The Dark Precursor: International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research, 2015
Orpheus Institute, Ghent, Belgium
Zigzagging: Bound by the Absence of Tie
Andrej Radman
Introduction: Ecology
Let us go back to the opposition between the all-too-abstract parametricists and the non-abstract-enough neo-phenomenologists.[4] Once again we are offered a false choice between the syntax-without-semantics and semantics-without-syntax. ‘Objective’ reality or ‘subjective’ illusion? The red or the blue pill from The Matrix?[5] We opt for a third pill, as does Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.[6] Yet, this is as far as we are prepared to follow his Hegelian/Lacanian trajectory (that insists on human exceptionalism). Instead, we turn to the Spinozian ethics as a mode of existence, for it is there that the distinction between abstraction and empathy finally collapses.
We also follow the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who rejected the solipsistic self in favour of ontogenesis (i.e. developmentally constructed subject). Whitehead famously launched an (in)famous plea for a radical Prometheanism by way of substituting super-ject for sub-ject, or the effect for the cause.[7] The architecture theorist Sanford Kwinter recently reiterated his critique of the liberal humanist subject as follows: “humans are […] neurologically compelled to modify their worlds, and produce objects of meaning and affective capacity in order to modify in turn their internal body state (art, culture, etc.).”[8] In other words, the essential human engagement in the environment is geared toward extraction of sensory stimulation, not food. Félix Guattari’s prodigious statement on ‘architectural enunciation’ from his Schizoanalytic Cartographies is worth quoting at length:
Ecology is governed by a different logic from that of ego-logic, insofar as the individual is no longer the universal guarantor of the dominant meanings. As Guattari explains in his seminal The Three Ecologies, while ego-logic seeks to delimit its objects, ecology concerns itself solely with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. The process – which Guattari counterposes to the all-too-static notions of system and structure – “seeks to grasp existence in the very act of its constitution, definition, and deterritorisation [...].”[12]
The general lesson of the logic of relation is that the stable regularities we see in actuality – a.k.a. objects – do not have a specific cause that can be demarcated and isolated but may only be understood as a dynamic cascade of many processes operating over time.[13] If effects were reducible to their causes, novelty would be impossible. Time cannot therefore be treated as an abstraction. It is real through and through.
The ethico-political lesson of the logic of intensity is that all things are contingently obligatory and not logically necessary. Therein lies the possibility of pursuing a (non-determinist) project of defatalisation (anti-teleology). Resetting ourselves in a metaphysical perspective, as the speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux suggests, permits us to reconstruct our existence beyond faith alone or the sole opportunism of interest.[14] Designers beware; all things could have been different. The time has come to unyoke the architect from Newtonian physics and Cartesian metaphysics in favour of the ecological i.e. intensive and relational approach. In the words of Guattari:
Zig: Umwelt
It is for this reason that we want to revamp the legacy of Deleuzian transcendental empiricism in general and Gibsonian ecological perception in particular. The American psychologist Gibson vehemently rejects the reductionist information-processing view, with its implied separation of the activity of the mind in the body (abstraction) from the reactivity of the body in the world (empathy). Instead, he argues that perception is part and parcel of the total system of relations constituted by the ecology of the life form or its mode of existence (metastable plasticity).
