Architectural Technicities (Architectural Borders and Territories) [1 ed.] 9781032235240, 9781032235257, 9781003278078, 1032235241

Citation preview

Architectural Technicities

This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To respond, it will embark on a captivating journey through many singular architectural concepts. The entasis of Doric columns, Ulysses and desert islands will outline an architectural act that moves beyond representation. A ferryman who stutters will present two different types of architectural minds. A stilus and a theory of signs will reconsider the ways architects can develop a particular kind of intuition, while architectural technicities will bring forth a membranic and territorial understanding of architecture. Finally, as a melody that sings itself, a larval architecture will be introduced, bringing space and time together. Assisting this endeavour, the thought of philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Gilbert Simondon and Raymond Ruyer will meet the latest developments in fields like affect theory, cognitive sciences, environmental studies and neuroanthropology. Eventually, by the end of this book, the readers – from architecture students and researchers to academics and practitioners with an interest in theory – will have been exposed to a comprehensive and original philosophy of architecture and the built environment. Stavros Kousoulas is Assistant Professor of Architecture Philosophy and Theory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft, the Netherlands. He studied architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece and at TU Delft, the Netherlands. He graduated cum laude from IUAV Venice, Italy, participating in the Villard d’ Honnecourt International Research Doctorate. He has published and lectured in Europe and abroad and has been a member of the editorial board of Footprint: Delft Architecture Theory Journal since 2014. His previous publications include the edited volumes Architectures of Life and Death (with Andrej Radman) and Design Commons (with Gerhard Bruyns).

Architectural Borders and Territories Series editor: Marc Schoonderbeek

Architectural Borders and Territories offers a comprehensive series of books on architectural ‘borders’ and ‘territories’, emphasising the intrinsic critical relationship as well as the inherent complexities between these two core terms of architecture. Topics include:

1. border and migration studies in relation to spaces of conflict; 2. the territory and architecture, infrastructure and landscape; 3. critical theories probing (the boundaries of) architecture as a discipline 4. design thinking in relation to design methodologies.

The series is theoretical and historical in its scope and presents discussions relevant to international contemporary scholarship in architecture. Mapping in Architectural Discourse Place-Time Discontinuities Marc Schoonderbeek Architectural Technicities A Foray Into Larval Space Stavros Kousoulas

Architectural Technicities A Foray Into Larval Space

Stavros Kousoulas

Cover image: Designed by Stavros Kousoulas First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Stavros Kousoulas The right of Stavros Kousoulas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kousoulas, Stavros, author. Title: Architectural technicities: a foray into larval space / Stavros Kousoulas. Description: Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. | Series: Architectural borders and territories | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022007045 (print) | LCCN 2022007046 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032235240 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032235257 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003278078 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture–Philosophy. Classification: LCC NA2500 .K685 2022 (print) | LCC NA2500 (ebook) | DDC 720.1–dc23/eng/20220411 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007045 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007046 ISBN: 978-1-032-23524-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-23525-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27807-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078 Typeset in Garamond by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgements vii What Is Architecture’s Problem? 0.1 So Many Solutions, So Few Problems  1 0.1.1 Architecture-Without 2 0.1.2 A Chrysalis Awake  6 0.1.3 What If There Were a Problem  9 0.2 The Producer Product  10 0.2.1 A True Problem, a Pure Event  11 0.2.2 A Concept Responds, a Concept Asks  12 Notes 15 Bibliography 17

1

1 An Architect Who Stutters 1.1 Ulysses’s Ship 19 1.1.1 A Column, a Wave, a Paper and a Brain  20 1.1.2 Extended Architectural Minds, Minor and Major  24 1.2 Desert Islands, Intransitive Forces  29 1.2.1 The Antecedence Criterion  29 1.2.2 To Begin Anew  32 1.2.3 Signs of Disruption  34 1.3 The Ferryman of Hades  38 1.3.1 Ratiognition 38 1.3.2 Subliminally Beautiful 40 1.3.3 Stuttering to Death  44 Notes 49 Bibliography 53

19

2 Technicities of Architectural Intuition 2.1 Concrete Walls Abstractly Concretizing  56 2.1.1 A Manipulative Account  57 2.1.2 Architectural Technicities 59 2.1.3 Give Architecture a Hand  61

56

vi Contents 2.1.4 Concretized Abstractions 64 2.1.5 The Undetermined Hand  67 2.2 The Oldest Prejudice  72 2.2.1 Trans-intuitive Stutters 72 2.2.2 Digitally Broken, Analogically Glued  76 2.2.3 The Event Is in the Plural  77 2.2.4 Digital until Proven Immanent  80 2.3 The Ethopoiesis of Architecture  82 2.3.1 Reductionist to the Bitter (Autopoietic) End  82 2.3.2 Architectural Part-to-Affective Whole  85 2.3.3 Drift, Naturally 90 2.3.4 Put the Blame on the Relation, Boys  93 Notes 97 Bibliography 101 3 Architecture on the Limit 3.1 Analogue Flights of a Digital Spider  104 3.1.1 Eppur Si Individuate 105 3.1.2 All Is Information  108 3.1.3 Parametricist Scholasticism 111 3.1.4 Transductive Modulations under the Allagmatic Bridge  114 3.2 Bells and Whistles  120 3.2.1 An Artisan of Rhythms  121 3.2.2 It Comes with the Territory  125 3.2.3 Ritornerà 130 3.2.4 It Doesn’t Fold Because You Say So  134 3.2.5 Un-frame the Veil  137 3.2.6 What Happens on the Membrane, Stays on the Membrane  141 Notes 146 Bibliography 150

104

4 Larval Space 4.1 Memorie dal Futuro 153 4.1.1 Synaptic Passages 153 4.1.2 A Melody that Sings Itself  161 4.2 The End Is the Beginning Is the End  170 4.2.1 A Brief History of Architectural Time  170 4.2.2 One Final(ist) Act  177 Notes 187 Bibliography 190

152

Index

193

Acknowledgements

This book would not be possible if it were not for the countless and intensive discussions on architecture theory and philosophy that I have had the privilege to be part of throughout the years. As such, I owe to my friend and colleague Andrej Radman for being a spearhead of all things theory and whose constant feedback can be traced throughout this book; to Heidi Sohn for her continuous support, invaluable input and her meticulously close readings and corrections on early drafts of this text; to Patrick Healy for his ability to provoke thought as no other; to Robert A. Gorny for being capable of both the most radical and systematic forms of thinking; to Rosi Braidotti, Sjoerd van Tuinen and Rick Dolphijn for our exchanges in the local Deleuze Circle; and to all my students who inspired this book in the first place. I am grateful to my colleague and series editor Marc Schoonderbeek, as well as to Francesca Ford, Caroline Church and Trudy Varcianna for their generous editorial guidance. I am indebted to Heleen Schröder for her copyediting and proofreading. Finally, I am thankful to my institution, the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology, for the financial support in all stages of preparing this book.

What Is Architecture’s Problem? 

This book poses a simple question: how is this architecture possible? To be precise, it will not focus on the exact techniques that actualize the built environment. Even though such issues will be addressed, the focus is much broader; in this sense, it is a metaphysical issue. Moving beyond the notorious Heideggerian declaration of the ‘end of metaphysics’, we will explore the very nature of architecture. I will claim that metaphysics not only has not ended, but it is perhaps more necessary than ever before. However, what is needed is not a general – and generalizing – metaphysics, a theory of everything that, in the end, addresses nothing in particular. To the contrary, I will outline a metaphysics of architecture, not by borrowing concepts and notions from other discourses and attempting to apply them metaphorically within architectural thought, but rather by exploring the trajectories where architecture and other disciplines can productively encounter each other and potentially transform. If we accept, paraphrasing French philosopher Henri Bergson, that architecture has not yet found its metaphysics, then this book is an effort to change that.1 To do so, I need not only to further detail the problem at the core of the book; what is necessary is to radically reformulate the notion of ‘problem’ itself. 0.1 So Many Solutions, So Few Problems When Martin Heidegger announced the ‘end of metaphysics’ in his books on Nietzsche, he made it clear that this end also stood for another, perhaps more significant end: the end of Western philosophy.2 In this regard, Heidegger was right; indeed, Nietzsche’s immanent metaphysics marked an end, the end of transcendental philosophies. As such, ‘ the end of metaphysics only signifies the end of the metaphysics that believes itself to be or pretends to be transcendent.’3 Indeed, already at its anecdotal birth, as the book after Aristotle’s Physics in the Library of Alexandria, metaphysics did not intend to ostracize the sensible to a realm beyond, but rather to express the rules and principles that governed the sensible world; or, at least, this was the case for any major pre-Socratic philosopher.4 It was only later, as we will see when focusing on Plato, that metaphysics became almost synonymous with transcendental thought. Nonetheless, what is the difference between ­immanence and ­transcendence, and why does it matter for architecture? DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-1

2  What Is Architecture’s Problem? 0.1.1 Architecture-Without

As expressions of rules and principles concerning the nature of the real, both transcendental and immanent metaphysics wish to express how the real is given, how its sense becomes sensible. Etymologically, one can approach both in terms of their relation to a ground, a place; what is immanent remains within, remains there, holding firmly to its location, while the transcendent is what detaches and unbinds itself – as the Parmenidean chain or the soul that leaves the body.5 Transcendental metaphysics as the philosophy of the Idea replaces the real with a symbol – mathematical, linguistic, or, in any case, representational – and detaches itself from the real, expressing the rules and principles not of this world but of a world that serves the principles themselves. It is not the model that compromises to the world, but rather the world conforming to its modelled version. Sense is no longer the sense of this world but rather the sense of the ideal, modelled version that the world needs to conform with and participate in. As such, any transcendental account of sense can be easily replaced with another, since, in any case, it does not correspond to real experience but to an ideal modelling of experience. Any sensible act of and in the real can be explained, justified and controlled at will; any architectural act can be rendered compatible to an ideal. Consequently, there are two reasons why one should turn to an immanent architectural metaphysics: acknowledging architecture as of this world, and granting it both a place and an irreplaceability. 6 Doing so, one can approach architecture as the architectural sense that produces it and the sense that it itself produces. Moreover, one can understand architectural sense without necessarily confusing it with signification. As philosopher and cultural theorist Erich Hörl reminds us, for the greatest part of human thought – and because of the transcendental metaphysics that accompanied it – sense has always been understood as, or even become synonymous with, signification. 7 As he claims, up until the second half of the last century, ‘this sense of sense was understood as the sense of sense: that is to say, the age-old figuration and interpretation of sense, the doxa or dogmatic image that conceives of sense as signification.’ 8 However, Hörl, following philosopher Gilbert Simondon, is quick to add that the emergence and gradual popularization of information technologies – what one can simply refer to as cybernetics – coincides with the emergence of another trajectory, one that can never allow returning to mere signification.9 Simply put, it is the emergence of ‘open machines’ and ‘open objects’, a technology of the outside, that has circumvented, surpassed and essentially rendered obsolete the traditional culture of sense that remains obsessed with signification. As Hörl puts it, in such a vision, the technical object no longer features as a meaningless tool, or as an instrument that is a mere means to achieve the ends

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  3

of an already constituted and meaning-giving subject. It is no longer a ­separate, minoritized object situated at the abyss of non-sense; no longer the accursed share, or the impossible outside of meaning. This inferior object that was always considered a mere thing in the work of interiority and the theatre of intentionality, now appears at the very heart of the culture of sense, opening up a new stage and new environment of sense.10 Simply put, if one no longer considers technology and culture apart, but rather conceives technology – and, consequently, architecture – as a mechanism of culture, then what occurred in the past century was a technological transformation of sense.11 Nonetheless, what does our current technological sense imply for architecture? In short, it calls, nowadays more than ever before, for an immanent account of architectural production. This is the case precisely because our current technological condition necessitates an understanding of being that does not correlate to anything but its own mode of production. As Hörl claims, following philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, it is a being-without: without essence, without model, without rules.12 A being that is not extrinsically conditioned is a being that is unchained, one that not only has no (cultural) soul that leaves its (technological) body but, more importantly, does not even distinguish between soul and body. The reason why such a being-without is the mode of existence of our technological condition is the technological object itself. As will become clear by the end of this book, technology is the driving motor of a purposiveness without purpose, a consequence-organized dynamic that is its own consequence and depends on nothing except the act that produces it and the acts that it allows or constrains. As such, it is clear why a metaphysics of immanence is necessary for an architecture that is now transformed to an architecture-without. To speak of an architecture-without equally implies an architectural production-without. It asks for an account of architectural production that does not rely on anything but production itself. As such, it goes directly against the foundational principle of any transcendental philosophy, namely the originary, Platonic rejection of an absolute creation – a creation without any pre-existing example, without any model to base itself on and without any dominant principle. Simultaneously, it goes against notions of autonomy, especially those implied in various architectural theories: to speak of production itself is to speak of heterogeneity, of transversal and transdisciplinary practices of contamination, rather than suppose pure and ideal typologies or strict disciplinary boundaries. In this sense, according to Hörl, the complex and extended couplings between the human and the technological that our current condition allows, bring forward a radical shift from onto-theology (the pinnacle of transcendental metaphysics) to onto-technology.13 This echoes Nancy’s thought, when he claims that from creation as the result of an accomplished divine action, one shifts to creation as, in sum, an unceasing activity and actuality of this world in

4  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

its singularity. One sense of the word (creation as a state of affairs of the given world) yields to another (creation as bringing forth a world – an active sense that is nothing else than the first sense of creatio.)14 Nancy is correct to point out that, ironically, an onto-technological understanding of creation stands much closer to the very etymology of the word: creare, to make, to bring forth. Without asterisks or transcendental rules, creation is just bringing forth and not bringing forth out of a somewhere or something that is given in advance. In this sense, technological – and architectural – creation brings forth not only new objects, but, crucially, new subjects. Moreover, this is not an exception that applies only to our current technological condition: technology is not only a mechanism of culture but also a mechanism for the production of subjectivities – even though one could claim that the two coincide. Consequently, the subject who thinks transcendentally, the one to whom all sense appears to be given only as synthesizable based on its significations, the writing, reading, alphabetized, grammatized or even cinematographic subject, is nothing but a product of the technologies that provided it with a language, a grammar or a moving image: the pencil, the book and the screen precede the subject who misconceives them as mere infrastructure, ready to be picked up at will for its own pleasure or interest.15 On this misunderstanding that prioritizes the subject in favour of the (technological) object, lie the fundamental presuppositions of the hylomorphic schema. Hylomorphism, in brief, assumes a binary relation between form and matter, while simultaneously privileging the first. Simply put, it states that matter is nothing but the passive, objective ground upon which the active, subjective form will impose. It is against the hylomorphic tradition that has dominated the history of Western thought – including, of course, architectural thought – that Gilbert Simondon would devote his oeuvre. While this will be a recurrent topic, what is crucial for now is to understand one of Simondon’s most important claims regarding hylomorphism: Simondon claims that ‘the entire ontological and epistemological organization of the occidental sense culture is encapsulated in the hylomorphic juxtaposition of form and matter, which is nothing else but a representation of work and its basic object relations, which minorize technical objects.’16 Put differently, Simondon claims that hylomorphism does not emerge as an ideological caprice, but directly from specific working conditions – or from specific actions. Moreover, hylomorphic thought becomes a presumption that propels consequent actions, patterns of work that secure its dominance.17 As Hörl summarizes, the main point of Simondon is that hylomorphism has shaped the entire Western practice of describing concrete physical, psychic and social processes. In which way has it shaped them though? As Simondon puts it, The hylomorphic schema corresponds to the knowledge of someone who remains outside the workshop and considers nothing but what enters and exits it; in order to know the true hylomorphic relation, it is not even

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  5

enough to enter the workshop and work with the craftsman: we would have to penetrate into the mold itself in order to follow the operation of form-taking on the different scales of magnitude of physical reality.18 Hylomorphism implies a distorted understanding of any environment, since it constantly remains ‘outside’ of it. If we understand an environment as a population of relations, then representational logics and the transcendental metaphysics that gave birth to it are, in the end, disinterested in relations and much more geared towards fixed products and terms. As such, the wish of hylomorphism to remain outside of what it attempts to examine or manipulate has the opposite effect on the relations that produce it or the relations that it as a product catalyses. Any thought that is on the outside implies an absolute interiorization of relations: they are always dominated by the endproducts, the fixed objects that express them. In this sense, architecture turns into a discourse of inputs and outputs; the glorified practitioners or thinkers who feed the discourse with inputs, the majestic buildings and texts that stand as the outputs of their excellence. What is absent, in both cases, is architecture itself, as the simultaneous production of both an architectural subject and object that are indistinguishable from each other. Thus, the input–output fallacy of most architectural logics is not only inadequate to address our current architectural condition; it is outdated, because it is based on a pre-technological sense of culture. If architecture could, until now, avoid an immanent account of architectural production and insist on being outside of this reality, this can no longer be the case. According to Simondon, The technical operation that imposes a form on a passive and undetermined matter is not just an operation considered abstractly by the spectator who sees what enters the workshop and what leaves it without knowing the elaboration properly speaking. This is essentially the operation controlled by the free man and executed by the slave … The active characteristic of the form and the passive characteristic of the matter correspond to the conditions of the transmission of the order, which supposes social hierarchy: it is in the content of the order that the indication of the matter is an indetermination, whereas the form is determination, i.e. expressible and logical … The distinction between matter and form, between the soul and the body, reflects a city that contains citizens in opposition to slaves.19 An architecture of inputs and outputs is, therefore, an architecture of masters and slaves: those who dictate, those who execute and the products that – mysteriously for the masters, not so for the slaves – emerge in the world. It is obvious that such an account is both inaccurate and neglectful of actual architectural production; thus, it is obvious that such an account is not an account of this reality but an account of an ideal state, a transcendental discourse on architectural production that does not examine architecture

6  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

as such, but architecture as that account would prefer it to be. What is not obvious, however, is that such an account has another, even more fundamental consequence: even in an age of no masters or slaves, it manages to produce them both. Either in the form of experts, of architectural stars and theoretical geniuses, or in the form of rebels, of alienated interns and amazed spectators, an architecture of the outside is, surprisingly, the ultimate negation of an architecture-without: it is, indeed, an architecture without architecture. 0.1.2 A Chrysalis Awake

The aim of this book is to speak of an architecture-without but without anything except architecture. This is the premise of an immanent architectural account: to speak of architectural production without depending on anything but the architectural act itself. To do so, however, one needs to be precise. This is, perhaps, one of the greatest advantages of immanence: it is either precise regarding the reality it examines or is not immanence at all. After all, this is the great lesson that Bergson taught us. It is starting with Bergson that an immanent architectural metaphysics will be set up; moreover, not by coincidence, it is also with Bergson that the notion of the problem will be reformulated. As he claims, what philosophy – which we can understand as metaphysics – has lacked most is precision.20 By precision, Bergson has in mind a reliable method that can actually deliver precise knowledge about metaphysical reality.21 According to him, transcendental thought is simply too wide for reality, making propositions and advancing statements that can also ‘hold as true for a world or universe that is radically different than the one we do occupy.’22 In his own words, transcendental thought could apply equally well to a world in which neither plants nor animals have existence, only men, and in which men would quite possibly do without eating and drinking, where they would neither sleep nor dream nor let their minds wander … and where everything might just as easily go backwards and be upside down.23 Bergson demands a metaphysics that does justice to this reality and not a possible one; to this world and not one that would serve the person thinking about it; to an architecture that is without anything except its architectural reality. Even more, to an architecture so close to its reality that between the two nothing else can really fit, since the only explanation we should accept as satisfactory is one which fits tightly to its object, with no space between them, no crevice in which any other explanation might equally well be lodged; one which fits the object only and to which alone the object lends itself.24

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  7

Bergson does not hesitate to point out the exact fallacy of transcendental metaphysics, which does not allow it to be precise about reality: it showcases a fundamental disrespect for time. Put succinctly, its only interest lies in seeking the truth in what does not change, thus positioning itself outside of time. Close to the masters who remain distant from the workshop, transcendental thought relies on inputs and outputs precisely because these are without any temporal dimension, static terms that can not only be exchanged at will but, crucially, they themselves never change. One needs to be cautious though: for Bergson, the greatest change of all, the greatest difference of all, is the difference of something from itself. To understand why, it is important to follow Bergson in one of his most beautiful examples. As he writes, one might as well discourse on the subject of the cocoon from which the butterfly is to emerge, and claim that the fluttering, changing, living butterfly finds its raison d’être and fulfilment in the immutability of its shell. On the contrary, let us unfasten the cocoon, awaken the chrysalis; let us restore to movement its mobility, to change its fluidity, to time its duration. Who knows but what the ‘great insoluble problems’ will remain attached to the outer shell? They were not concerned with either movement or change or time, but solely with the conceptual cocoon which we mistakenly took for them or for their equivalent. Metaphysics will then become experience itself; and duration will be revealed as it really is,— unceasing creation, the uninterrupted up-surge of novelty.25 The keyword in Bergson’s quote is duration: this is what can provide precision to thought, and what any transcendental metaphysics lacks. Bergson claimed that it is his conclusions on the importance of duration that lead him to develop a method that could approach reality with precision.26 He would, somewhat provocatively, call this method intuition, and while aware of the controversial nature of the term, would claim that it is the only term that can express ‘a mode of knowing distinct from intelligence.’27 Brought close to architectural thought and practices, intuition – along with the disruptive potential of spatial stuttering – will be crucial throughout this book, as indeed a mode of knowledge that, albeit not to be confused with instinct or feeling, can actually think in terms of duration, in terms of internal differences and diverse lines of individuation. This is the case precisely because intuition does not start from the static and immobile in order to explain that which is always transforming; quite the contrary, intuition starts from movement and considers immobility as a mere abstraction.28 It is a method that needs to constantly experiment, to begin anew, to speculate on and extrapolate from the reality that it wishes to examine and manipulate. Simply put, intuition can express most fully the fundamental Simondonian plea: the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge. What kind of knowledge are we referring to here, though? For both Bergson and Simondon, the goal of intuition is a concrete knowledge reached

8  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

‘not by way of the abstract, as is customary in many metaphysics, but through sustained engagement and connection with the concrete, since this latter route enables a tighter fit between object and explanation (i.e. metaphysical precision).’29 Even though the relationship between the abstract and the concrete is more complex than a simple binary opposition, what Bergson claims is that any account that detaches the individuated entities – which we can also understand as their solutions – from their individuation – which we can understand as their problematic field – is an account that misplaces concreteness: explanation is restricted to actualized entities while the forces, potentials and processes of actualization are completely disregarded. Famously, it was philosopher Alfred North Whitehead who called this way of thinking ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’, where the abstract is constantly mistaken for the concrete, denying not only the reality of temporal duration, but also the reality of experience itself. To bring metaphysics back in this reality, one that is both individuating and experiential, Bergson wonders, how much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one? Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth.30 Deploying intuition in order to grasp reality in its movement and duration implies that this reality should be understood problematically. Moreover, as Bergson clarifies, for each new problem there should be a new intuitive effort to approach it – or, even better, to determine it. Bergson adds that intuition is capable of being precise while also addressing individuation and not the individuated, because it is obscure. In a line of thought influenced by Leibniz, Bergson proposes that when an idea is said to be ‘clear’, it is often because it merely draws on elements and propositions that are already known.31 That is, clear ideas do nothing more than re-arrange already established notions. On the contrary, there lies a much more profound clarity in the ‘radically new and absolutely simple idea, which catches as it were an intuition.’32 Obscure, complex and incomprehensible as they may appear, genuinely novel ideas that do not rely on simply re-arranging the established have as an effect a clearing out of obscurities, a resolution of problematic tensions. They are

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  9

clear, therefore, on the basis of their effects, not their initial composition; they become understandable only because they manage to re-determine how we understand what we understand. Consequently, since it needs to constantly begin anew whenever it encounters a novel problem, for Bergson intuition becomes almost synonymous with invention – a peculiar invention, however, since it relies on an absolute origin and not on anything given in advance. As he claims, a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated. By that I mean that its solution exists then, although it may remain hidden and, so to speak, covered up: the only thing left to do is to uncover it. But stating the problem is not simply uncovering, it is inventing. Discovery, or uncovering, had to do with what already exists actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might never have happened.33 For Bergson, to state a problem is to invent it. However, how can one be sure that the invented problem has a truly transformative potential? How can one be sure that out of obscure intuitions an effect of clarification will emerge? How can one be sure that what is being invented is a true problem? 0.1.3 What If There Were a Problem

Contrary to the common belief that architecture is a problem-solving enterprise – understood as focused on solely providing solutions to specific problems – it instead occupies itself with a constant problematization. Within architectural practices, of course, a substantial amount of effort is devoted to the actualization of solutions regarding problems of different levels and of different scales. Nevertheless, the ability of architecture to problematize is what differentiates it from other disciplines, especially those classified as engineering. Following architectural theorist Jeffrey Kipnis, it may be argued that while engineering has a subjugating effect, the effect of architecture is liberating.34 It is crucial to be exact as to what the one discipline subjugates and what the other liberates: what is at stake here is difference. Engineering subjugates differences precisely in order to respond to the problems it faces, while architecture liberates difference in order to problematize the field of a constant production of subjectivity. Engineering, aiming to respond in a seriality of ‘if … then’ deductions, aims to deliver the greatest good for most people, and in order to do so, it needs to eliminate differences, both in the initial formulation of its problems and in its potential responses – assuming that those responses also need to be wide enough to address the discipline’s broad audience.35 By contrast, architecture offers emancipatory potentials by amplifying the problematic field and eventually creating new existential niches via the manipulative abductive interference of a myriad ‘what … ifs.’36

10  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

In this sense, architectural problems need to be assigned a double meaning: on the one hand, that of a difficulty that needs a response and on the other, as an ‘impersonal field of singularities out of which thought draws its localized solutions, the latent structure that elicits the dynamisms of conceptualization.’37 Here, architectural theories and practices, architectural thinking itself, need to transform. Only problems of the greatest significance actually demand a transformation, since for all the rest one can simply rely on the countless textbooks that pretend to provide a safe guide. After all, as Deleuze puts it, ‘to what are we dedicated if not those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and language?’38 This is a point, among many others, where Deleuze and Simondon converge, asking for a radical break with the two most influential lines of philosophical thought: Plato and Aristotle. At the very beginning of his philosophical work, Simondon famously called out his two most important ‘enemies’: substantialism and hylomorphism. Against the monism of substance and the dualism of matter and form, Simondon rejected any philosophical account which would presuppose the existence of any genetic principle prior to genesis itself. In other words, he opposed any attempt to approach the individual as a static entity that would not only come before its genesis but would also serve as the role model able to account for it. Therefore, he develops an account of the genesis of the individual prior to any notion of a fixed individual being. Consequently, Simondon poses the following questions regarding substantialism: what if processes of individuation exceed what we traditionally consider as individuals? Moreover, what if these genetic processes produce something more than the individual and what if they can be also extended so as to include a much broader range of beings?39 How can one ‘think individuals in general as the result of prior processes of individuation?’40 To do so, it is paramount to understand the Deleuzian concept of determination. 0.2 The Producer Product For Deleuze, substituting any notion of transcendental Platonic participation and opting for an active mode of determination has two aims: on the one hand, metaphysics can now examine reality immanently; on the other, one can now properly distinguish between false and true problems. In his book on Bergson, Deleuze goes to great lengths in examining Bergson’s problematic philosophy, so much so that he even articulates rules for a problem-based methodology.41 Already in the introductory pages of the book, Deleuze claims that the great asset of Bergson’s problematic and intuitive account is that it allows for ‘an intrinsic determination of the false in the expression “false problem”.’42 While the notions of true and false are commonly associated with solutions, Bergson claims that, on the contrary, it is on a problematic level that truth and falsity ought to be sought. In fact, Bergson considers false problems as fictitious, pseudo-problems, leading Deleuze to provocatively

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  11

state that ‘there are false problems more than there are false solutions, more than there are false solutions for true problems.’43 0.2.1 A True Problem, a Pure Event

What is crucial is to be able to properly determine a true problem; to be able to distinguish what is singular and what is ordinary within a problematic field and, accordingly, attempt to resolve it. Consequently, the determination of a problem is no longer an issue that faces the possibility of error, that is paralysed in its development under the threat of a mistaken outcome, a misleading solution. On the contrary, thought errs when it poses false problems, as it is these false problems that mislead it. As Deleuze writes, who says ‘Good morning Theodorus’ when Theaters passes, ‘It is three o’clock’ when it is three thirty and that 7+5=13? These are effective examples of errors, but examples which, like the majority of such ‘facts’, refer to thoroughly artificial or puerile situations, and offer a grotesque image of thought because they relate it to very simple questions to which one can and must respond by independent propositions. Error acquires a sense only once the play of thought ceases to be speculative and becomes a kind of radio quiz.44 Once we no longer bother with questions that simply demand a demonstration of propositional knowledge, once we move beyond the fixed responses to quiz questions, then the duty of thought becomes to be able to determine problems that necessarily can transform thought itself. As such, learning becomes much more important than knowledge. There is a profound difference between learning – a knowing-how – and knowledge, which corresponds to the accumulation and memorization of knowing-that propositions. As any teacher would confirm, errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework (except in those exercises where a fixed result must be produced, or propositions must be translated one by one). Rather, what is more frequently found – and worse – are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary ‘points’ confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems – all heave with dangers, yet the fate of us all.45 Consequently, the question asked in the beginning of this book starts to make more sense; how is this architecture possible? Not architecture in general, not any architecture, not the one that would suit better a specific part of the discourse or a specific set of practices, but rather the architecture that – for better or worse – we have. It is in terms of an internal architectural difference that we can understand the individuation of architecture since the question

12  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

is no longer about different architectural styles or thoughts – this would be an external understanding of difference – but rather about the singular and ordinary points that within an architectural duration determine the nature of its individuation. Deleuze was clear when claiming that the virtue of the Bergsonian question is that it allows us to move beyond the falsity of the question ‘why something rather than nothing’ towards the productive force of the question ‘why this rather than something else.’46 It is time to reformulate the question: How does this architecture structure and operate, based on the ways that it expresses itself? Posed as such, the question aims at a threefold problem. First, as should be clear already, it refers to an architecture of this reality. Second, it brings together the structure and the operation of this architectural reality; this will be pivotal, since as will be clear by the end of this book, any account that separates the two is nothing but reductionist. Finally, it examines the structure and the operation of this architectural reality in terms of its own expression; thus, it allows us to examine it in terms of its own duration, its own internal difference, since expression is always temporal, always occurring as an event and an act. Not surprisingly, for Deleuze the event is always a complex network of thought and action involved in a problem and the attempts to solve it.47 Therefore, he will distinguish between two types of event: the historical and the pure event. The pure event is a problem-poser: it determines the singular and ordinary points that encompass all its historical actualizations, it produces a difference in kind, reshuffling the field of potentials. In other words, it brings new information into the world. It goes without saying that historical events have the power to determine the pure event anew, to alter the continuum, to inform differential relations. If not, the actual could never affect the virtual. Nonetheless, it is the pure event that initially catalyses such a drastic and radical shift. As such, one can understand the pure event as the production of novel sense, novel meaning: indeed, Simondon would add, as new information. Consequently, to grasp the architectural event beyond its historical actualizations would mean to determine an architectural problem in terms of the production of novel architectural information: when, where, how, for whom, with what purpose and why can architecture produce new information, new architectural sense and meaning? This already implies a shift in architectural thinking itself, since it no longer bothers with taxonomizing, comparing or analysing discourses, styles and practices, but rather attempts to ‘extract an event from things and beings, to set up the new event from things and being, always give them a new event.’48 0.2.2 A Concept Responds, a Concept Asks

It is for this reason that extracting the pure event is a process of learning. More than just the propositional acquisition of data, learning – understood as extracting a problem-posing event – deals with the production of new information, synchronous to the informational liberation that a pure event

