to authorities such as
Latour, Marres, etc. Perhaps a difference should be made between ideological
and tactical politics in further iterations of this experiment. Many of the
practices tended to express a wish to move toward the center of the chart, to
remain in a more ambiguous position, including those positions which claimed
that every project develops its own political stance. Some of them even claimed
that every partner has a different political stance, which is both probably
true and interesting.
Other than the tendency toward the
center, Activism and Cosmopolitical are some of the most coveted locations for
emerging practices. Those located in the Populist area did not agree with their
location and tended to complain of oversimplification of their position. This
may very well be true, as populism is more of a style of delivery and we
ourselves believe that, while it may be predominant in some practices, we can
probably have populists among the Cosmopoliticals, the Activists or the
Material Fundamentalists.
Those practices that we have located
in the Material Fundamentalism or the Cosmopolitical tended not to respond to
the experiment by a large margin. The same is true for the people we located
within the Activist and Austerity proponents. That seems to be consistent with
their political stance of prioritizing the actual building itself, the cosmos
or the engagement with the community...
The Global compass was not as global
as we had wanted: we did not manage to engage a sufficient number of Asian
practices, despite their disproportionate weight in the global construction
output by comparison with other regions in the world. The scarce engagement of
Asian practices in the study may be an index of a general disbelief in
architectural politics, or perhaps the reluctance to engage with a possibly
too-Western political perspective.
80% of the contributors expressed a
positive attitude towards the classification. Even some of the ones who refused
to take part in the quest qualified the experiment as “nice,” “intriguing,”
“amazing,” “maniac,” “genial,” “funny,” “great,” “very cool,” “super interesting,”
or “fascinating,” and they appeared to like the fact that a magazine best known
for monographs of established architects was willing to open this debate. To
all those who engaged in the experiment, in whatever form, our deepest
gratitude. We hope to continue the debate that was initiated here with all of
them, to produce more sophisticated versions of this map.
The Compass of Beauty:
A Search for the Middle
Lars Spuybroek
(An
excerpt from the forthcoming chapter in: Maria Voyatzaki (ed.), Architectural Materialisms: Nonhuman
Creativity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press)).
Compass and Wheel
Before we
move to the final stage in the development of a biaxial systemacy, in the form
of Charles Hartshorne’s Diagram
of Aesthetic Values, we should take a brief look at the ideas
on beauty of his primary
influence, the Anglo-American philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Like Hartshorne, Whitehead developed his ideas on beauty quite late in life, and not really
until two of his last books, Adventures of Ideas (1933) and Modes of Thought (1938),
published when he was in his seventies.
As I have discussed
on earlier occasions,39 to define the nature of the two axes properly
it is vital to understand Whitehead’s argument, especially considering the
history of aesthetic theories, which, by the way, both he and Hartshorne felt confident
enough to omit. Beauty—“the teleology of the universe,” as Whitehead phrased
it40—consists of two dimensions, one of “mutual
adaptation,” the other of “patterned contrasts,”41 or, in the words of Price, Hogarth
and Burke, one dimension of smoothness and one of roughness. The axis of mutual adaptation (note the phrase’s subtle evolutionary and environmental ring) indexes the necessity
of harmonizing, that is, wholes harmonizing with other wholes;
in short, the synthetic axis of smoothness, or extensity. The fact that it consists of an axis means that on the one end we find things
that harmonize extremely, that are ultraunified, which Whitehead calls “minor beauty”
or “the absence of a painful clash.”42 Meanwhile,
on the other end, we find things that don’t succeed in harmonizing, that is, things that are ultraplurified, what we call ugly. It is important to understand that the other term, contrast, is different from mere diversity, though. Things do not simply vary, they break away from each other. We see fractures emerging, sudden shifts and cuts (being literally analytic). Such contrasts and fractures often
lead to layering
and stratification with parts
or groups of parts hiding
behind one another,
in what we often denote with “depth”
or “profundity.” Therefore, the effect of contrast
is often expressed by magnitude, which
is why we find the previously discussed greatness of the sublime on this axis, as well as the smallness of the cute at its opposite end.
This system
allows every thing, every “occasion,” every gesture to exist as a combination of smoothness and roughness, or in Whitehead’s terms,
massiveness and intensity. Here, massiveness refers to an index of coordination by gradual variation,
and intensity to an index of the degree to which that coordinated whole allows its parts to be available to others. In themselves, there
is nothing new in these
remarks; we find them as readily
in Uvedale Price or Edmund Burke. What is remarkable, however,
is the fact that Whitehead does not put these on a single
sliding scale,
with massive, compact wholes on one end and loose, fractured ones on the other. Whitehead’s doctrine is not just another
take on Hutcheson’s unity amidst variety. The parameters of massiveness and of intensity each have a uniform side and a diverse side; both are driven
by variation, but each by a different
type: one smooth,
the other rough; one operating on adaptation, the other on contrast.43 Though he does not refer to prior aesthetic theories, which would have been helpful, nor visualize his system in the form of a diagram,
which would have been even more helpful, he clearly views the system as a two-dimensional one, organized
along two axes, each with minimum and maximum values at the ends.