Under the Assemblage Theory, capacities do depend on components’ properties but cannot be reduced to them (externality of relations).[19] This is how Gibson explains the shift from the metaphysical (always and for everyone) experience-of-space to the space-of-experience, which is dynamic (synaesthetic and kinaesthetic):
In his review of Deleuze's early works – Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) – Foucault gives credit to Deleuze for challenging the three conditions that make it impossible to think through the event, namely the world, the self, and god (a sphere, a circle, and a centre).[21] Perverting the triple subjection, Deleuze introduces a metaphysics of the real yet incorporeal event (the virtual), which is consequently irreducible to the physics of the world (the actual). There is a logic of neutral meaning (affect/affordance), rather than a phenomenology of signification based on the subject (sense-bestowing). Finally, the tethering of the conceptual future in a past essence (being) is rejected in favour of a thought of the present infinitive (becoming). Consequently, the prerogative of the Ecologies of Architecture is to renounce any order of preference, any goal-oriented organisation, any signification, any a-priori tie.[22] It is the future that perverts the past. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari will characterise the auto-unifying form (survol) in the following terms:
Zag: To Have Done with the Linguistic Turn
Semiotics is only one of the many regimes of signs and certainly not the most important for architecture. After all, natural stimuli cannot be understood by analogy and with reference to socially coded stimuli, for that would be like putting the cart before the horse.[24] A sign, according to Spinoza, can have several meanings but it is always an effect. An effect is first of all the trace of one body upon another, the state of a body insofar as it suffers the action of another body. For the Ecologies of Architecture, singularities come before identities and participation precedes cognition.
Therefore, a body ought to be defined not by its form, nor by its organs or functions, but by its capacity for affecting or being affected.[25] The limit of something is the limit of its action and not the outline of its figure. This is what it means to be bound in the absence of tie and by the absence of tie. Things are powers, not forms. There may be consistency in spite of incongruence or isomorphism without correspondence. Deleuze gives an example which, at first, seems counterintuitive and proves just how much we are accustomed to Aristotelian categorisation (genera and species). There is more difference between a work-horse and a race-horse than between an ox and a work-horse. This is because the race-horse and the work-horse do not have the same affects or the same capacity for being affected; the work-horse has more affects in common with the ox. Things are no longer defined by qualitative essence, as in ‘man as a reasonable animal’, but by quantifiable power.
The Ecologies of Architecture underscores the inseparability of agencies and structures as implied by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. Michel Callon explains:
Conclusion: Libidinal Field
Unconscious experience is not an oxymoron because much more is felt than known.[28] For radical empiricism thought cannot be richer than reality.[29] This is a response to the Nietzschean problem of nihilism understood as a distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, with the former privileged over and devaluing the latter. The Ecologies of Architecture is interested in an encounter between thought and that which forces it into action. While accepting multiple scales of reality, the Ecologies of Architecture opposes the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world discovered by physics. By contrast, it posits that we have to perceive and cope with the world considered as the environment. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence which returns the body to a process field of exteriority. Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into thought’s development. It effectively turns contingency into condition for thinking. Contingency upsets logical identity and opposition and places the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical system.
Thought cannot activate itself by thinking. It has to be provoked. It must suffer violence. Art and architecture may inflict such violence as they bear 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.”[30] As we have argued, 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. ‘Desiring machines’ connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another without meaning or intention. This is how Guattari explains their concept:
The circulation of de-coded and de-territorialized flows resists facile co-option by re-coding or capture.[34] The potential lies, quite literally, in the pure agency of transcendental causality, or the difference in itself that relates heterogeneities. The concept of quasi-cause (dark precursor) prevents regression into simple reductionism (of the sensible to the intelligible). To think differently, one has to feel differently.
Ask not what's inside your head, rather what your head's inside of.[35]
[1] For an account of ‘parametricism’ see: Patrik Schumacher, “Creator of ParametricismThe Parametricism” interview by Flavien Onfroy, http://artilinki.com/en/patrik-schumacher-creator-of-parametricism/ (accessed September 28, 2015). See also: Patrik Schumacher, “The Parametricist Epoch: Let the Style Wars Begin” in AJ - The Architects' Journal (Vol. 231, No. 16, 2010).
[2] For an account of ‘neo-phenomenology’ see: Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Perez-Gomez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (Tokyo: A+U, 1994).
[3] See: http://www.tudelft-architecture.nl/chairs/architecture-theory/research
[4] Joel McKim, “Radical Infrastructure? A New Realism and Materialism in Philosophy and Architecture” The Missed Encounter Between Radical Philosophy With Architecture, ed.Nadir Lahiji (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 133-149.