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  13

catalyses: only true problems correspond to pure events. In both, a new sense has been produced and alongside it, a new subject: if a new sense corresponds to a new point of view, then indeed it is a novel line of subjectification that unravels every time a pure event and a true problem emerge. As philosopher Sean Bowden claims when commenting on Deleuze’s approach to learning, problems are not the experience of, nor do they depend upon, a thinking subject who exists in an independent and prior way. Problems for Deleuze are rather responsible for the genesis of the thinking subject … In fact problems are also responsible for the determination of the objects of this subject’s thought, without themselves ever being determinate objects of thought.49 Both problems and events coincide in their capacity for informational novelty and the formation of a novel subject, precisely because they assist in the emergence of a new point of view: such an emergence is always the consequence of a production of novel signs. Throughout this book, signs and information will be continuously connected with a novel understanding of architecture, one that no longer deals just with the production of space but shifts focus to the capacity of architecture to produce ways of life – hence, novel individuations, novel subjects. As will be demonstrated in the coming chapters, signs will be disconnected from an account that approaches them merely semiotically – that is, in terms of their relationship with language and its significations – and will, in turn, be placed next to the affective power of significance. Signs will be understood as the affective limit, a crossing of an intensive threshold that, the moment it is enacted and perceived, has the capacity to produce new information. This is what Deleuze has in mind when he claims that problems and their symbolic fields stand in a relationship with signs. It is signs which ‘cause’ problems … and truth emerges … as though it were the limit of a problem completely determined and entirely understood, or the product of those genetic series which constitute the sense.50 Consequently, problems can be understood as the crossing of a conceptual threshold, the passing of a limit that in the very event of its passing produces thought it itself: the producer product, as Deleuze and Guattari call it.51 The act of crossing the limit is one of the fundamental concerns of this book. It is through an examination of the limit that an immanent account of architectural production will be developed. To this end, concepts such as the membrane will be examined in detail and brought in close contact with an architecture that structures and operates as a constant play of limits. However, and it is in this way that the first and last parts of this book fold in upon each other, both problems and limits can be understood as constraints. It is with a reinvigorated account of constraints that architecture will be determined as a

14  What Is Architecture’s Problem?

population of technicities that form a consequence-organized dynamic that is its own consequence. Nonetheless, how are problems connected with constraints? Etymologically, the term ‘problem’ comes from the Greek πρόβλημα: something thrown or put forward, an obstacle in the way towards something. Problems constrain a path, not allowing for an easy and uninterrupted flow, while demanding new forms of articulation. Problems enable constraints that in their demand for new articulations produce a new meaning, a new sense, novel information: a difference that can make a difference. Therefore, true problems do not need a solution but rather a response. They do not ask for the insertion of the correct data that will make them disappear; they demand the responsive expression of an act that will transform them. A response, consequently, is always directed not towards the problem itself, but towards the conditions of its emergence. Even when understood literally as an obstacle in a path, responses to problems manage to comprehend reality and potentially transform it only if they approach the conditions that individuate it: if one does not deal with the conditions that make an obstacle appear, then it is only a matter of time before one encounters that obstacle again. For Deleuze, concepts are thought’s responses to problems. However, Deleuze does not distinguish a concept from the question that made it emerge; as such, a concept that responds to a true problem is simultaneously a question. As he writes, far from being an empirical state of knowledge destined to disappear in the response once a response is given, the question silences all empirical responses which purport to suppress it, in order to force the one response which always continues and maintains it.52 Consequently, the issue is how to develop concepts that function both as a question and as a response, that determine a problem not in order to make it disappear but in order to productively transform it through the enabling constraints that they impose. The relation between questions, problems and concepts is also known as the question–problem complex.53 Not surprisingly, different metaphysics involve different approaches to this issue. In a transcendental approach, the questions that suffice to determine a problem are questions on the essence of a problem: what it is. On the contrary, in an immanent approach, it is minor questions that determine the nature of a problem: who, which, where, when, how, for whom and with what purpose. The first approach, the one that deploys a series of ‘what is’ questions, seeks to define the essence of something. However, it poses the problem of essence in a totalizing way. By forming an essentialist question we will almost certainly form a generalizing concept, one that will attempt to prioritize only one singular point of the problematic field. Hence, instead of exploring the mutations of a problem and the concepts that emerge from it, we settle on only one of its aspects; even more, we must necessarily conclude that this one

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  15

aspect, this one singular point, is capable of explaining, once and for all, the problem itself. However, if we are to respect the continuous transformations of a problem, the way it shifts with each and every one of our responses, then we should approach it in a manner that remains plastic enough, mutable enough, so as to follow the transformations of the problematic field and the continuous emergence of novel problems. In this sense, as Proust suggests, we should not approach it as friends but as jealous lovers.54 Proust claims that jealousy is not a disease of love but, on the contrary, its truth, its finality: all that love consists of is a dispute over evidence.55 As lovers of a problem we should constantly attempt to extract the evidence, the events that push us in its pursuit. A problem needs to be interrogated, confronted with all the minor empirical questions that will not reveal one singular defining point, but a population of them, capable of determining it not once and for all, but now and again and once more, as long as our relationship with it lasts. This is, finally, the aim of this book: to develop a series of minor questions that correspond to a population of concepts, attempting to respond to the question of how this architecture is possible. Dispersed in this introductory chapter, as elements of a how-to guide, one can find all the concepts that simultaneously pose and respond to this question. They are all here, in a larval state, as constraints and relays that prefigure thought, catalyse it; they are all waiting to encounter new problems, new questions that will transform them, singular points that will produce new information, informing architectural thought itself. From the entasis of Doric columns, to Ulysses and desert islands; from an architectural mind that is not one but many, always extended, always in becoming, to a ferryman who stutters his way through the Acheron; from a stilus that is eventually a style to speculative extrapolations that manipulate the environment where we individuate; from bells and whistles that are both expressive and possessive at once to a membrane that can only be intuited; and finally, from a melody that sings itself to a larval architecture that no longer considers space and time apart. Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’, interview by Arnaud Villani, in Collapse III, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), 42. 2 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. II, trans. David Farrrell Krell (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991), 204. 3 Arnaud Villani, ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’, in Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics, ed. Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian, and Julia Sushytska (London: Lexington Books, 2014), vii. 4 Villani, ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’, vii. 5 Ibid., viii. 6 Ibid., ix. 7 Erich Hörl, ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology after Jean-Luc Nancy (By Way of Gilbert Simondon)’, trans. Arne De Boever, Parrhesia 17 (2013): 11.

16  What Is Architecture’s Problem? 8 Hörl, ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense’, 11. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 14. 12 Ibid., 15. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007), 65. 15 Erich Hörl, ‘The Technological Condition’, trans. Anthony Enns, Parrhesia 22 (2015): 3. 16 Hörl, ‘The Technological Condition’, 5. 17 Ibid. 18 Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 30. 19 Simondon, Individuation, 35–36. 20 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998), 1. 21 Craig Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation and the Pursuit of Metaphysical Precision’, Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 32. 22 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 1. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 7. 26 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 34. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 19–20. 31 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 35. 32 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 23. 33 Ibid., 36–37. [Emphasis in original]. 34 Andrej Radman, ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’, in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 68. 35 Radman, ‘Involutionary Architecture’, 68. 36 Ibid. 37 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 2. 38 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 241. 39 David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: University Press, 2014), 31. 40 Ibid., 31. 41 Lundy, ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation’, 36. 42 Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York: Zone, 1988), 17. 43 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 22. 44 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 150. 45 Ibid. 46 Deleuze, Desert Islands, 24. 47 Brian McCormack, ‘The Problem with Problem-Solving’, Issues in Integrative Studies 27 (2009): 28. 48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996),33.

W hat Is Architecture’s Problem?  17 49 Sean Bowden, ‘An Anti-Positivist Conception of Problems’, Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 56. 50 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 165. 51 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5. 52 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 195. 53 Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 19. 54 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 132, 138. 55 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 132.

Bibliography Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Mabelle L. Andison. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 1998. Bowden, Sean. ‘An Anti-Positivist Conception of Problems’. Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 45–63. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. ‘Responses to a Series of Questions’. Interview by Arnaud Villani. In Collapse III. Edited by Robin Mackay, 39–43. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs: The Complete Text. Translated by Richard Howard. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Nietzsche vol. II. Translated by David Farrrell Krell. San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1991. Hörl, Erich. ‘The Artificial Intelligence of Sense: The History of Sense and Technology after Jean-Luc Nancy (by Way of Gilbert Simondon)’. Translated by Arne De Boever. Parrhesia 17 (2013): 11–24. Hörl, Erich. ‘The Technological Condition’. Translated by Anthony Enns. Parrhesia 22 (2015): 1–15. Lundy, Craig. ‘Bergson’s Method of Problematisation and the Pursuit of Metaphysical Precision’. Angelaki Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 23, no. 2 (2018): 31–44. McCormack, Brian. ‘The Problem with Problem-Solving’. Issues in Integrative Studies 27 (2009): 17–34. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Translated by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007. Radman, Andrej. ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’. In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, 61–86. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014.

18  What Is Architecture’s Problem? Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Villani, Arnaud. ‘The Problem of Immanent Metaphysics’. In Gilles Deleuze and Metaphysics. Edited by Alain Beaulieu, Edward Kazarian and Julia Sushytska, vii–x. London: Lexington Books, 2014.

1

An Architect Who Stutters

During the twentieth century, art and philosophy posed a similar problem: to renounce the domain of representation and instead take the conditions of representation as their object. Regardless of the responses proposed in these fields, it is the formulation of the problem that matters. What does it take to embark on the quest of exploring the conditions of representation, a quest that many have called the Odyssey of philosophy?1 Much of the production of twentieth-century art aimed not at the reproduction of visible forms but rather at highlighting the non-visible forces that act in parallel to these forms. The intensity of presentation took precedence over the discreteness of representation. If, however, blocks of sensation were produced and extracted in the artistic field, what could one claim for architecture? Moreover, if architectural representation is taken for granted, both in architectural production and in its pedagogies, what is it that grounds this certainty? 1.1 Ulysses’s Ship While the origins of the word ‘architect’ are undoubtedly Greek, relatively little attention has been given to the intricate connections between the constant shifts in the word’s usage in civil and naval architecture. Ancient Greek urban societies developed both the resources and the need not only for ambitious public buildings but also for large, complex ships. Temples and naval fleets are testimonies to this. The root τcκτων (tékton) is first used – at least in written form – in Homer’s Odyssey to describe the lack of skilled shipbuilders on the island of the Cyclopes, stating that ου̉δ’ ἄνδρες νηῶν ἐνὶ τέκτονες οἵ κε κάμοιεν νήας ευ̉σσέλμους, αἴ κεν τελέοιεν ἕκαστα. (there are no shipbuilders who can finish well covered ships which can reach any destination.)2 Τέκτων stands in ancient Greek for the craftsman – carpenter, shipbuilder and so on – in hard materials – wood, stone, metal – as well as for the originator, the producer, the master or artist. Homer’s reference to τέκτονες as DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-2

20  An Architect Who Stutters

shipbuilders does not predate much the appearance of the derived word αρχιτέκτων (arhitékton), a term by then used for both civil and naval architects.3 The two professions were regarded as closely related in terms of social status, public responsibility and professional function. Despite apparent differences in the required knowledge, skills and experience, the two fields shared many similarities. These similarities extend also to the field of theoretical endeavours developed by figures prominent in architectural theory. Both Vitruvius and Alberti refer, albeit in different ways and for different purposes, to the proximity between civil and naval architecture. One cannot but note here Alberti’s now lost text Navis, which was widely read and discussed at the end of the fifteenth century.4 Despite the loss of Alberti’s treatise on naval architecture, we can get a sense of his approach towards shipbuilding from Chapter XII of De Re Aedificatoria. The relationship between De Re Aedificatoria and De Re Navalis is best highlighted via the application of principles developed in the former so as to distinguish between proper shipbuilding and what was called fabrilis peritia, the empirical shipbuilding practice.5 The rationalization of construction through the use of formal proportional principles and through the elimination of construction faults by the study of past and contemporary techniques, as well as the thorough knowledge of physics and contemporary scientific developments were pivotal for Alberti’s references to naval architecture.6 It is this latter aspect that binds Alberti and Vitruvius, namely the rationalization of every building process, aiming at the optimization of its functional performance. Nevertheless, Vitruvius’s and Alberti’s references to naval architecture also intersect in a minor way. It is this marginal point that will interest us here. Vitruvius, Alberti, civil and naval architecture intersect on the issue of entasis, a typical characteristic of columns in Doric temples. Entasis is the slight convexity in the body of a column, originating from the Greek word εντείνειν, which means to stretch, to apply tension, to bow. According to historian Francis Penrose, it is the swelling given to a column in the middle parts of the shaft for the purpose of correcting a disagreeable optical illusion, which is found to give an attenuated appearance to columns formed with straight sides, and to cause their outlines to seem concave instead of straight.7 In this regard, architect Patrick Nuttgens comments that ‘most Greek buildings of the Golden Period use entasis, the device whereby tapering columns are given a slight swelling about a third of the way up to counteract a tendency of the eye to see them as curving inwards from their side.’8 1.1.1 A Column, a Wave, a Paper and a Brain

Entasis was probably first used in the Later Temple of Aphaia in Aigina, around 490 BCE and is most often found in Doric Temples built in mainland Greece,

An Architect Who Stutters  21

southern Italy, as well as, later on, in Renaissance buildings.9 The Doric order is arguably the oldest, simplest and preferred style in temple construction in the Mediterranean throughout classical antiquity.10 Many scholars, including Vitruvius, argue that the Doric order obtained its proportion, strength and beauty from its analogy with the human figure. According to Vitruvius, a Doric column’s diameter–height ratio should be based on the relationship between foot length and height in a man’s figure.11 Entasis not only creates an aesthetic weight that makes the appearance of the construction look plastic and animated, it also supports the bearing load ‘not as a lifeless, isolated element but comparable to a muscle in action.’12 In Vitruvius’s words, These proportionate enlargements are made in the thickness of columns on account of the different heights to which the eye has to climb. For the eye is always in search of beauty, and if we do not gratify its desire for pleasure by a proportionate enlargement in these measures, and thus make compensation for ocular deception, a clumsy and awkward appearance will be presented in the beholder. With regard to the enlargement made at the middle of columns, which among the Greeks is called entasis, at the end of the book a figure and a calculation will be subjoined, showing how an agreeable and appropriate effect may be produced by it.13 The figure and calculation Vitruvius mentions are lost and therefore there is not an accurate description of his approach regarding the design of entasis. Alberti, however, deals with this issue. In De Re Aedificatoria, he outlines the Vitruvian approach in ambiguous yet intriguing terms: ambiguous due to the lack of illustrations, intriguing due to the reference of a design method which implies the presence of something broader than a mere issue of appropriate calculation, representation and building technique. Alberti informs us of the use of what he calls a tabula gracilis: tracing the curvature with a thin and flexible wooden board, providing in this way the template for the stonecutters on site.14 What is astonishing is that this precise reference to the use of a thin, flexible wooden board is borrowed directly from the practices of ancient naval architecture and its construction techniques of forming the curvatures of a ship’s hull.15 The use of wooden boards provided the outline for curving the hull of the ship’s main structure, both for larger constructions that took place in the state shipyards and for smaller ones done by groups of both builders and fishermen alike. In many ways, it is a building process that is still present, not so much in the sites where the massive contemporary naval structures are built, but in the small-scaled docks of provincial seashores. Traditionally, the use of entasis in Doric temples is connected by many archaeologists and architectural historians either with the resolution of an optical illusion regarding the vertical development of the columns or with supposed aesthetic refinements. However, it is worth mentioning that both of the traditional explanations recently have been discarded in favour of a third approach, the so-called engineering hypothesis.16 According to this

22  An Architect Who Stutters

hypothesis, the load-bearing strength of the column is at its peak when tapered along its length, being thickest in the middle and thinnest at both ends, with the optimal shape for a column being the one that uses entasis.17 In addition, it has been shown that such a column would be lighter for the same compressive force, resulting in the optimization of material use.18 It is at this point that one can move from the technical understanding of entasis to its other meaning in Greek. Entasis stands not only for stretching but also for intensity. Doric columns and wooden hulls not only share a common method of construction, they also share a common problem. The ways of dealing with intensive forces highlight that before any outlining of arcs and hyperboles on the ground of Athens or on the sand of Delos, there operates an assemblage of intensities. These intensities range from the brute force of the waves to the bending of the heated wood, the curvature of hulls and columns to the sliding on water and marble. If the architectural mind is to be understood not as a fixed term, as a relatum, but as a relation, then how can one approach the conventions regarding the primacy of representation when it comes to its cognitive abilities? If the forces we have seen operating on the development of entasis in columns precede their representation or annotation, then why is primacy given to the architect’s ability to represent and project? Most importantly, how can one shift from a commanding subject towards a fully material assemblage of formal co-production? To begin approaching these questions, I will refer to cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind Andy Clark’s hypothesis of the extended mind. The extended mind hypothesis challenges the convention that the mind is primarily representational and has to be conceived as a set of functions that take place solely in the brain.19 It also challenges one of the main premises of representational theory, namely that cognition consists of the manipulation of symbols in thoughts that take place in the human brain.20 Clark situates human beings in physical environments where they biologically exist in constant, real-time interaction with those environments. The necessity to situate human beings within a fully material interactive environment stems from his effort to prove that representational models of mind are insufficient when it comes to real-time responses to the exigencies of the environment.21 If one assumes that the mind is indeed representational, then one cannot but face the inability of almost any form of action in any given environment, let alone the one assuming that any decision should be made instantly. Imagine a representational mind that wishes to cognize ways of avoiding an approaching object in motion while driving a car. It would first have to come up with all different kinds of representational schemata only to classify the approaching object. Considering that all this happens in real time, and both the mind and the object are on a collision trajectory, the challenge increases. The mind not only has to symbolically process the object from many different perspectives, but it must also do so in a fraction of time. In addition, all the different perspectives somehow need to be unified by the mind and only then can

An Architect Who Stutters  23

the given object be ‘categorized’ as such. Eventually, and after the successful identification of the moving object, a new series of representational manipulations would have to take place, this time to avoid the object. These empirical observations, alongside experimental failures of representational cognition models when tested in artificial intelligence, lead Clark to reject the understanding of the mind as a centralized agency that mainly processes and manipulates representations. Instead, Clark adopts a ‘distributed conception of the mind where a number of non-conscious operations respond to events in the environment without constantly manipulating representations.’22 Despite recognizing that there are instances in which the mind manipulates symbolic representations, Clark claims that such instances are the exception and not the rule.23 Furthermore, Clark proposes that brains alone are far from sufficient in responding to the immediate changes and events occurring in their environment. He disentangles the mind from the brain, claiming that the mind is a relation between brain, body and the physical world.24 The mind – and I would add the architectural mind – is not to be placed inside the head, but on the contrary is a pure exteriority. It offloads cognitive problems onto the world so that the world will do part of the work for it, allowing it not only to respond in a timely manner but also to attend to other problems, sometimes of higher degree. It is in this relational and technological sense that the mind is always extended. To emphasize his point, Clark makes use of a common example derived from mathematics. Based on the fact that we are faced by similar issues when given the option of solving complex mathematical problems purely with representationalist and internalist means – that is, relying solely on the capacities of our brains – Clark concludes that the process of problem solving in such manner significantly increases both the chances of error, and the energy and time consumed.25 Human short-term memory is often an unsurpassable obstacle. Clark argues instead that humans tackle these limitations by offloading information about the problem onto their surrounding world, thus allowing for the work to be done on their behalf. In solving an equation, alongside the brain, both the pencil and the paper are contributing to the process. By storing information written on a piece of paper, the brain focuses on two numbers alone and not on the entire set. This way, both accuracy and time efficiency increase.26 In addition to the pencil, the paper and the brain, one has to also add the symbols used. The same process would be nearly impossible with Roman numerals instead of Arabic. The mind, as a cognitive agent, is never confined to the brain. The mind is a relational assemblage. Clark’s thesis is anti-representational, not because he denies the use of symbols and representations as part of certain cognitive activities, but because he claims that such use is limited to a small part of a broader process. This purely representationalist type of cognition that takes place within the brain constitutes a certain type of mind which nevertheless is different from the mind that performs cognitive processes as part of an extended assemblage – the brain, the paper, the pencil and Arabic numerals. For Clark, these are two

24  An Architect Who Stutters

different types of minds.27 The mind that faces the sheer intensity of forces as an assemblage constituted by waves, marble, wooden ships, boards and Doric columns is radically different from a mind of rulers, protractors and an architectural subject in command. They present to us a distinction within epistemological practices themselves: minor and royal sciences, the problematic and the axiomatic. 1.1.2 Extended Architectural Minds, Minor and Major

It is these minor practices that Homer describes in the following, rather extensive, quote from the Odyssey, where we find ourselves in the company of Calypso stranded on the island of Ogygia. She gave him a heavy bronze axe that fit his grip, both blades well-honed, with a fine olive haft lashed firm to its head. She gave him a polished smoothing-adze as well and then she led the way to the island’s outer edge where the trees grew tall, alders, black poplars and firs that shot sky-high, seasoned, drying for years, ideal for easy floating. Once she had shown her guest where the tall timber stood, Calypso the lustrous goddess headed home again. He set to cutting trunks – the work was done in no time. Twenty in all he felled, he trimmed them clean with his axe and split them deftly, trued them straight to the line. Meanwhile, the radiant goddess brought him drills – he bored through all his planks and wedged them snugly, knocking them home together, locked with pegs and bolts. Broad in the beam and bottom flat as a merchantman when a master shipwright turns out her hull, so broad the craft Odysseus made himself. Working away at speed he put up half-decks pinned to close-set ribs and a sweep of gunwales rounded off the sides. He fashioned the mast and sank its yard in deep and added a steering-oar to hold her right on course, then he fenced her stem to stern with twigs and wicker, bulwark against the sea-surge, floored with heaps of brush. And lustrous Calypso came again, now with bolts of cloth to make the sail, and he finished that off too, expertly. Braces, sheets and brails – he rigged all fast on board, then eased her down with levers into the sunlit sea.28 Ulysses’s ship, ready to embark into the sunset, is constructed by a mind that involves a castaway, a nymph, the trees of Ogygia, drills, cloth and an axe. It is an architectural mind employed in the actualization of a relational assemblage, one that does not deal with the projection of a set of rules, but rather with the mapping of the singular. The intensity of the sea, embodied in the fragility of Ulysses the castaway, in his ambivalence over leaving the island refuge and in the excitement of the return, streams in the formation of its own counterpart; the striated ship in the smooth space of the sea. Deleuze, referring to Virilio, notes that ‘it is at sea that the problem of the “fleet in being” is posed’, the task of occupying an open space with a vertical movement that can rise

An Architect Who Stutters  25

up at any point. Similar to different architectural minds that are simultaneously in action, we find different rhythms as well: a cadenced and measured rhythm, the rhythm of a striated space, and the rhythm of the flow, of a smooth space.30 Has the task of architecture always been to produce striated spaces through the manipulation of its corresponding rhythms? That would explain the dominance of representational means – and their minds – in our discipline. Or is it that architecture navigates in the flux of smooth spaces? As it will be clear, neither of the two options will suffice (to save us). There is the need to dramatize a marginal line where rhythms penetrate each other; it is a special kind of stuttering that is the locus of architecture. For Deleuze, minor or nomad sciences are distinguished from royal sciences according to four characteristics. Nomad sciences do not draw on the theory of solids in which fluids are a special case, but the other way around. Their diagram is not a stable one, but rather one of becoming and heterogeneity. They deal with smooth – vectorial, projective or topological – spaces rather than with striated – metric – ones. While in the latter ‘space is counted in order to be occupied’, in the former ‘space is occupied without being counted.’31 Ultimately, minor sciences develop problematic models instead of axiomatic ones.32 Therefore, we encounter on the one hand the science of the royal societies and academies, at the service of the state, focusing on the production of abstract universalizing laws, while on the other we encounter minor practices of scientific research that not only test the validity of those laws, but also develop the necessary apparatuses to do so.33 Nevertheless, placing the two sciences in strict opposition would simplify and distort the particularities of many given individual cases. That is because royal and minor modes of entangling with materiality bear a long history. Metallurgy, for instance, is an exemplary ‘minor science’; hence, it is no surprise that a metallurgist provides us with one of the most thorough accounts of this history. Cyril Stanley Smith, also a historian of materials, focuses on the development of the philosophy of matter in the West, concluding that for its greatest part, studying the complexity and variability of material behaviour was the concern of empirically oriented craftsmen or engineers.34 He also argues that the inherited condescending attitude, which lingers to this day, may be traced back to the ancient Greeks, who despite admiring the products of the craftsmen, despised their material activities and unwillingness to engage in the public realm of the Agora.35 In his words, 29

Throughout ancient society the most menial tasks, especially those of mining and metallurgy, were left to slaves. Hence the common social attitude of antiquity, persisting to this day in some intellectual circles, was to look down upon those who work with their hands. Xenophon stated the case in this fashion, ‘What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities. For these arts damage the bodies of those who work at them by compelling them to a sedentary life and to an indoor life, and, in some cases, to spend the whole day by

26  An Architect Who Stutters

the fire. This physical degeneration results also in deterioration of the soul. Furthermore, the workers at these trades simply do not have the time to perform the offices of friendship or citizenship. Consequently, they are looked upon as bad friends and bad patriots, and in some cities, especially the warlike ones, it is not legal for a citizen to ply a mechanical trade.36 In contrast to the craftsmen, the leading architects – both civil and naval – were perceived with a high public prestige. According to the Athenian constitution, prior to their responsibility of carrying out state projects, both had to be elected by the Boule.37 As a matter of fact, it is in the Athenian constitution that the earliest literary reference to the architect’s profession – assigned and controlled by the state – is found.38 Public building projects and war fleets were opposed to private constructions, destined either for groups of craftsmen or shipbuilders. While these groups were occupied with what one might refer to as vernacular architecture, it was the state-assigned architects who were publicly acknowledged, advancing the use of drawings and calculations. In addition, it is possible that both the processes and the tools used in each type of construction were also different: different architectural minds, developing different construction techniques also dealt with different rhythms and different spaces – the flow and the cadenced, the smooth and the striated. It is for this reason that in the building practices of ancient Greece one can trace the origins of what may be retroactively named as minor and major architectures.39 While both deal with the production of space, the two architectural minds operate differently. The problematic pole of architecture may be associated with its minor practices, while the axiomatic pole relates to its major practices. The tension between the two, an architecture employed by the state and dealing with the extensities of striated spaces and an architecture occupied with the intensities of smooth spaces, marks a line in which architectural discourse, both in its theory and its practices, can be located. However, as we have seen in the case of entasis, the one does not exclude the other but rather both are reciprocally determined in this borderline ‘walk’; or rather, this walk could be conceptualized as a tension that leads to an eloquent dance that forms a plane; an entanglement, a material discursive practice that formulates both its consistency and references. In Deleuze’s words, the fact is that the two kinds of science have different modes of formalization … What we have are two formally different conceptions of science, and ontologically, a single field of interaction in which royal science continually appropriates the contents of vague or nomad science, while nomad science continually cuts the contents of royal science loose.40 Minor architecture develops its practices in mapping the sensual materiality of phenomena, following rather than repeating, while major architecture invents an ideal field of intangible phenomena. Out of this ideal field, and

An Architect Who Stutters  27

purely deductively, universal spatial relations and arrangements are extracted, regardless of their materiality. It is these relations that are eventually arranged hierarchically through architectural representation, pertaining to a set of rules in the form of self-evident statements. These statements, based on their selfevidence – an example of which is the Vitruvian triad – form the axiomatics of the discipline, complemented by a wider population of theorems. In this sense, Alberti’s lineamenta is a theorem enriching the axioms posed by Vitruvius through a deductive method. Nonetheless, since deductive logic is not ampliative, that is, it is unable to add any truth that the axioms and theorems do not already tautologically presuppose, the entire structure of major architectures is not only trapped in its self-evidence, but, more importantly, is detached to an almost absolute degree from the spatial phenomena it wishes to examine and produce. Major architecture, following a clearly Platonic fashion, defines the figures of the discourse – space, its forms and functions – in an essentially static way. Spatial production and analysis focus on the properties of space, which in turn relate to each other intrinsically, their relations being manipulated by the adequate manipulations of the related terms through their representations. Contrarily, in its minor practices, architecture defines figures dynamically. It is no longer spatial properties that receive attention, but the capacity of space – as a relational assemblage – to affect and be affected. As Husserl points out, a theorematic understanding of a circle would conceive it as a static fixed essence, whereas its morphological variations – lens-shaped, umbelliform, indented – drive towards the formulation of problematic figures. Problematic spatial figures are ‘anexact yet rigorous,’ or ‘essentially and not accidentally inexact.’41 It is through major architectural practices that the hylomorphic schema is deployed. Hylomorphism implies both a form that organizes matter and matter which is already at hand, prone to formal domination. From the point of view of minor architectures, while still remaining within a labour-divided ecology of practices, the technical aspects coincide more often than not with the artistic ones, no longer fixed on a duality between matter and form, but a rigorous and dynamic relationship between material and forces. Regarding the intensity and the materiality of the forces and their sedimentation, the point of interest is not that of extracting constants from variables but of placing the variables themselves in a plane of constant variation.42 Minor practices map the singular, the realm of the event in its haecceity, rather than in the static form of a predefined, represented (projected and annotated) object. If representation is about reproduction, then minor architectures are about diagramming. While representational reproduction always involves a static point of view, external to the very object it wishes to reproduce – the subject with the stick that draws on the sand, the hand that clicks the mouse – mapping the singular implies becoming (one with the) molecular. Contrary to the major practices of formation, minor architectures deal with deformation. As philosopher Brian Massumi puts it,

28  An Architect Who Stutters

the variation [of] seamlessly interlinking forms takes precedence over their separation. Forms figure less as self-enclosures than as open codependencies of a shared deformational field. The continuity of that field of variation is inseparable from the forms populating it. Yet it exceeds any one of them, running across them all. When the focus shifts to continuity of variation, still-standing form appears as residue of a process of change, from which it stands out in its stoppage.43 While architecture – as formation – considers form as both the raw material and the end product, its origin and telos, architecture understood as deformation shifts focus to the design process itself; no longer a means of arranging order and ordering arrangements, but rather the practice of ‘intuiting’ topological transformations.44 The static figures of Euclidean geometry – a circle, a square, a triangle – when seen topologically are conceived as one homeomorphic figure, given that they can continuously transform into each other. Therefore, the limits of representations of the striated space are surpassed, not towards mere abstraction, but towards a trans-spatial imagination, or, in better terms, towards the continuity of trans-intuition.45 Essentially, major architectures isolate ‘all operations from the conditions of intuition, making them true intrinsic concepts, or categories.’46 Practising architecture as a dynamic activity involves diagramming spatial, material singularities through intuition; sensing the potentialities of material–force relations and grasping their eventifying haecceities. Intuition, as Massumi claims, is not a dreamlike state nor an imposition of form and order on matter. It is a pragmatic interplay of activities on a level.47 If, despite their conceptual value, we leave the all-too-rigid distinction of minor and major architecture aside, we face an ecology of material discursive practices. Assigning specific characteristics based on a binary opposition would not only simplify and universalize their situated attributes, but it would also shift attention from their field of interaction – which, ontologically, is the only one there is. A more nuanced view of that field should conceive it as dynamic assemblage itself, continuously undergoing becomings. In this way, we understand architectural practices as going through episodes of becomingminor and becoming-major.48 In the field where the two architectural minds interact, minor architectures confine themselves to inventing problems whose solution is tied to a whole set of collective, non-scientific activities but whose scientific solution depends, on the contrary, on royal science and the way it has transformed the problem by introducing it into its theorematic apparatus and its organization of work.49 Architecture operates in this field, in the form of a spatiotemporal stuttering. If Ulysses’s ship and Doric entasis meet each other it is because they both share something which cannot be traced in their formal outlines. To grasp

An Architect Who Stutters  29

this, we need to go off-board, rest our feet on the sand of desert islands full of intransitive powers. It is only afterwards that we will meet Ulysses and his ship again, as well as extended architectural minds that become major and minor, carried to Hades by a ferryman who stutters: larval space arises. 1.2 Desert Islands, Intransitive Forces In the terms of the architect Robin Evans, ‘geometry is one subject, architecture another, but there is geometry in architecture. Its presence is assumed as much as the presence of mathematics is assumed in physics, or letters in words.’50 Or more directly, ‘architects do not produce geometry, they consume it.’51 If geometry was given such importance within the epistemes of architectural theory and practice, it was due to its ability to rationalize architectural intuition; geometry is logotherapy for spatial stuttering. It endows architectural intuition with reason, ‘a foundation in that geometry offers certainty in situations beset with doubt.’52 Architectural representation and its geometries are there to reassure the architect for every paralysing instance where the absolute futurity of architecture manifests itself. 1.2.1 The Antecedence Criterion

The futurity of the architectural project is radically different than an account which attempts to examine architectural representation on the grounds of any form of absence. Architecture, and the representational extended minds that it deploys, does not attempt to represent an object which is not present, as architectural theorist Stan Allen claims.53 Rather, architecture is acting counter to the past, and therefore on the present, for the benefit, let us hope, of a future – but the future is not a historical future, not even a utopian history, it is the infinite Now, the Nun that Plato already distinguished from every present: the Intensive or Untimely, not an instant but a becoming.54 To conceptualize architectural representation in terms of an object absent in the present fails on two accounts. First, it assumes that architecture deals with an object – to be represented, projected, built – and not with catalysing the emergence of diverse ecologies and relational assemblages in which modes of subjectification unfold. Second, it presupposes that architecture deals with the present and not with the actual. The crucial difference between the present and the actual is that between being and becoming. The present is always what we are and, in this sense, it is always what we are already ceasing to be.55 On the other hand, the actual does not divide time into chunks of past, present and future, but deals with a process of becoming. As Deleuze and Guattari write,

30  An Architect Who Stutters

we must distinguish not only the share that belongs to the past and the one that belongs to the present, but, more profoundly, the share that belongs to the present and that belonging to the actual. It is not that the actual is the utopian prefiguration of a future that is still part of our history. Rather, it is the now of our becoming.56 The architectural minds are privileged and obliged with the diagnosis of the actual in every single present that passes by. An architect is close to what Nietzsche had in mind when he assigned to the philosopher the role of a physician, more precisely, a ‘physician of civilization.’57 An architect is a physician of subjectification, producing modes where conatus – the potentials for life – can thrive. If architecture and its representational practices do not deal with an object in the present, struggling to capture its absence and represent it, but rather with catalysing a future – and a people to come – then the architectural mind has to tap into the antecedence of intransitive intensities in order to operate. The concept of antecedence was developed by philosopher Ian Hamilton Grant in order to conceptualize a nature which is never exhausted in its appearances.58 Grant, continuing a discussion with a long philosophical trajectory, asks whether there is a relation of anteriority between substance and potency in the nature of matter.59 Grant identifies two conceptions of actuality within contemporary discourse: what he calls the depth model, which is made of either objects all the way down or of a single ground from which everything emerges, and a genetic model in which depth is regional with respect to anteriority.60 At the heart of Grant’s philosophical model lies a problem of causality. Stemming from Giordano Bruno’s metaphysics, Grant wishes to resolve the bipolarity of substance and potency in matter. Bruno developed a radical metaphysical system, advancing a univocal being well before many other attempts, in which a single substance brings everything together, while potency as power holds being together. His conclusion, responsible for his inevitable death by burning, states that both substance and potency ought to be integrally maintained to form the one (finite) yet self-differentiating (infinite) object (space, time and their experience). Grant underlines that the real challenge would be to speak of grounding without universalizing, that is, to remain within a condition plastic enough that it transforms alongside the conditioned. As philosopher François Zourabichvili says, thinking happens only in the middle, the question being not one of discovering a ground, but rather of expressing a ‘universal ungrounding.’61 In his words, ‘if thinking necessarily fails to grasp its beginning, perhaps it is because the beginning does not depend upon thought.’62 That is what Grant has in mind when he develops the concept of antecedence: the act of thinking has the potential of de-subjectifying the thinking subject precisely because necessity fails to comply with the demands of a given and fully constituted subject, pointing constantly towards a state of thought that is outside of itself.