Eventually, by combining Whitehead’s ideas on beauty
with Dessoir’s little
diagram, Hartshorne took the final steps in his development of a diagram
of aesthetics, an effort
which can be traced over many years,
beginning in the 1970s with Creative
Synthesis and Philosophic Method, where he published the first version of what he then called the Dessoir-Davis Circle. As a diagram, it was strongly
influenced by Dessoir’s
example from the beginning of the century, but the philosophy behind it owes far more to Whitehead. The version Hartshorne
published in Creative Synthesis was a still-crude version
of what he later, in 1987’s Wisdom as Moderation, finalized as the “Diagram
of Aesthetic Values”.
[Diagram 4] In these diagrams, Hartshorne made two essential
adjustments to Dessoir’s
model, based on his readings of Whitehead: first, he repositioned beauty, and second, he added the superb,44 the neat and the commonplace.45
We should look at the repositioning of beauty first. It is quite clear that
Whitehead’s notion of beauty lies at the core of his process philosophy: things are only beautiful in their striving for beauty. Beauty is, above all, a teleological concept, since, as Whitehead himself said, “adaptation implies
an end,”46 and while
things strive to harmonize they can only do so by freeing
their parts, allowing them to break
away. Beauty, then, is not simply a state but a vector, similar to
Apollo’s arrow at the beginning of our discussion: each extensive act carries the need for intensity. Beauty inherently lies at the center of all this, as literally the target of every arrow, merging target with trajectory. It lies where
the two axes intersect, and not where
Dessoir located it, at the rim. Even though Hartshorne was deeply influenced by Whitehead, to actually position beauty at the center of a circle
with two axes was a masterstroke.47 Thinking
back to Plato’s
white and black
horses, we can see how Hartshorne’s model recasts the two forces as one striving for harmonization and the other for intensity. In Hartshorne’s diagram, beauty is again firmly positioned in the middle, but the middle of a far more complex system
that reconfigures Plato’s
monopolar, solar
notion of beauty:
“Beauty, in the most natural sense of the word, is the center,
the double mean in both dimensions.”48 Beauty is not a simple,
singular middle, but a middle trying to find another middle.
Along with his Platonic
repositioning of beauty,
Hartshorne added three new
categories to Dessoir’s six, one of which he called “superb”—an idea we have already come across in Burke, in the form of magnificence, as well as in Kant, in the form of the Prächtige—and the other two “neat” and “commonplace.” The latter two are crucial additions: “neat,” though not a wholly satisfactory term, has connotations of monotony
and boredom, while the commonplace corresponds to the normal
or ordinary. With these,
Hartshorne completely rearranges—repairs—the top half of Dessoir’s model.
It can be no accident
that these final categories were added in the twentieth century,
the age of the media and the masses. Before then, the concept
of the commonplace was known mostly in the form of vulgarity, which at best ended up being associated with the comic. But in its modernist form,
it points to a blandness and a complete
lack of qualities that is truly
original. The neat,
better known in the form of boredom, is far older and, as ennui, was even considered an art by the likes of Charles Baudelaire and Beau Brummell (who famously turned to his valet to ask which of two lakes he admired most.)49 Andy Warhol, the twentieth-century champion, if not saint, of boredom,
made an eight-hour movie of the Empire State Building filmed
in real time over a single
night, appropriately titled Empire. He also loved to spend his holidays
in Sweden, because,
as he said, “in a place like that you can get so bored.”50 The closest category
from ancient history
would probably be the decadence
of the late Roman Empire as
described in Petronius’s Satyricon. With Hartshorne’s circle, the aesthetic spectrum
seems to transform into a continent, a planet even,
where the spectral
lines of Kant, Dilthey and Dessoir form partial routes or complete
equators. Hartshorne’s addition
of the neat and the commonplace created a “north
passage” at the top of the diagram similar to sixteenth-century attempts to expand
shipping routes from Europe.
With his Diagram of Aesthetic Values, we can finally
go full circle: reading
clockwise, we encounter the
sublime, the superb, the neat, the commonplace, the pretty, the comic, the ugly, the tragic and finally the sublime again. We should make a few adjustments, however.
The superb is not as convincing as magnificence; the latter has more historical roots that go deeper and wider than superb, which dates back no
further than the Renaissance. The neat should be substituted with the boring; again, its history is just too powerful,
as we saw above, to say nothing of the celebrated
elaborations of Martin Heidegger and Erich Fromm on the topic. The other
replacement should be for the pretty, which we should exchange for the cute, which is conceptually stronger, and more correct opposite
the sublime. Hartshorne seems unaware of Dilthey’s categorization of “trifling” coinciding with his own qualification of the
pretty as bordering on the “too trivial,”
and how Kant’s notion of the Hübsch preceded these. Oddly enough, Hartshorne never discusses any historical precedents or developments of the circle or its terminology. Therefore, the final circular
lineup will be: sublime, magnificent, boring, commonplace, cute,
comic, ugly, tragic,
and back to sublime. Although Hartshorne never bothered to draw the actual axes and only indicated
the four poles in additional captions, we should include these in the revised
diagram as well:
a horizontal axis spanning from sublime on the left to cute on the right, and a vertical
axis from ugly at the bottom to boring at the top. [Diagram 5] Together they create the structure of a wheel or compass.