[5] Warchowski Brothers, The Matrix (Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999).
[6] Sophie Finnes, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Vienna: Mischief Films, London: Amoeba Film, 2006).
[7] Ray Brassier (2014), “Prometheanism and its Critics” in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic and Merve Verlag, 2014), pp. 467-487.
[8] Sanford Kwinter, “Neuroecology: Notes Toward a Synthesis”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), pp. 313-333.
[9] Félix Guattari, “Architectural Enunciation”, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2013), pp. 231-239.
[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, NY: Penguin, [1972] 2008), p. 260. See also: Gilles Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 28. “Unlike the paranoid whose delirium consists of restoring codes and reinventing territories, the schizophrenic never ceases to go one more step in a movement of self-decoding and self-deterritorialization […].”
[11] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology (London: Jason Aronson, 1972), pp. 199-204.
[12] The three ecologies are spatio-temporal haecceities - environmental, social and psychic. ‘Haecceity’ is Deleuze and Guattari's term for an ‘individual singularity’. It is usually translated as ‘thisness’ (as opposed to ‘whatness’). The term comes originally from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus and denotes the qualities and properties that make a thing, object or person an individual entity or an event. This is not an essential property but an emergent one. It means that each artefact, building, bone, etc. is a haecceity. See: Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Continuum, [1989] 2008), p. 44.
[13] Sanford Kwinter, "Hydraulic Vision" in Mood River, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Annetta Massie (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002), pp. 32-33.
[14] Interview with Meillassoux, http://steve-harris.blogspot.com/2010/02/interview-with-meillassoux.html (accessed May 25, 2011). See also: Andrej Radman, “Sensibility is Ground Zero: On Inclusive Disjunction and Politics of Defatalization” in This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Society, eds. R. Braidotti and R. Dolphijn (Leiden & Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2014), pp. 57-86.
[15] Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist” in Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lothringer (Los Angeles: Autonomedia/Semiotext(e), 1995), pp. 160-161.
[16] The Kantian-Copernican revolution turned out to be a Ptolomeic counter-revolution.
[17] “[N]othing is ever entirely determined by its causes. An actual entity must decide how it receives and responds to causes that feed into it.” See: Steven Shaviro, “Panpsychism And/Or Eliminativism.” http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1012 (accessed September 25, 2015).
[18] For a comprehensive overview of the Affective Turn see: The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2010).
[19] Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2009).
[20] James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, [1979] 1986), p. 127.
[21] Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Critique (No. 282, 1970), pp. 885-908. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994); Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, [1969] 1990).
[22] Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted” in Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, [1993] 1997), pp. 152-174.
[23] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia UP, [1991] 1994), p. 210.; Cf. A. Radman and D. Hauptmann, (2013) “Northern Line” in Deleuze and Architecture, eds. Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 40-60.
[24] James Jerome Gibson, “The concept of the stimulus in psychology” in American Psychologist (Vol. 15, No. 11, November 1960), p. 702.
[25] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, [1970] 1988), p. 124.
[26] Michel Callon as quoted in Karl Palmas, “Deleuze and DeLanda: A new ontology, a new political economy?” Paper presented on 29 January 2007 at the Economic Sociology Seminar Series, the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics & Political Science.
[27] Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature" in Dialogues (New York: Columbia UP, [1977] 1987), p. 51. "The utterance is the product of an assemblage - which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.”
[28] Katherine N. Hayles, “on Nonconscious Cognition and Material Processes”, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/watch_n._katherine_hayles_on_nonconscious_cognition_and_material_processes (accessed September 27, 2015).
[29] Paradoxically, feelings (affections, not affects) are states produced by thought, while thoughts are produced by affects. See: Teresa Brennan, “The Education of Senses” in The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004), p. 116.
[30] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 227.