An Architect Who Stutters  31

Antecedence makes material grounds non-recoverable by reason, while at the same moment it is required for the very existence of thought. If the criterion of antecedence is eliminated, then thought – and the conditions for representation that it entails – must be considered as something different in kind to material being, retreating to a universal ground which would analogically seek all kinds of hegemonies to cover for its insufficiency to account for itself. If, however, that is not the case, if thought and representation are fully material and immanent, then ‘the causes of thinking are the same as those of that object antecedent to thinking which thinking thinks.’63 The virtual ‘object’ of architectural representation and the actual ‘subject’ that represents it do not operate on the ground of the absence of the one or the other, but rather on the ungrounding of the absolute presence of their immanent antecedence. Here, Grant’s example helps to clarify the concept of antecedence. Grant invites us to think of a mountain. Thinking of a mountain entails (a) that there is already a mountain to be thought, whatever its nature; and (b) that the causes of the existence of the mountain must also be involved in the thinking of the mountain. When thinking attempts to recover the causes of its thinking of the mountain, it reaches two non-finite series that vitiate this project: firstly, the thinking about the mountain is always antecedent to any thinking about the thinking of the mountain, so that the object-thinking is always the product of an actual thinking with which the causal sequence keeps pace in fact, but cannot be recovered in thought in principle. Secondly, in retrospecting the causes of mountain formation, let alone the formation of thought thereupon, or of geology, the track taken by those causes invariably fails to reduce specifically to the object from which the thinking started: the causes of mountain formation are also, that is, involved in speciation, meteorological metastasis, and so on. Accordingly, being is antecedent to thinking precisely because if it were not, not only there would be nothing to think, but neither could there be any thinking.64 What Grant claims is that the conditions on which the existence of a mountain depends, including it being thought of and represented, are not ‘its’ conditions but rather the conditions that potentialize it.65 Since these conditions exceed – or, in other terms, are antecedent to – the mountain, they can also be found in other objects, making them independent and intransitive of any given object. As he puts it, the causes of mountain formation are at once causes also of geogony, ideation, animals, fever-dreams and of telecommunication.66 If this were not the case, then each object would necessarily formulate its own, fully constituted and autonomous universe, posing once again the problems that Kant managed to resolve when postulating the causal insufficiency of the illusion of the world. That is why Deleuze and Guattari invite us to think of a ‘geophilosophy’ in which ‘subject and object give a poor approximation of thought. Thinking is neither a line drawn between subject

32  An Architect Who Stutters

and object nor a revolving of one around the other. Rather, thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth.’67 Geology is the greatest enemy of anything that boasts about its supposed autonomy and self-constitution, since it is able to present ‘an anteriority even to the becoming of the planetary object.’68 1.2.2 To Begin Anew

The lesson that oceanic islands give to thought lies in the opening of a place where the world constantly begins anew.69 It is on the solitary islands, the ones lost in the ocean, where Ulysses’s ship begins from and ends up, where the smooth and the striated no longer struggle with each other. Contrary to the continental islands that accidentally got separated from the mainland, an oceanic island is an island where the earth is simultaneously present and actual: the earth – smooth and striated – as what becomes and what ceases to be. An island is at once a mountain and vice versa, since ‘the island is a mountain under water, and the mountain, an island that is still dry.’70 In Desert Islands, a short but extremely rich text, Deleuze makes a rather bold and strange claim: islands are either from before or for after humankind.71 Inhabiting an island necessarily entails forgetting what an island is. Islands, pure territorial becomings, ambivalent formations that surpass both depth and width at once, do not only escape representation due to the manifestation of an absolute antecedence, they also express the forces that constitute them by expressing their own absolute movement. On them, the subject and the object collapse, the representing and the represented become one, since both would have to ‘reduce themselves to the movement that brings them to the island, the movement which prolongs and takes up the elan that produced the island. Then geography and the imagination would be one.’72 Any island is in fact a desert island. In its desertedness it can express the antecedent, dynamic image of its conscious movement. Desert islands are the places and moments where space is larval again, where the break between the smooth and the striated has not yet occurred and waits for eruption every single second. They are the where and the when of the antecedence that makes thought think of itself, where the niche for representation of an exhausting presence rather than that of absence emerges. On a desert island one does not ask: Why is there something instead of nothing? but instead Why this rather than that? When reason meets intuition about the island’s movement, every attempt to represent becomes a presentation, and not a representation. As Deleuze writes, ‘it is not creation but re-creation, not the beginning but a re-beginning that takes place. The deserted island is the origin, but a second origin. From it everything begins anew.’73 The second beginning happens because of the island’s peculiar movement; it moves in all directions and yet it remains intransitive. If on Ulysses’s ship we witnessed the smooth and the striated, on the desert island we witness the intransitive and the transitive.

An Architect Who Stutters  33

In his book A Realist Theory of Science philosopher Roy Bhaskar deals with the significance of intransitive forces. When he asks, What must the world be like for science to be possible? he is essentially asking what one ought to presuppose of the world so that any form of scientific practice – and, consequently, representation – becomes possible.74 As he underlines, any adequate philosophy of science must find a way of grappling with this central paradox of science: that men in their social activity produce knowledge which is a social product much like any other, which is no more independent of its production and the men who produce it than motor cars, armchairs or books, which has its own craftsmen, technicians, publicists, standards and skill and which is no less subject to change than any other commodity. This is one side of ‘knowledge’. The other is that knowledge is of things which are not produced by men at all: the specific gravity of mercury, the process of electrolysis, the mechanism of light propagation. None of these ‘objects of knowledge’ depend on human activity. If men ceased to exist sound would continue to travel and heavy bodies fall to the earth in exactly the same way, though ex hypothesi there would be no one to know it.75 For Bhaskar, these two distinct dimensions of knowledge are the transitive and the intransitive respectively. In simplified terms, the transitive refers to the realm of the social in the production of knowledge while the intransitive refers to the ‘domain of being which would exist regardless of whether or not humans know of it.’76 Hence, Bhaskar’s inquiry into what the world must be like for science to be possible seems fitting. According to Bhaskar, the condition that makes science and representation possible is the existence of intransitive objects. Following Bhaskar, intransitive objects are real structures that exist independently of our minds and are often ‘out of phase’ with actual patterns of events.77 They are invariant to our knowledge of them – real things and structures, mechanisms and processes, events, possibilities and forces of the world that are independent of us and of our perception of them.78 They are understood as intransitive forces precisely because they are assemblages of absolute force, desert islands moving in all directions without moving at all. Upon their persistence the world begins anew. As will soon be clear, what is important in understanding why intransitive forces are what make architectural representation possible is their capacity to be ‘out of phase’ with actual patterns of events and with the very nature of scientific experimentation.79 In Bhaskar’s words, while experimenting ‘we are a causal agent of the sequence of events, but not of the causal law which the sequence of events … enables us to identify.’80 This is in stark contrast with a traditional account of science. Ever since Hume, most traditional philosophies of science – and especially empiricist ones – identify a causal law as a simple, constant conjunction of events. According to such accounts, both the

34  An Architect Who Stutters

objects already there, out in the world, and the representations that we produce of them, are bundles of sensations, blooming with secondary qualities that are only unified and brought together in a body via the perceiving mind. The objects of architectural representation, consequently, are dependent on the architect’s intellectual and drawing power, her ability to express what she can witness as a constant conjunction and translate to instructions for yet another conjunction of events, this time to be executed as a project. 1.2.3 Signs of Disruption

This distinction reminds us of Stan Allen’s contrast between autographic and allographic arts, in which he classifies architectural representation and its notational systems as a curious mixture.81 This curious mixture, as philosopher Nelson Goodman first defined it, is what differentiates architecture from other disciplines.82 As Goodman underlines, the work of architecture is not always as surely disengaged from a particular building as is a work of music from a particular performance. The end product of architecture, unlike that of music, is not ephemeral; and the notational language was developed in response rather to the need for participation of many hands in construction … Insofar as its notational language has not yet acquired full authority to divorce the identity of the work in all cases from particular production, architecture is a mixed and transitional case.83 Following Goodman, Allen claims that architectural drawings are neither an end in themselves, like paintings, sculptures or other products of art, nor simple technical instruments.84 Rather, architectural drawings are transitive, in the sense that they are able to produce something new from something else. It is at this point that I disagree with Goodman and Allen. According to Allen, ‘far from being an ideal construction, architectural representation is marked by contact with a messy and inconsistent reality.’85 Why is it that reality is messy and inconsistent, while our architectural reality is tidy and consistent? Are they truly set apart? How is it that representation is ‘an entire intellectual and social construct that makes possible to imagine and construct new fragments of reality’?86 How does that differ from the struggle that Evans had in mind when he referred to geometry as the provider of the necessary amount of reason able to tame architectural imagination? How is that understanding any different from the empiricist’s account of science, which would privilege the controlled constant conjunction of the laboratory – the drawing – not only in favour of reality’s mess, but also as what is able to transform it. Is Hume an architectural theorist? Bhaskar would probably agree on the grounds that the Humean account depends upon a misidentification of causal laws with their empirical grounds. Notice that as human activity is in general

An Architect Who Stutters  35

necessary for constant conjunctions, if one identifies causal laws with them then one is logically committed to the absurdity that human beings … cause the laws of nature.87 What is needed, then, for a non-reductionist approach to representation? Primarily, one has to acknowledge that intransitive forces often do not catalyse constant casual conjunctions. Manuel DeLanda notes in a humorous tone that to speak of non-linear causality is as nonsensical as to speak of nonelephant zoology.88 The dichotomy between linear and non-linear is a false one, since linear effects are but a minority, a special case among a wide array of non-linear causation. However, there is a distinction that makes much more sense and is helpful in warding off the hegemony of linearity: the distinction between closed and open systems. Closed systems are systems where constant conjunctions of events can be recognized, while in open systems, intransitive forces are in a state of such an absolute form of expression that isolating one type of force vis-à-vis another seems impossible. This second type of systems, desert islands of absolute movement, are the norm and not the exception. The independence of intransitive forces lies in their antecedence. They bear the potential of a universal ungrounding, where you have to constantly begin from the middle, and then anew. Consequently, the very fact that intransitive forces can be out of phase with events is what makes representation possible and necessary. Here, representation is understood as an experimental activity that is required to produce closed systems so that the relation between intransitive forces and transitive practices may be grasped and discovered.89 Simply put, it is not that representation is about the essentially non-representable. As a condition, representation is not possible because of an absent, dormant object that awaits its realization, an intervention to a messy reality using the tidy means of architecture. In any form of representation acting as an apparatus that reproduces the causal sequence of events within a closed system, it is the intransitive persistence of an open system that injects it with causality; not in the form of a natural law but in the form of a contingent virtuality. Architectural representation is a closed system of experimentation, possible due to the injected causality from a much broader, open system of intransitive forces. However, systems do not differ only in terms of their openness or closure, a condition determined by their degree of intransitiveness; they also differ in scale, stability and the ways they deal with their symmetry, or their degree of freedom. What I wish to underline for now has to do with a particular reading of the stability of systems. Referring to a system’s stability will help us to understand why a specific conceptualization of signs has to be introduced soon, and why spatial stuttering plays such an important role. In brief, systems that are governed by linear causality, closed systems such as architectural representation, are systems that are ultra-stable and do not evolve.90 Be it autographic, allographic or a curious mixture, architectural representation

36  An Architect Who Stutters

presents no possibilities of transformation to another system within its own closed and transitive system. On the other hand, non-linear, open, intransitive systems are metastable: they can transform, for better or worse.91 As Steven Shaviro writes, a metastable system is transversed by potentials and powers, or by energy gradients and inherent tendencies. At any moment, these may be activated and actualized. The most minute imbalance, or the most fleeting encounter, can be enough to set things in motion. And there is generally more to the effect than there is to the cause. The consequences of these imbalances and encounters tend to be orders of magnitude larger than the incidents that set them into motion.92 When metastability is interrupted, an individual emerges and develops a structure along with an environment. Architectural representation is only one among many agents in the process of spatialization, its potential for productivity being based on the metastable state of intransitive open systems. In this sense, architects do not simply project a space yet to come: they radically disrupt spatial metastability. The question is whether architectural representation and its various (geometrical) modes are the most productive mode of disruption? The simple answer is no. The not so simple answer is that if architecture operates within open and closed systems, at the borderline between intransitive and transitive forces, disrupting spatial metastability, then one must be aware of the signs of such disruption, and how to grasp and manipulate them. To achieve this, it is necessary to introduce an important premise of a non-signifying theory of signs. In a nutshell, signs are expressed and embodied intensity. The friction of spatial stuttering, the dynamism of architecture’s open generative mechanisms and closed systems of representation, the dervish dance of architectural reason and intuition within one and the same body, are enunciated in signs. As Zourabichvili writes, what is the status of this object that is encountered without being recognized? What escapes representation is the sign. The exterior world becomes interesting at the moment it produces signs, thereby losing its reassuring unity, its homogeneity, its truthful appearance. And in a certain respect, the world never ceases to produce signs, is composed of nothing but signs, on condition that we be sensitive to them.93 But are we really sensitive to signs? If we mistakenly confuse signs with signification, then the answer is quite bluntly: no. If, however, the domain of signs is one of an encounter and not of recognition, then it becomes clear that there is never anything insensitive about signs. Of course, sensibility is itself dynamic, meaning that it mutates, it shrinks and expands. Sensibility is not only ‘ground zero’, it is also a practice.94 Practices of affirmation (understood

An Architect Who Stutters  37

ethologically) not only amplify sensibility, they also expand the potential of the architect to create new worlds, and quite literally so. Nonetheless, there is no ground under signs, no content waiting to be unmasked. In this sense, signs are simulacral; they have denied their mythical origin or rational telos, opting instead for pure force. Signs operate in a dual mode, of implication and explication. As Zourabichvili remarks, it is sense that surfaces from the sign and merges with its explication.95 Signs are not there for a point of view to recognize them. On the contrary, they formulate points of view and the possibility of acquiring them. They are quintessentially heterogeneous, produced by the mixture of experience as singular moments in which the plurality of a curved space–time finds its expression. In signs, Peirce’s ‘thirdness’ is found.96 If signs express a passage of intensity then in this passage from one threshold to the other, the potential of a third is already present. In the passages that signs implicate and explicate, representation finds the niche to virtually communicate with the intransitive: to adopt other points of view which eventually, following Leibniz, formulate new subjects. If what we are after is ‘an architecture yet to come’, then we need to delve into the regime of non-signifying signs. We need to follow the expressions of intensity, probe for new points of view and for a new subjectivity. If representation is supposed to make points of view communicate – views that implicate the same closed system and explicate the resemblance of its extensities – then nothing novel can ever emerge. Thus, according to Zourabichvili, this is why the heterogeneous or the other point of view is implicated (it cannot be the object of an act of recognition) … Sense, as expression or explication, can be said to consist in the putting-into-communication of two points of view, two planes of heterogeneous dimensions. There is sense only in the interstices of representation, in the gap between points of view. Sense is divergence, dissonance, disjunction. Sense is problematic.97 Signs are important not because they express resemblances, instances of a reassuring recognition which strengthens the architectural subject. Signs in architecture are neither drawings nor notations. Understood as such, signs are the elements of a certain type of architectural communication that rigidifies the closeness of its own system. Drawings and notations do communicate, but they only communicate with each other, hence limiting the production of points of view which through the intensity of their heterogeneity could produce new architectural subjects. Architectural minds, both minor and major, find in signs the possibility to create points of view that not only assist their becoming, but also enable them to transduce. On the borderline of their transduction, the possibility of architecture emerges. Beyond translation (from plan to space), transduction becomes an ‘atypical expression’.98 Between architectural reason and imagination there is a ferryman who stutters.

38  An Architect Who Stutters

1.3 The Ferryman of Hades What would thinking be if it did not constantly confront chaos?99 Allow me to reformulate: what would architecture be if it did not constantly confront chaos? This confrontation, the friction between architectural reason and intuition, between major and minor architectural minds, leads to the introduction of architecture’s special mode of enunciation: the atypical expression of spatial stuttering as the precursor of disrupting metastability. As Evans writes, architecture has ‘been thought as an attempt at maximum preservation in which both meaning and likeness are transported from idea through drawing to building with minimum loss. This is the doctrine of essentialism.’100 However, in addition to its essentialist conception, this understanding of architecture operates based on an even broader assumption. 1.3.1 Ratiognition

In a long trajectory of architectural theories, reason has been considered as the foundation of architectural practices. Expressed in the rational science of geometry, reason could control the creativity of architecture. Geometry could offer architecture a reasonable ground while, at the same time, lend it additional rationality.101 In Evans’s words, it is due to the domestication of architectural intuition by rational geometry that ‘the creative, intuitive, or rhetorical aspects of architecture can therefore ride on the back of geometric rationality.’102 But what is reason? Or more precisely, how is reason connected with ratio? Simply put, ratio is the relationship between two objects, mostly numerically posited, standing for the number of times that the one can be contained in the other. Ratio is an expression of analogical thinking, although it was introduced mathematically through Euclidean geometry much earlier than the formulation of analogical reasoning. While not all forms of analogy can be reduced to their mathematical operation, it is in this way that analogical thinking was introduced to architectural practices and theories.103 The consequent expression of ratio – as an expression of analogies of proportion and proportionality – is architectural representation, standardized by the rationalizing agency of geometry. One can judge the success of a project when modes of ratio are deployed, asserting a fabricated quasi-singularity in spatial proportions and quasi-ordinariness in design principles. Nonetheless, how is it that ratio emerges as a representation of reason? Kant famously divided the mind into several faculties, two of which are of interest to my argument: the faculty of reason and that of imagination. Imagination, or in more precise terms, the faculty of sensuous intuition, is that of pure experience, where things are taken as they appear via sensory experience: what Kant names phenomena.104 It is nature apprehended in awareness, bustling with secondary qualities. However, nothing can ever be fully exhausted in its perception. At least, such is the claim of the Kantian dogma. There is a thing-in-it-self, posited outside of any form of subjective

An Architect Who Stutters  39

knowledge. Nevertheless, according to Kant, the in-it-self-ness of a thing can be approached. The essence of a thing, the ‘zebrahood’ of the zebra – as De Landa puts it – might be impossible to know fully, but it can be approached by reason.105 Zebrahood as the essence of the zebra is therefore a noumenon, unknowable to the mind because it lies outside the boundaries of the mind, approachable however through the faculty of reason, which can ponder the essence of things. Reason, in its Kantian form, is a legislator: it attempts to tame and standardize that which is beyond the mind and cognition, that which is outside experience. For Kant, at least in his first treatises, it is recognition that binds together all the faculties. Imagination and reason are exercised in harmony when presented with an object that is supposedly identical to both of them: an object that can remain the same when seen, remembered, imagined, conceived and so on.106 For Kant, recognition is directly related with the formulation of what he calls ‘common sense’, not a sense in the empirical understanding of the term, but rather an expression of a universalizing identity, able to bring the subject together as one via the harmonious exercise of all faculties. We face the double constitution of the early Kantian, idealistic dogma: that of a self – the knower – whose subjective identity is based on common sense and that of a given – the known – whose objective identity is based on its recognition.107 It is on the harmonious exercise of all faculties via recognition that the classical understanding of knowledge is based. Following Foucault’s account on the genealogy of science, philosopher Gary Gutting claims that ‘the overall project of knowledge is that of achieving a general science of order.’108 Knowledge aims at representing things as placed serially according to the identities and differences that exist among their properties.109 Foucault notes that the expression of such a representation is that of a table – similar to Porphyry’s tree – full of genera and species. From this branched conceptualization of knowledge, based on an analogical being, two specific aspects of the very process of knowledge appropriation emerge. Typological thinking, with which architecture is more than familiar, implies both mathesis (learning) and taxinomia (taxonomy). In the first, science deals with ‘the ordering of simple natures’, the aspects that can be measured quantitatively. In it, we find analogies of proportion. The second, taxinomia, involves the ‘ordering of complex natures’, the qualitative classification of relations based on their analogical proportionality.110 Ratio merges with reason when knowledge is conceptualized as a process that has recognition as its origin and telos. Once again, this is to recognize the quasi-singular and to place it quasi-ordinarily for the ones that will study it in the future. Representation ensures that both ends of this process will be equally satisfied. Thus, one comes across two different ways of organizing knowledge. As Gutting describes, there is on the one hand the ideal spatial grouping, expressed in the great tables of taxonomic orders, that represented the true continuity of nature. On the other hand,

40  An Architect Who Stutters

there is the experienced grouping of living things that had resulted from the temporal series of events in the history of the Earth.111 It is at this point that a discourse starts to reconstruct the ideal order of proportion from the fragments of proportionality. Most major architectural modes act accordingly when they establish ways of learning and use proportion in projecting space, and their ways of grouping spatial arrangements typologically – nothing else than the application of analogical proportionality. According to Foucault, ‘for this form of thought … the sequence of time can never be anything but the line along which all the possible values of the preestablished variables succeed one another.’112 Paraphrasing him, it is impossible for architectural history to conceive the history of architecture.113 Even more, one might wonder what occurs when both architectural theory and practice are influenced by this specific form of thought that attaches itself to the force of typological thinking, be it in taxonomizing space, time or both. It is for this reason that architectural thinking should move beyond the inert and passive realm of recognition. If architecture aims to disrupt metastabilty and to catalyse subjectification, it can benefit significantly from a non-signifying understanding of signs. Firstly, signs are always the bearers of a problematic encounter. Secondly, signs can only be felt.114 Non-signifying signs never appear to thought alone, waiting passively to be recognized, but instead invade the sensible while being produced by it: they always come posing a problem that demands that the knower leave her comfort zone and that the known revolts against the typologies that standardize and domesticate it. On this simulacral intransitive force of the sign, Deleuze will advance his claim for ‘objectively, a science of the sensible freed from the model of recognition and, subjectively, a use of the faculties freed from the ideal of common sense.’115 We need to question not only architectural representation and its capacity to interact with intransitive intensities. We need, within architectural theories and practices, to push recognition and common sense to their limits. 1.3.2 Subliminally Beautiful

Ironically, the first to point towards the limits of recognition and common sense was Kant. In the last of his critiques, the Critique of Judgment, Kant provides an outline of a faculty he considers able to be free from the constraints of common sense. This is the faculty of imagination. As Daniel Smith underlines, until that moment Kant was interested in formulating as many common senses as there were natural interests of reasonable thought (knowledge, reflection, morality), differing in relation to the conditions of what had to be recognized (the known, moral value, aesthetics).116 However, in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’, located in the Critique of Judgment, Kant attempts a bold manoeuvre: the possibility of a faculty confronting its own limit. More specifically, Kant wonders what occurs when imagination faces its own maximum. Encountering an immense object (the desert, a mountain, a pyramid) or an

An Architect Who Stutters  41

outburst of power (a storm, the eruption of a volcano), the faculty of imagination attempts to comprehend the sensations it is facing in their totality, but, nevertheless, fails to do so.117 Facing such an event, imagination reaches its limits, its failure leading to pain, emerging precisely from the friction and the schism between what can be imagined and what can be thought. The sublime for Kant is the moment when imagination confronts reason. Kant claims that it is reason itself that pushes imagination to the limit. According to Smith’s excellent overview, ‘absolute immensity and power are Ideas of Reason, Ideas that can be thought but cannot be known or imagined, and which are accessible only to the faculty of Reason.’118 In addition to the pain that the subject experiences when confronting the sublime, Kant claims that it also experiences pleasure. Confronting its limit, imagination simultaneously surpasses it by representing to itself its inability to access the totality of reason, an idea that can be thought yet not sensed. Representation emerges both as capitulation and failure, tied to the experience of the unpresentable. Even more importantly, Smith underlines, the unpresentable not only exists, but does so in a sensible nature.119 Although one cannot understand a sublime experience, one is nevertheless compelled to speak endlessly of one’s failure to understand it.120 If geometry functions as the ground for reason, with representation emerging from the failure of architectural imagination, then it is not surprising to see why Evans conceptualizes their tripartite relationship as a series of translations. Still, to present such a relationship as a translation remains fully within the realm of reason: translation operates on the basis of ratio, a one-to-one correspondence of signification and syntax, between the imagined, the projected and the built. In addition, it assumes a fully linear causality in which the rationality of geometry and its translations can control the inconsistence and messiness of reality. Here it becomes clear why architectural theories need to deal – again and from a more radical perspective – with the sublime as the friction between imagination and reason. I claim that the sublime not only needs to be acknowledged as being within experience, but that it also needs to be clearly connected with its reciprocal term: the beautiful. This association does not point towards a process of translation but rather towards an atypical expression: that of stuttering.121 The limit that appears inaccessible to imagination is viewed from an empirical point of view. However, and this is where Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism comes into use, from a transcendental point of view, the limit of imagination can only be imagined. It is crucial to grasp the vast difference between Kant’s and Deleuze’s approach to the transcendental. Kant conceptualizes the transcendental as a set of templates, a priori conditions of possibility, which despite having been drawn from the empirical, are in a position to legislate it. The empirical conforms to any transcendental a priori. On the contrary, Deleuze approaches the transcendental as a field of potential energies in a metastable equilibrium, able to actualize a subject but not in the form of any a priori. Following Deleuze’s immanent account of

42  An Architect Who Stutters

the transcendental, the limit of imagination is accessible only to imagination, under the condition that it is transcendentally exercised.122 Deleuze identifies in the ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ the possibility for a disjunctive account of all faculties, no longer under the harmonious unity of recognition and reason, but rather in their confrontation with their differential limits. As Deleuze writes, each of the faculties goes to its own limit … They struggle against one another, the one pushing the other to its maximum limit, the other reacting by pushing the first towards an inspiration which it would not have had alone. Each pushes the other to the limit, but each makes the one go beyond the limit of the other.123 Via differential limits and the trespassing of their intensive and intransitive thresholds, signs are produced. The faculties do indeed communicate, however it is a violent form of communication that fails to reunite one with the other under any kind of common sense.124 It is a form of communication which in no case can be positioned outside of experience, but which on the contrary, occurs from, for and within experience itself. Neither the sublime nor the beautiful exist in themselves: something happens, and that which happens is always within the sensible. Both are events, not conditions or states of a subject’s mind. The sublime and the beautiful should not be taken as opposites, but rather as reciprocal terms, bound by the univocity of the sensible. Kant himself hints at their reciprocity. He approaches the sublime through the beautiful, considering that for him a judgment of beauty is to be determined through a sensual perception that is freed from any moral imperatives, ideological ties or rational taxonomizations.125 Conversely, Kant argues that beauty is recognized through an intuition of sensing the expression of the transcendental. When the body intuits and perceives the transcendental, imagination locates the corresponding object within the empirical and therefore a judgment of beauty is actualized. In other words, both the sublime and the beautiful involve the transcendental exercise of imagination and its consequent push towards its limits. In the traditional Kantian account, this push leads to the universality of reason on the one hand, while on the other, it leads back to the singularity of imagination. The question, then, is how the two can be brought together, not in a rational unity, but rather as parts of real, and not only possible, experience. It is a question of extreme importance for architectural theory, since when adequately posed, it can provide an understanding of architectural practices that no longer distinguish between minor and major modes, but, on the contrary, acknowledge their becoming as a reciprocal disruption of metastability. Connecting the sublime with the beautiful and the way that they express their eventification as the haecceity of expression itself, can bring architectural intuition and reason together, not via representation but via the presentation of their expressive agency. As such, if indeed the

An Architect Who Stutters  43

beautiful can be considered as a theory of singularity, it is because it implies a new type of judgment. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Shaviro reads aesthetic judgment as an appreciation of how the object adapts to the way a subject apprehends it, while at the same time remaining indifferent to it.126 To make this clear, he uses the example of the orchid and the wasp: the orchid adapts itself to the way the wasp apprehends it and as a result, the wasp finds beauty (and, as we will see later, meaning) in the orchid. In this sense, the orchid is not to be considered beautiful in itself but rather beautiful to the wasp, regardless of the fact that the orchid remains indifferent to the wasp.127 The orchid lures the wasp, it seduces it. Besides, as Whitehead claims, seduction is part of the process by which a subject becomes what it is: no allure, no becoming.128 It is for this reason that both beauty and the sublime, are events; after all, seduction requires an encounter. To be seduced, one needs to be not only in a world, but also willing to hear its sirens. To find the beautiful and the sublime one needs to opt for the encounters that bear the potential of trespassing differential limits, producing the signs of a communication that evades representation. Both the beautiful and the sublime, the intuition of imagination and the concepts of reason, minor and major becomings of an architectural extended mind, involve the experience of an event. This event is always an encounter that works both ways. Both the beautiful and the sublime express the radical incommensurability between intuitions and concepts.129 The relationship between the two cannot be represented with any type of ratio, while, and this is crucial, they are reciprocal. The unrepresentability of the ways that intuition and concepts relate, not only highlights that both terms as relata come after their relationship, but it also exposes that this relationship is an intransitive one: indifferent to any subject–object division, it surpasses the taxonomies of the knower and the known. Intuitions and concepts are in a phantasmatic, simulacral relation, which escapes judgment. How can their relation be best described? Let me use Deleuze’s example of Orson Welles’s last film, F for Fake. In it, Welles explores the difference between Vermeer and his famous forger, Han van Meegeren. The question that bothers Welles is how van Meegeren managed to persuade viewers of the authenticity of his paintings. Deleuze’s response, based on Nietzsche’s account of the falsifier, is that van Meegeren used the criteria of the experts, the ones who judge. As Smith puts it, ‘the expert is able to recognize a true Vermeer by means of criteria he himself has established concerning Vermeer’s style and periods.’130 The task of the forger, therefore, is to study these criteria, these rational modes of judgment, in order to reproduce them in such detail and mastery that the expert has no other choice but to declare that, indeed, this must be an original since it corresponds to all the standards. Here, analogy of proportion and proportionality are once again at play. There is always a forger within the expert, since they both operate on the system of analogical judgment.131 Nonetheless, this raises a second, even more important