It moves from the silent scream
of the sublime to the exalted cry of the magnificent to the yawning
mouth of boredom to the flat expression of the commonplace to the gentle smile of the cute to
the outright laughter of the comic to the disgusted
“ick” of the ugly, on to the weeping
of the tragic, and back to the noiseless gasp of the sublime. We could play these facial expressions as an animation
and we wouldn’t be able to discern
any jumps or cuts. And it all works because beauty has been taken out of the sequence:
the relations between
all these aesthetic values are wholly different than those between
them and beauty.
We have eight aesthetic categories that occur on the outer rim of aesthetics, connected by spokes of gradually
decreasing value to the hub of beauty, which is in fact a ninth one,
or the first, whichever one prefers. That the system in its final form looks like a
compass reflects both meanings
of the word: a limited, finite structure
such as a planet as well as an instrument for
navigating that planet.
Translated back into the color wheel, this would give
us the standard hues at the outer edge of the circle,
with more brightness mixed into each color until
it becomes pure white light in the middle. (Plato’s solar model of beauty was probably no accident.) Now we should also be able to find a place for every nameable aesthetic
value on this circle, since feelings can vary in all directions, both rotationally and radially. We should
have no problem finding positions that are located
neither at the center or at the rim but occupy the as-yet-undefined area in between—the quirky, the quaint,
the weird, the cool, the elegant, the vulgar, the melodramatic, the horrific, the gruesome, etc.—but
that is an argument we will save for later.
When we fast-forward through
the history of beauty, the first peculiarity that attracts our attention
is that it started with Plato, who hated art, then developed through
aesthetics, with indispensable contributions by artists, and then moved away from art again. For example, I think the Large
Hadron Collider and the Saturn
V rocket are more sublime than paintings of mountains, far more abstract
and far more violent. And football stadiums are more magnificent
than Kant’s St. Peter’s, and when a wave performed by 80,000 spectators moves over the stands, we are overpowered and swept away—to
use Longinus’s terms—by sheer awe. General Tommy Franks also called his invasion of Baghdad
a strategy of “shock and awe,” leaving no misunderstanding about where we should locate the sublime
in our own age. I think there is more terror and horror in the daily imagery of suicide bombings than in Alien, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
put together. There
is more of the commonplace and the ordinary
in reality television, in the endless
soap operas and in Facebook
posts than in the street life of Baudelaire’s Paris. And if you type “beauty” into your search engine,
you won’t find the work of contemporary artists but a zillion websites
related to the cosmetics industry. And who is not cute today (though no society goes as far as the Japanese with their kawaii)? It seems that art is playing an ever-smaller role—and the media an ever-larger one—in the development of the diagram, and especially
in how it organizes the distribution of objects.
Was Plato right again? Permit me to leave that as an open
question.
In any case, what becomes evident in the developments over the last fifty years is that they show the ontological nature of the diagram more prominently. It is also clear from these developments that we seem to be living in an era that is expanding the diagram at high speed while moving away from its middle with equal speed. We live in an age of design:
not just the design of objects but of events,
concepts and issues,
of organizations and procedures, even of our own lives.
One’s own life has become
a project. The number of things is growing exponentially, and growing exponentially further away from beauty. If the diagram concerns all things, not just works of art, we should realize that it concerns them through beauty. This is the true power of
Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values:
only beauty can relate the vertical axis to
the horizontal one. The two axes are not independent; they don’t form a mere coordinate system. If they were independent, the diagram would not be a circle but a square, and we could simply combine one extreme with the other, which goes against the whole
notion of a middle. A square is not an equation;
a circle is. We should keep in mind that even the sublime in Hartshorne’s diagram is plotted
halfway against the vertical
axis of harmony and coordination. The fact that the influence
of each axis always needs to be mediated makes beauty more than simply the middle of a circular world: it
reverses the roles and makes
the periphery a derivative of the middle.
Both areas are circles: a white one in the middle and a multicolored one at the outskirts.
I don’t have to stress the fact that Hartshorne’s diagram
shares many traits with
the cruciform structure of Heidegger’s fourfold; the similarities are quite obvious. They share the same purpose:
to divide Being according to two axes, one spanning
the space between the unified (boredom) and the plurified (ugly), the other
between the deep (sublime) and the shallow
(cute).51 Of course,
Heidegger does not define the fourfold
by the axes but by the four quadrants, which he identifies as sky, mortals,
gods and earth. This is telling
in a way, because by defining the quadrants he makes it impossible
to view the axes as productive. The fourfold
remains a static architectural system, a Geviert, and though he sometimes
speculates about one quadrant mirroring the other, and even about a “round dance,”52 it never attains
the status of an ontological machine equipped with dynamic sliders. Viewing
the intersection of the axes as a hub, and identifying that with beauty,
causes the compass
to take on the character
of a wheel more than a cross. Heidegger’s Being always takes an unmoving, neutral
position, humming
in the background, whereas
Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s beauty
thrusts things forward into presence.