[31] Félix Guattari "A Liberation of Desire" in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 142
[32] Claire Colebrook, “Who Comes after the Post-human?” in Deleuze and the Non/Human, eds. Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 217-234.
[33] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 145.
[34] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 271.; Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, NY: Penguin, [1972] 2008), p. 379
[35] William M. Mace, “James J. Gibson's Strategy for Perceiving: Ask Not What's Inside Your Head, but What Your Head's Inside of” in Perceiving, acting and knowing; Toward an ecological psychology, eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1977), pp. 43-65.
Andrej Radman
Introduction: Ecology
Q1: How to overcome techno-determinism,
i.e. dominating abstraction
(without regressing to relativism)?
Q2: How to escape relativism,
i.e. submissive empathy
(without regressing to determinism)?
In contemporary architectural discourse, the crypto-modernist logic of techno-determinism goes by the name of parametricism. The parametracists’ wet dream is total formalisation/simulation: Intelligent City, Big Data, Infrastructure, to name but a few.[1]
The crypto PoMo relativism is associated with neo-phenomenologists such as Steven Holl and Peter Zumthor, who privilege ‘the poetics of space’, ‘the subjective’, ‘the haptic’, and similar.[2]
A: The answer lies in eco-logic as advanced by the Ecologies of Architecture.[3]The Ecologies of Architecture is a neo-materialist Research Group of the Architecture Theory Chair, Department of Architecture at TU Delft. ‘New materialism’ is the umbrella term for a series of movements that distance themselves from anthropocentrism, rethink subjectivity and ethics in terms of ‘inhuman’ forces within the human, emphasise heteropoiesis as the organising power of transversal (zigzagging) processes, and explore the political ramifications of these processes for cultural practices such as architecture. According to this view, architecture does not represent culture but is a mechanism of culture.
Let us go back to the opposition between the all-too-abstract parametricists and the non-abstract-enough neo-phenomenologists.[4] Once again we are offered a false choice between the syntax-without-semantics and semantics-without-syntax. ‘Objective’ reality or ‘subjective’ illusion? The red or the blue pill from The Matrix?[5] We opt for a third pill, as does Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.[6] Yet, this is as far as we are prepared to follow his Hegelian/Lacanian trajectory (that insists on human exceptionalism). Instead, we turn to the Spinozian ethics as a mode of existence, for it is there that the distinction between abstraction and empathy finally collapses.
We also follow the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who rejected the solipsistic self in favour of ontogenesis (i.e. developmentally constructed subject). Whitehead famously launched an (in)famous plea for a radical Prometheanism by way of substituting super-ject for sub-ject, or the effect for the cause.[7] The architecture theorist Sanford Kwinter recently reiterated his critique of the liberal humanist subject as follows: “humans are […] neurologically compelled to modify their worlds, and produce objects of meaning and affective capacity in order to modify in turn their internal body state (art, culture, etc.).”[8] In other words, the essential human engagement in the environment is geared toward extraction of sensory stimulation, not food. Félix Guattari’s prodigious statement on ‘architectural enunciation’ from his Schizoanalytic Cartographies is worth quoting at length:
Reinventing architecture can no longer signify the relaunching of a style, a school, a theory with a hegemonic vocation [pace parametricism], but the recomposition of architectural enunciation, and, in a sense, the trade of the architect, under today’s conditions.He continues:
Once it is no longer the goal of the architect to be the artist of built forms [pace neo-phenomenology] but to offer his services in revealing the virtual desire 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 o become an artist and an artisan of sensible and relational lived experience.[9]Not only do humans realise ‘natural’ ends, but they do so by creating the means of their realisation. They creatively transform these ends into those of culture. The transformation allows a deterritorialisation (from the organic strata) and its subsequent (non-organic) reterritorialisation, both fraught with the dangers of ‘ex-futurism’ and ‘neoarchaism’, respectively. It is eco-logic that will help us navigate between the evident schizophrenia of ‘revolutionary’ parametricism and the equally evident paranoia of ‘reactionary’ neo-phenomenology. Deleuze and Guattari anticipated the impasse in their first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia:
The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity [neo-phenomenology], and the unfettered flows [parametricism] that carry them toward an absolute threshold. [...] They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia. They vacillate between two poles: the paranoiac despotic sign, the sign-signifier of the despot that they try to revive as a unit of code; and the sign-figure of the schizo as a unit of decoded flux, a schiz, a point-sign or flow-break. They try to hold on to the one, but they pour or flow out through the other. They are continually behind or ahead of themselves.[10]The term ecology is as political as it is scientific. By contrast to the Logic of Discreteness, ecological thinking endorses a Logic of Continuity (logic of the included middle). There is discreteness, to be sure, but the finite always consists of an infinity under a certain relation. So the discrete and the continuous – digital and analogue – are not to be taken as mutually exclusive but rather as effectively codetermining, albeit asymmetrically (double bind).[11] This is to say that the content is always too big for the form.