44  An Architect Who Stutters

question. How can one distinguish between the forger and the artist; what differentiates van Meegeren and Vermeer? While they are both able to operate between intuition and concepts, the artist has the potential not only to reproduce form – the true form of the concept – or to develop the most productive techniques of following her intuitions – the hound dog of imagination – but she is able to transform. This is where the distinction lies. It is a heterogeneous transformation, a transindividuation, which transforms not only a world but also the one attempting this transformation. How can one distinguish an architect? Perhaps it is in her ability to provoke and embrace an encounter, her ability to dissolve between concepts and intuition, only to find herself communicating with the uncommunicable in order to literally transform a life. 1.3.3 Stuttering to Death

To reunite concepts and intuition is a process that cannot be generalized as a method. It cannot be accomplished in principle but only in fact: through everyday practice and constant singular processes of individuation. For this reason, spatial stuttering may be understood as the precursor of any attempt to disrupt metastability. Stuttering produces peculiar moments of architectural noise, able to free architecture from itself and to put it in contact with an intransitive field. When claiming that stuttering can free architecture from itself, we must be specific: to free architecture from its representational self, the one who conceives the real as messy and wants to enforce order within it by means of geometrical order. It also means to free architecture from its translators, the rational operators who advocate a linear equation between concepts, drawings, projects and built space. Architecture must stop ‘making sense’ – understood as common sense – and start making new sensibilities. Stuttering operates as a singular moment of indeterminacy, able to open a multiplicity of bifurcations, a multiplicity of worlds yet to come. Such moments of spatial stuttering, genuine events, involve a dual process: at once a negation and an affirmation, a rupture and a creation. The stutter is a sound of something else, of a difference that attempts to get through.132 We need to advance with caution though: stuttering is not to be taken metaphorically. Despite the potential of bringing unrelated (perhaps even strange) concepts together, metaphors are unable to produce the strange, to produce relations. They capture the strange and render it familiar according to common sense, according to what everybody already knows.133 Contrary to this, the function of stuttering is to produce the strange, to redirect difference in order to make a difference. It is close to what philosopher Alphonso Lingis terms ‘immediate blows of the actual.’134 In his words, stuttering seeks to practice a thought prior to the formulation of the philosophy which makes the difference an object of representation … This disruptive practice would be provoked by … practices of discourse in which an

An Architect Who Stutters  45

unrepresentable sensible, sensation without sense, is set forth. Provoked by the shock of the encounter, it would then not proceed to interpret it, to re-cognize its meaning, but to practice a mechanic’s analysis – see how it works.135 Put differently, stuttering is not a metaphor, but a metamorphosis.136 An architectural account of stuttering stands next to a clinical one: it is not a matter of analysing speech and its uses – or misuses – but rather of isolating the singular moments of both creativity and indeterminacy that stuttering offers. The focus should not be on the mispronounced sounds of one who stutters, but, conversely, on the event itself: to stop and start again, to begin anew, tides on an intransitive desert island, a repetition full of minimal differences, tensions and cracks. When space stutters, it expresses the violent encounter between forces that bear the potential of disrupting metastability, of producing atypical expressions that can make the different communicate through difference. Architecture is brought to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise).137 There are at least three ways of making space and architecture stutter. One has to decompose them, deterritorialize them and push them to their limits. Each of these processes operates diffractively, in the sense that they themselves need to be considered as a population of differential limits that can potentially produce novel information. To find oneself in the rhizome of spatial stuttering, this is how it should be done: lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers, find an advantageous point on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continuums of intensity segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times. It is through a meticulous relation with the strata that one succeeds in freeing lines of flight.138 It requires more than simply setting them in action in order to inhabit the plane they formulate: they are not ready-made paths that one can follow step by step, but trajectories within a field of forces that proceed through a constant resolution of tensions.139 To decompose them means to destabilize the conception of what they are by straining architecture with intensities; to deterritorialize them means to examine the ways that they inform each other and how this information can be productive and disrupting, how it can follow a line of flight; and, finally, to push them to their limits means to focus on

46  An Architect Who Stutters

what they can do and where/when they can become-other. When architecture stutters, it is not to represent, it is to present the potential of a new life. Therefore, stuttering plays an important role, since it not only intensifies architectural practices and theories, but it also opens architecture to lines of flight that are blocked within representational logics. How can the architectural subject fall apart and disintegrate without ceasing to exist? Here, the architectural subject is understood as a relational one, a topological field in a constant state of transition, which ceaselessly modulates its relation with a world.140 When architectural intuition accepts the invitation of a world and the – seemingly – threatened architectural subject steps forward, the violent encounter with spatial indeterminacy leads to a transformative experience, out of which emerges a subjectivity which cannot be the same as before. The subject dissolves but does not cease to exist. What ceases to exist is ‘the’ subject as a self-referential essence that resists transformation. Through stuttering, subjectivity appears as subjectification and relations as antecedent to their emergent terms. In addition, an architectural subject who stutters – a subject composed of extended minds open to the decomposing effects of a violent encounter – brings forward a theory of perception that destabilizes representational logics. It is a theory of perception that philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has qualified as subtractive: there is less in perception than in matter, less in representation than in presentation.141 Central to a subtractive theory of perception is something we have identified earlier as one of the main fallacies of representational thinking: to account for itself it necessarily reifies a concept as the ground out of which being emanates. Thus representational logics pass from matter to perception by adding something and then attempt to account for that addition by reifying an entity – a stubborn, powerful and rigid architectural subject in our case – as the one able to perform such an addition. Meillassoux bases his concept of subtraction on Bergson’s theory of pure perception as developed in Matter and Memory.142 Bergson claims that there are two processes of selection at play when it comes to perception: the ‘selection of images’, which is made by the body and comes before the conscious choice, and a selection which occurs afterwards by the mind, and within the elements that the body already selected from an infinite amount.143 I interpret such a distinction as one between a minor and a major architectural mind. When following the singularities of matter, a minor architectural mind forms a selection of perceptions (and arguably also creates new perceptions) while a major mind stratifies them. However, prior to both minds there is the antecedence of material relations, and this, in the form of intransitive intensities, informs both the singularization of a minor mind and the universalization of a major one. The decomposition of the architectural subject that stuttering brings forth can potentially not only transform it, but also bring it in touch with infinity itself. Meillassoux claims that the body is formulated by a ‘disinterest for that which communicates.’144 One could add that a minor architectural mind is

An Architect Who Stutters  47

also primarily composed of a fundamental disinterest in everything but material singularities. The minor mind is ‘that which discerns, in the infinity of imagistic communication, certain rare virtual actions capable of interesting action.’145 It is only afterwards that an architectural mind, now in its major becoming, chooses from the selection based on the previous disinterest. The first selection that of the minor mind formulates perception as a set of possible actions. The second selection, that of a major mind, is a choice among equipotent finite options already preselected from the infinity and the chaos into which a minor mind dives. They both operate together, at once and reciprocally in order to make not only architectural representation, but architecture itself possible. They both contain gradually diminishing degrees of chaos: intransitive intensities. Meillassoux remarks that such a theory of perception – and, consequently, of subjectivity – is radical because perception is no longer a synthesis but an ascesis: it does not connect, it disconnects.146 Consequently, his subtractive model considers becoming as fluxes and their interceptions. For if it were to be only flows and nothing but flows then it would not be enough for a flow to just pass through. There must be a disconnection, a discontinuity, in order to disrupt metastability; there must be a stutter. In addition, the very disconnections that break the experiential flows, the stutters that spatialize, are, in their own right, flows. A bifurcation of the flow is always accompanied by a retardation effect imposed upon the same flow.147 The atypical expressionism of spatial stuttering has an infinite duration as well, with every specific stutter, every disruption being the actualization of its absolute power to re-singularize both matter and the subject that emerges out of its perceptual subtractions. When an architect stutters, she moves through the flow of breaks, alongside the flows that make these breaks possible; she moves through the transitive disruptions of spatial metastability while also moving through the intransitive flows that make them possible. If one adopts Meillassoux’s subtractive model, then the architectural subject may be conceptualized as a ‘discontinuous loop of interceptions.’148 The subject already presupposes its own decomposition, its dissolution. It becomes necessary to practice this dissolution by means of expressing the interceptions that constitute it, not only to resist entropy, but also to intervene with the environment that the architectural subject creates. As Meillassoux clarifies, such an account of subjectivity occurs because it is necessary to assure a place for the rarefaction of fluxes … Because a living being cannot entirely cut itself from the fluxes – otherwise it would no longer have any affective and/or perceptive relation with the surrounding world. I mean by ‘rarefaction’ any localized impoverishment of fluxes – thus, every living being is a rarefaction. A rarefaction is more than an interception: an interception does not make a rarefaction, whereas a rarefaction is made solely from interception of fluxes.149

48  An Architect Who Stutters

When seen as a loop of interceptions – Meillassoux’s rarefaction – the architectural subject can be distinguished in two: either as a subject that increases its inherent power of disinterest or as one that gradually expands its openness to intransitive flows. For Meillassoux the first case refers to a reactive subject, while the second subject is active.150 A reactive subject undergoes a line of becoming that consists of a constant retreat, a reassurance of its own supposed givens and limits, a perpetuation of modes of thinking and practices that are never to deviate from common sense, or worse even, common opinions: doxa and urdoxa. It is a form of subjectivity shielded behind its own stubbornness, its own ‘idiocy’ – or what Deleuze refers to as betise. Interestingly, the noun idiot, when examined etymologically, derives from the Greek ιδιώτης: a private citizen, the one who has no interest in the commons, enclosed in herself, refusing any opening to anything exterior. Contrary to this, an active subject follows a becoming that connects it to the becoming of a world. It is a subject that has no interest in maintaining its stability just for the sake of existing, but which instead wishes to actively seek the violence of the encounter and the multiplication of its interceptions/disruptions for the sake of its enjoyment. According to Meillassoux, an active architectural subject that is not afraid of stuttering the intensities of its body made of two minds, is capable of an innovative, inventive becoming … Its increase of force does not come from an autonomous decision of a constitutive subject, but from an experience that is always undergone, an affective test in which a radical exteriority gives itself, an exteriority never felt before as such.151 The question remains: how can the singularity of architectural intuition and the universality of architectural reason be reunited within the architectural subject and its practices? I have claimed that spatial stuttering holds the potential to formulate an active subject, which relentlessly strives for its dissolution, given that this dissolution provides the potential of a new life. Architecture confronts chaos, but, nonetheless, it has to do so with style. To style the ways one confronts chaos means to style one’s own decomposition, one’s own death. After all, there are two types of subjects precisely because there are two types of deaths.152 A subject can nest into its idiocy and make the loop that it itself is more and more rigid and progressively smaller, or it can let the loop dissipate until its disappearance. The way that one styles one’s dissolution does not determine the inevitability of entropy, but the expressionism of one’s becoming. By practising the ways that architecture could plunge into the infinity of experience, the same infinity that it wishes to manipulate when attempting to intervene, its two minds could reunite, even temporarily, even to perform a survey of the field in an instance. If opening oneself to chaos means opening to the infinity of a world’s flows, to the intransitive powers that mobilize not just representation but all that can be represented, then what is important is

An Architect Who Stutters  49

to learn how to die without dying: to confront chaos and come back ready for another round. This is where the ferryman awaits. One has to negotiate with him, if one wants to negotiate how to confront chaos. Not only how fast his rowing should be, but more importantly, to ask him for a return trip. In the roar of Acheron, one should know how to stutter; speaking does not help, the river to chaos is full of noise. Only when one learns how to struggle with one’s own language, with one’s own syntax, can one grab his attention. The language of the ferryman is one of stuttering. And th-th-thrice victorious I have crossed the Acheron. Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Strivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 254. 2 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 9.126–7. 3 Horst Nowacki, ‘Shape Creation Knowledge in Civil and Naval Architecture’, in Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture, ed. Horst Nowacki and Wolfgang Lefévre (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 16. 4 Irad Malkin and Robert L. Hohlfelder, Mediterranean Cities: Historical Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1988), 160. 5 Ibid., 161. 6 Ibid., 160. 7 Francis Penrose, An Investigation on the Principles of Athenian Architecture (London: Macmillan, 1888), 39. 8 Patrick Nuttgens, The Story of Architecture (London: Phaidon, 1999), 96. 9 Peter Thompson, Georgia Papadopoulou, and Eleni Vassiliou, ‘The Origins of Entasis: Illusion, Aesthetics or Engineering?’, Spatial Vision 20, no. 6 (2007): 532. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Lothar Hasselberger and Hansgeorg Bankel, Appearance and Essence: Refinements of Classical Architecture: Curvature (Philadelphia: UPenn Museum of Archaeology, 1999), 24. 13 Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (New York: Dover Publications, 1914), 86. 14 Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, vol. 6.2, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Travenor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), VI. 15 Antonio Becchi, ‘Pregnant Columns: From Word to Shape’, in Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture, ed. Horst Nowacki and Wolfgang Lefévre (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 281. 16 Thompson et al., ‘The Origins of Entasis’, 541. 17 Joseph B. Keller, ‘The Shape of the Strongest Column’, Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis 5 (1960): 275–85. 18 Teodor Atanackovic and Valentin Glavardanow, ‘Optical Shape of a Heavy Compressed Column’, Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization 28 (2004): 388–96. 19 Andy Clark, Being-There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 20 Levi Bryant, Ontocartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: University Press, 2014), 83. 21 Clark, Being-There, 21–23. 22 Bryant, Ontocartography, 85. 23 Clark, Being-There, 24. 24 Andy Clark and David Chalmers, ‘The Extended Mind’, in Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension, ed. Andy Clark (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 220–32. 25 Bryant, Ontocartography, 86.

50  An Architect Who Stutters 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 87. 28 Homer, Odyssey, 5.234–53. 29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 363. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 362. 32 Ibid. 33 Manuel DeLanda, ‘Material Complexity’, in Digital Tectonics, ed. Neil Leach, David Turnbull, and Chris Williams (Chichester: Wiley, 2004), 16. 34 Ibid., 14. 35 Ibid. 36 Melvin Kranzberg and Cyril Stanley Smith, ‘Materials in History and Society’, in The Materials Revolution, ed. Tom Forrester (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 93. 37 Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, trans. Harris Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 128–29. 38 Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution, 129. 39 It is worth noting that my approach towards major and minor architectures is radically different than that of architectural theorist Jill Stoner. Stoner wishes to correlate architecture with literature, using the Deleuzian concept of minor literature, especially as seen in his reading of Kafka. I, on the other hand, do not wish to examine architecture via literature (or vice versa) but rather architecture via architecture. Jill Stoner, Towards a Minor Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 40 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 362, 367. 41 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. William Ralph Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1931), 74, 208. 42 Ibid., 208. 43 Brian Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’, Architectural Design (Hypersurface Architecture) 68, no. 5/6 (1998): 16–24. 44 Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’. 45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 554. 46 Ibid., 373. 47 Massumi, ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’. 48 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: University Press), 5. 49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 374. 50 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), xxvi. 51 Evans, The Projective Cast, xxvi. 52 Ibid., xxvii. 53 Stan Allen, Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. 54 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 112. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid, 113. 58 Ian Hamilton Grant, ‘Does Nature Stay What-it-is? Dynamics and the Antecendence Criterion’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.Press, 2011), 66–83. 59 Ian Hamilton Grant, ‘Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman’, in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryan, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re. Press, 2011), 41. 60 Grant, ‘Mining Conditions’, 41. 61 François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons, ed. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 51. 62 Zourabichvili, Deleuze, 51.

An Architect Who Stutters  51 63 Grant, ‘Does Nature Stay What-it-is?’, 82. 64 Ibid. 65 Grant, ‘Mining Conditions’, 43. 66 Ibid. 67 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 85. 68 Grant, ‘Mining Conditions’, 44. 69 Gilles Deleuze, Desert Islands and Other Texts, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 13. 70 Ibid., 13. 71 Ibid., 9. 72 Ibid., 11. 73 Ibid., 13. 74 Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (New York: Routledge, 1998), 21. 75 Ibid., 21. 76 Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 41. 77 Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 13. 78 Ibid., 22. 79 Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, 45. 80 Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 33. 81 Allen, Practice, 46. 82 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (New York: Hackett, 1976). 83 Goodman, Languages of Art, 129–30. 84 Allen, Practice, 48. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1998), 9. 88 Manuel DeLanda, ‘1000 Years of War: CTHEORY Interview with Manuel DeLanda’, in ctheory​.net​, http://www​.ctheory​.net​/articles​.aspx​?id​=383 (accessed 1 January 2021). 89 Bryant, The Democracy of Objects, 49. 90 Peter N. Kugler and Robert E. Shaw, ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic Engines: A Coupling of First and Second Laws’, in Synergetics of Cognition, ed. Hermann Haken and Michael Stadler (Berlin: Springer, 1990), 303. 91 Kugler and Shaw, ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking’. 92 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (London: Repeater, 2016), 197. 93 Zourabichvili, Deleuze, 67. 94 Andrej Radman, ‘Sensibility is Ground Zero: On Inclusive Disjunction and Politics of Defatalization’, in This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn (Leiden: Rodopi, 2015), 57–86. 95 Zourabichvili, Deleuze, 67. 96 Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in A Shock to Thought: Expressionism after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), xxii. 97 Zourabichvili, Deleuze, 68. 98 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 99. 99 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 208. 100 Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1986), 181. 101 Ibid., xxviii. 102 Ibid. 103 Evans, The Projective Cast, 182. 104 Anoka Faruqee, ‘The Kantian Sublime: Why Care?’, in Why Theory Cal Arts Exhibition Catalogue (Santa Clarita, CA: Cal Arts, 2009), 1.

52  An Architect Who Stutters 105 Manuel DeLanda, ‘Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason’, in Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 263–86. 106 Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 90. 107 Ibid. 108 Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge: University Press, 1989), 155. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid., 166. 112 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 153. 113 Ibid., 157. 114 Smith, Essays on Deleuze, 92. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 93. 117 Ibid. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 10. 121 Kate Nesbitt, ‘The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (an Aesthetic of) Abstraction’, New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 95–110. 122 Smith, Essays on Deleuze, 93. 123 Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xi–xii. 124 Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, xii. 125 Marie Shurkus, ‘The Sublime Event with Kant, Deleuze and Lyotard’, in Facing the Sublime in Water, ed. Irene Tsatsos (Pasadena, CA: Armory Press, 2013), 15. 126 Ibid., 15. 127 Ibid., 3. 128 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978). 129 Steven Shaviro, ‘The Wrenching Duality of Aesthetics: Kant, Deleuze and the Theory of the Sensible’, http://www​.shaviro​.com​/Othertexts​/SPEP​.pdf (accessed 1 January 2021). 130 Smith, Essays on Deleuze, 140. 131 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 146. 132 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice’, Deleuze Studies 3, no. 2 (2009): 251. 133 Kelly Hardcastle Jones, ‘Deleuze’s Stuttering: Decomposition, Deterritorialization, and Pushing Language to its Limit’, https://kellyhjones​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2014​/03​/ deleuzes​-stuttering​.pdf (accessed 1 January 2021). 134 Alphonso Lingis, ‘Deleuze on a Deserted Island’, in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since Merleau-Ponty, ed. Hugh Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 146. 135 Ibid., 152. 136 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 219. 137 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 143. 138 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 161. 139 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 209. 140 Shurkus, ‘The Sublime Event’, 20.

An Architect Who Stutters  53 141 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory’, in Collapse 3, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), 72. 142 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. W. Scott Palmer and Nancy Margaret Paul (New York: Zone Books, 1990). 143 Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction’, 73. 144 Ibid., 74. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 75. 147 Ibid., 92. 148 Ibid., 97. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 99. 151 Ibid., 101. 152 Ibid., 102.

Bibliography Alberti, Leon Battista. De Re Aedificatoria, volume 6.2. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Travenor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Allen, Stan. Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. London: Routledge, 2000. Aristotle. The Athenian Constitution. Translated by Harris Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Atanackovic, Teodor and Valentin Glavardanov. ‘Optical Shape of a Heavy Compressed Column’. Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization 28 (2004): 388–96. Becchi, Antonio. ‘Pregnant Columns: From Word to Shape’. In Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture. Edited by Horst Nowacki and Wolfgang Lefévre, 279–96. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by W. Scott Palmer and Nancy Margaret Paul. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. New York: Routledge, 1998. Bhaskar, Roy. The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 1998. Bryant, Levi. Ontocartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011. Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. ‘The Extended Mind’. In Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. Edited by Andy Clark, 220–32. Oxford: University Press, 2008. Clark, Andy. Being-There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. DeLanda, Manuel. ‘1000  Years of War: CTHEORY Interview with Manuel DeLanda’. ctheory​ .net​. http://www​.ctheory​.net​/articles​.aspx​?id​=383. Accessed 1 January 2021. DeLanda, Manuel. ‘Material Complexity’. In Digital Tectonics. Edited by Neil Leach, David Turnbull and Chris Williams, 14–20. Chichester: Wiley, 2004. DeLanda, Manuel. ‘Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason’. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Edited by Mark Dery, 263–86. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: University Press, 2016. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

54  An Architect Who Stutters Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Desert Islands and Other Texts. Edited by David Lapoujade. Translated by Mike Taormina. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. The Logic of Sense. Translated by Mark Lester and Charles Strivale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Evans, Robin. The Projective Cast. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. London: Architectural Association, 1986. Faruqee, Anoka. ‘The Kantian Sublime: Why Care?’ In Why Theory Cal Arts Exhibition Catalogue. Santa Clarita, CA: Cal Arts, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. New York: Hackett, 1976. Grant, Ian Hamilton. ‘Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Edited by Levi Bryan, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, 41–6. Melbourne: re.Press, 2011. Grant, Ian Hamilton. ‘Does Nature Stay What-it-is? Dynamics and the Antecendence Criterion’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, 66–83. Melbourne: re.Press, 2011. Gutting, Gary. Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason. Cambridge: University Press, 1989. Hardcastle Jones, Kelly. ‘Deleuze’s Stuttering: Decomposition, Deterritorialization, and Pushing Language to its Limit’. https://kellyhjones​.files​.wordpress​.com​/2014​/03​/ deleuzes​-stuttering​.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2021. Hasselberger, Lothar and Hansgeorg Bankel. Appearance and Essence: Refinements of Classical Architecture: Curvature. Philadelphia: UPenn Museum of Archaeology, 1999. Homer. Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Translated by William Ralph Boyce Gibson. New York: Macmillan, 1931. Keller, Joseph B. ‘The Shape of the Strongest Column’. Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis 5 (1960): 275–85. Kranzberg, Melvin and Cyril Stanley Smith. ‘Materials in History and Society’. In The Materials Revolution. Edited by Tom Forrester, 1–39. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Kugler, Peter N. and Robert E. Shaw. ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic Engines: A Coupling of First and Second Laws’. In Synergetics of Cognition. Edited by Hermann Haken and Michael Stadler, 296–331. Berlin: Springer, 1990. Lecercle, Jean Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Lingis, Alphonso. ‘Deleuze on a Deserted Island’. In Philosophy and Non-Philosophy since MerleauPonty. Edited by Hugh Silverman, 1–152. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1997. Malkin, Irad and Robert L. Hohlfelder. Mediterranean Cities: Historical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 1988. Massumi, Brian. ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’. In A Shock to Thought: Expressionism after Deleuze and Guattari. Edited by Brian Massumi, xiii–xxxix. London: Routledge, 2002.

An Architect Who Stutters  55 Massumi, Brian. ‘Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible’. Architectural Design (Hypersurface Architecture) 68, no. 5/6 (1998): 16–24. Meillassoux, Quentin. ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory’. In Collapse 3. Edited by Robin Mackay, 63–108. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007. Nesbitt, Kate. ‘The Sublime and Modern Architecture: Unmasking (an Aesthetic of) Abstraction’. New Literary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 95–110. Nowacki, Horst. ‘Shape Creation Knowledge in Civil and Naval Architecture’. In Creating Shapes in Civil and Naval Architecture. Edited by Horst Nowacki and Wolfgang Lefévre, 3–48. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Nuttgens, Patrick. The Story of Architecture. London: Phaidon, 1999. O’Sullivan, Simon. ‘From Stuttering and Stammering to the Diagram: Deleuze, Bacon and Contemporary Art Practice’. Deleuze Studies 3, no. 2 (2009): 247–58. Penrose, Francis. An Investigation on the Principles of Athenian Architecture. London: Macmillan, 1888. Radman, Andrej. ‘Sensibility is Ground Zero: On Inclusive Disjunction and Politics of Defatalization’. In This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Rick Dolphijn, 57–86. Leiden: Rodopi, 2015. Shaviro, Steven. ‘The Wrenching Duality of Aesthetics: Kant, Deleuze and the Theory of the Sensible’. http://www​.shaviro​.com​/Othertexts​/SPEP​.pdf. Accessed 1 January 2021. Shaviro, Steven. Discognition. London: Repeater, 2016. Shaviro, Steven. Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Shurkus, Marie. ‘The Sublime Event with Kant, Deleuze and Lyotard’. In Facing the Sublime in Water. Edited by Irene Tsatsos, 13–21. Pasadena, CA: Armory Press, 2013. Smith, Daniel W. Essays on Deleuze. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Stoner, Jill. Towards a Minor Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Thompson, Peter, Georgia Papadopoulou and Eleni Vassiliou. ‘The Origins of Entasis: Illusion, Aesthetics or Engineering?’ Spatial Vision 20, no. 6 (2007): 531–43. Vitruvius. The Ten Books of Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. New York: Dover Publications, 1914. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Zourabichvili, Francois. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012.

2

Technicities of Architectural Intuition

To move from the productive decomposition of an architectural subject towards the emancipating deterritorialization of its practices, we need to examine the very notion of the territory itself. However, dealing with the notion of the territory involves, essentially, facing the environmental logics within architectural theories and practices. ‘Environmental’, or better said, ‘ecological’, by no means stands for the dominant understanding of the term. Therefore, my concerns are not related to issues of sustainability or the various shades of green within the discipline of architecture. ‘Ecological’ should immediately be translated to relational; the operations and structures that architecture involves in proceeding towards the production of built environments. What will be of interest throughout this chapter is both the input and the output of architectural practices and, especially, the ways in which they are related. To this end, digital logics within architectural theories and practices will also be one of my main interests. In like manner, as representation was detached from its manifestations and instead focus shifted to its logics, the digital – in all its modes – will be considered and studied as a logic that has been governing architectural thinking. To make space stutter, one needs to make the pointing finger shake. 2.1 Concrete Walls Abstractly Concretizing How does the input–output fallacy operate? What is happening in that ‘black box’, the one that so readily processes all sorts of inputs and happily produces the outputs we architects desire? Even more, where is that box located and when can one trigger it? Is it at will, is it at the click of a button or a movement of the mouse? Is it novel or has it been among architectural practices all along? First and foremost, does it exist? To debunk the fallacy, which takes the translation of projected, represented and annotated space to build space as a matter of aligning the ratio as closely to one-to-one as possible, I will first attempt to overturn its most basic premise, which assumes the primacy of inputs and the fully linear manifestation of outputs. To do so, let us briefly focus on a recent, drastic paradigm shift in the neurosciences. As neurobiologist Björn Brembs claims, there has been a ‘dramatic shift DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-3

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  57

in perspectives from input–output to output–input.’1 What does this shift stand for? 2.1.1 A Manipulative Account

Following Steven Shaviro, we should no longer be content with the outdated stimulus/response model which implied that organisms are calibrated to passively respond to prior stimuli and accordingly accumulate knowledge by means of conditioning.2 On the contrary, organisms are active testers of reality. According to Shaviro, they are always engaged in testing their environments with ongoing, variable actions first and only later evaluate the sensory feedback.3 This is the exact opposite of the input–output model. It is output that comes first, modulating the persistent and ongoing probing activity of any entity. For Shaviro, the reversal of the typical model stands for the primacy of processes of speculative extrapolation on behalf of living organisms. Speculative extrapolation can be understood in terms of what philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce has called abductive reasoning. Abduction describes ‘all those human and animal hypothetical inferences that are operated through actions made up of smart manipulations to both detect new affordances and to create manufactured external objects that offer new affordances.’4 So abduction supplements both inductive and deductive reasoning. Induction consists in producing generalizations based on an already given set of observations, while deduction, following the opposite way, produces the sufficient casual and logical sequence to support its initial, generalizing, assumptions. Both stand for complementary forms of vertical, linear logical reasoning, be it top-down or bottom-up. Not surprisingly, close to Peirce, Whitehead too has pointed out the insufficiency of both inductive and deductive logics, Baconian and Newtonian methodologies, traditional empiricism and the absence of any hypotheses. As a matter of fact, Whitehead claimed that were it only for these forms of scientific reasoning and for the experimental methodologies that they imply, they ‘would have left science where they found it’ since they both omit a ‘play of free imagination, controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic.’5 This imaginative play, abduction, is as Shaviro suggests, a leap into novelty, since it suggests a higher-order explanation for the circumstances that concern it or it posits a plausible cause for the experienced effects.6 Abduction is not an arbitrary practice; while its accuracy cannot be guaranteed, it must set out from a compelling reasoning and maintain a consistency throughout its deployment.7 Any form of speculative extrapolation is in a sense a moment of stutter; a leap from and towards a structural consistency while synchronically testing novel operations via the disruption of metastability. Within architectural minds and practices, it is moments of encounter that trigger abductive leaps and potentialize the formation of space. These encounters mark the manipulative processes where, like Brembs is claiming, an architect tests their environment. What is crucial,

58  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

and in a way particular to architectural practices, is that architects not only test their actual environments, but they also test a virtual ecology, made of the intransitive intensities inherent to the openness of metastable spatial systems. The encounter with a space yet to come – a subjectivity yet to unfold – is an encounter with materiality that is neither fully empirical nor solely speculative, while being able to remain abductive and pertain to real constraints.8 Environmental manipulation, in this sense, is always an abductive process. According to philosopher Lorenzo Magnani, humans can be considered as active chance seekers, constantly involved in a process of producing and taking advantage of opportunities within the environment.9 At the heart of his argument, Magnani proposes that the chance-seeking attitude of humans is in fact what makes them ecological engineers.10 In his words, humans like other creatures do not simply live in their environments, but they actively shape and change it looking for suitable chances. In doing so, they construct cognitive niches through which the offerings provided by the environment in terms of cognitive possibilities are appropriately selected and/or manufactured to enhance their fitness as chance seekers. Hence, this ecological approach aims at understanding cognitive systems in terms of their environmental situatedness.11 Magnani claims that when one approaches cognition in these terms, one has to conclude that information is by no means stored solely internally – that is, in memory – or merely available externally, but, and this is crucial, it has to be extracted and then picked up upon occasion.12 The extended architectural mind moves one step further: not only offloading and storing information in their environments, but actively manipulating the environment in order to produce new forms of information. Niche construction, based on psychologist James J. Gibson’s perception theories, is both ecological and cognitive, affecting environmental manipulation on various levels, from the genetic to the cultural. As a matter of fact, what can be traditionally named as cultural nice construction and involves the production of artefacts presents better chances of actively and immediately influencing those responsible for its production, albeit not always for the same reasons and intentions that lie at their origin. Precisely due to their spatiotemporal persistence and durability, as well as their manipulative potentials, artefacts shape not only the production of new subjectivities but also the information that potentializes them. Magnani claims that ‘niche construction is related to cognitive processes which are abductive in themselves, because it formulates hypotheses about the chances offered by the environment and the possible subsequent active changes in terms of niche.’13 Evolution is dependent on two reciprocal processes: the classic Darwinian natural selection in which environmental pressures affect populations of various organisms and, in addition, a process which is based