From the perspective of the Diagram of Aesthetic Values, the four quadrants can never be primary because
they are parented
by two axes. All activity lies with the axes, and they are bound to one another, limiting
each other’s influence
to a circular field of existence—what I earlier called
the arena of presence. Heidegger
strongly resented the notion of being as presence53 and attempted to extend the phenomenal world
to absence (e.g.,
the negativity of nothingness and the invisibility of Zuhandenheit), to things happening without passing through
consciousness. Certainly, no one would deny that things exist before they enter human consciousness, but that doesn’t mean reality condemns things to roam around in darkness. On the contrary,
it means things can claim
light and consciousness in their own right: nonhuman
thought and unseen
light. Things think
before we think
them (how else could we understand things?), they are visible before we see them (how else would we see them?), and they affect their environment before we feel them (how else would we find them beautiful?). Again, the way the existence
of things is constructed cannot be fundamentally different from the structure of our feelings;
this is what the Diagram of Aesthetic
Values teaches us.54
When we take a careful look at the diagram, we can better see how process and product not only are combined but are combined symmetrically only in the middle and asymmetrically everywhere
else (though still equated). When we go back again to stand in front of St. Peter’s with our faces upturned and our mouths open in admiration, it is the magnificent structure that overwhelms us. If we move from the basilica’s position of
magnificence vertically down on Hartshorne’s map, we encounter
figures such as Macbeth and Michael Jackson,
obliterated by the tragic events they have instigated. At the position of magnificence, it is the massive structure
that overwhelms us, and at the position of the tragic, it is the enormity of the events
overwhelming their subjects:
exactly the same magnitude in very different
dimensions. This is why we recognize the top area of the diagram—the realm of magnificence, boredom and the commonplace— as the general
territory of structures, or what Mikel Dufrenne
called the spatial arts, and
the bottom area—the realm of the tragic,
the ugly and the comic—as the zone of events, or again in terms of aesthetics, the temporal arts.55 That doesn’t mean buildings
“are” boring; it means
that when time is stopped they become boring,
as in Warhol’s Empire, where the Empire State Building is boring because
you are trapped in your seat. (If you are walking
in New York, the Empire State Building is anything but boring.)
Or think of the funny
example of Heidegger stuck
in a provincial railway station
after missing a train.56 Forced to wait for four hours, he started walking up and down
the platform like a pendulum, hopelessly trying to restore time, like a
panther in a cage. Inversely, the asymmetry of space and time means that the positivity of ugliness functions very well in plays, literature and movies but not in architecture. While in a gangster movie a character
like Al Capone boosts the speed of events by bashing in heads
with a baseball bat, an ugly building
does not have the same positive effect
on urban space. That doesn’t mean a building
can’t be ugly; obviously it can, and a play can as easily be boring—that is not my point. In the specific case of a boring play, I think it exposes too much architecture, for example when it lacks
development and has cardboard characters that move through the drama without
changing. Similarly, a building is ugly when it tries to be funny or becomes
too theatrical, since the chances are that we will encounter it more than once, killing all possible humor, or that we will experience it from more than one angle, destroying every illusion.
On the product side, things have to be looked at in terms of how they relate to time; from the process
side, they have to be looked at in terms of how they relate to space. Beauty
is not organized by going
from product to product nor from process
to process, but from process to product and from product
to process and back again. Ours is a jerking,
jolting universe.
If aesthetics operated within one dimension, a single line of variations and gradations would suffice. If it consisted merely of spatial
encounters, things would simply shape each other from the outside and the synthetic
axis would do all the necessary work. And if it solely
consisted of events
meeting one another, all would be pure development; the internal growth of things would never lead to them being born into the world. In the Diagram
of Aesthetic Values, these two lines are bound to one another as axes, with both rather than one or the other exerting
their influence on the final product. When things are formed,
they are internally driven by a force occupying the analytic axis of intensity, while they simultaneously orient themselves in and adapt to an external world whose powers are expressed
along the synthetic axis of the extensive, i.e., present themselves
as forms. Things present themselves in one realm, but they cannot be explained through
one dimension, only through
the conflation of two dimensions.
Stand in front of a 400-year-old oak tree. Its structure—the branchings, the bifurcations, the random curvature—all this is pure process, pure time and growth. But does it present itself to us as time? Do we experience
it as time? No, we experience it as sheer magnificence. All that was time is presented
to us as beauty, and all that is beauty we experience in time, yes, but the second stretch
of time is wholly discontinuous with the first. In
this sense, beauty is purely Platonic,
atemporal stoppage.
Endnotes
39. Lars Spuybroek, “The Ages of Beauty: Revisiting Hartshorne’s Diagram of Aesthetic Values,”
in: Vital Beauty:
Reclaiming Aesthetics in the Tangle
of Technology and Nature (Rotterdam: V2_Publishing, 2012), 32-60.
40. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures
of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967), 265.
41. Ibid., 252.
42. Ibid., 252.
43. The two dimensions of smoothness
and roughness, or massiveness and intensity, correspond directly to Ruskin’s
organization of Gothic
aesthetics in terms of changefulness and savageness, as I have discussed in the first
chapter of The Sympathy of Things (2nd
ed., London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
44. Hartshorne changed
it from “magnificent” in 1970 to “superb” in 1987.
45. Hartshorne borrows the term “commonplace” from Whitehead.
See: Adventures of Ideas, 261.
46. Whitehead, Adventures
of Ideas, 252.
47. Actually, the idea to take beauty
from the rim and move it to the middle came from Kay Davis- Leclerc, one of his students at Emory University. Hartshorne mentions
this in several of his books but gives slightly
different versions of the story. In The Zero Fallacy (p.
203), he suggests
that the diagram was a collaboration between him, Dessoir and Davis-Leclerc, but this can be true only in an abstract sense: Dessoir
died in 1947 in Frankfurt
and never met Hartshorne. Hartshorne most probably saw Dessoir’s diagram
for the first time in 1970, when the English translation of the latter’s
work was published. This assumption is supported by the fact that Hartshorne adopted the mistranslation of Niedlich as “pretty”
in his own diagram.