Ecology is governed by a different logic from that of ego-logic, insofar as the individual is no longer the universal guarantor of the dominant meanings. As Guattari explains in his seminal The Three Ecologies, while ego-logic seeks to delimit its objects, ecology concerns itself solely with the movement and intensity of evolutive processes. The process – which Guattari counterposes to the all-too-static notions of system and structure – “seeks to grasp existence in the very act of its constitution, definition, and deterritorisation [...].”[12]
The general lesson of the logic of relation is that the stable regularities we see in actuality – a.k.a. objects – do not have a specific cause that can be demarcated and isolated but may only be understood as a dynamic cascade of many processes operating over time.[13] If effects were reducible to their causes, novelty would be impossible. Time cannot therefore be treated as an abstraction. It is real through and through.
The ethico-political lesson of the logic of intensity is that all things are contingently obligatory and not logically necessary. Therein lies the possibility of pursuing a (non-determinist) project of defatalisation (anti-teleology). Resetting ourselves in a metaphysical perspective, as the speculative realist Quentin Meillassoux suggests, permits us to reconstruct our existence beyond faith alone or the sole opportunism of interest.[14] Designers beware; all things could have been different. The time has come to unyoke the architect from Newtonian physics and Cartesian metaphysics in favour of the ecological i.e. intensive and relational approach. In the words of Guattari:
Subjects and object are no longer face-to-face, with a means of expression in a third position; there is no longer a tripartite division between the realm of reality, the realm of representation or representativity, and the realm of subjectivity. You have a collective set-up which is, at once, subject, object, and expression. [...] Here, everything can participate in enunciation: individuals, as well as zones of the body, semiotic trajectories, or machines that are plugged in on all horizons. The collective disposition of enunciation thus unites semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows, well short of its possible recuperation within a theoretical corpus.[15]The traditional chasm between ‘two cultures’ – the quasi-objective scientific world-in-itself and the quasi-subjective humanistic world-for-us – becomes obsolete, as do the categories of the knower and known. The Ecologies of Architecture starts from the middle instead. Pace Kant, we must avoid reducing the world to our own conceptual schemes.[16] It is for this reason that “aesthetics becomes first philosophy.”[17] Hence the importance of the current Affective Turn.[18]
Zig: Umwelt
It is for this reason that we want to revamp the legacy of Deleuzian transcendental empiricism in general and Gibsonian ecological perception in particular. The American psychologist Gibson vehemently rejects the reductionist information-processing view, with its implied separation of the activity of the mind in the body (abstraction) from the reactivity of the body in the world (empathy). Instead, he argues that perception is part and parcel of the total system of relations constituted by the ecology of the life form or its mode of existence (metastable plasticity).