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  59

on the informational value – or what we call meaning – of multiple actions in different places and times of equally variable populations of organisms.14 Why is it, however, that manipulation becomes so important? As philosopher Reza Negarestani claims, any concept of materiality that does not consider a multi-level account of material manipulation fails not only to explain materiality, but even worse, presents materiality as a metaphysical curiosity, referring necessarily to either an a priori transcendent or an a posteriori taxonomization.15 Negarestani proposes that manipulation is what affords any explanatory account of materiality, and not merely descriptive accounts. He suggests that the manipulationist account of explanation – where any given X explains Y, only if one manipulates X, leading to the production of Y – makes intervention and explanation synonymous.16 Nevertheless, what one is manipulating when aiming to account for any instance of material production are the intransitive forces which condition that production itself. Intransitive forces can be manipulated through a play of limits, an intervention at the thresholds of invariants. It is at that exact moment when ‘engineering comes into play because … it is the armamentarium of complex heuristics and manipulative modes of inference for interaction with the material organization or the system under study.’17 Engineering, or in a broader sense, technology, is a method of abductive inference which remains plastic enough in terms of trial and error in order to be able to stutter so as to interact with open systems. 2.1.2 Architectural Technicities

Foucault asks us to consider technology in a much broader sense, not confined only to what can traditionally be called ‘hard sciences’ but encompassing a population of practices, including institutions and practices of governance.18 To achieve this, Foucault advances a concept in which technology is understood as any practical rationality governed by a conscious goal: technê.19 If an artefact and its capacity for niche construction is conceptualized focusing on its interventionist and manipulative agency, then the very concept of technology – the production and control of artefacts – can surpass the binaries of social and material, human and non-human, while eventually assisting the conception of an actuality disinterested in the nature–culture division.20 In Foucault’s words, if one placed the history of architecture back in this general history of technê, in this wide sense of the word, one would have a more interesting guiding concept than by the opposition between the exact sciences and the inexact ones.21 Faced with problems of the technological domain and not merely the epistemological, the decisive factor is the very limit of knowledge itself since technological problems necessarily cross the threshold of already accumulated

60  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

knowledge. There is no handbook that will ever fully respond to a novel technological problem, precisely because its nature is uncertain and, eventually, its approach requires the deployment of abductive practices that manage to intervene and manipulate materiality. Nonetheless, it is a form of manipulation that is not only spatial, but also temporal: if technê can mediate between the uncertainty of the novel and the certainty of the established, it is because through technê one can find a way to conduct the present into the future.22 As philosopher Marco Altamirano puts it, ‘technê is a way of ordering time and events.’23 Simondon shared similar concerns. At the heart of one of his most important books, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, lies the conflict between culture and technology.24 According to Simondon, this conflict is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of technology which, at least in cultural terms, positions it as a foreign reality. For that reason, Simondon proposes the term ‘technical culture’, suggesting a way of thinking which surpasses that conflict.25 The point of departure for a way of thinking that no longer considers technology and culture separately is a shift away from the utility of technical objects. Aiming to provoke an awareness of the modes of existence of technical objects, one should instead focus on the genesis of the objects themselves.26 Hence, the aim of any form of technological thinking should be not to focus on fixed properties and functional attributes, but rather on the genealogical evolution of technical objects. As philosopher Muriel Combes claims in her book on Simondon, in effect, technical being is invented (which distinguishes it from living being), and yet, precisely because it is invented by living being capable of self-conditioning, technical being is endowed with relative autonomy. This is why, although the fabricational intention deposited in the technical object must not be confused with the utilitarian intention that is essentially exterior to it, we cannot explain the mode of technical object in terms of the fabricational intention that gave rise to it.27 The autonomy of technical objects separates them from the moment of their invention, which actualizes a technical essence. As soon as they are actualized, technical objects formulate their own, specific and continuously specified genetic phylum, something that Simondon calls concretization.28 To this end, Simondon claims that ‘even if the sciences were to stop progressing for a time, the progress of the technical object toward specificity would continue.’29 The autonomy of technical objects, however, is not to be located in the fixity of any terms – be it culture, technology or architecture – but rather in the evolution of the very technicities of each one of them. For Simondon, the notion of technicity is taken as fully relational since, being abductive, it necessarily deals with a constant becoming. If we aim to avoid reductionism, we should move beyond the technical object and study the technicity of these objects as a mode of relation between human and world.30 The autonomy of

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  61

each technical object – or better said, each technical individual – lies in its relational technicity, since ‘technical objects result from an objectivation of technicity; they are produced by it, but technicity does not exhaust itself in the objects and is not entirely contained within them.’31 As such, we should move from architectural objects to an architectural technicity that operates in terms of reticularity. Located within assemblages, reticularity is the immediate relation of events and actions that occur in a given structure, which nevertheless is understood in terms of its potentials for action, not in its extensive and formal outlines, and which should be studied in ethological, that is affective, terms. The problem of the manipulator and the manipulated, the subject and the object, the body and the environment becomes a technical and temporal one, which, in the relationality of the event itself, no longer deals with the application of transcendental design rules, but rather with the abductive heuristics of affective techniques; no input nor output but practices of sensorial amplification via material manipulation and vice versa. Consequently, as philosopher Bernard Stiegler claims, technê could be understood as a prosthetic replacement, one that manages to supplement the primordial deficits of human beings, where both the deficits and the attempts to overcome them formulate the basis of any human sociality.32 What Stiegler proposes is that we attempt to provide an account of human sociality qua technology and not the opposite. Yet, as Combes suggests when criticizing Stiegler, humans share more than default or lack.33 Humans share both a becoming, in their possession of relational potentials, but also a belonging, in the sense in which Masumi uses the term, namely as a form of a social, diverse technology – better understood now as technicity.34 Thus, we may understand technology as prosthetic, but not based on a lack that technical objects come to cover. Rather, technical objects can be conceptualized in an affirmative way, ‘as basic life expressions, and as exuberant forms of invention, expansion and transformation.’35 2.1.3 Give Architecture a Hand

Let us focus now on a technical object all architects are more than familiar with: a stilus. A stilus is any writing utensil, any small tool used to either mark or shape, the digital pens used nowadays to assist software navigation and design or even the pointed needle of a turntable. A stilus however is not only a technical object; it is part of a reticular technicity, a mode of relation between humans and their environment. It should not come as a surprise then, that the very root of the word style, another a familiar term for architects, comes directly from stilus. To belong to the same style, as architectural theorist Mario Carpo reminds us, refers directly to the tools shared and not to the intentions.36 A style, in this sense, is a technicity. We come across style when one examines how an assemblage operates, both internally and also in relation to other assemblages, in its consistency and in the moments it stutters, producing and following new lines of flight. In this sense, a style, including an

62  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

architectural style, belongs to the assemblage alone. Any architect is always of the style, meaning that she is always of the technicity, of the assemblage. She is never ‘the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have a style, it is style that has an author.’37 If stilus and style share a common thread, what about the hand? Anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan provides an account of a particular form of technicity, directly connected with the use of the hand. In his book Gesture and Speech, Leroi-Gourhan examines the anatomical technicity of the human hand, positing its development within the reticularity of body and environment.38 Focusing on the discovery of the fossils of Zinjanthropus in Kenya in 1959, Leroi-Gourhan argues against the myth of the so-called ancestral monkey, the originating link between humans and simians. In his words, if we consider that the discovery of Zinjanthropus in Tanganyika in 1959 established the presence of a toolmaking being not readily describable as human at the confines of the Cenozoic era, we realize that, here again, a great insight was founded upon false or non-existent records; for the mistake lay in misinterpreting the characteristics of present-day monkeys, not in assuming the existence of very primitive human forms.39 The myth of the ancestral monkey conceived evolution, and walking upright in particular, as a cerebral initiative. As Altamirano describes, traditional evolutionary theories – including both Darwin and Lamarck – conceptualized this initiative as a gradual enlargement of the brain, up until the moment that the brain, having reached a critical point, made the monkey ‘think’ of walking upright and using tools.40 The discovery of Zinjanthropus suggested otherwise: the fossils belonged to an adult Australopithecus and next to the remains stone implements were found. Australopithecus could walk upright, its face had a retreated mandible, and most importantly, its brain was very small.41 What the discovery of these fossils suggested was that the brain, contrary to the common belief, was what benefited from walking upright and not its originating cause. As Leroi-Gourhan argues, It is conceivable that monkeys and humans had a common source, but as soon as erect posture was established there was no more monkey in humans and consequently, no half-human. The conditions created by erect human posture had consequences in terms of neuropsychological development; this meant that the development of the human brain was something other than just an increase in volume. In the development of the brain the relationship between face and hand remained as close as ever: tools for the hand, language for the face, are twin poles of the same apparatus.42 As the discovery of Zinjanthropus suggests, the anatomical technicity of human beings is present in even the most primary human forms. It was

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  63

based on this technicity that the brain developed, consequently leading to the required protrusion of the skull in the form of the forehead. In simple mechanical terms, the bipedal posture advances the recession of the mandible, having as an effect the protrusion of the forehead.43 The brain, for LeroiGourhan, is fully contingent and incidental, since its development is strictly connected with the shortening of the face and the stress release that occurs when the mandible shrinks.44 Only later does the expressive face emerge and along it, a whole new assemblage of affects: faciality. Before moving towards issues of expression, however, let’s make a leap in time, to the moment that language, the first stuttering noises, appears. Leroi-Gourhan claims that the necessary condition for language is precisely bipedalism. When an animal moves on all its four limbs, then its only potential way to grasp and pick up objects is with the mouth. The mouth itself can only afford a certain number of actions, which certainly do not involve the anatomical refinements of talking. These refinements can only appear if the mouth is freed from the task of operating as a grasping organ: it literally needs to be given a hand. Bipedalism frees the hands from walking and simultaneously enables the mouth to speak, creating a new form of anatomical technicity, composed of new relations of speed and slowness, movement and stasis in the animal itself, altering radically the ways it relates with its environment. The hand is now digital: it can point, count, divide into chunks and acquire. The hand can finally make and hold the stilus, relating now not only to the surface of the earth but to any surface. It is this abstraction that pushes anatomical technicity to the technicity we examined earlier, technê. It is impossible to conceive in isolation the hand, the mouth, the face, the head, all parts of the body we now call human, since they are all but consequences of coincidental freedoms, emerging in relation to one another.45 The amplification in the degrees of freedom of the limb-now-known-as-thehand is an example of what Leroi-Gourhan calls generalization or de-specialization and, as I will claim further on, of deterritorialization.46 The evolution of the hand and the tools that it uses has its own genealogy. It formulates its own technical culture. While the early humanoids, like Australopithecus, used their stone tools in a similar way that animals use their claws, humans nowadays use their tools at both a spatial and temporal distance.47 There are degrees of freedom also within the prosthetic artefacts themselves. This is precisely what LeroiGourhan has in mind when he uses the concept of generalization: while other animals follow an evolutionary path that was highly specialized and, essentially, internal, humans evolved by externalizing through technology. Following such an evolutionary account, we come across a captivating conclusion, namely, that the distance between ‘the incorporated technologies of Australopithecae … and the detached technologies of Homo Sapiens … is a distance produced by a series of steps installed within technological sequences themselves.’48 The extended architectural mind, in its various becomings, transforms its environment while transforming itself. Meaning, one cannot separate technics from consciousness.49 As Altamirano underlines,

64  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

Leroi-Gourhan shows how the historical stages of technology betray memorial and imaginative advances – from the bi-faced stone whose two-strike construction requires only a two-step memory to the flakes and knives of later periods that require a sequence of steps that must be memorized for their construction.50 The development of artefacts is therefore synchronous to the development of the mind that produces them, manipulates them and, eventually, is produced by them. In addition, as the mind develops more elaborate tools and simultaneously becomes more elaborate itself, new modes of abstraction emerge that push the potentials for the production of artefacts to the limits. While the bi-faced stone resembles a prosthetic claw from its conception to its production and to its use, most of the objects we find in our times do not. A table, to give a simple example, resembles nothing; it is a fully contingent object, the outcome of an abstraction which elevates the earth – the floor – and produces radically novel subjects. What distinguishes human beings from other animals is that contrary to the internal specialization that animals must undergo, humans evolve via their technologies, a mode of evolution which externalizes and de-specializes them. Consequently, human reasoning is technical; there has never been any other mode of reason but technical reason. In addition, we should no longer speak of natural or artificial, conscious or unconscious technicities. What we should focus on is affective technicities and their capacities for sensorial amplification or the opposite. 2.1.4 Concretized Abstractions

While modes of affective technicity are present in a quite broad field that includes both human and non-human agents, there is an element of human technicity which is quite distinctive: the technical products themselves, the artefacts that the abductive environmental manipulations produce. In Simondon’s words, ‘the individual technical object is not this or that thing, given hic et nunc, but that of which there is genesis.’51 How is it that any technical individual comes to be? For Simondon, the genesis of an object is a process of refinement, which should not be examined in terms of usefulness or profitability since such external criteria obscure the technicity of the object itself.52 One should work towards an immanent understanding of the technical objects that is able to account for their genesis and evolution without referring to external properties that – in an input–output fashion – render them as functional mediators. Instead, Simondon advances an immanent process of examining the evolution of technical objects: a process of concretization. While human evolution involves a constant generalization via the external de-specialization of the species through its technicities, the technical objects, assisting in that generalization, follow a process of continuous specialization. In his words,

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  65

there is a primitive form of the technical object, the abstract form, in which each theoretical and material unit is treated as an absolute and is completed according to an intrinsic perfection that requires, in order for it to function, that it be constituted as a closed system; integration into an ensemble in this case raises a series of so-called technical problems that must be resolved and which are in fact problems of compatibility between already given ensembles.53 What Simondon claims is that any technical object is located between an unstable event – the coming together of parts – and a consistent, stable structure – the parts when in operation. Different objects possess different degrees of concretization, the levels of which determine the technicity of a given technology. The degrees of concretization are composed of the relations of the parts which constitute the technical object. Therefore, technical objects evolve in a way which is quite close to evolutionary modes reserved for biological entities. As Simondon points out, as in a phylogenetic lineage, a definite stage of evolution contains dynamic structures and schemas within itself that partake in the principal stages of an evolution of forms. The technical being evolves through convergence and self-adaptation; it unifies itself internally according to a principle of inner resonance.54 Let us imagine for a moment the most abstract house at any given context, urban or other. Once the abstraction of the house is there, let us focus on each of its elements: the structural parts, bricks, concrete and slabs that hold it together to the networks of tubes which transfer energy and water throughout it, to the openings in its surfaces, its doors and windows. It goes without saying that I do not aim at providing an evolutionary account of each of these elements, and that is precisely the point: each of the elements that this abstract house consists of has its own independent history, its own genealogy that needs to be unravelled. Even in this abstract house, each of its parts fails to explain their coming together when examined in isolation. Technological, and consequently, architectural invention implies the formulation of a consistent and coherent system from disparate parts. The house-assemblage that emerges from the combination of these disparate elements is an example of concretization. Simondon claims that, after the industrial revolution, the concretization of technical objects gained even greater speed, managing now to alter and manipulate the very needs that made it emerge. In his words, during the industrial stage, the object achieves its coherence and it is the system of needs that is now less coherent than the system of the object; needs mold themselves onto the industrial technical object, which in turn acquires the power to shape a civilization … the principle of this process

66  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

is effectively the manner in which the object causes and conditions itself in its functioning and in the reactions of its functioning on its utilization; the technical object, issued forth from the abstract work of the organization of sub-systems, is the theatre of a certain number of reciprocal causal relations.55 The relationships of reciprocal causality that Simondon mentions are in fact the operational modes of a reticular technicity: technê in action. In the theatre of environmental manipulation, the one that produces cognitive niches – a humble house being one of the most important – the hand and the stilus do not only solve problems, but, crucially, they pose new problems through their abductive inferences. Simondon, in the same passage, underlines that it is due to these relations, given certain limits of the conditions of utilization, that the object encounters obstacles within its own operation: the play of limits, whose overcoming constitutes progress, resides in the incompatibilities that arise from the progressive saturation of the system of sub-ensembles.56 Architecture, an ecology of material–discursive practices, needs to be abductive; and for its abductive inferences to become a leap, it needs to constantly attempt environmental manipulations. The reassurance of a black box, from Alberti’s dislike for the vulgar world of the builders’ clans to the glossy anthropomorphic droids that will carry out the task of transforming pixels to volumes, is essentially an unwillingness to pose new problems. It marks a retreat to an apparent stability, in the closeness of systems such as architectural representation or in the impenetrable ‘parametricism’ of today’s self-proclaimed avant-garde. Why do we retreat to segmentarity? Perhaps, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, we flee from flight, rigidify our segments, give ourselves over to binary logic because the only segmentarity we know is molar, at the level of the large-scale aggregates we belong to, as well as at the level of the little groups we get into, as well as at the level of what goes on in our most intimate and private recesses.57 Simondon warned of the risks of such closure: ‘because of its very nature, this overcoming can occur only as a leap, as a modification of the internal distribution of functions, a rearrangement of their system; what was once an obstacle, must become the means of realisation.’58 Function is the keyword in Simondon’s quote: the functions of an object ought to be examined from the perspective of the internal disposition towards functionality that the object’s affective technicity imposes. It is not a matter of how useful a technological object can be, but rather a question of immanent consistency. This consistency is the reason why Simondon claims that technical evolution is no different from biological evolution. The moment when a technical object reaches a high level of concretization is the moment when it affords multi-functionality. In a paradoxical sense, the technical object becomes more concrete as it becomes more abstract. Here we need to keep in mind that the opposite of

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  67

the concrete is the discrete, not the abstract. The abstract house of my previous example is concrete precisely because of its ability to present such a complex level of abstraction, one that is made by the multi-functionality of all the other technical objects that it is made of: the tubes where warm water runs, the dinner that is being prepared in the oven, the windows that allow visual but not thermal contact. It is not only the house that becomes multi-functional; each of these elements become so too. A wall supports loads, protects from outside temperatures, connects appliances to networks of electricity and communications while it is a blank canvas for any form of the resident’s interventions. Its affective capacities, its potentials to affect and be affected, have been amplified to such a degree that one can speak of high-level wall technicity. This is why any technicity is primarily affective. The effects of the wall exceed by far and in ways never imagined the initial problem that they were meant to confront. With that in mind, let me return to the architect’s hand and its stilus. 2.1.5 The Undetermined Hand

How is it that the hand is always reduced to the fingers? In one of his lectures, anthropologist Gregory Bateson raised his hand and asked the audience: how many fingers? Most answered ‘five’, some ‘four’ thinking that he was tricking them with the ‘thumb’. However, his answer was surprising: to count the fingers is not the appropriate way to approach the problem of the hand. The fingers are nothing but a derivative of the four bifurcations that allow for a numberless set of relations.59 The four intervals between the fingers are the singular points in the problematic field of the hand. Fingers themselves are ordinary, they are non-remarkable: what is singular is the intervals between them and all the possibilities for action that they imply. The problem that the hand poses, a means of human evolution as generalization via external de-specialization and the development of consequent technicities, is one that formulates its own continuum among the fingers and their intervals. The limb itself, conditioned by what embryologists call Hox genes, develops through a process of constantly emerging singularities. Hox genes are extremely old, preceding the differentiation of multicellular organisms.60 Clustered together in the animal genome, they display exceptional similarities throughout various body plans, ranging from those of insects, molluscs and vertebrates. Their most important aspect, however, is that during the constant individuation of the intensive continuum, their spatial arrangement triggers many consequences regarding the distribution of body parts and segments, which eventually characterize a fully formed individual.61 A limb in mammals is made of different parts, while their extremities are composed of equally variable modules. The actualization of the limb starts as a small bud that is projected out of the embryo at a specific location along the east–west axis. Subsequently, the growing bud is further segmented by its own specific set of spatial arrangements and orientations, its own longitudes and

68  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

latitudes. In the form of a progressive segmentation, this process ­continues until the moment that the future fingers – or better said, digits – are prefigured. The hand, when approached as a problem itself, allows for an analysis based on the differential relations that continuously determine it: the digits are completely undetermined, while, nonetheless, reciprocally determinable in a differential relation, both genetic and spatial. To this reciprocal determination, the complete determination of a set of singularities corresponds, which defines a multiplicity: the hand and its manipulative potential. The question, then, is why we should stop at the determination of the hand. If we can understand the individuation of the hand in terms of the differential relations that produce it, then why not approach all that a hand can do in a similar manner? The reticular technicities that a set of fingers and a stilus produce, the countless architectural styles, do not belong in the museum of classifications and typologies, but rather in the wilderness of the differential relations that condition them. Accordingly, the problematic field of the hand and the stilus should be examined based on the differentials that constitute it as an assemblage and on the singular and ordinary points it produces. Put succinctly, between each finger and each pencil, between each hand, mouse and click, each hammer and drill held, there lies a difference which produces the singularities of any technology, which determine it via its technicities while, reticularly, determining us in return. This approach differs from most of the dominant perspectives of examining architectural styles. It positions itself opposite to many – older and recent – efforts that aspire to ‘call for a unified, contemporary style in architecture and design.’62 Crucially, it does not claim that a style is either a continuation of or a response to a previous style, conceptualized either as a reconstitution of existing forms as Otto Wagner had it, or classified in relation to a hypothetical continuity between sets of supposedly opposing styles – the latter being the approach of architect Patrik Schumacher, largely based on Bruno Zevi’s theories of style development within architectural practices.63 Thinking in terms of technicities does not presuppose any form of continuation or opposition between architectural styles, because it eventually claims that the technicities that produce architectural styles are never undetermined, never a tabula rasa for any form of discourse to assign to them characteristics that only serve the specific requirements of that discourse itself. Thus, architectural technicities provide the genealogical framework necessary to avoid retroactive hypostatization – how creation adds anything to its concept – that would all too easily break into parts or bring back together that which is fundamentally neither a priori nor a posteriori. The architect’s hand is never undetermined: it is not assignable to anything specific, yet fully determinable through the differential relations of the elements that constitute it. Conceptualizing the hand as undetermined makes it prey to various forms of external and universalizing determination. The hand, seen in its generic attributes and not in its genetic genealogies, technicities and capacities, becomes subordinated to a dominant mode of thought, to a doxa. The hand

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  69

is reduced to a finger, the hand becomes digital. It is, however, digital not because of its own fingers, its own digits, but because of its subordination to a very specific logic. As Deleuze puts it, there are several aspects in the value of the hand that must be distinguished from each other: the digital, the tactile, the manual proper, and the haptic. The digital seems to mark the maximum subordination of the hand to the eye; vision is internalized, and the hand is reduced to the finger; that is, it intervenes only in order to choose the units that correspond to pure visual forms. The more the hand is subordinated in this way, the more sight develops an ‘ideal’ optical space and tends to grasp its forms through an optical code.64 The problematic field of the hand is emptied of its differences, the potential for novelty is reduced, the ordinary overcomes the singular: a dominant relation – that between vision, its representational and projective modes and the hand that executes – gains importance, becomes the primary one. Perhaps it is the dominance of this relation that leads to all types of fallacies when conceiving architecture as a translation of annotations to build space; perhaps it is at its interstices that the black box of inputs and outputs emerges. Not surprisingly, it is Kant who introduced the dominance of vision in relation to the undetermined and subordinate hand. If any experience of beauty is an experience that manages to unify the faculties of reason, it does so, as Kant claims, because beauty is about distinction and repeatability.65 As philosopher Claire Colebrook underlines, this is an account of beauty that is geared towards reason as the dominant faculty, with all its attributes being domesticated for the sake of rational and conceptual recognition. In this sense, to experience beauty is to experience what would and could be equally formalizable for others through its representations.66 Therefore, if beauty is to be found anywhere, then it is in the elements that can be broken down – if not broken already – and then, as digits, be re-assembled representationally. With Kant, issues of aesthetics no longer belong to the affective domain, but to the domain of repetition through representation. In his own words, the characterization of the human being as rational animal is already present in the form and organization of his hand, his fingers, and fingertips; partly through their structure, partly through their sensitive feeling. By this means nature has made the human being not suited for one way of manipulating things but undetermined for every way, consequently suited for the use of reason; and thereby has indicated the technical predisposition, or the predisposition of skill, of his species as a rational animal.67 With the subordination of the hand to reason, the human being is conceptualized as rational. By means of its indeterminacy, Kant is not opening the way to the immanence of differential relations, but rather to the dominance

70  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

of the transcendental, this time in the form of the rational – analytic and synthetic – digitalization of both the human and its world. For Kant there are no technicities but only prosthetics: the rational human being, starting with its modes of vision and extending to its hands its abilities of recognition, is no longer positioned in the reciprocity of affect, but in the ‘breaking down/ putting together’ operation of the digits. The more supposedly fragmented the world is, the better, since there is more work that needs to be done to put it back together. With the endless fragmentations that the digital entails, the architectural subject is more than the one who has the privilege of access to each break. The architectural subject becomes the one who has the burden of synthesizing it after its analysis. However, it is a synthesis that rarely adds anything novel to the already analysed parts. With focus being placed on an analytic–synthetic operation that does not wish to problematize – in order to amplify differential relations – but to provide universalizing solutions – that can be taxonomized – architecture has been digital for hundreds or even thousands of years before any computer-aided design (CAD) software or any contemporary parametricism. How can one support such a claim? To answer this one would have to consider that architectural reason and the digitalization of architectural logics were already at work from as early as Vitruvius. Vitruvius was one of the first authors to use the word encyclopaedia, effectively arguing for an encyclopaedic approach to knowledge. Through the mathematization of physical space that Euclidian geometry provided, the architect was now able to rationally provide solutions to higher-order problems. Through possessing mathematical and engineering skills, architectural thinking and practice could not only focus on the formulation of problem-responding schemata, but also on analysing, synthesizing and later distributing architectural reason. Ever since Vitruvius, architecture was conceived as the practice of ordering materiality, taming it through scientific knowledge and eventually approaching an ideal solution. The methodologies for doing so would all be encircled – as in their encyclopaedic distribution – within reason. Vitruvius’s Ten Books, as he himself claims, are the first architectural encyclopaedia.68 Simondon has an unconventional approach in terms of the relation between technologies and the encyclopaedic distribution of knowledge. According to Simondon, the ‘universalizing power’ of technologies lies in their capacity to spread across culturally diverse regions due to their technological ‘primitiveness’.69 A system such as technology needs to be broken down into its simplest of terms in order to be diffused, with any losses in subtlety being reversed in universality. For Simondon, the symbol of any mature technology is the encyclopaedia, the gathering and consequent distribution of technical knowledge. As philosopher Pascal Chabot claims, technology’s coming of age is not heralded by a new invention. It is announced by a book written by philosophers. This choice is telling: it

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  71

expresses the fact that technologies outlive their technicians and that they are ultimately dependent upon the discourse that emerged.70 Vitruvius the scholar will forever be much more influential than Vitruvius the practising architect. In addition, the fact that there has been an architectural encyclopaedia for a few millennia highlights the maturity of architecture as a technology, and thus, the high degree of its concretization and technicities. In a practice common for architects yet peculiar for many others, the later encyclopaedists, especially those of the Enlightenment, observed the work and gestures of craftsmen and recorded them in pictures. However, such a method of recording and distributing knowledge poses a very specific problem. The image is ambivalent in terms of expressing clearly which type of information is more important. Said differently, in an image, one cannot easily recognize which pieces contain the crucial. The analogue image had to be digitized: the way that the encyclopaedists solved this issue was, not surprisingly, through the introduction of hands. As a graphic device now, a disembodied hand was inserted at various pictorial encyclopaedic entrances in order to point to whatever should be most notable in the image. As Chabot points out, these hands probably did not attract much attention at the time of the Encyclopaedia: they were understood in their primary function: as indicators. But today, when the illustrations are themselves historical relics, these floating hands serve as symbols of a mentality. The universe represented in these plates is a familiar one. Man has made his own. He humanizes everything he touches and rationalizes everything he depicts. His hand is present everywhere, obsessively.71 The hand, in its encyclopaedic mode, is a transfer of power.72 It is not in its agency of performing an action, nor in the differential between the hand and matter: power now lies in the floating hand, the abstract hand that points. In a way, it is a suitable outcome: the concretized technological objects and their technicities demanded an equally generalized hand made of digital digits. The ubiquitous digital hand, from webpages to various design software, is the hand of the encyclopaedia. Both the world and our knowledge, both architecture and its analysis or synthesis are but a click away. The hand, as Colebrook says, is digital in its capacity to count, reduce and master, and dis-organizing in its capacity to be released from the body.73 Which are the invariants that allow for the multi-functionality of the digit? What can one learn from the technicity of the hand? As Deleuze writes, optical space, at least in its early stages, still presents manual referents with which it is connected. We will call these virtual referents … tactile referents. This relaxed subordination of the hand to the eye, in turn, can give way to a veritable insubordination of the hand: the painting remains

72  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

a visual reality, but what is imposed on sight is space without form and movement without rest, which the eye can barely follow, and which dismantles the optical. We call this reversed relationship the manual. Finally, we speak of the haptic whenever there is no longer a strict subordination in either direction, but when sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function.74 We now move from the floating hand to haptic vision; or from the measuring digit to the immeasurable, unassignable yet fully determinable, affective technicity that architecture produces and is produced by. When aesthetics becomes affective again, it becomes haptic. It becomes aesthetics of a ‘close range’.75 In such aesthetics, every organ can literally feel the sensation of the genesis of figures from matters.76 As Colebrook argues, it is as though the organs that have been organized by the measuring eye expand to meet the affects of the body’s largest organ: the tactility of the skin, the membrane.77 The question, therefore, for all types of digital logics within architecture, is how to encounter the membrane, and most importantly, how to manipulate it. Before that, however, one must decide to stop deciding. 2.2 The Oldest Prejudice All technicities are affective. To substantiate this claim, one needs not only to understand how technicities are formulated: one needs to focus on affects and their potential for both transformation and the emergence of novelty. The problem is already gradually shifting, its conditions are being progressively refined. How is it that architectural technicities, reticular in their very mode of operation, are attached not only to issues of the digital but also to the affective agency of the milieu? How do affects produce, and how are they produced by information, and how is information understood not in terms of communication but in terms of the differential between the sign and the event? The artefacts that surround us, all the technological individuals that individuate through concretization while assisting our individuation by means of externalization and generalization, are neither in a vacuum nor in a container: the milieu, the environment, is not a third term next to subject and object. The milieu is both subject and object, since ecologies are always in the plural: psychic, collective and environmental. 2.2.1 Trans-intuitive Stutters

The study of the performance of pilots during landing and taxying, especially in more complex situations such as severe weather conditions, has led to some impressive findings. If we attempt to approach the landing process from a pilot’s point of view and if we do so in an ecological, relational way, then we come across the many difficulties that any pilot faces. These difficulties are related to the fact that the mode of technicity, the technologies that are

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  73

available to the pilot in the cockpit, present ‘a discrete ecology that does not sufficiently involve the approximation and convergence performed by continuous ecologies of natural environmental structure.’78 Said differently, the design of a cockpit and its control systems is discrete while being proximal to the pilots, whereas the system they wish to control is both distal and continuous.79 One can translate discrete to digital and continuous to analogue. Both digital and analogue, in their very own differential, produce a novel point of view that not only perceives in a specific way, but rather transforms perception itself by the formation of new cognitive niches. That is precisely what it means to claim that all issues of the digital are issues of aesthetics: the relation between what is intuited – aesthesis – and the formalized systems that allow for intuitions to be given form and repeatability.80 In the milieu, it is not only subject and object that become one, it is also the digital and the analogue that merge through its manipulation via diverse affective technicities. To approach the genetic conditions of the milieu and not the generic already conditioned, or to approach individuation as prior to the individual, involves the deployment of a way of thinking that dares to move beyond the digit. An approach that refuses to determine the world in advance, regardless of its taxonomical convenience or its communicational value, is an approach that misaligns the hand from the eye, the finger from the digit, in order to find the reticularity of the technicities that they employ. In this approach, substances are replaced by events and, consequently, events are studied in their affective potential. As Colebrook claims, rather than see the actual world as deriving from static forms, the actual world comes into being by contracting all the potential differential relations … The world we know and live in is composed of actual relations among differences, but it is possible to intuit the virtual differential forces from which actuality has been contracted … Intuition considers both the potential decomposition that would imagine the forces that entered into relation to produce the quantities of this world (counter-actualization) and what variation of differential powers would produce new relations.81 In other words, intuition is a form of counter-stuttering, no longer a disruption but rather a virtual synthesis, a term that may be substituted for the Simondonian term transduction. For transduction both stuttering and intuition are needed. This is why one needs to practice both the ways of disrupting metastability, but also the ways of problematizing it, of intuiting its genetic conditions. If intuition implies a recomposition of the intensive, then how can one intuit matter as flow? As Deleuze explains, the question is not whether matter is movement or energy or whether one can know if matter in itself is movement or energy. That is a non-productive formulation of the problem. The productive question is in which conditions intuition is determined to grasp matter in motion and to grasp that which is in motion in matter.82 A table, that is, may be understood as a break in the flow of wood: a coupure, a