Davis-Leclerc was his student
in the 1950s, but not by the time he published
Creative Synthesis, where the diagram
is presented in the final
chapter.
48. Charles Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation, 2.
49. Carlo Maria Franzero, Beau Brummell:
His Life and Times (New York: John Day Co., 1958),
71.
50. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (Orlando: First Harvest,
1977), 72: “When you’re
in Sweden & you see beautiful
person after beautiful
person & you finally don’t even turn around to look because
you know the next person
you see will be just as beautiful
as the one you didn’t bother to turn around
to look at—in a place like that you can get so bored that when you see a person who’s not beautiful, they look very beautiful to you because
they break the beautiful monotony.”
51. Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained (Chicago: Open Court, 2007),
132–5.
52. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,
Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 178.
53. Harman, Heidegger Explained, 1.
54. To give an example: it means that I think a sunset is actually there,
and beautiful, without
anybody seeing it—a thought
that would horrify
any (neo-)materialist.
55. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 239–48.
56. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93.
Félix
Guattari
An excerpt from Félix Guattari, ‘Architectural
Enunciation’ in Schizoanalytic
Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2013), pp.
231-239.
For millennia and perhaps
in imitation of crustaceans or termites, human beings have had the habit of surrounding themselves with shells of all kinds.
The buildings, clothes, cars, images and messages that they endlessly
secrete, stick to their skin, adhere to the flesh of their existence
just as much as their bones do. There nevertheless exists a notable difference between humans,
crustaceans and termites, which is
that so far no one has
detected corporations of architects, tailors or media ‘professionals’ in the last two species.
Whatever the case may be, one observes
that for a very long period
of history it is to an ecolithical expression of the sort that builds
ziggurats, demolishes the Bastille,
takes the Winter Palace that we owe the delineation of social
Assemblages. Except that recently, besides
stone being hidden behind
steel, concrete and glass, it
is above
all in terms of speeds of communication and the mastery of information that the division
of powers is played out. Under these conditions, architects no longer really know which saint to pray to! What use today would it be to invoke Le Corbusier
in a city like Mexico, for example, which is careering deliriously towards its 40 millionth
inhabitant! Even Baron Hausmann wouldn’t be able to do anything about it! Politicians, technocrats, engineers deal with this sort of thing by having as little recourse as possible to the men of an art that Hegel nonetheless put in first place. Certainly
architects retain control of a minimal
niche in the domain of sumptuary constructions. But we know that positions are expensive in this domain, and, short of accepting – like a postmodern dandy – the politico-financial wheeler-dealering that they imply at every step, their
rare occupiers are generally doomed to an underhanded degrading of their
creative talents. The paths of pure theory,1 of utopia,2 of a nostalgic return to the past,3 remain.
Or even that of critical
contestation, although the times scarcely
seem to lend themselves to it!
The object of architecture has been smashed
to pieces. It is useless to hold on to what it was or what it ought to be! Situated at the intersection of political stakes of the first importance, of democratic and ethnic tensions, of economic, social and regional antagonisms that are nowhere near resolved,
spurred on by constant technological and industrial mutations, it is irreversibly condemned to being dragged and pulled
in every direction. However, nothing implies that one must take the eclectic
side in this state of affairs, which on the contrary perhaps calls for an exacerbation of the ethico-political choices that have always been subjacent
to the exercise
of this profession. It is henceforth impossible to take refuge behind art for art’s sake or pure science
in good faith.4 Reinventing architecture can no longer signify the relaunching of a style, a school, a theory with a hegemonic
vocation, but the recomposition of architectural enunciation, and, in a sense, the trade of the architect, under today’s conditions.
Once it is no longer the goal of the architect to be the artist of built forms but to offer his services
in revealing the virtual desires of spaces, places, trajectories and territories, he will have to undertake
the analysis of the relations of individual and collective corporeality by constantly singularizing his approach. Moreover, he will have to become
an intercessor between these desires, brought to light, and the interests
that they thwart. In other words, he will have to become an artist and an artisan of sensible and relational lived experience. Understand that I do not particularly intend to make him recline
on the psychoanalytic couch, so as to make him accept such a decentring of his role. On the contrary, I consider
that it is the architect
who finds he is in the position of having to analyse certain
specific functions
of subjectification himself.5 In this way and in the company of numerous other social and cultural
operators, he could constitute an essential relay at the heart of multiple-headed Assemblages of enunciation,
able to take analytic and
pragmatic responsibility for contemporary productions of subjectivity. As a consequence, one really is a long way here from only seeing the architect in the simple position of critical observer! [Diagram 6]
With the accent
thus displaced from the object
to the project
– whatever the characteristics of its semiotic expression and semantic content may be – an architectural work henceforth calls for a specific elaboration of its enunciative ‘matter’: how is one to be an architect
today? Which part of oneself is to be mobilized? In what way must one engage and with what operators? What relative importance will developers, engineers, urbanists, actual and potential users have for him? To what point will it be licit to compromise with the diverse parties present?