Under the Assemblage Theory, capacities do depend on components’ properties but cannot be reduced to them (externality of relations).[19] This is how Gibson explains the shift from the metaphysical (always and for everyone) experience-of-space to the space-of-experience, which is dynamic (synaesthetic and kinaesthetic):
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the [human], what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the [human] in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the [human] and the environment [...].[20]It would be difficult to imagine a more elegant shift of focus from the extensive space of properties to the intensive spatium of capacities, or in Deleuzean parlance, from longitude to latitude. A mode of existence never pre-exists an event.
In his review of Deleuze's early works – Difference and Repetition (1968) and The Logic of Sense (1969) – Foucault gives credit to Deleuze for challenging the three conditions that make it impossible to think through the event, namely the world, the self, and god (a sphere, a circle, and a centre).[21] Perverting the triple subjection, Deleuze introduces a metaphysics of the real yet incorporeal event (the virtual), which is consequently irreducible to the physics of the world (the actual). There is a logic of neutral meaning (affect/affordance), rather than a phenomenology of signification based on the subject (sense-bestowing). Finally, the tethering of the conceptual future in a past essence (being) is rejected in favour of a thought of the present infinitive (becoming). Consequently, the prerogative of the Ecologies of Architecture is to renounce any order of preference, any goal-oriented organisation, any signification, any a-priori tie.[22] It is the future that perverts the past. In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari will characterise the auto-unifying form (survol) in the following terms:
It is a primary, ‘true form’ as Ruyer has defined it: neither a Gestalt nor a perceived form, but a form in itself that does not refer to any external point of view, [...] it is an absolute consistent form that surveys itself independently of any supplementary dimension, which does not appeal therefore to any transcendence.[23]
Zag: To Have Done with the Linguistic Turn
Semiotics is only one of the many regimes of signs and certainly not the most important for architecture. After all, natural stimuli cannot be understood by analogy and with reference to socially coded stimuli, for that would be like putting the cart before the horse.[24] A sign, according to Spinoza, can have several meanings but it is always an effect. An effect is first of all the trace of one body upon another, the state of a body insofar as it suffers the action of another body. For the Ecologies of Architecture, singularities come before identities and participation precedes cognition.
Therefore, a body ought to be defined not by its form, nor by its organs or functions, but by its capacity for affecting or being affected.[25] The limit of something is the limit of its action and not the outline of its figure. This is what it means to be bound in the absence of tie and by the absence of tie. Things are powers, not forms. There may be consistency in spite of incongruence or isomorphism without correspondence. Deleuze gives an example which, at first, seems counterintuitive and proves just how much we are accustomed to Aristotelian categorisation (genera and species). There is more difference between a work-horse and a race-horse than between an ox and a work-horse. This is because the race-horse and the work-horse do not have the same affects or the same capacity for being affected; the work-horse has more affects in common with the ox. Things are no longer defined by qualitative essence, as in ‘man as a reasonable animal’, but by quantifiable power.
The Ecologies of Architecture underscores the inseparability of agencies and structures as implied by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. Michel Callon explains:
The term agencement is a French word that has no exact English counterpart. In French its meaning is very close to “arrangement” (or “assemblage”). It conveys the idea of a combination of heterogeneous elements that have been carefully adjusted to one another. But arrangements (as well as assemblages) could imply a sort of divide between human agents (those who arrange or assemble) and things that have been arranged. This is why Deleuze and Guattari proposed the notion of agencement. Agencement has the same root as agency: agencements are arrangements endowed with the capacity of acting in different ways depending on their configuration. This means that there is nothing left outside agencements: there is no need for further explanation, because the construction of its meaning is part of an agencement. A socio-technical agencement includes the statement[s] pointing to it, and it is because the former includes the latter that the agencement acts in line with the statement, just as the operating instructions are part of the device and participate in making it work.[26]As far as pragmatism is concerned, “the minimum real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier”, explains Deleuze, “but the assemblage.”[27]
Conclusion: Libidinal Field
Unconscious experience is not an oxymoron because much more is felt than known.[28] For radical empiricism thought cannot be richer than reality.[29] This is a response to the Nietzschean problem of nihilism understood as a distinction between the intelligible and the sensible, with the former privileged over and devaluing the latter. The Ecologies of Architecture is interested in an encounter between thought and that which forces it into action. While accepting multiple scales of reality, the Ecologies of Architecture opposes the alleged primacy of the ‘physical’ world discovered by physics. By contrast, it posits that we have to perceive and cope with the world considered as the environment. The emphasis is on the encounter, where experience is seen as an emergence which returns the body to a process field of exteriority. Sensibility introduces an aleatory moment into thought’s development. It effectively turns contingency into condition for thinking. Contingency upsets logical identity and opposition and places the limit of thinking beyond any dialectical system.