74  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

cut in the flow. The task of intuition would be to diagram the flow of wood from its disruptions, from its cuts.83 How can architectural thought be attuned – as a very precise and meticulous process – to think of space not as malleable but rather as space information? For there are as many ways of grasping space as there are of intuiting it. In this sense, one does not come across only intuitions but also different situations of intuition. We should therefore ‘distinguish several states of matter, not at all in itself, but in relation to the intuitions and the modes of apprehension that we are capable [of].’84 Among different architectural minds and their becomings lie equally different modes of intuition, their differential relations determining the continuity of trans-intuition. As Massumi puts it, intuition is a thinking feeling. Not feeling something. Feeling thought – as such, in its movement, as process, on arrival as yet unthought – out and unenacted, post-instrumental and preoperative. Suspended. Looped out … Insensibly unstill. Outside any given thing, outside any given sense, outside actuality. Outside coming in. The mutual envelopment of thought and sensation, as they arrive together, pre- what they will have become, just beginning to unfold from the unfelt and the unthinkable outside: of process, transformation in itself.85 So to intuit is to follow the processes of material emergence, to follow the differentials that assist the emergence of novelty while simultaneously probing new tensions, new differentials by practising a constant spatial stuttering, a constant decomposition, a constant deterritorialization and a constant play of limits. To follow the process means, as Massumi claims, to have a certain feeling, a thinking feeling, for its elusiveness and its changeability: feeling the virtual. As he says, ‘intuition is the feeling for potential that comes of drawing close enough to the autonomous dynamic of a variational process to effectively donate a measure of one’s affinity to it. Intuition is a real interplay of activities.’86 Hence, there is no intuition as such, but rather situations of intuition. Abductive inferences and different processes of environmental manipulation are produced by and produce different forms of intuition, while simultaneously and reticularly generating novel intuitions of form. Therefore, among an architect’s skills, next to stuttering, would be the expansion of her trans-intuition, the expansion of her capacity to intuit the individuation of her own body along the environment that this body produces and along the virtual ecology that produces them both. For Simondon, such a process of obtaining knowledge and catalysing material transformation – including the transformation of the subject triggering it – is a gnoseological leap in ontology. Simondon not only reformulates philosophical practice, but he also fundamentally reconceives it as a mode of intuition; a pure understanding without knowledge.87 At the core of Simondon’s approach to epistemology lies a basic assumption: one cannot know individuation, one can only individuate. Individuation cannot be

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  75

known in terms of an external observer grasping it and detailing their knowledge about it, individuation is grasped in grasping itself as it constructs itself.88 Knowledge individuates and assists in the individuation of what it examines synchronously with the ones possessing it: the individual who gathers knowledge of another individual is reticularly manipulated by that knowledge in their own attempts to manipulate it. Simondon articulates the necessity for a shift from both a priori (subjective) and a posteriori (objective) forms of knowledge, but most importantly, he provides us with its outline: the intuition of being qua becoming.89 As he puts it, knowledge by way of intuition is a grasping of being that is neither a priori nor a posteriori, but contemporaneous with the existence of the being it grasps, and which is at the same level as this being; it is not a knowledge by way of the idea, for intuition is not already contained within the structure of the known being; it does not belong to that being; it is not a concept, since it has an internal unity that grants its autonomy and its singularity, preventing a genesis through accumulation; lastly, knowledge by way of intuition is really mediate in the sense that it does not grasp being in its absolute totality, like the idea, or on the basis of elements and by combination, like the concept, but rather grasps being at the level of domains constituting a structured ensemble. Intuition is neither sensible nor intellectual; it is the analogy between the coming-into-being of known being and the coming-into-being of the subject, the coincidence of two comings-into-being: intuition is not merely the grasping of figural realities, like the concept, nor a reference to the totality of the ground of the real taken in its unity, like the idea; it aims at the real insofar as it forms systems in which a genesis occurs; it is the knowledge proper to genetic processes.90 Therefore, intuition is a third kind of knowledge, freed from both the subjective a priori and the objective a posteriori. Intuition is freed from both imagination and concepts, since it is able to proceed from the singular to the universal without compromises. It commits solely to the temporality of its own individuation via the reticular technicities it deploys. Spatial stuttering and architectural intuition go hand in hand, forming a mode of architectural thinking and doing which does not rely on a priori totalities or on a posteriori taxonomies, but rather on the a praesenti of their own transformative potential for subjectification: an informative and interactive exchange between what is greater than the individual and what is smaller, between what architecture produces and what it is produced of.91 In the tension between spatial stuttering and architectural intuition, understood both as polarities of a differential, lies the potential for material emergence and the structural and operational organization that architecture stands for. For that to be clear, however, it must become evident how neither of them have anything to do with any notion of analysis or, surprisingly, synthesis.

76  Technicities of Architectural Intuition 2.2.2 Digitally Broken, Analogically Glued

French philosopher François Laruelle, known mostly for his concept of non-philosophy, has devoted a large part of his writings to the issue of the digital. His method, which claims to be non-standard, aims to approach the digital from within and beyond the distinctions that the very notion entails. For Laruelle, any philosophical distinction is based on the opposition, reflection or relation between at least two elements. Similarly, digitalism assumes a very basic distinction between either ones and zeros or any other discrete units.92 As philosopher Alexander Galloway explains in his book on the relation between Laruelle and the digital, ‘any digital medium will have a bed of genetically distinct elements. These elements form a homogeneous substrate from which constructions are built.’93 In a bold move, Laruelle withdraws himself from the digital distinction, while simultaneously reconceptualizing the distinction as a decision. Hence, he enables us to approach the digital without relating it to any contemporary practice, focusing instead on digitalism as a purely philosophical problem. Consequently, for Laruelle the digital is the most fundamental philosophical problem. However, it is also a problem that already includes its counterpart in its formulation: the analogue. One of his initial assumptions is that the digital should not be approached in terms of zeros and ones, as we mistakenly do due to our contemporary technological influences, but rather in terms of one and two.94 Laruelle underlines that any attempt to speak of discrete, digital units is nothing more than a description of what is already there, of what can already be sensed. In a line of thought similar to that of Deleuze, he focuses on how any unit becomes discrete in the first place, thus making the digital the basic distinction for any other distinction to be possible. In fact, Laruelle claims that the very capacity to distinguish anything is digital in itself.95 Consequently, the digital is defined as ‘the one dividing in two’, whereas the analogue is defined as the ‘two coming together as one.’ These two processes correspond to analysis and synthesis respectively.96 The one becoming two: according to Deleuze and Guattari, this is the oldest and weariest mode of thought, the one that is never to be encountered anywhere else but in thought itself.97 Digitality, the analytical breaking of the world into chunks, is what Laruelle has aptly named the oldest prejudice.98 It is a prejudice precisely because it demands a choice, a decision between separate elements that are forever split, without ever actually being split. We need to proceed with caution: digitality is never ontological, digitality is epistemology at its best – and most mundane. However, if we move beyond the distinction of ontology and epistemology, how should the issue of the digital be approached? If we want to move beyond distinction itself, then we need to be prepared, ironically, for a bold decision: both synthesis and analysis are unappealing. Either in bringing the units together or further splitting them apart, both involve, in the first place, the portioning of the world in pieces.

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  77

What could be an alternative? For Deleuze and Guattari, the alternative to chunking is the rhizome, irreducible to either synthesis or analysis. The rhizome is nothing but a multiplicity: the complete determination of a set of singularities, a combination of the singular, the ordinary and the differential relations that produce them both. As Galloway writes, if we follow the rhizome as the response to the issue of the digital, then we necessarily reach the conclusion that ‘what exists is digital, but what exists is analogue.’99 Difference in kind and difference in degree, simultaneously and reciprocally determining each other, as analogue becomings and digital beings. What remains unresolved, nonetheless, is how one can approach difference – both in kind and in degree – not as separate instances but as a common and continuous process. For Laruelle, what constitutes the digital is the moment of the decision. It is for this reason that he asks for a withdrawal: to distance oneself from any decision. According to him, there is a logical principle that conditions and circumvents all others. Identity, the excluded middle and non-contradiction all belong to a more substantial and fundamental principle, namely that of sufficient digitality. The principle of sufficient digitality claims that for everything in the world there is a process of distinction that is appropriate to it.100 Why does Laruelle insist that this is the fundamental logical principle? Because, without a doubt, it states that ‘digitality is an autonomous field able to encode and simulate anything whatsoever within the universe … The digital decision is simply the decision to start down such a path, the decision to decide at all, the decision of distinction.’101 Why is it that the digital decision is so attractive to architects? What makes architectural practices and theories so prone to an immediate understanding of the world as chunked? Arguably, it is the inherent digitality of space, assuming that we make the initial digital decision to break space and time in two. While time allows for co-temporality, space places strict and discrete boundaries in co-spatiality. In simple terms, there cannot be two discrete entities occupying the same space. What is known as the prohibition of co-location constitutes space as the natural domain of digitality.102 Despite the claims for non-location, dislocation and dematerialization that the second digital turn of the early noughties brought forth, the truth for architects is that any form of spatial production will always be a localized – and apparently, a materialized – one. Buildings are not simply the organizations of what belongs where, and similarly, a sign, often misunderstood for a carrier of telecommunication, is never bodiless.103 In this sense, one cannot fight the digital with more digital, and surprisingly, one cannot fight the digital with the analogue either. To move beyond the digital, one needs something radically outside modality. 2.2.3 The Event Is in the Plural

If ‘to decide’ means ‘to cut off’, then the opposite, that of bringing back together, would mean to relate. Laruelle approaches the decision and the

78  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

relation, analysis and synthesis, through the event. Essentially, what lies at the core of his argument is a crucial question: does the event bring something back or does it cut something off from being?104 Should one associate the event with the digitality of space or with the analogue agency of time? Laruelle approaches the event by introducing a crucial term, one that simultaneously addresses the before and the after of an event – be it as a cutting off or as a bringing back together. His ‘prevent’ stands for what comes before the event itself (in this sense, it is a pre-event) and for what at the same moment obstructs the genetic potential of the event (prevention).105 Consequently, Laruelle claims that to think in terms of the prevent is to think in terms of a universe ‘without philosophy and digitality.’106 Laruelle conceptualizes the prevent by twisting Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. Based on Whitehead’s elegant and straightforward interpretation, one can directly claim that the principle of sufficient reason stands for a very simple assumption: no actual entity, then no reason.107 Laruelle formulates his prevent but altering Whitehead’s interpretation: from ‘no actual entity, then no reason’ to ‘no actual entity and no reason.’ Laruelle highlights the agency of negation, albeit in an affirmative manner. For him, the prevent is ‘a condition where there are no actual entities (no bodies, no objects, no matter, no extension) and in which there is no reason (no language, no mediation).’108 Laruelle’s main concern is modality and its inherent tendency for chunking and digitalization. As Galloway says, to fully follow the principle of sufficient reason stands for the assumption that ‘to be means to think with.’109 To think with, or in Latin, computare. Laruelle’s definition of a computer is telling: a machine that can actuate events as long as these are formulated in terms of the transcendental.110 How can an event be considered transcendental? If an event is considered as that which brings into the world a change from x to y, then events should be understood as inherently digital.111 If an event is understood as that which is able to change everything by means of an addition to or an extraction from a given totality, then Laruelle is right to claim that events are transcendental. However, that is just one side of the story. It is high time to examine the event more closely. Focusing on François Zourabichvili, a philosopher who dedicated most of his work to examining Deleuze as the philosopher of the event per se will assist immensely. Through Zourabichvili we will see how the event can be conceptualized affirmatively, not as a decision or as a moment in time, but rather as time itself, in all its genetic agency; not as chronos but as aeon, as a catalyst and not a mere determinant in a causal chain. At the outset of his book Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, Zourabichvili claims that there is no event except in the plural: the event is always at least two.112 With that claim, he underlines that we would be mistaken if we were to conceptualize the event in terms of a single and absolute occurrence, like something that is born out of nothing. To the contrary, the event should be approached in terms of a becoming, one in which both a before and an after cease to exist separately without, nonetheless, dissipating. The event crosses

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  79

the thresholds of both digital chunking and analogue merging, since the event, in the form of the encounter and its relational catalysis, does not bring forth time as of the past or of a future, but rather time as the actual: as what is always in-becoming. Therefore, the event, understood as the actual encounter that proliferates the virtual, is not modal but genetic. While the recognition of an event’s effects might be digital (in the sense of a sensible transformation) the eventuating powers that trigger the encounter and are triggered from it, are neither digital nor analogue: they are intensive and intransitive, in a different realm altogether. Let us follow the example that Zourabichvili uses. What could be more digital than a throw of the die? Allow me to rephrase: is the throw of a die, both in its predicated outcomes and in its solitary instance, an exemplary digitalism? The short answer is yes. What happens however when the unique throw of a die is opposed to an infinite succession of throws, all ‘reaffirming change each time, appearing thus as fragments of the same unique throw for all times’?113 The indefinite and never-ending throw, the throw on a desert island, the throw which always begins anew, being numerically one but formally multiple, is what escapes both the digital and the analogue, what escapes any binary. It is the affirmation of absolute change, or in Zourabichvili’s words, a pure becoming: an affirmation of the future and a selective repetition that is able to make sure that what has been affirmed once and for all does not return.114 The event as the encounter, the event as the becoming, excludes any notion of causality and probability, in favour of ‘a non-causal correspondence between events.’115 This is Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, difference and repetition, a time which is not measured and a space which affords neither its analysis – in digital pieces – nor its synthesis – in artificial, computable relations. This is also why the event exists only in the plural, only as the succession which actualizes a new dimension, a relation between forces that constantly produce new points of view, new subjects and new signs. The principle of sufficient reason that Laruelle wishes to dismantle by dismantling the event, can, surprisingly, be dismantled only by dint of the event itself. Because, as Zourabichvili reminds us, it is because of the event that reason can form any kind of relation with things, since the validity of any logical proposition always comes afterwards in order to assume, falsely, the priority of its access to any given thing that it ponders.116 The event is the expressible, not a decision or a synthesis, definitely not the co-thinkable, but that which in the fundamental asymmetry between expression and modality, mobilizes sensation in order for it to become sense, in order for it to become co-expressible, compossible and, therefore, computable. So Laruelle is right to speak of the event as digital but only if one separates the modal event from the genetic event. For indeed, the modal event can both break into parts and produce relations, but it can produce only digital relations that simply standardize and tame whatever they wish to examine – or, simply put, can only operate representationally. No wonder then, that in a field such as architecture, dominated

80  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

by an infinite number of analyses and syntheses, the digital, in all its forms, from its logics to its technicities, has become so prevalent. 2.2.4 Digital until Proven Immanent

If the event is that which conditions the digital through its genetic agency, then what about the analogue? Is Laruelle correct when he implies that the analogue corresponds to synthesis, and consequently, that it should also be dismissed as a form of transcendental bringing together, a relational reconstruction of what has been already chunked and taxonomized in digits? In principle one might agree with Laruelle. In fact, the analogue is much more complex than the digital and its transcendental capacities for chunking and relating. This is so because there is, once more, a fundamental asymmetry between the digital and the analogue, granted that one approaches the analogue in a manner that connects it directly to the event. Likewise, the analogue should not be thought in singular terms, but always in the plural: the analogue is not one, and it is for this reason that it will always be ‘one fold ahead’.117 For Massumi, this is because the analogue is a process, always attached to its very own variations and mutations, to its modulations, therefore resembling nothing but itself.118 Having examined the event, we could claim that the analogue is the thing closest to the event: the process closest to the catalyst of any procedural and productive potential. As Massumi beautifully writes, this is the analogue in a sense close to the technical meaning, as a continuously variable impulse or momentum that can cross from one qualitatively different medium into another. Like electricity into sound waves. Or heat into pain. Or light waves into vision. Or vision into imagination. Or noise in the ear into the music in the heart. Or outside coming in. Variable continuity across the qualitatively different: continuity in transformation.119 The analogue is process-in-process, process as transformation, and not merely a bringing back together as a synthesis of digits. Indeed, we can see the analogue as such, as a mere counterpart of the digital, but that is because of the capacity of the analogue to mutate along with that which it mutates, to individuate along with that which individuates. In other words, the analogue can become digital, and even seemingly and temporarily appear as a digital in reverse; the opposite, however, is not true. The medium of the digital is possibility, while that of the analogue is virtuality.120 It is useful to further detail the analogue not as simple synthesis or as the binary opposite of the digital, but rather as the interplay between stuttering and intuition, that which allows for the intensive and the intransitive to rhythmically individuate, that which passes from the virtual to the actual and back. For that reason, Massumi connects the analogue with transduction by claiming that transduction is the analogue impulse from one medium to the other.121 Within architectural

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  81

technicities, one should be careful not to connect the analogue with traditional design, drawing and annotating practices. Such a connection would consider the analogue only in the pejorative way that Laruelle conceptualized it. The analogue, also in architecture, is not to be found in the terms, but rather in the differential relations that produce and are produced by architectural technicities, as well as in the transductive capacities that they engender. Furthermore, the fundamental asymmetry between the analogue and the digital lies in the asymmetry between immanence and transcendence. If immanence affords both production and elimination without a shift in its own conditions and if transcendence requires a transformation of the whole whenever an element is introduced or removed, it is because for immanence relations always come first. By giving priority to the differentials that produce novelty – or anything that is not yet captured – immanent being is always an immanent becoming: the operation of a system possessing potentials in its reality, as Simondon would have it.122 Within transcendence, that is within relations of interiority, both the analogue and the digital remain exhausted in their appearance while both operate under modality: the decision to chunk, the chunking of decision, the analogue digit. As digital theorist Aden Evans claims, digitalization captures the general, the representable, the repeatable, but leaves out the singular, the unique, the immediate: whatever is not formal. Actuality always exceeds its form, for it moves along lines that connect singularities; the actual is not a neat sequence of frozen or static moments but an irreducible complex process that cannot be cleanly articulated in time or space.123 The analogue, in its expressive potentials, can also express digital relations since they are also part of the actual. Were it not for the asymmetry between the analogue and the digital, then none of the schemas that canonize and promote digital – or even better, representational – logics would be possible. It is the capacity of the analogue to stutter between immanence and transcendence that allows Porphyry to canonize Aristotelian thought as an image: that of a tree. With Porphyry’s attempt to canonize Aristotle’s thought, no thing is meant to be connected by its resemblances, its forms of mimetic participation in an idea, but instead is chunked, distinguished and grouped – analysed and synthesized – via the signification of its resemblances. Aristotelian logics is the amplification of Plato’s fundamental decision to reflect on the world as one that is already set apart from its own reflection. In this sense, the whole of Porphyry’s tree, the taxonomies, hierarchies and typologies that stem from it are nothing but an expansion of the initial branch that Plato established. In the horizontality of the branch, any thing attempts to serially approach its ideal, while on the verticality of the tree, being and individuality are left out. With the vertical schema of the tree, one can analyse and synthesize as much

82  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

as desired, as long as one never aspires to speak of either being in general or the individual in particular. In this sense, Aristotelianism and Platonism are both digital, albeit with a different direction. The serial thinking of the branch is a horizontal digitality, while the analytical thinking of the tree is a vertical digitality. It is for that reason that if we wish to examine what both the tree and the branch exclude, that is the individual, then we have to move beyond both the vertical and the horizontal digitality that they imply and focus on what inhabits them: not as a term – the individual – but as its becoming – individuation. From the branches of the tree, to the spiders that crawl on them, to the flies that surround it and to the flights that individuate them; a manipulative and an ethological account of architecture. 2.3 The Ethopoiesis of Architecture If Porphyry’s tree loses its first name, if it becomes more than just a schema for classifying, taxonomizing and typologically arranging individual beings, then we are confronted with the immediate issue of its territoriality. Moving away from the digital discreteness of a schematic tree, we encounter the expressive potential of a tree as a population of singular and ordinary points, a problematic assemblage that produces itself alongside an environment that is produced by it and reticularly affects it. In the tree-assemblage we encounter more than just caricatures of individuals, digitally arranged, horizontally or vertically. The oldest prejudice is no longer relevant or applicable. On the non-Porphyrian tree we will examine why any technicity is primarily affective. But not exclusively: we will also see how architects disrupt spatial metastability and how it is that signs acquire such a prominent role in that direction. A role, however, that is not connected to any form of signification; an a-signifying understanding of signs as the expression of a differential, as the precursor of the emergence of novelty. 2.3.1 Reductionist to the Bitter (Autopoietic) End

Being the father of ecological thinking, German biologist Jakob von Uexküll set as the goal of his academic life to examine what it is like to be an animal, or, more precisely, what it means to be an animal. Perhaps the best-known of Uexküll’s concepts is that of the Umwelt. Crucial for Uexküll is to approach the animal world through animals themselves, instead of examining it as a mode of human extensions. He approaches any living being according to its own specific actions and perceptions. In his own words, We no longer regard animals as mere objects, but as subjects whose essential activity consists of perceiving and acting. We thus unlock the gates that lead to other realms, for all that a subject perceives becomes his perceptual world (Merkwelt) and all that he does, his active world (Wirkwelt). Perceptual and active worlds together form a closed unit, the Umwelt.124

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  83

Perception and action, or environmental manipulations, are central to an Umwelt: the perceptions and actions that an entity affords and because of which it can develop various technicities that manipulate its environment while also counter-affecting it. We are no longer in the realm of the digitally discrete, but rather in the realm of affective technicities and their eventuating capacities to condition a new subject, a new object and a new environment while simultaneously – and reticularly – abolishing them. The more recent and well-known concept of the milieu is based on Uexküll’s Umwelt. As philosopher Georges Canguilhem writes, ‘the notion of the milieu is in the process of becoming a universal and obligatory mode to capture the experience and existence of living beings. We can almost even say that it forms a necessary category of contemporary thought.’125 Through the concept of the Umwelt, we no longer distinguish between an animal and a natural milieu, since they are both one and the same. In this sense, a milieu is not formed by chunked discreteness, by a digital counting of entities and wholes, but rather is constantly forming itself based on its affective capacities. Uexküll introduces and maintains throughout his oeuvre a melodic perspective that not only allows him to conceptualize organisms as ‘tonal’ entities that resonate and harmonize with each other, but which also helps him to distance himself from the dominant Darwinian accounts of evolution.126 He considers Darwin’s evolutionary model too vertical and too hierarchical; instead, he advances an evolutionary account that does not develop in the form of a descent, but rather focuses on how entities relate with each other and how they behave according to their relational agency. In simple terms, Uexküll brings forth a horizontal evolutionary mode.127 Not surprisingly, Uexküll’s ambition for a non-vertical (and for that reason, non-Darwinian) evolutionary account has produced many responses from both biological and philosophical perspectives. For now, let us focus on the so-called Santiago theory of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Maturana and Varela examine self-organizing systems, systems whose operational and structural patterns emerge spontaneously from chaotic states.128 In order to describe the ongoing process of self-organization, self-maintenance and self-reference of such systems, they coined the term autopoiesis: a continuous process of autoregulation and autogeneration. Autopoiesis is a familiar term to architects, especially those engaged in the so-called parametricist turn. Patrik Schumacher, in the opening of his influential book The Autopoiesis of Architecture, claims that ‘the phenomenon of architecture can be most adequately grasped if it is analysed as an autonomous network (autopoietic system) of communications’, adding that ‘autopoiesis means self-production.’129 It is crucial to enter into the world of Uexküll, even in its later interpretations – and misinterpretations – via a defining moment in contemporary architectural theory. Schumacher’s architectural autopoiesis comes surprisingly close to other theoretical viewpoints, like that of architectural autonomy. To understand architecture as an assemblage of affective technicities that disrupts spatial metastability, we need a heterogeneous

84  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

account that goes beyond autopoiesis and surpasses both the transcendental digital and the transcendental analogue. Such an account refuses to decide but does so without relinquishing its will to design. If, according to Schumacher, architectural autopoiesis ‘identifies the distinct elemental communications of architecture as design decisions and identifies the distinction of form vs function as the lead-distinction of the discipline’, then an account of architectural practices as manipulative, reticular and affective technicities could not be further away from it.130 The concept of structural coupling will be of great importance in that attempt, especially since it has been so often misunderstood and misused, even by Schumacher himself. However, it is not the only crucial fallacy that Schumacher deploys when approaching architecture as an autopoietic system. In addition to the inherent ‘input–output fallacy’, characteristic of most dominant digital logics, Schumacher commits another error. In his words, this idea of living systems as autonomous, self-making unities can be transposed into the theory of social systems understood as systems of communications that reproduce all their necessary, specific communication structures within their own self-referentially closed process. Systems of communications can therefore be theorized as autopoietic systems in the sense that they generate their own components and structures within the ongoing flow of communications. Within this theoretical framework society is defined as the overarching, all-encompassing system of communications.131 First, Schumacher prioritizes communication over the much broader notion of material information. Even if he is not solely responsible for this, mainly because even Maturana and Varela deploy and allow similar adaptations of their theory, Schumacher’s second misconception is his alone. This is often repeated within architectural theory, leading almost always to unavoidable dead-ends: the fallacy of infinite idealization. Let us examine how Negarestani approaches infinite idealization, since his account will prove helpful in understanding the main methodological and conceptual errors of most forms of essentialist thinking. Negarestani asks us to imagine a steel beam equipped with a zooming function that can zoom in and out of the beam’s fabric.132 When zooming in on the steel beam the structure of its grains becomes visible. Further zooming in will not change what we see: the same structure and the same organization appears, all the way down.133 According to Negarestani, infinite idealization occurs when ‘zooming in and out of the material x yields the same or similar picture, only contracted or dilated.’134 Granted, there might be some minor differences mainly in the organizational properties of a given material. However, its most important characteristics are preserved while zooming in and out. Why is such an approach towards materiality problematic? First, it is an approach that does not account for materiality in a manipulative way, thus constructing an account of materiality as a mere

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  85

metaphysical curiosity. However, it brings forward another important issue. As Negarestani claims, The infinite idealization brings about a construction-friendly picture of materiality, precisely because it uniformly deepens the domain of the ordinary language which is specific to the stabilized surface phenomena of macroscopic length scales. Since the domain of ordinary language is rich with manipulation conditionals and enjoys a maximal stability at the level of form, it is applied all the way down or idealized as the constructive model of the material organization. But the morphogenetic stability of form and the conceptual mappings of the ordinary language are exclusive to the macroscopic surface phenomena and the world of appearances. They cannot be treated as ubiquitous features throughout different levels of material organization.135 How is it that Schumacher falls into such process of infinite idealization? Arguably, because of his demand that what might occur on the level of a living individual also ought to be transposed to the level of a social system in general, and to that of architecture in particular. If one follows Negarestani, any model of material organization and manipulation should be able to incorporate at least three different domains, assuming that it avoids reductionism: the macroscopic, the meso-scale and the microscopic are all necessary in order to speak of materiality without turning it into a digitalized whole of discrete parts that structures itself and accordingly operates as a mere aggregate of its digits. As a matter of fact, DeLanda has identified and associated three different types of reductionism, each one associated with the three different material domains mentioned earlier. When we attempt to explain the assemblage by dint of the properties of the individuals that constitute it – as Schumacher does – we can speak of micro-reductionism, while when following an explanation of the individual according to the properties of the system in which it is located, then we are dealing with macro-reductionism. Interestingly, DeLanda identifies a third type of reductionism that is found in architectural theories and explains both the micro- and the macro-level by reifying a supposedly immediate level, that of praxis as the true core of any social reality.136 2.3.2 Architectural Part-to-Affective Whole

Both DeLanda and Negarestani suggest that substituting the somewhat vague term ‘systems’ for the more specific one of assemblages, might assist in effectively tackling all variations of reductionism, micro, macro or meso. However, to ask what an assemblage is would prove to be counter-productive; it would redirect the capacities of assemblage thinking towards modes of thought that do not differ from essentialist approaches, including the ones we encounter in architectural theories. We should return to minor questions: when is an

86  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

assemblage, where, how, what does it do, for whom, with which purpose and aim. The concept of the assemblage was first introduced by Deleuze and Guattari as agencement, a term that refers both to the action of matching or fitting together a set of components (agencer) and to the result of such an action, an ensemble of parts that come together.137 Thus an assemblage refers simultaneously to both operation and structure. The main characteristics of an assemblage may be understood as component parts that are characterized by relations of exteriority, thus existing in principle independently of their interactions, having both material and expressive capacities, interacting in processes that stabilize or destabilize the assemblage (territorialization and deterritorialization) while other, mainly expressive processes, rigidify its identity (coding and decoding), resulting in larger scale entities that have properties irreducible to the initial components. For Deleuze, an assemblage refers directly to a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns – different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a cofunctioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys; these are not successions, lines of descent, but contagions, epidemics, the wind.138 An assemblage therefore operates as a multiplicity. Made of singular and ordinary points, it is constructed by the differentials that precede the terms while also conditioning them. Said differently, an assemblage is made of points of view which constitute both the subjects that belong to it and its properties. According to DeLanda, one must adapt the concept to include two crucial parameters that determine both an assemblage’s structure and its operation: the degrees of coding and territorialization of an assemblage. Without going into details, coding refers to the degree in which the components of an assemblage have been ‘subjected to a process of homogenisation’ while territorialization refers to the degree in which its ‘defining boundaries have been delineated and made impermeable.’139 DeLanda claims that one must also further modify the original concept by stating that all the parts that come together in order to form an assemblage should be treated as assemblages, suggesting that we refer to assemblages of assemblages.140 DeLanda is right to claim that the concept should be pluralized and problematized via the addition of the crucial parameters of coding and territorialization. Adding them allows us to ward off the opposition between assemblages and strata – between minor and major modes – since they are both understood now as phases, ‘like the solid and fluid phases of matter.’141 By expanding the concept to include both its expressivity (coding) and its relation with a given environment (territorialization), the opposition between minor and major modes becomes obsolete. Any binary pair is substituted

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  87

with an understanding where nothing is opposed to anything else, but rather everything is in a process (operation) of continuous becoming, which affects and is affected by its formal capacities (structure). So if an assemblage is the minimum unit of reality, it is not because it ‘exists’ in reality but rather, because it ‘produces’ reality; affective technicities which manipulate an environment that, at the same moment, is directly produced by assemblages. However, why do assemblages matter for architectural and urban theory? In DeLanda’s account, any assemblage has a fully contingent historical identity, meaning that it is always an outcome of productive relations, while simultaneously being an individual entity.142 From the largest to the smallest, from the planet, to a city, to a person, each one of them is an assemblage composed of and taking part in relations that are contingently obligatory and not logically necessary.143 In addition, any assemblage is always composed of heterogeneous elements.144 Again, this is DeLanda’s way of claiming that in any assemblage, it is relations of difference that come first, constituting its problematic field composed of the singular and the ordinary; an unassignable yet perfectly determinable field, since assemblages do indeed emerge from the interaction between their parts, but ‘once an assemblage is in place it immediately starts acting as a source of limitations and opportunities for its components.’145 In other words, any solution has the problem that conditions it, based on the significance and the relevancy of the elements that populate it. Finally, and crucially for architecture, any assemblage can become part of another assemblage.146 DeLanda insists on approaching the interchangeability between assemblages as an issue of scale – from larger to smaller and vice versa – but, as already hinted at, scale does not suffice to provide a satisfactory account of the relations of exteriority that assemblage thinking entails. From an architectural and urban perspective, it is theorist Sanford Kwinter who provides an alternative that examines the exteriority of relations as a matter unrelated to scale. Kwinter suggests that the practices of any urban unit can be distinguished from those it partakes in and those that take place in it. These are the relations that Kwinter refers to as ‘micro-architectures’, saturating and composing the urban unit, while the ‘macro-architectures’ are the relations that comprehend or envelop it.147 For Kwinter, practices are clusters of action, affectivity and matter which correspond less to formed, distinguishable objects than to a specific ‘regime’ that for a specific time inhabits the urban milieu. A regime imposes a certain configuration on a field as it organizes, aligns and distributes bodies, materials, movements and techniques in space while simultaneously controlling and developing the temporal relations between them. If we want to examine the emergence of an urban unit, an architectural style or a building technique, its persistence, its transformations, as well as the differentiating patterns of life it produces, then we have to trace, interrelate and diagrammatically expose the virtual and actual regimes that manifest it as a formal solution to the problems they pose. While I support Kwinter’s approach and account of the regime, I would claim that if one replaces it with the much more accurate and precise concept of