It is
a matter here of a highly
elaborated transferential economy that I propose
to examine from the angle of the two modalities of consistency of the enunciation of an architectural
concept:
> one is polyphonic, of the order of the percept, inherent
to the deployment
of components contributing to its discursive setting into existence;
> the other is ethico-aesthetic, of the order of the affect, inherent
to its non-discursive ‘taking on of being’.
[…]
Ethico-aesthetic ordinates
Architectural enunciation doesn’t only involve diachronic discursive components. It equally implies a taking consistency of synchronic existential dimensions or levels of ordinates. Following Bakhtin, I will distinguish three types:17
> Cognitive ordinates, that is,
the energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates that arise from the logics of discursive sets. It is in this register
that the scriptural enunciation of architecture concatenates the first five types of Assemblage of enunciation previously listed;
> Axiological ordinates encompassing the
ensemble of systems of anthropocentric valorization, as much of an ethical as of an economic
and political order;
> Aesthetic ordinates
determining the thresholds of consummation of an entity,
an object or a structural
ensemble, in so far as these start to emit sense and form on their own count. It pertains to these ethico-aesthetic ordinates to make the components of signifying
enunciation and existential deterritorialization interface with other components. Thus the built, the lived and the incorporeal find themselves
rearticulated with one another,
although capitalist societies haven’t stopped eliminating every trace of subjective
singularization from their architecture and town planning, to the profit of rigourous functional, informational and communicational transparency.
Don’t misunderstand me: the singularization of which it is a question
here is not a simple affair of ‘spiritual compensation’, a ‘personalization’ dispensed as a kind of ‘after-sales service’. It arises from instances that operate
at the heart of the architectural object and confer its
most intrinsic consistency on it. Under its external discursive face, this object
is established at the intersection
of a thousand tensions that pull it
in every direction; but under its ethico-aesthetic enunciative faces it holds itself
together in a non-discursive mode, the phenomenological access to which is given to us through the particular experience of spatialized Affects. On this side of a threshold of cognitive consistency, the architectural object topples over into the imaginary,
the dream, delirium,
whereas on this side of a threshold
of axiological consistency, the dimensions of it that are the alterity
and desire crumble – like the cinematic images that
Australian Aboriginals turned away from long ago because they found nothing of interest in them. On this side of an aesthetic
threshold of consistency, it ceases to catch the existence of the forms and intensities called on to inhabit it.
As a consequence, in the last analysis, the specificity
of the architect’s art would be his capacity
to apprehend these Affects of spatialized enunciation. Except one has to admit that it is a matter of paradoxical objects, which cannot be located in the coordinates of ordinary rationality and which one can only approach indirectly, through meta-modelling, aesthetic detour, mythical or ideological narrative. Like Melanie Klein’s part objects18 or the transitional objects of Winnicott,19
this kind of affect is established transversally across the most heterogeneous of levels. Not in order to homogenize them but, on the contrary, to engage them more deeply in fractal processes
of heterogenesis. The
architectural form is not called on to function
as a gestalt closed in on itself, but as a catalytic
operator triggering chain reactions at the heart of modes of semiotization that make us escape from ourselves and open us up to original fields of possibility. The feeling
of intimacy and existential singularity connected to the aura exuded by familiar surroundings, an old residence or a landscape
inhabited by our memories, establishes itself in a rupture with substanceless redundancies and it can generate proliferation and lines of flight in every register of the desire to live, the refusal to give in to the dominant inertia.
For example, it is the same movement
of existential territorialization and synchronic taking consistency that will make things
as different as: a box for shoes and treasures under the bed of a child hospitalized in a medico-psychological boarding school; the password-refrain that he perhaps shares with some mates; the place at the heart of the particular Constellation he occupies in the refectory; a totem-tree in the playground and an outline [découpe] of the sky known only by him all ‘work’ together.
It is up to the architect,
if not to compose
all these fragmentary components of subjectification harmoniously, at least not to mutilate the essentials of their virtualities in advance!
To work in this way for the recomposition of existential Territories, in the context of our societies
devastated by capitalistic Flows, the architect
would thus have to be capable of detecting
and exploiting processually the catalytic
points of singularities that can be incarnated in the sensible dimensions of the architectural apparatus as well as in the most complex of formal compositions and institutional problematics. Every cartographic method
for achieving this is licit,
once the architect’s commitment – let us not step back from this old Sartrean
concept, which has long been taboo – finds its own regime of ethico-aesthetic autonomization. The only criterion for truth that will be imposed on him will then be an effect of existential
consummation and superabundance of being,
which he will not fail to encounter once he has the good fortune to find himself
carried off by a process of eventization, that is to say, of the historical enrichment and
re-singularization of desire and of values.
Endnotes
1. Léon Krier, for example, considers that faced with the ‘holocaust that is all the rage in our cities (…) a responsible architect can no longer build today’ Krier in Babylone
1, Paris, UGE, 1983 p.132.
2. For example, Daniel Liebeskind’s work, or even the landscape
compositions of Vittorio Gregotti, such as his Cefalu housing project, which has little chance of ever succeeding.
3. See in this regard the interesting position of Henri Gaudin on regional architecture, in La cabane et le labyrinth Brussels, Pierre Mardaga, 1984.
4. I refer here to the passionate analyses of Christian Girard in Architecture et concepts nomads. Traité d’interdiscipline op. cit.
5.
On the sometimes decisive position of the planner and the architect in the modelling of psychiatric institutions, see the special issue of the journal Recherches ‘Planning, Architecture and Psychiatry’ Recherches June 1967.