Thought cannot activate itself by thinking. It has to be provoked. It must suffer violence. Art and architecture may inflict such violence as they bear 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.”[30] As we have argued, 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. ‘Desiring machines’ connect, disconnect, and reconnect with one another without meaning or intention. This is how Guattari explains their concept:
[D]esire is everything that exists before the opposition between subject and object, before representation and production. It's everything whereby the world and affects constitute us outside of ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It's everything that overflows from us. That's why we define it as flow.[31]There may be intention without intentionality, desire without volition, and a smile without a cat. Individuality is not characteristic of a self or an ego, but of a perpetually individualising differential, a dark precursor. As Claire Colebrook put it, “I love you not because of the predicates that personalize you, but rather for that absolutely singular event of your existence that is irreducible to determination.”[32] In the words of Deleuze, “Each faculty, including thought, has only involuntary adventures,” and “involuntary operation remains embedded in the empirical.”[33] This constitutes his famous ‘pedagogy of the senses’. To turn the theatre of representation into the order of desiring-production is to acknowledge that there lies a (r)evolutionary potential in creating the ‘new’.
The circulation of de-coded and de-territorialized flows resists facile co-option by re-coding or capture.[34] The potential lies, quite literally, in the pure agency of transcendental causality, or the difference in itself that relates heterogeneities. The concept of quasi-cause (dark precursor) prevents regression into simple reductionism (of the sensible to the intelligible). To think differently, one has to feel differently.
Ask not what's inside your head, rather what your head's inside of.[35]
Notes
[1] For an account of ‘parametricism’ see: Patrik Schumacher, “Creator of ParametricismThe Parametricism” interview by Flavien Onfroy, http://artilinki.com/en/patrik-schumacher-creator-of-parametricism/ (accessed September 28, 2015). See also: Patrik Schumacher, “The Parametricist Epoch: Let the Style Wars Begin” in AJ - The Architects' Journal (Vol. 231, No. 16, 2010).
[2] For an account of ‘neo-phenomenology’ see: Steven Holl, Juhani Pallasmaa and Alberto Perez-Gomez, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture (Tokyo: A+U, 1994).
[3] See: http://www.tudelft-architecture.nl/chairs/architecture-theory/research
[4] Joel McKim, “Radical Infrastructure? A New Realism and Materialism in Philosophy and Architecture” The Missed Encounter Between Radical Philosophy With Architecture, ed.Nadir Lahiji (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 133-149.
[5] Warchowski Brothers, The Matrix (Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999).
[6] Sophie Finnes, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Vienna: Mischief Films, London: Amoeba Film, 2006).
[7] Ray Brassier (2014), “Prometheanism and its Critics” in #Accelerate#: The Accelerationist Reader, eds. Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian (Urbanomic and Merve Verlag, 2014), pp. 467-487.
[8] Sanford Kwinter, “Neuroecology: Notes Toward a Synthesis”, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two, ed. Warren Neidich (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014), pp. 313-333.
[9] Félix Guattari, “Architectural Enunciation”, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, [1989] 2013), pp. 231-239.
[10] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, NY: Penguin, [1972] 2008), p. 260. See also: Gilles Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 28. “Unlike the paranoid whose delirium consists of restoring codes and reinventing territories, the schizophrenic never ceases to go one more step in a movement of self-decoding and self-deterritorialization […].”