88  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

technicity – which already includes all of these elements – then understanding and examining both micro- and macro-architectures becomes a task that resorts to a manipulative account of architecture – and not just a metaphysical curiosity, as Negarestani would say. How can we examine the intricate relationships between assemblages of micro- and macro-architectures? The concept of structural coupling can prove helpful. In a nutshell, to advance a non-scalar methodology towards examining architectural and urban assemblages through structural couplings helps us to examine any architectural individual (any architectural entity) regardless of shape or size, but rather in the relationships that it partakes in and the ones that take place within it. According to the logic of structural couplings, every relationship within and among given entities functions as a medium that expands or diminishes its agential capacities.148 Maturana and Varela introduced the concept and examined forms of relations among various entities as well as the ways in which the relations affect the entities, through their reciprocal – or reticular – development. Maturana and Varela claim that structural coupling can be either unidirectional or bidirectional: in the first case, an entity can affect another and trigger an action on its part, with the latter entity and its actions being unable to affect the former, while when a structural coupling is bidirectional then the affectivity of two entities is reciprocal.149 I would hesitate to formulate yet another binary, this time between unidirectional and bidirectional coupling, suggesting on the contrary, and similar to DeLanda’s proposal for assemblages, that the two extremes are mere gradients within a relational field. There is no difference in kind among the relations one comes across when examining assemblages and their structural couplings, but only differences of affective degree. Niklas Luhmann, sociologist and systems theory thinker, claims that ‘structural couplings rest on a material (or energetic) continuum, into which the borders of the system do not inscribe themselves … on a physically functioning world.’150 Thus the limits of any individual’s figure are replaced by the limits of their actions, especially since an individual’s actions are always relational and affective. That is, any individual deploys a technicity while synchronously being part of one, with the potentials to affect and be affected within a fully active assemblage of technicities defining both its structure and its operation. As Maturana claims, ‘the result of the establishment of this dynamic structural correspondence, or structural coupling, is the effective spatiotemporal correspondence of changes of states of the organism with the recurrent changes of state of the medium.’151 Put succinctly, Maturana claims that when one entity enters into structural coupling with another entity, then it functions as a medium for that entity.152 Maturana, influenced by the media theories of Marshall McLuhan, understands the term medium as an extension or an amplification of an entity’s agential capacities. Once again, we can incorporate the function of the medium as part of the affective potential that any technicity implies. Instead of a theory of communication – as Schumacher understands it – the medium, part of an architectural technicity,

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  89

is first and foremost a catalyst and a product of an environmental manipulation, not the mediator of signifying exchanges but rather the material of sensorial amplifications. The medium, as the continuum of the singular and ordinary points of a technicity, involves both the production and the perception of signs. In the interchangeability of matter, energy and information that any structural coupling potentializes, one can no longer speak of affects as belonging to an individual alone, but rather of trans-affectivity as the constitutive aspect of any process of individuation. Architecture is singular in its production of subjectivities, but it is always plural in its affective assemblages. In this sense, any technicity is not only affective, but trans-affective. According to philosopher Stacy Alaimo, imagining human corporeality as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment’. It makes it difficult to pose nature as mere background … for the exploits of the human since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin – perhaps even closer. Indeed, thinking across bodies may catalyse the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims and actions. By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents and other actors.153 There is a crucial point where I differ from Alaimo: it is not only human corporeality, but all corporeality. If any individual is determined only by its affects as they are catalysed in the technicities it unfolds, then one can no longer speak of trans-corporeality but of trans-affectivity. Within the realm of the trans-affective, the skin, the membrane, as the differential limit where the interplay of any structural coupling and any medium takes place, will become the place where the territory begins and, through infinite transductions, ends. It is on the membrane that the monadic equals the transnomadic. Guattari is right when he claims that the grasping of the fold, of the membrane, only confers auto-consistency on the monad to the extent that it deploys a trans-nomadic exteriority and alterity such that neither the first nor the second benefit from a relation of precedence, and that one cannot approach either of them without referring to the other.154

90  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

Monad and trans-nomad, the body and its trans-corporeality, the individual and its trans-individuation, meet each other not as a curiosity or as a caprice, but as that which folds, tears, unfolds and assembles the membrane, the differential limits that any technicity produces. 2.3.3 Drift, Naturally

Any structural coupling deals with the ways that an assemblage interacts with its world. At least that is Maturana and Varela’s argument. This interaction, however, is never unilateral: an assemblage manipulates the environment it produces while the produced environment affects the assemblage’s structure and operation. Any assemblage both acts and reacts to an outside, but also, and like Meillassoux’s subtraction, it chooses and specifies which external perturbations can and will affect it. As philosopher Ronald Bogue explains, assemblages engage in structural couplings with selected features of their surroundings, thereby bringing forth a world. Maturana and Varela equate the process of structural coupling with cognition. Hence Maturana’s statement that living systems are cognitive systems, and living is a process of cognition.155 Magnani’s initial hypothesis regarding the production of cognitive niches as that which any form of ecological engineering is after seems clearer now. In addition, we can now return to Uexküll and his horizontal evolutionary account, this time with a renewed arsenal. While both traditional and new versions of Darwinism imply the existence of a static and fixed environment to which any individual must adapt in order to survive, the conceptual line I have followed thus far claims quite the opposite. If in Darwinism genetic variation serves merely as the motor of adaptation to a static environment, ecological thought claims that individuals and their environments are reticularly determined, concluding that no genetic code can be separated from its material context.156 All sorts of individuals, both physical and technical, determine their genetic and their epigenetic context through their technicities and through their structural couplings with micro- and macro-architectures. Moreover, if living is indeed a process of cognition, then the signs that populate the medium of any coupling are what essentially drive evolution, be it through concretization or through generalization. Decisively, the cognition of signs is not a matter of a digital cognition, this sign over that, but rather a constant ethological practice; being worthy of the event. Before examining more closely the structural coupling between Uexküll and Simondon, allow me to provide an example of what an ecological, epigenetic account of evolution stands for. At this point we can move from epigenesis to the even more inclusive term epiphylogenesis. Bernard Stiegler provides us with the concept of epiphylogenesis, since according to him, there are

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  91

not two, but three forms of memory: genetic memory that is unfolded in our DNA, epigenetic memory which is acquired during an individual’s lifetime and is stored in their nervous system and, thirdly, epiphylogenetic memory that is embodied in a technical assemblage.157 For Stiegler, epiphylogenesis stands for a theory of artificial selection (as opposed to natural selection) in which successive epigenetic experiences are stored, accumulated and transmitted from one generation and a population of individuals to another in the form of technical objects and artefacts.158 If one adopts the epiphylogenetic model, then architecture becomes much more than just the production of space. The claim that architecture involves the production of subjectivities via the stuttered disruption of metastability through the manipulation of signs becomes quite literal, since it not only focuses on the lifetime of an individual but extends from Chronos to Aeon: life diagrams itself epiphylogenetically onto architecture. In this regard, Maturana, Varela and Stiegler, from different perspectives and for different purposes, coincide with the analyses of philosopher Susan Oyama. In her book, The Ontogeny of Information, Oyama asserts that most of contemporary research in genetics goes against the notion that DNA alone suffices to provide an account for biological evolution.159 To substantiate her claim, she examines the development of the egg. In the fertilized egg, she says, there are three components that are crucial for its development: nuclear DNA, regionalized cytoplasmic macromolecules – what is known as mRNA and does not belong to the embryo but to its mother’s genome – and the cytoskeletal matrix, that is, the structure of the cell.160 All three components affect the embryo’s development, while none of them can be retroactively claimed as the determining factor: in the technicity they imply, they all co-determine the development of the embryo. In their co-determination, signals ‘between developing embryonic cells, as well as environmental influences such as heat and light from the outside of the embryo, at times initiate sequences of differentiation, at other maintain differentiation in surrounding cells.’161 Among genetic, epigenetic and epiphylogenetic elements there unfolds a play of intensive material informational exchange, in the form of signs, which determine both its structural and operational affects. In this sense, Oyama concludes that, it is not that genes and environment are necessary for all characteristics, inherited or acquired (the usual enlightened positions), but that there is no intelligible distinctions between inherited (biological, genetically based) and acquired (environmentally mediated) characteristics.162 Hence, evolution returns to its original Latin meaning, connected to the term evolutio: to unfold. Contrary to the logic of the survival of the fittest, unfolding does not dictate in advance which forms come forth, but instead it determines which of them are not viable. This was Uexküll’s main argument against Darwinism: a theory of evolution should be a theory of fewer

92  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

folds, an unfolding of folds, and not a theory that explains the complexity of unfolding by introducing a static element that drives it. Nothing drives the unfolding but the unfolding itself. It is the condition that brings forth a new world, one that is viable through the very differentials that determine the condition, and not the other way around. Structurally coupled individuals unfold an intensive continuum in which there is no natural selection prescribing any outcome, but only a continuous natural drift. The affective potentials that produce and are produced in the technicities of the drifted unfolding do not need to be the best, but simply good enough.163 Evolution, or more precisely, individuation, is, as Oyama puts it, ‘satisficing (taking a suboptimal solution that is satisfactory) rather than optimizing, proceeding by the putting together of parts and items in complicated arrays, not because they fulfil some ideal design but simply because they are possible.’164 For that reason, Maturana and Varela claim that love, and not Darwinian struggle or opposition, is what determines evolution: not an affective diminishing but instead an affirmative, trans-affective amplification, where any individual structurally coupled with another brings forth a world through an aberrant nuptial, not because it must but simply because it can, because it is possible. As Bogue wonderfully states, ‘the broad constraints of survival and reproduction allow myriad structural couplings but dictate none; ever new couplings emerge simply because living systems are inherently creative, inventive, formative processes.’165 In like manner, architecture individuates along the individuals that individuate it, not following any prescribed and imposed path, or any typological evolution which (in a Darwinian sense) eliminates the weakest arrangements in favour of the optimal ones, but rather by sustaining the contingent structural couplings among the assemblages that a population of architectural technicities affords. If we understand architectural individuation as such, the question then is how the individuals that compose what we broadly call ‘architecture’ couple with each other, how they arrive at a reticular, co-determining process of exchanging material information. To approach this issue, Uexküll and his concept of Umwelt are useful. Uexküll’s main concern is to study what it means to be an entity without being fixated on an anthropocentric point of view. Influenced by Leibniz, Uexküll demonstrates how it is that points of view constitute any given subject, and not the other way around. In one of his examples, he notes how something as plain as a flower can adopt a drastically different role – later he would say meaning – in relation to the other individuals that it couples with: from a sign of adornment for a human, to a nutritious asset for an insect or an obstacle in an ant’s way.166 Any individual affords not only multiple structural couplings, but the couplings themselves, the mediums that they establish, adopt a different meaning in each case. By putting into action his most beloved metaphor, the soap bubble, Uexküll demonstrates that there is not just one world, an environment as a fixed container, but rather that there are as many worlds as there are couplings.

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  93 2.3.4 Put the Blame on the Relation, Boys

For Uexküll, the metaphor of the soap bubble demonstrates how the Umwelt of an individual has a double function: on the one hand, it inscribes and contains its structural and operational limits, while on the other it masks it from other entities. In simpler terms, the soap bubble as produced by an entity’s affects manages to determine at once what is singular for that entity both internally and externally. One can assume, and many have, that Uexküll draws his fascination with the bubble metaphor from the Leibnizian monad: in the same way that the monad is determined by the point of view that the differentials produce, the bubble is an adequate metaphor to incorporate the individual and its constitutive Umwelt as the point of view that emerges from their affective differences.167 In his words, the space that determines each entity can be compared to a soap bubble which completely surrounds the creature at a greater or less distance. The extended soap bubble constitutes the limit of what is finite for the animal, and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity.168 Although the soap bubble metaphor might imply a closed system, Uexküll has the opposite in mind. He suggests that any entity is in possession of different degrees of affective tonality: there are things that leave it indifferent, while there are others that are meaningful and significant for it. His most famous example in this regard is that of the female tick. As Uexküll claims, ‘out of the vast world which surrounds the tick, three stimuli shine forth from the dark like beacons and serve as guides to lead her unerringly to her goal.’169 All the individuals that might matter for any other entity, from the rustling of the leaves to the sound of running water, from the buzzing of an insect to a bird’s song, simply make no sense to her. What matters, what indeed makes sense, full of tick-meaning, is the heat and the sweat from any warm-blooded animal, where she can lay her eggs, meeting a meaningful death. In the meantime, in the endless anticipation of the passing of an entity that matters, the tick hangs from a tree, patiently waiting for a moment that really counts, a moment when she can deploy her technicity by performing a leap towards life and death. For the tick there are three different affects that matter: the sun that guides her to a tree branch, the heat of the passing animal and the encounter with a smooth, hairless spot on its skin so that she can lay her eggs. Deleuze connects the capacity to affect and be affected with a novel ethological approach that renewed Spinoza’s ethics. What Deleuze calls ethology is indeed a study of affects since it allows us to ‘define bodies, animals or humans by the affects that they are capable of.’170 Drawing on Spinoza’s definition of a body, Deleuze claims that any individual can be defined in two simultaneous ways. On the one hand, a body, regardless of its size, is composed of an infinite number of particles that determine it in their differential relation. On the other hand, a body is capable of both affecting other bodies and being

94  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

affected by them, a reciprocity which in its differential also determines the individual. Hence, Deleuze concludes that each of these aspects corresponds to a kinetic and a dynamic determination of an individual, who is always to be positioned between the two.171 In his words, every point has its counterpoints: the plant and the rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never inseparable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world … Now we are concerned, not with a relation of point to counterpoint, but with a symphony of Nature, the composition of a world that is increasingly wide and intense. In what order and what manner will the powers, speeds, and slownesses be composed?172 When approached ethologically, an individual is no longer defined by how it looks, by its extensive characteristics, by its figure, but rather by its intensities and its relational capacities: by what it can do. Any entity is to be defined ‘not by its form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable.’173 The task of ethology becomes to recognize and examine an individual’s affects. We should proceed with caution though, since an individual’s affects are always to be approached immanently and not in opposition to any other. The fact that the tick is determined by three affects does not mean that she should be considered any less important than another individual who presents wider affective capacities. Deleuze advises us to always examine affects in ordinal and not cardinal terms. This is an important distinction, especially if we are to avoid reformulating any type of taxonomical categories. A cardinal series is always a digital one, conceptualizing the world as already chunked and ready to be numbered, added and divided in metric terms, while conversely ‘an ordinal series demands only certain asymmetrical relations between abstract elements, relations like that of being between two other elements.’174 Examining the example of the tick, philosopher Brett Buchanan underlines that between affects, literally nothing affects it. Each affect instantiates a new becoming in the tick’s life. Second, and along the same line, the affects themselves are of an ordinal nature, meaning that there are no states that can be counted and divided without changing their nature altogether.175 Therefore, affects do not belong to the extensive metric space, but rather to the realm of the intensive and the intransitive. They do not sit comfortably in a list among other affects precisely because they are always double and reticular: an affect never is, an affect always does. It is immanently in and of the event, a plural analogue in the signal exchange that occurs within the medium of any structural coupling, composed of sense-events and effect-events,

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  95

irreducible to any digitalization. This is the reason why affects are not only ordinal, but also intensive. They are between sense and effect; they are produced by and produce an event. The crucial difference between the extensive and the intensive is that the former can be divided into parts, while the latter can not. As Deleuze explains, 176

when it is pointed out that a temperature is not composed of other temperatures, or a speed of other speeds, what is meant is that each temperature is already a difference, and that differences are not composed of differences of the same order but imply series of heterogeneous terms.177 Any change in extensive terms is always quantitative, while any intensive change is qualitative: one may divide the volume of a box in two by halving it, but it is impossible to do the same for its temperature, unless by cooling it down. What is crucial when it comes to an ethological approach is that any affect operates on the basis of perceiving an intensive difference. It literally matters little what the extensive figure of the coupled individuals is, as long as their coupling catalyses a difference in intensity that is perceived as belonging to the affective sensorium of an entity that will find it meaningful. For this reason, affects are independent of the individuals that sense them or possess the capacity to exercise them; affects are determined in terms of intensive thresholds and not in terms of prescribed attributes. As media theorists Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth claim, an affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and resonances themselves.178 Arguably, architectural theories and practices can benefit greatly if they adopt an ethological approach. Ethology can ensure that we no longer deal with extensive appearances in a solely typological manner, but that we instead move towards the intensive capacities of structural couplings. Architectural technicities as autonomous media of trans-affective manipulations are not governed by a system of judgment but rather by a multiplicity of powers along with their thresholds. The digital binary opposition between ‘good and bad’ that presupposes that architectural agency lies in the ‘correct’ decision can be substituted with a practice of constant ethological diagramming: the intuitive search for assemblages of technicities that may be productive for processes of architectural ethopoiesis. By ethopoietically productive I understand the encounters that radically enhance and amplify the capacities of an individual to act according to their own immanent potentials. Through transaffective encounters the focus is no longer placed on the analytical terms that merely repeat an ideal while using an equally digital synthesis of a typological,

96  Technicities of Architectural Intuition

sociological, economic or political vocabulary. Instead, what matters is the proximal unfolding of an intensive threshold: a play always on the limits. Before we turn to issues of the membrane, it is important to underline a crucial connection between affects and affordances, since James J. Gibson’s affordances is a concept that comes quite close to affects. Gibson’s first definition of affordances is rather simple and straightforward. He claims that ‘the affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.’179 Despite the simplicity of his first definition, Gibson makes clear that an affordance is never of something else, but only the relation itself. As he claims, an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy subjective–objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behaviour. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.180 Hence, affordances imply a double act, to afford and be afforded. Let me underline two remarkable points in Gibson’s definition: affordances are not properties and they do not belong to an environment. As philosopher Anthony Chemero claims, it is vital to distinguish between features and properties when speaking of affordances. To perceive an affordance does not mean to perceive an individual’s property.181 To clarify that point, Chemero makes use of the concept of feature placing. To perceive that object x is y, that is, that your car is dented, simultaneously assumes the perception of object x, the knowledge of its identity, the knowledge of what it means to be y, and the identification of all that x implies with all that y stands for. Placing a feature operates very differently. To realize that it is raining, that is, we do not need to know anything about any particular entity. All that is needed is to perceive a feature of situations, ‘raininess’ in this case.182 What matters when perceiving a situation is the ability to sense its features, that is, to sense the conditions that produced it as well as the conditions of action that the situation affords. In that regard, pertaining to Gibson’s second point, affordances do not belong to an environment – or any individual in particular – but to the relation alone. If perception is direct, and that is what any radical empiricist would claim, from William James to Uexküll to Deleuze and Gibson, then what is real in perception is not only the object perceived, but crucially, relations among individuals. The relations that one perceives are affordances of action and manipulation, while they are themselves only perceived through action and manipulation: perception equals action while they both operate constantly on the limit. To understand the liminality of perception and action, we may remember that pharmakon means both medicine and poison; it is the dosage that nourishes or kills. The pharmakon that will save or kill can exhibit a critical threshold that

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  97

turns it from a gift to poison, but only if its dosage is manipulated and acted upon. In this sense, when we perceive pills (one or twenty) what is meaningful is not the quantity, but the direct perception of a potentially productive – or lethal – relationship with our own body. As such, architecture becomes the field of affordances per se, considering that it constantly claims, wishes or indeed manages to produce new forms of spatial arrangements, and also new possibilities for action. Consequently, it would be extremely productive if architectural theories and practices shifted focus from an understanding of design as ‘digital–typological decision-chunk making’ to an ‘affect–affordance action–perception subjectification catalyst’; from an autopoietic to an ethopoietic architecture that operates on the membranic limit. Notes 1 Björn Brembs, ‘Watching a Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience’, http://bjoern​.brembs​.net​ /2015​/03​/watching​-a​-para​-digm​-shift​-in​-neuroscience/ (accessed 12 January 2021). 2 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (London: Repeater, 2016), 12. 3 Ibid. 4 Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 318. 5 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 5. 6 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (London: Repeater, 2016), 12. 7 Ibid., 155. 8 Reza Negarestani, ‘Frontiers of Manipulations’, in Speculations on Anonymous Materials Symposium MMXIV, transcript Andrej Radman, http://radurb​.blogspot​.nl​/2014​/01​/50​ -transcript​-of​-negarestani​-frontiers​.html (accessed 12 January 2021). 9 Magnani, Abductive Cognition, 319. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., emphasis in original. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid, 324, emphasis in original. 14 Ibid. 15 Negarestani, ‘Frontiers of Manipulations’. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Michel Foucault, Power, ed. James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press, 2000), 364. 19 Ibid., 364. 20 Marco Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment (Edinburgh: University Press, 2016), 118. 21 Foucault, Power, 364. 22 Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment, 121. 23 Ibid. 24 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017). 25 Ibid., 134. 26 Ibid., xi. 27 Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 58, original emphasis. 28 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 20.

98  Technicities of Architectural Intuition 29 30 31 32

Ibid., 32. Ibid., 162. Ibid., 176. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: University Press, 1998), 118. 33 Combes, Gilbert Simondon, 69. 34 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 68–88. 35 Shaviro, Discognition, 180. 36 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 100. 37 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 223– 24. 38 André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, trans. Anna Bostock Berger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 39 Ibid., 9. 40 Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment, 133. 41 Ibid. 42 Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 20. 43 Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment, 134. 44 Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech, 73. 45 Ibid., 134. 46 Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment, 134. 47 Ibid., 135. 48 Ibid., 136. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 26. 52 Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation, trans. Aliza Krefetz (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 12. 53 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 27, original emphasis. 54 Ibid., 26. 55 Ibid., 29–32. 56 Ibid., 32, emphasis in original. 57 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 227. 58 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 32–33. 59 Gregory Bateson, ‘Lecture on Epistemology’, https://archive​.org​/details​/Gre​gory​Bate​ sonO​nEpi​stemology (accessed 12 January 2021). 60 Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: University Press), 156. 61 Ibid. 62 Patrik Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture: A New Framework for Architecture Vol. 1 (Chichester: Wiley, 2011), 255. 63 Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History and Art and the Humanities, 1988); Panagiotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 64 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 108. 65 Claire Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), xxiii. 66 Ibid., xxiii. 67 Immanuel Kant, ‘Anthropology from a Practical Point of View’, in Anthropology, History and Education, ed. Günter Zoller and Robert. B. Louden, trans. Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: University Press, 2007), 417. 68 Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture.

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  99 69 Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon, 25. 70 Ibid., 26. 71 Ibid., 28. 72 Ibid. 73 Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital. 74 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 108. 75 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 544. 76 Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital, xxvii. 77 Ibid. 78 Magnani, Abductive Cognition, 342. 79 Ibid. 80 Colebrook, Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital, i. 81 Ibid., p. xii. 82 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’, in Seminar Session at Vincennes, 27 February 1979, trans. Timothy S. Murphy, https://ins​earc​hoft​heco​ncrete​ .wordpress​.com​/2015​/07​/08​/deleuze​-metal​-metallurgy​-music​-husserl​-simondon/ (accessed 12 January 2021). 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 134. 86 Ibid., 22. 87 David Scott, Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: University Press, 2014), 21. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid., 35. 90 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 242. 91 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 154. 92 Alexander Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), xix. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., xxix. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5. 98 Galloway, Laruelle, xxxii. 99 Ibid., xxxii; original emphasis. 100 Ibid., xxxiv. 101 Ibid. 102 Ibid, 66. 103 Peter Weibel, ‘Architecture: From Location to Non-Location, from Presence to Absence’, in Disappearing Architecture, ed. Georg Flachbart and Peter Weibel (Basel: Birkhauser, 2005), 265–71. 104 Galloway, Laruelle, 73. 105 Ibid., 16. 106 Ibid. 107 Whitehead, Process and Reality, 19. 108 Ibid., 20. 109 Ibid., 110. 110 Ibid., 111. 111 Ibid., 59. 112 François Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event, trans. Kieran Aarons, ed. Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 40. 113 Ibid., 98.

100  Technicities of Architectural Intuition 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 129. 117 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 143. 118 Ibid., 135. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 137. 121 Ibid., 135. 122 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 169. 123 Aden Evans, Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 66. 124 Jakob von Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, in Instinctive Behaviour: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, 1957), 6. 125 Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de la Vie (Paris: J. Vrin, 1969), 129, cited in Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 7. 126 Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, 8. 127 Ibid. 128 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), 66. 129 Schumacher, The Autopoiesis of Architecture, 1. 130 Ibid., 10. 131 Ibid., 2. 132 Negarestani, ‘Frontiers of Manipulations’. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum, 2006), 5. 137 DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, 1. 138 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 69. 139 DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, 3. 140 Ibid. 141 Ibid., 19. 142 Ibid. 143 DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, 11. 144 DeLanda, Assemblage Theory, 20. 145 Ibid., 21. 146 Ibid., 20. 147 Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 14. 148 Levi Bryant, Ontocartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: University Press, 2014), 31. 149 Ibid., 25. 150 Niklas Luhmann, Die Geselschaft der Geselschaft (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 102, cited in Hanjo Berressem, ‘Structural Couplings: Radical Constructivism and Deleuzian Ecologics’, in Deleuze/Guattari & Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 80. 151 Humberto Maturana, ‘The Organization of the Living: A Theory of the Living Organization’, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 7 (1975): 320. 152 Bryant, Ontocartography, 30. 153 Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2. 154 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julia Pefanis (Sydney, NSW: Power Publications, 1995), 113.

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  101 155 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 67. 156 Ibid. 157 Stiegler, Technics and Time 1. 158 Ibid. 159 Susan Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 160 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 67. 161 Ibid., 68. 162 Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, 122. 163 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 68. 164 Oyama, The Ontogeny of Information, 196. 165 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 69. 166 Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, 23. 167 Ibid., 23. 168 Jakob von Uexküll, Theoretical Biology, trans. Doris L. Mackinnon (New York: Harcourt, 1926), 42. 169 Uexküll, ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’, 12. 170 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1988), 125. 171 Deleuze, Spinoza, 123. 172 Ibid., 126. 173 Ibid., 124. 174 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002), 82. 175 Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, 156. 176 Altamirano, Time, Technology and Environment. 177 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 237. 178 Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Greg, ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’, in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Greg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 1. 179 James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127. 180 Ibid., 129. 181 Anthony Chemero, ‘An Outline of a Theory of Affordances’, Ecological Psychology 15, no. 2 (2003): 185. 182 Chemero, ‘An Outline of a Theory of Affordances’, 185.

Bibliography Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010. Altamirano, Marco. Time, Technology and Environment. Edinburgh: University Press, 2016. Bateson, Gregory. ‘Lecture on Epistemology’. https://archive​.org​/details​/Gre​gory​Bate​sonO​ nEpi​stemology. Accessed 12 January 2021. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003. Brembs, Björn. ‘Watching a Paradigm Shift in Neuroscience’. http://bjoern​.brembs​.net​/2015​ /03​/watching​-a​-para​-digm​-shift​-in​-neuroscience/. Accessed 12 January 2021. Bryant, Levi. Ontocartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014. Canguilhem, Georges. La Connaissance de la Vie. Paris: J. Vrin, 1969. Carpo, Mario. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Chabot, Pascal. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Translated by Aliza Krefetz. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

102  Technicities of Architectural Intuition Chemero, Anthony. ‘An Outline of a Theory of Affordances’. Ecological Psychology 15, no. 2 (2003): 181–95. Colebrook, Claire. Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics and the Digital. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum, 2006. DeLanda, Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: University Press, 2016. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New York: Continuum, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles ‘Metal, Metallurgy, Music, Husserl, Simondon’. Seminar Session at Vincennes, 27 February 1979. Translated by Timothy S. Murphy. https://ins​ earc​ hoft​ heco​ ncrete​ .wordpress ​.com​ / 2015​ / 07​ / 08​ / deleuze​ -metal​ -metallurgy ​-music ​-husserl ​-simondon/. Accessed 12 January 2021. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues II. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Franscisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1988. Evans, Aden. Sound Ideas: Music, Machines and Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Foucault, Michel. Power. Edited by James D. Faubion and Paul Rabinow, translated by Robert Hurley. New York: The New Press, 2000. Galloway, Alexander. Laruelle: Against the Digital. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-aesthetic Paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julia Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995. Kant, Immanuel. ‘Anthropology from a Practical Point of View’. In Anthropology, History and Education. Edited by Günter Zoller and Robert B. Louden. Translated by Robert B. Louden, 227–429. Cambridge: University Press, 2007. Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Lecercle, Jean Jacques. Deleuze and Language. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Leroi-Gourhan, André. Gesture and Speech. Translated by Anna Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Luhmann, Niklas. Die Geselschaft der Geselschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997. Magnani, Lorenzo. Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2009. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Maturana, Humberto. ‘The Organization of the Living: A Theory of the Living Organization’. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 7 (1975): 313–32. Negarestani, Reza. ‘Frontiers of Manipulations’. In Speculations on Anonymous Materials Symposium MMXIV, transcript Andrej Radman. http://radurb​.blogspot​.nl​/2014​/01​/50​-transcript​-of​ -negarestani​-frontiers​.html. Accessed 12 January 2021. Oyama, Susan. The Ontogeny of Information. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000.

Technicities of Architectural Intuition  103 Schumacher, Patrik. The Autopoiesis of Architecture: A New Framework for Architecture Vol. 1. Chichester: Wiley, 2011. Scott, David. Gilbert Simondon’s Psychic and Collective Individuation: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014. Seigworth, Gregory and Melissa Greg. ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’. In The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by Melissa Greg and Gregory Seigworth, 1–28. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Shaviro, Steven. Discognition. London: Repeater, 2016. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: University Press, 1998. https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/ Technics​_and​_Time,_1 Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Tournikiotis, Panagiotis. The Historiography of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Uexküll, Jakob von. ‘A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men’. In Instinctive Behaviour: The Development of a Modern Concept. Edited by and translated by Claire Schiller, 5–80. New York: International Universities Press, 1957. Uexküll, Jakob von. Theoretical Biology. Translated by Doris L. Mackinnon. New York: Harcourt, 1926. Vitruvius. The Ten Books of Architecture. Translated by Morris Hicky Morgan. New York: Dover Publications, 1914. Wagner, Otto. Modern Architecture. Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History and Art and the Humanities, 1988. Weibel, Peter. ‘Architecture: From Location to Non-Location, From Presence to Absence’. In Disappearing Architecture. Edited by Georg Flachbart and Peter Weibel, 265–71. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2005. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978. Zourabichvili, Francois. Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event. Translated by Kieran Aarons. Edited by Gregg Lambert and Daniel W. Smith. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012.