17. I refer to the tripartite division of enunciation (cognitive, ethical, aesthetic) proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in ‘The Problem of Content’ in Art and Answerability op. cit.
18. Melanie Klein Contributions to Psychoanalysis London, The Hogarth
Press, 1950.
19. D. W. Winnicott
La psychanalyse Paris, PUF, 1959. The French text refers to ‘les objets partiels de Winnicott’. The reference however makes it obvious that Guattari meant ‘transitional objects’ [TN].
Ecologies of Architecture
Andrej Radman
(From: Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (eds.), Posthuman
Glossary (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), pp. 117-120).
Introduction
In a desperate attempt to catch up
with forms of contemporary media culture, architects tend to perpetuate earlier
notions of culture as representation rather than culture as forms of life.1
Architecture has yet to break with culture as reflection still firmly embedded
in its concepts of Utopia, Type, History, City, Geometry, Landscape and
Ornament. To speak of the ecologies of architecture is to
break with judgement for experience, to break with the propositional
knowing-that for the impredicative knowing-how.2 As the
self-declared empiricist (i.e. pluralist) Gilles Deleuze put it in his book on
Nietzsche, it is not about justification, “but a different way of feeling:
another sensibility.”3 If to think differently we have to feel
differently then the design of built
environment has no other purpose but to transform us.4 While
engineering focuses on solutions, architecture dramatises the problem so that
we may stumble upon a new emancipatory potential.5 After all,
problems always have the solution that they deserve.6 [Diagram 5]
Pedagogy of the Senses
Posthuman
architecture ought to focus on the encounter between thought and that which
forces it into action. While accepting multiple nested scales of reality, the
ecologies of architecture challenge
the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world. What we engage with is the world
considered as an environment
and not an aggregate of objects. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence which
returns the body to a process field of exteriority.7 Sensibility
introduces an aleatory moment into thought’s development thus turning contingency
into the very condition for thinking. Not only does this upset logical identity
and opposition, it also places the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical
system. Thought cannot activate itself by thinking but has to be provoked. It
must suffer violence. Art and architecture may inflict such violence. They harbour
the potential for breaking up the faculties’ common function by placing them
before their own limits: “thought before the unthinkable, memory before the
immemorial, sensibility before the imperceptible, etc.”8 The
eco-logical ‘perspectivist’ assault on the ego-logical representational thinking
inevitably impinges upon the identity of the subject. Where Kant founded the
representational unity of space and time upon the formal unity of consciousness, difference fractures consciousness
into multiple states not predicable of a single subject. In other words, difference
breaks with the differentiation of an undifferentiated world in favour of the
homogenisation of a
milieu or umwelt.9 To
speak of Whiteheadian super-ject is to break with earlier notions of sub-ject
as a foundation.10 ‘Desiring-machines’ connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another without meaning or intention.11
Paradoxically, actions are primary in relation to the intentions that
animate them the same way that desiring is primary to volition. Individuality is not
characteristic of a self or an ego, but a perpetually individualising
differential. It is not the subject that has a point of view, rather it is the
point of view that has its larval subject.12 Deleuze explains: “[e]ach faculty, including thought, has only involuntary
adventures,” and “involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical.”13
This constitutes his famous ‘pedagogy of the senses’.
Asignifying Semiotics
The ecologies of architecture rely on cartography to overturn the
theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production.14 The
ultimate ambition is to debunk hylomorphism – where form is imposed upon
inert matter from without and where the architect is seen as a god-given,
inspired creator and genius – and to promote the alternative immanent
morphogenetic approach that is at once more humble and ambitious.15 There
lies a (r)evolutionary potential in creating the ‘new’, defined as the circulation
of de-coded and de-territorialized flows that resist the facile co-option by
re-coding or capturing.16 To speak of univocity of expression is to
break with equivocity of the hegemonic linguistic sign. Action and perception
are inseparable, as are forms of life and their environments. If the objects of
knowledge were separated from the objects of existence, we would end up with a
duality of mental and physical objects – bifurcation of nature – that leads to
an ontologically indirect perception. By contrast, the premise of the ecologies of architecture is that
perceptual systems resonate to information, where information is defined
as a difference that makes a difference.17 This ‘direct realism’ is
grounded on the premise that, from the outset, real experience is a relation of
potential structure rather than a formless chaotic swirl onto which structure
must be imposed by cognitive process (sapience). The world is seen as an
ongoing open process of mattering,
where meaning and form are acquired in the actualisation of different agential
virtualities.18 Following Deleuze’s argument, it is possible to
assert that the genetic principles of sensation (sentience) are thus at the
same time the principles of composition of art(efact).19
Niche Constructionism
Architecture ought to reclaim its vanguard position within the
Epigenetic Turn which embraces tekhne
as constitutive of posthumanity, and not just the other way around.20
Experience is not an event ‘in’ the mind. Rather, the mind emerges from
interaction with the environment. The predominant homeostatic notion of
structure in architectural thinking has to give way to the event-centred
ontology of relations. The metastability of existence (formerly known as
sustainability) is to be mapped in the very act of becoming. The Affective Turn
in architecture concentrates on perception which occurs not on the level at
which actions are decided but on the level at which the very capacity for
action forms, the virtual.21 If representation is a means to an end
(to classify), schizoanalytic cartography is a means to a means (to intervene).22
Teleology cannot be used as the sole design criterion because the freedom of