[11] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology (London: Jason Aronson, 1972), pp. 199-204.
[12] The three ecologies are spatio-temporal haecceities - environmental, social and psychic. ‘Haecceity’ is Deleuze and Guattari's term for an ‘individual singularity’. It is usually translated as ‘thisness’ (as opposed to ‘whatness’). The term comes originally from the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus and denotes the qualities and properties that make a thing, object or person an individual entity or an event. This is not an essential property but an emergent one. It means that each artefact, building, bone, etc. is a haecceity. See: Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies (London: Continuum, [1989] 2008), p. 44.
[13] Sanford Kwinter, "Hydraulic Vision" in Mood River, ed. Jeffrey Kipnis and Annetta Massie (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2002), pp. 32-33.
[14] Interview with Meillassoux, http://steve-harris.blogspot.com/2010/02/interview-with-meillassoux.html (accessed May 25, 2011). See also: Andrej Radman, “Sensibility is Ground Zero: On Inclusive Disjunction and Politics of Defatalization” in This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Society, eds. R. Braidotti and R. Dolphijn (Leiden & Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2014), pp. 57-86.
[15] Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist” in Chaosophy, ed. Sylvere Lothringer (Los Angeles: Autonomedia/Semiotext(e), 1995), pp. 160-161.
[16] The Kantian-Copernican revolution turned out to be a Ptolomeic counter-revolution.
[17] “[N]othing is ever entirely determined by its causes. An actual entity must decide how it receives and responds to causes that feed into it.” See: Steven Shaviro, “Panpsychism And/Or Eliminativism.” http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1012 (accessed September 25, 2015).
[18] For a comprehensive overview of the Affective Turn see: The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2010).
[19] Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2009).
[20] James Jerome Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, [1979] 1986), p. 127.
[21] Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Critique (No. 282, 1970), pp. 885-908. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994); Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia UP, [1969] 1990).
[22] Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted” in Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, [1993] 1997), pp. 152-174.
[23] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia UP, [1991] 1994), p. 210.; Cf. A. Radman and D. Hauptmann, (2013) “Northern Line” in Deleuze and Architecture, eds. Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 40-60.
[24] James Jerome Gibson, “The concept of the stimulus in psychology” in American Psychologist (Vol. 15, No. 11, November 1960), p. 702.
[25] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza, Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, [1970] 1988), p. 124.
[26] Michel Callon as quoted in Karl Palmas, “Deleuze and DeLanda: A new ontology, a new political economy?” Paper presented on 29 January 2007 at the Economic Sociology Seminar Series, the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics & Political Science.
[27] Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature" in Dialogues (New York: Columbia UP, [1977] 1987), p. 51. "The utterance is the product of an assemblage - which is always collective, which brings into play within us and outside us populations, multiplicities, territories, becomings, affects, events.”
[28] Katherine N. Hayles, “on Nonconscious Cognition and Material Processes”, http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/watch_n._katherine_hayles_on_nonconscious_cognition_and_material_processes (accessed September 27, 2015).
[29] Paradoxically, feelings (affections, not affects) are states produced by thought, while thoughts are produced by affects. See: Teresa Brennan, “The Education of Senses” in The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004), p. 116.
[30] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 227.
[31] Félix Guattari "A Liberation of Desire" in Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), p. 142
[32] Claire Colebrook, “Who Comes after the Post-human?” in Deleuze and the Non/Human, eds. Jon Roffe and Hannah Stark (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 217-234.
[33] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 145.
[34] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, [1968] 1994), p. 271.; Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, NY: Penguin, [1972] 2008), p. 379
[35] William M. Mace, “James J. Gibson's Strategy for Perceiving: Ask Not What's Inside Your Head, but What Your Head's Inside of” in Perceiving, acting and knowing; Toward an ecological psychology, eds. Robert Shaw and John Bransford, (Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1977), pp. 43-65.
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