action is never a de facto established condition, it is always a virtuality.23
This proto-epistemological level of potentialisation (priming) is already
ontological.24 It concerns change in the degree to which a life-form
is enabled vis-à-vis its (built) environment. Their reciprocal determination
commits contemporary architecture to ecology in general and ethico-aesthetics
in particular.25 The psychotropic cry that “we shape our
cities; thereafter they shape us” is to be taken literally. Only recently have
biologists conceded the effect that ‘niche construction’ has on the inheritance
system.26 They confirmed that a life-form does not only passively submit to the pressures of a
pre-existing environment (evo), but also actively
constructs its existential niche (devo), that being the city in the
anthropocene. The implications for the discipline of architecture, considering
its quasi-causal role in the neo-Lamarckian Baldwian
Evolution (evo-devo), remain significant and binding.27
Futurity
The New Materialisms in general, and the Affective Turn in
particular, seem to be gaining momentum to such an extent that even some of the
scholars of this affiliation have been urging caution.28 However, as
far as the discipline of architecture is concerned, this otherwise healthy dose
of scepticism is not only premature but also counterproductive. In its history,
architecture has undergone a gradual disassociation from the material realm and
become an ultimate white-collar profession. The consequent withdrawal from
reality (thesis of autonomy) has been variously seen as ‘bad’ escapism or a ‘good’
strategy of resistance.29 The urge to ward off the givens and to
continue to contemplate (possible) alternatives is praiseworthy. But idealist bracketing
and messianic ambition come at a price. Architects might end up painting
themselves into a corner of impotence by depriving themselves of the (virtual) means
to intervene. After all, intervention has always been the main trait of (any)
materialism. The best strategy of resistance seems to lie not in opposition but
in (strategic) affirmation.30 The recognition of the present-future
relation provides a point of departure for an ecological account of
anticipation and/or creation akin to Isabelle Stengers’ thinking par le
milieu.31 What defines the concept of futurity is the
inseparability of the event and its environment. Futurity is a condition of the
present; it is the anti-utopianism of the ecologies of architecture par excellence.
Endnotes
1.
Scott Lash, ‘Technological
Forms of Life’, Theory,
Culture & Society Vol. 18(1) (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi:
SAGE, 2001), pp. 105–20 (107).
2.
Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London:
Routledge, [1949] 2009), pp. 25-61.
3.
Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy,
trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, [1962] 1983), p.
94.
4. Sanford Kwinter, ‘Neuroecology: Notes Toward a Synthesis’, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism:
Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), pp. 313-33 (313).
5.
Jeffrey Kipnis, A Question of Qualities:
Essays in Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
6.
Daniel W. Smith, ‘Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and
Deleuze Revisited’ in Essays on Deleuze
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012), pp. 287-311 (307).
7.
Claire Colebrook, ‘The Sense of Space: On the Specificity of Affect in Deleuze
and Guattari’ in Postmodern Culture
(No. 15.1, 2004).
[accessed February 23, 2018].
8.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 227.
9.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi (London, New York:
Continuum [1980] 2004), p. 62.
10.
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology, ed.
David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free, 1978), p. 29.
11.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane(New York, NY: Penguin, [1972] 2008),
p. 288.
12.
Gilles Deleuze, Cours Vincennes: ‘Leibniz’ (April 15,
1980), http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=50&groupe=Leibniz&langue=2
[accessed February 23, 2018].
13. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 145.
14. Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, p. 12.
15.
Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London
and New York: Continuum, 2002), p. 28.
16.
Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus,
p. 379.
17.
James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates,
[1979] 1986), p. 249. Cf. Gregory
Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Chicago: Chicago UP, 1972).
18.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum
Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke UP, 2007).
19.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic
of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum,
[1981] 2003).
20.
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans.
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, California: Stanford UP,
1998), p. 12.
21.
Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation (Durham: Duke UP, 2002), p. 79.
22. Félix Guattari, ‘Architectural
Enunciation’, Schizoanalytic
Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2013), pp 231-39.
23.
Robin Evans, ‘Interference’ in Translation
from Drawing to Buildings (London: AA Documents 2,
2003), pp. 10-33 (16-17).
24.
Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, powers, and the State of
Perception (Durham and London: Duke UP,
2015), p. 71.
25. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1995).
26.
Eva Jablonka and Marion J.
Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions:
Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Cf. John Odling-Smee, Kelvin N. Laland, and
Marcus W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution
(New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2003).
27.
Bruce Wexler, ‘Shaping the
Environments that Shape Our Brains; A Long Term Perspective’ in Cognitive Architecture - From Bio-Politics To Noo-Politics, ed.
Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), pp. 142-67 (143).
28.
Claire Colebrook, Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (London: Continuum, 2010),
pp. 168-69.
29.
Michael K. Hays, ‘Critical Architecture Between Culture and Form’ in Perspecta (No. 21, 1981), pp. 14-29.
30.
Rosi Braidotti, ‘Interview with
Rosi Braidotti’ in New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, ed.
by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (Open Humanities Press, 2012),
pp. 19-37.
31.
(Stengers 2005: 187) Stengers,
Isabelle, ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’ in Cultural studies review (Vol. 11, No. 1,
March 2005), pp. 183-96 (187).
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