3

Architecture on the Limit

The lesson that architecture can learn from ethology is to never examine the assemblages that constitute an individual in isolation from their internal and external relations. These relations, these micro- and macro-structural couplings, determine the individual in its structure and operation. This is Uexküll’s crucial argument: life starts with a relation, since ‘we see here the first comprehensive musical law of nature. All living beings have their origin in a duet.’1 Moreover, Uexküll adds, ‘life can only be understood when one has acknowledged the importance of meaning.’2 Meaning is what is produced in a duet, but it is also what brings living beings together and catalyses their affective potential. Uexküll suggests, however, that meaning should be understood in an amplified way that does not reduce it to semiotic signification. This is what humans tend to do. But meaning is not human meaning, at least not exclusively. Uexküll’s life project is conceptualizing biology as ‘a theory of life’ whose purpose is to discover how meaning is generated through relationships.3 3.1 Analogue Flights of a Digital Spider DeLanda argues that our confusion regarding the word ‘meaning’ comes from the fact that ‘meaning’ has two meanings: signification and significance, the first referring to semantic context, the other to importance and relevance.4 It is the second meaning of ‘meaning’ that Uexküll has in mind when he develops his biosemiotics: the field of studies that examines how signs are communicated throughout living systems.5 If there are as many Umwelten as there are individuals, then the question is how these infinite Umwelten can relate to each other in a meaningful way – in an important, relevant and significant way. As Uexküll points out, ‘meaning in nature’s score, serves as a connecting link, or rather as a bridge, and takes the place of harmony in a musical score; it joins two of nature’s factors.’6 Meaning is always generated in a structural coupling. In other words, every individual affords its becoming-other and from its affectivity to become-what-it-couples-with, meaning is produced. As such, inspired by Goethe, Uexküll writes that DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-4

Architecture on the Limit  105

If the flower were not bee-like, and the bee were not flower-like, the unison could never be successful.7 With that in mind, we will examine Simondon’s theory of individuation in detail. Having seen how architectural technicities involve a reticular generalization and concretization, how the field of architecture is one of assemblages produced by differential points of view, having approached the digital not as a technical advancement of design practices but rather as a logic of discreteness, having defined the analogue as opposed to the digital only when conceptualized in immanent terms and having seen how architectural individuals couple structurally based on their affective technicities and their potential for meaningful encounters, a detailed account of Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, with all its nuances, will prove invaluable when it comes to finally shifting gears towards a larval understanding of space. 3.1.1 Eppur Si Individuate

For Simondon the question of knowing where individuality is situated is no longer relevant or significant. Instead, focus shifts from fixed individuals to individuation itself.8 As he writes, we cannot rigorously speak of the individual but of individuation; we must come back to the activity, to the genesis, instead of attempting to grasp the fully formed being in order to discover the criteria by means of which we will know whether or not it is an individual. The individual is not a being but an act, and the being is an individual as an agent of this act of individuation through which it appears and exists. Individuality is an aspect of generation, is explained by the genesis of a being, and consists in the perpetuation of this genesis; the individual is that which has been individuated and continues to be individuated.9 Simondon’s ‘ontogenesis’ is the move from the generic, cardinal examination of end products to the genetic, ordinal phases of a process of individuation. Ontogenesis is almost synonymous to individuation, precisely because for Simondon any process of individuation is genetic. Crucially, ontogenesis helps Simondon overcome the subject–object division by applying an ontogenetic method to knowledge: the knowledge of individuation is the individuation of knowledge. Or, said differently, one cannot know individuation, one can only individuate.10 As such, ontogenesis stands for the becoming of being, a general process of coming-to-be and being-to-come that includes both the genesis of an individual and its associated milieu.11 Ontogenesis, according to this perspective, … would become the starting point for philosophical thought; it would really be first philosophy, anterior to the

106  Architecture on the Limit

theory of knowledge and to an ontology that would follow this theory. Ontogenesis would be the theory of the phases of the being, anterior to objective knowledge, which is a relation of the individuated being to the milieu after individuation. The existence of the individuated being as subject is anterior to knowledge; a first study of the individuated being must precede the theory of knowledge.12 The ordinal phases of individuation, a process that Simondon calls dephasing, start from a pre-individual milieu, a pre-individual Umwelt, with its own specific affects, its own capacities to afford what is relevant and significant for it; or in Leibnizian terms, what is singular. The fundamental epistemological assumption of Simondon’s theory is that any relation between two relations is itself a relation. Thus, the relation between two phases of individuation does not connect pre-existing phases but rather emerges through constituting the phases as relations.13 Simondon and Uexküll, individuation and Umwelten, meet each other in the importance of affects. As Simondon puts it, ‘relation does not spring forth between two terms that would already be individuals; relation is an aspect of the internal resonance of a system of individuation; it belongs to a system state.’14 An internal resonance is always of the assemblage: it is what drives the becoming of that assemblage based on what it possesses and what it can do with it, potestas and potentia, its affective capacities. Furthermore, according to Simondon, the pre-individual milieu is neither stable nor unstable: it is metastable. By claiming that the pre-individual is metastable, Simondon brings forth the idea that before any individuality, before any given subject or object, any entity that can be recognized, chunked and pointed at with a digit, there is a field populated with tensions, pregnant with incompatible potentials.15 Prior to its chunking, being contains potentials, reservoirs of becoming; it is always more than itself. It is on the excess of becoming in being, on the potentials that lurk within the structure and the operation of any individual, that architecture stutters in order to affect the pre-individual milieu, where neither space nor time are yet formed, aiming at the production of a new process of subjectification, of a new phase of individuation. As Muriel Combes explains, a physical system is said to be in metastable equilibrium (or false equilibrium) when the least modification of system parameters (pressure, temperature, etc.) suffices to break its equilibrium. Thus, in super-cooled water … the least impurity with a structure isomorphic to that of ice plays the role of a seed for crystallization and suffices to turn the water to ice. Before all individuation, being can be understood as a system containing potential energy. Although this energy becomes active within the system, it is called potential because it requires a transformation of the system in order to be structured, that is to be actualized in accordance with structures. Pre-individual being, and in a general way, any system in metastable state, harbors potentials that are incompatible because they belong to

Architecture on the Limit  107

heterogeneous dimensions of being. This is why pre-individual being can be perpetuated only by dephasing.16 In its pre-individual (virtual) phase, and prior to dephasing, being is necessarily polyphased. Any assemblage that subsists a state change – such as the example of water turning to ice – always contains more phases (liquid and solid) that are brought together, folded in the actualization of the assemblage’s transformation. During dephasing, ‘being always simultaneously gives birth to an individual mediating two orders of magnitude and to a milieu at the same level of being.’17 Thus, a metastable genesis involves the transformations of an assemblage that has not yet exhausted its differences, its potentials: the differentials within a metastable field are always ‘ready’ to perfectly determine an unassignable novelty, a new that is beyond space and time while it nevertheless actualizes them. What is essential in metastable disruptions is that the assemblage undergoing them does so from the point of view of an augmentation of its orders, an augmentation of its informational potentials; its negentropy.18 Nonetheless, for the first of transformations to happen, for the initial disruption, there is the need for a catalytic singularity, a germ, a stutter that will energize the tension between potentials, the disparates. At this point, the thought of Simondon and Deleuze converges. For Deleuze, the virtual is a problematic field, made of differential relations and singularities, that are later actualized by intensive processes of individuation and by spatiotemporal dynamisms. The movement from the virtual to the actual, through the intensive, comes close to what Simondon conceptualizes as a purely relational individual made of different orders of magnitude.19 As a matter of fact, Deleuze himself acknowledges his proximity to Simondon when he claims that Gilbert Simondon has shown recently that individuation presupposes a prior metastable state – in other words, the existence of a ‘disparateness’ such as at least two orders of magnitude or two scales of heterogeneous reality between which potentials are distributed. Such a pre-individual field nevertheless does not lack singularities: the distinctive or singular points are defined by the existence and distribution of potentials. An ‘objective’ problematic field thus appears, determined by the distance between two heterogeneous orders. Individuation emerges like the act of solving a problem, or – what amounts to the same thing – like the actualization of a potential and the establishing of communication between disparates. The act of individuation consists … in integrating the elements of disparateness into a state of coupling which ensures its internal resonance. The individual thus finds itself attached to a pre-individual half which is not the impersonal within it so much as the reservoir of its singularities. In all these respects, we believe that individuation is essentially intensive, and that the pre-individual field is a virtual-ideal field, made up of differential relations … Individuation is the act by

108  Architecture on the Limit

which intensity determines differential relations to become actualized, along the lines of differenciation and within the qualities and extensities it creates.20 One could not ask for a more proper general definition of individuation. However, besides making clear how individuation operates, the passage shows how Deleuze – and Simondon – are both influenced by Leibniz. All the crucial Leibnizian terms are here: differentials, singular points, problematic field, solutions. Moreover, it becomes clear how individuation is connected both with the milieu and with affects: couplings, intensive affectivity, production of extensities. However, for the intensive communication of heterogeneous potentials, ‘rather than the substantial support of relations that would inhere within it, being is defined as affected by disparation, that is, by the tension between incompatible – not yet related – dimensions or potentials in being.’21 How can one define a potential? Charles Sanders Peirce defines it as that which is ‘indeterminate yet capable of determination in any special case.’22 Similar to the development of the limb, determined by spatial arrangements of latitude and longitude, any thing’s thingness – its haecceity – is defined by what it is made of, what composes it, and by what it can do with it: by its affects. Haecceity can be defined as an individuation which directly assembles multiplicities, or problematic fields, with one another.23 In this sense, any thing’s essence can be approached in terms of latitude and longitude: potestas and potentia. Consequently, any architectural technicity would involve the composition of a problematic field, expanding or shrinking in terms of latitude and longitude. The former refers to all the assemblages of material elements that belong to it under specific relations of movement and stasis, while the latter to the intensive affects that it is capable of at a given degree of potential.24 3.1.2 All Is Information

Simondon claims that every individuation starts from the potential of an emergent tension of problematic heterogeneous elements, or, more precisely, that every individuation starts from a problematic ‘disparation’. The tension itself demands the production of a radically new dimension that can resolve the disparity. Simondon arrives at the concept of disparation through a very specific example: the emergent production of a third dimension – what we call volume – in the case of binocular vision.25 Volume emerges in order to resolve the tension of the parallax difference between two incompatible, disparate retinas. In Simondon’s words, there is disparation when two twin ensembles that are not completely superposable, such as the left retinal image and the right retinal image, are grasped together as a system, allowing for the formation of a single

Architecture on the Limit  109

ensemble at a higher degree that integrates all their elements due to a new dimension (for example, in the case of vision, the layering of depths of field).26 In this sense, Simondon proposes a radical theory of emergence that it is not based on relations of identity, but instead on differentials: there needs to be a compatibility, a composability between the pre-individual metastable milieu and the singularity that energizes its potentials by activating the disparates. The consequences for architecture of such a radical account of emergence are immense. Any architectural object, regardless of its scale, when conceptualized as an individual, has no historical cause but rather an absolute origin. As Massumi says, it has an autonomous taking-effect of a futurity, an effective coming into existence that conditions its own potentials to be as it comes; he concludes that ‘invention is less about cause than it is about self-conditioning emergence.’27 What Massumi asserts, is that the presence of an idea or an abstract design model to be represented, projected and annotated by the designer and later on executed via the input–output black box of digital discreteness, is, simply put, secondary. On the contrary, any design idea depends on the autonomous taking-effect of the affective relation. Fully contingently, it can either be compossible within an architectural technicity or not. Therefore, the task of the architect becomes to find and energize via constant practices of stuttering the disparate elements – as they are formed by a technicity – but also to intuit the trespassing of the intensive threshold as constituted in the differential of the disparates: the potential for novelty lies in their coupling, belonging only to their immanent metastability. The architect is a helpmate to emergence.28 According to Massumi, an architect can put the pieces in place, moving through a linear series of steps progressing from the past of abstract conception to a present on the brink. But the passing of that threshold to invention depends on the potentialization of the elements presently in place as a function of their future. The new-found potential expresses itself as ‘operative solidarity’ between the elements, across the disparity of their fields. That solidarity is not the result of a simple step-by-step accumulation, or of piecemeal adding together of elements. It is non-decomposable. It is holistic. It is not a structure. It does not add elements together to form a structural unity. Rather, it is a holism-effect that adds a whole new dimension of existence to the elements’ diversity.29 Simondon is clear that what catalyses the resolution of a problematic field is what he calls the germ. As architectural theorist Bernard Cache points out, the germ produces two effects when its affectivity is disparately coupled with metastable tensions. Its asymmetry destabilizes the energy contained in the resolution, while simultaneously giving this destabilized energy a structure that prefigures the novel individual.30 Cache provides a fully detailed account

110  Architecture on the Limit

of Simondon’s concept of crystallization, one that I will not repeat here. Nonetheless, there is an important conclusion to be made. In the individuation of the crystal, we can distinguish three phases: the pre-individual field of disparate potentials, the germ that energizes their heterogeneous tensions and the final structure of the crystal.31 The point is that the individuation of the crystal – its dephasing – repeats itself without any radical change. A crystalline structure exhausts its potential energy constantly through its individuation, forming a highly austere negentropic assemblage that allows only for reproductions of its established crystalline form. Following Simondon, Cache claims that the trick of life is that it suspends the process of crystallization ‘by creating pre-crystalline structures that don’t exhaust the medium’s potential and allow its becoming to move on toward other individuations.’32 Life is quasi-crystal: it allows the germ to disrupt the metastable field without exhausting its potentials on the very first solution.33 In this sense, if architectural technicities indeed evolve, they also do so in quasi-crystal manner, embracing the stuttering germs and intuiting their resolution. To embrace the germ, however, we must understand it as an element that is singular and new: as information. The crucial issue, according to Simondon, is not to find the origin of the germ; that would not only be futile, but it would also go against everything that individuation stands for. The real issue is to discover the conditions under which the germ will be able to catalyse an effect; to do that, one needs to approach the germ in terms of information. As philosopher Pascal Chabot notes, information can be understood in three different ways: syntactical, semantic and pragmatic.34 Syntactical information deals with issues of information transmissions, and, hence, its concerns are mainly technical: how information is coded, through which channels and how noise can be avoided. From a semantic understanding, information deals with the meaning of symbols and the ways that they can form a message. One of the most important semantic concerns is to identify the shared conventions between a transmitter and a receiver for a message to be mutually comprehended. The third approach, of real concern for my argument, is the pragmatic approach to information: examining how it can affect the behaviour of both transmitter and receiver.35 While Simondon might have shared what one could call the ulterior cybernetic ideal of formulating a unified theory of being based on the concept of information, throughout his work he goes directly against most of the common and popular accounts of information theory. For Simondon, information is the concept that can at once combine both form and action, leading him to state that ‘the notion of form must be replaced with that of information.’36 Information not only determines a process of individuation, it is also that which comes after the germ has been introduced, it is the first product of the disparates. It is immanently analogue, the process closest to the event of disparation. On that account, Simondon criticizes cybernetics as a quantitative theory that is fundamentally detached from his main objective: not to examine meaning

Architecture on the Limit  111

per se, but rather the experience of meaning. Here, the lines between Uexküll and Simondon converge once again. Simondon claims that when meaning is approached as its experiences, then it becomes characteristic of the very becoming of every individual in its affective–perceptive relations with its milieu, with its Umwelt.38 Seen in this way, meaning is far from being the main object of study of conventional cybernetics. As Simondon says, cybernetics allow 37

the correlation between the emitter and the receiver in cases where this correlation must exist; but, if one wanted to transpose it directly into the psychological and sociological domain, it would contain a paradox: as the correlation between the emitter and receiver becomes tighter, the quantity of information decreases. Thus, for example, in a totally realized apprenticeship, the operator merely requires a very small quantity of information from the emitter, i.e. from the object on which he works, from the machine he controls. The best form would therefore be one that requires the least quantity of information. This is not something that seems possible.39 In other words, cybernetics tend to reduce being into simplified technical schemas. Close to Platonist and Aristotelian schematizations, cybernetics tends to advance an understanding of being that exists through verbs such as control, command, communicate, move, act and react.40 It is no surprise that Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, formulates its principles from a strictly military perspective, with all the inherent digitalism that this entails. The American government commissioned Wiener to develop a device that could automatically aim and fire an anti-aircraft missile during the Second World War. The main purpose was to produce the first device able to locate its target and then fire a missile that would hit it in its trajectory.41 The initial information of the target, broken into digits of speed and location, was used by Wiener’s device to predict the future location of the target. Wiener’s ‘feed-back’ device is probably one of the most straightforward examples of digital logics: analysis and synthesis, always in extensive terms and always as the breaking down and putting together of chunked parts. The cybernetic approach to information reduced it to its mere syntactical and semantic dimensions: each machine reacting to the signs it receives from the previous, each operating in a fully linear way. Essentially, everything was a matter of control and prediction. This early cybernetic attitude spread to various fields, including architecture. The parametricist’s dream is an architectural practice in which everything that matters ought to ‘take place in the intimacy of a control room, where the material operators were represented and controlled at a distance.’42 3.1.3 Parametricist Scholasticism

Mario Carpo directly connects the digital – mostly understood as a mode of architectural production – with one of the key aspirations of modernity,

112  Architecture on the Limit

namely the production of identical copies.43 He claims that the digital turn in architecture simultaneously ends two crucial paradigms within architectural thinking and doing. Carpo suggests that the digital surpasses both the Albertian notion of architectural design – understood as that which separates designing an architectural object and then building it as an identical copy of the design – and the mass production of identical copies that became possible through the industrial revolution.44 According to Carpo, the digital is variable and as such, digital variability goes counter to all the postulates of identicality that have informed the history of Western cultural technologies for the last five centuries. In architecture this means the end of notational limitations, of industrial standardization, and, more generally, of the Albertian and authorial way of building by design.45 Carpo’s claim that everything that is digital is variable is only partially accurate. What Carpo misses is that the digital is extensively variable. Within the transcendental realm of the decision, digital architectural production seems to come up with variable objects. For Carpo, what characterizes digital architecture is the fact that, essentially, design is no longer the design of an object but rather the design of a sequence of numbers: a digital file.46 Digital files later converge into objects, after a series of steps which might not even be under the control of the initial author of the design, but rather handled by different agents. Aside from the implication of the input–output logics that such an approach assumes, one comes across another crucial point: control. What we encountered as the language and logics of cybernetics – control, command, communicate, move, act and react – become what supposedly produces architectural variability. In this sense, Carpo conceptualizes architectural design as a purely informational operation, a claim that I support but with a radically different understanding of information, as will soon become apparent. For the moment, one cannot but wonder if the cyberneticist approach to information that Carpo considers revolutionary, does indeed produce architectural variability. Equally, if not more importantly, why is variability, extensive and typological diversity of any value? One should have in mind that difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given. Difference is not the phenomenon but the noumenon closest to the phenomenon. It is therefore true that God makes the world by calculating, but his calculations never work out exactly, and this inexactitude or injustice in the result, this irreducible inequality, forms the condition of the world. The world ‘happens’ while God calculates; if the calculation were exact there would be no world. The world can be regarded as a ‘remainder’, and the real in the world understood in terms of fractional or even incommensurable numbers. Every phenomenon refers to an inequality by which it is conditioned. Every diversity

Architecture on the Limit  113

and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity.47 Deleuze is claiming that variation, especially of the extensive kind, is an effect of an intensive difference. It is the primacy of affective differentials and the technicities they constitute, the ways that the tension between the disparates energizes the pre-individual milieu, triggering individuation, that forms a particular informational mode. This mode, nonetheless, has nothing in common with the digital discreteness of cybernetics. That is, variation for the sake of variation, and diversity for the sake of algorithmic fetishism, leads to a mixture of traditional versions of digital logics: Platonic horizontal digitalism and Aristotelian vertical digitalism. Even Carpo unwillingly admits so by claiming that parametricism can bring forth ‘a new scholasticism of sorts, based on algorithmically defined fixed genera and endlessly morphing species.’48 Notably, it was Bernard Cache and Patrick Beaucé who with their ‘table projective’ came to fulfil many of the premises of digital architectural production, even though they focus only on the production of small furniture: the serial yet customized production of technical objects, mass-produced on an industrial scale and at industrial cost, yet variable and with different formal outlines based on the parameters that each client set. The first attempt at a file-to-factory design was exhibited, asking the client/user to choose, control and select from several given parameters such as height and width, preparing the file that was later to be executed and built in the factory. Input–output at its best, this time with the illusion of parametric manipulation. However, manipulation is either wild and free, speculatively extrapolating a world yet to come, or is merely pretentious, at best. Before returning to a Simondonian account of information, one fundamentally opposed to the cybernetic–parametricist approach, it is worth highlighting a rudimentary misconception. Carpo uses the concept of the objectile, initially developed by Cache and Deleuze, adjusting it to the demands and expectations of algorithmic architectural practices. In doing so, however, he profoundly alters its logics. As Carpo says, the objectile should not be seen as an object but ‘as an algorithm – a parametric function which may determine an infinite variety of objects, all different (one for each set of parameters) yet all similar (as the underlying function is the same for all).’49 Carpo claims that an objectile is a fixed normative genus capable of engendering infinitely variable visual species coming from the same algorithmic code. Thus, it makes the observer grasp their similarities by recognizing ‘meaningful patterns in a stream of endlessly variable visual signs’, concluding that an objectile in this sense is generic, the general category to which the objects it produces belong.50 This last aspect in Carpo’s account of the objectile is what makes the crucial difference; in Deleuze, the objectile is not, as Carpo claims, generic but, on the contrary, genetic. The objectile, Deleuze writes,

114  Architecture on the Limit

refers neither to the beginnings of the industrial era nor to the idea of the standard that still upheld a semblance of essence and imposed a law of constancy (‘The Object produced by and for the masses’), but to our current state of things, where fluctuation of the norm replaces the permanence of a law … The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mould – in other words, to a relation of form-matter – but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form.51 It is no coincidence that Deleuze’s definition of the objectile is found in his book on Leibniz. Precisely because of his radical approach to Leibniz, Deleuze refers to the objectile as that which can break loose from the form– matter binary in order to introduce the much more anti-typological and antiessentialist concept of modulation, a concept that he takes directly from Simondon. The objectile stands as a different term for individuation, this time involving the technical individual and its evolution through the affective unfolding that determines its yet unassignable structural and operative affordances. It does not, by any means, stand for a reformulation of an Aristotelian taxonomization based on genera and species. Digitally controlled mass customization, a phrase taken ad verbatim from Carpo, is exactly the opposite of what Deleuze – and Simondon – had in mind.52 The objectile was never about the object produced by and for the masses, even when it is formally customizable. Said differently, when customization is massive, the objectile becomes just another word for essence, this time to be defined as the pre-set parameters that one is given the freedom of choice to adjust; the red pill or the blue pill. But what about another pill, one that is both informational and a-signifying, neither transcendentally analogue nor digital? What about a pill that individuates along with that which individuates it? 3.1.4 Transductive Modulations under the Allagmatic Bridge

The importance of meaning can only be understood once it is established that signs are produced by disparates, by difference itself. The Simondonian concept of information not only substitutes the cybernetic misinterpretations of the term, but, importantly, it relocates the relation between signal and sign within individuation itself. It is difference in itself that relates heterogeneous series and disparate singularities, that causes sensibility and thought to emerge as a resolution of a difference in potential, an intensive difference.53 As Simondon explains, information is located ‘between two halves of a system in a relation of disparation.’54 The aforesaid makes clear the extent to which Deleuze’s definition of the signal and sign comes from a thorough reading of Simondon. According to Deleuze, ‘by signal we mean a system with orders of disparate size, endowed with elements of dissymmetry; by sign, we mean what happens within such a system, what flashes across the intervals when a communication takes place between disparates.’55

Architecture on the Limit  115

Following Simondon, Deleuze understands the individual as a signal–sign assemblage. Simultaneously, the individual is also conceptualized as a series of events, as a dephasing process of individuation. Hence, Deleuze claims that ‘every phenomenon flashes in a signal-sign system … Individuals are signal-sign systems. All individuality is intensive … comprising and affirming in itself the differences in intensities by which it is constituted.’56 A signal is an assemblage composed of intensive disparates, of different and heterogeneous orders of magnitude, that through the disruptive agency of a singular germ, produces an informational effect among the disparates. A signal is itself metastable, since it belongs to the pre-individual milieu and stands for its affective potentials. Simply put, signals are pre-individual, metastable affects: the expressive and action-oriented potentials of an individual, before the individual is even constituted, as formed only by its virtuality. Accordingly, a sign has nothing to do with signification or with the recognition of an individual and its so-called qualities. A sign is an intensity that is produced through the resolution of tensions between signalling disparates. Moreover, at the moment of its production through sensation and its metastable signals, the sign refers directly to sense while it reticularly redirects and transforms sense itself. Signs deal with an immediate sensorial amplification: bootstrapping affective capacities while synchronously individuating them. Once having escaped the pre-individual signals, once having crossed the threshold of an intensive difference, signs are the purely sensible intuition of that crossing. This is why they do not deal with signification – or recognition – but can instead only be felt, a reticular affective experience that belongs to no one and to everyone at the same time, a non-subjective memory of the pre-individual. They constitute a fourth type of memory: in addition to genetic, epigenetic and epiphylogenetic comes the memory of an impersonal individuation, as that which folds and unfolds all the rest through a synchronous experience of both actual and virtual differentials, through the affects an individual has and the ones it could have had, were it to feel differently. It is for this reason that architecture, through practices of stuttering and intuition, can transform sense itself: disrupting metastability, creating new points of view, new signs and novel senses, producing new affects and, eventually, different individuals. Consequently, as hinted earlier, Carpo is right when he claims that architecture is an informational operation. However, we are now dealing with a radically different understanding of information. In the Simondonian account I am recounting, information is ‘the signification that will emerge when an operation of individuation will discover the dimension according to which two disparate reals can become a system.’57 Signification is understood as meaning, as that which makes sense for an individual who longs to feel different in order to individuate differently, in order to form new alliances, new encounters that will amplify and empower its affects. In this sense, the sign is the first step towards an individual worthy of the event, the compass of an ethology that goes beyond binaries, beyond good and evil. For that reason,

116  Architecture on the Limit

Simondon assigns to information two crucial characteristics. As philosopher Jean-Hugues Barthélémy explains, the fundamental condition for there to be information is not a particular state of the emitter, nor is it a property of the message, but a particular state of the receiver, which Simondon qualifies as metastable because it is charged with potentiality so as to make becoming-informed possible. This information as the transmission of the message is nothing but a perpetuated genesis of the receiver – because all information is genesis – and there is a ‘first information’ in which emitter and receiver do not yet exist. The condition of possibility here is a first metastability which is picked up by the information receiver when information is message transmission.58 Simondon conceives information as a universal process that concerns all being and claims that it is indeed the formula for individuation.59 More precisely, information is ‘an initiation of individuation, a requirement for individuation, for the passage from the metastable to the stable, it is never a given thing.’60 How is it then that an individual emerges from the informational resolution of a disparate tension? Responding to that question, Simondon introduces the concept of transduction, able to account for the emergence of both the structural and operational consistency that characterizes an individual. Between an already structured individual and its milieu, between the operational potentials of an individual and its milieu, Simondon recognizes the significance of the limit: that which is neither structure nor potential.61 The limit – or the membrane – belongs neither to the past nor to the future, but to a constant present, the a praesenti of being in becoming and becoming in being. On the limit that constantly shifts and transforms, grows and shrinks, both the past and the future inform each other. Through the disparity of their informational differential, the individual, itself polyphased, passes through the ongoing dephasing of its individuation. For Simondon, the limit is the here-and-now of individuation. It is where the propagation of information about a yet undetermined milieu occurs; it is where transduction takes place.62 In simple terms, transduction may be defined as the process whereby a domain undergoes information, where one individual finds its principle of constitution in another. Simondon will define transduction as a physical, biological, mental, or social operation through which an activity propagates incrementally within a domain by basing this propagation on a structuration of the domain operated from one region to another: each structural region serves as a principle and model, as an initiator for constituting the following region, such that a modification thereby extends progressively throughout this structuring operation.63 Simondon conceptualizes transduction as composed by two reticular processes that complement informational propagation: allagmatics and

Architecture on the Limit  117

modulation. Let me first examine the second, before focusing on allagmatics and returning to transduction. By the time this endeavour is complete, we will have a comprehensive overview of the most significant aspects of Simondonian ontogenesis and will be prepared to return to Uexküll – albeit from a novel point of view. The first transductive principle, where an individual finds its principle of constitution in another, brings forth the binary opposition between matter and form. Simondon, arguing against the traditional hylomorphic schema that separates matter and form, claims that essentially any such separation entails the distinction between structure and operation, while at the same moment, it turns thought towards representation.64 He refuses to grasp the structure of being without the operation, and the operation without the structure.65 On the contrary, he proposes that in order to study individuation one must leave the hylomorphic binary pairing behind, and be situated not only in the temporal middle – a praesenti – but also in a relational middle ground – au milieu, in the Umwelt itself. Let us examine the example that Simondon uses to break the matter–form binary pair and introduce the concept of modulation: the process of moulding. Moulding, as the hylomorphic schema would have it, consists of the imprint of an ideal form – the mould – upon passive and inert matter – the clay. Simondon’s first point is that the clay itself is neither passive nor inert, since it has its own capacities, its own affects – in terms of its plasticity for example – and based on these affective capacities, it has already undergone an initial preparation by the craftsman.66 Furthermore, the mould is not an abstract and ideal form, but rather a specific material frame, that actualizes its material composition, as structured in its shape, onto another material assemblage. What happens between the clay and the mould before they both produce a third individual? As Simondon claims, a reciprocal assumption of form, an information, occurs between the clay and the mould, an occurrence he terms modulation: a continuous temporal moulding.67 Clay and mould constitute the pre-individual milieu of the brick, the different orders of magnitude needed to individuate, with all the efforts of the artisan – such as the increase in temperature or applied pressure – being the singular seeds, the germs, that catalyse the resolution of the clay–mould tension. The form of the brick lies as a signal, a fully contingent virtuality that depends on the affective technicities that engender it, while the gradual actualization of the brick involves a constant exchange of signs between clay, mould, artisan and all the other individuals that enter in relations of intensive difference. It is for this reason that Deleuze claims that modulation ‘is the operation of the Real.’68 Each new individuation modulates an individual – even one that has undergone multiple individuations already, even if this individuation is not its own – through novel disruptions of metastability which produce new tensions in the milieu. Individuation modulates the individual precisely because it demands that it reorganize its limits – its membrane – and consequently, that it alter both its structure and its operation. As Simondon puts it,

118  Architecture on the Limit

the principle of individuation of the brick is neither the clay nor the mould: other bricks than this will emerge from this pile of clay and this mould, and they will each have their own haecceity, but the principle of individuation is this operation through which the clay, at a given moment in an energetic system that consisted of the smallest details of the mould as well as the smallest pilings of this humid earth, has taken form under a certain pressure, distributed in a certain way, diffused in a certain way, and actualized in a certain way: there has been a moment when the energy of the pressure has been transmitted in all directions from each molecule to all the others, from the clay to the walls and from the walls to the clay: the principle of individuation is the operation that realizes an energetic exchange between the form and the matter up to the point that the ensemble ends in a state of equilibrium. It could be said that the principle of individuation is the allagmatic operation common to matter and form through the actualization of potential energy. This energy is the energy of a system; it can produce effects in all the points of the system equally, is available, and can be communicated.69 Moving to allagmatics, Simondon defines it as the theory of operations.70 More accurately, allagmatics is the theory of operations that modulate structures through the transductive propagation of information in a milieu. Simondon considers most positive sciences to be sciences of generic structures. Hence, he proposes that allagmatics can stand as a science of genetic operations, since it is the operation which makes a structure appear or which modifies a structure.71 It is not that Simondon favours operations. Rather, he wishes to speak of operations and structures as one common process of reticular modulation. Put succinctly, for Simondon an operation is the conversion of a structure into another structure. In this sense, no operation can be determined outside a structure: any operation is always immanent to the structure that undergoes it.72 Hence, to define an operation will amount to defining a certain convertibility of operation into structure and of structure into operation, insofar as the operation effectuates the transformation of one structure into another structure and is therefore invested with the previous structure that will be reconverted at the end of the operation into the following structure.73 Allagmatics deal with a reticular operation that has both modulational and informational aspects. They bind together the transformation of a structure to another through an operation, as well as the transformation of an operation to another through the constraints imposed by a structure. Understood as such, allagmatics simultaneously assign structure and operation to both the actual and the virtual. There are virtual structures (the pre-individual milieu) that undergo actual operations (the resolution of tensions) and virtual operations (transduction) that transform actual structures (modulation through information).

Architecture on the Limit  119

Returning to transduction, we can now understand it as a dynamic relation which, based on the affective capacities of the individuals that form a milieu, determines at once their structural and operational potentials. The determination of their potentials is essentially what provides any sense of unity, of shared meaning within the milieu. It is shared precisely because it drives their trans-individuation, and means something precisely because it is informational: signs that in their perception assist in the further individuation of the milieu. The milieu itself, consequently, is metastable since one needs to ‘consider energetic regimes and structural states as convertible with one another through an ensemble’s becoming.’74 However, in order to become with the milieu, every individual needs to be able to dislocate itself from itself. From that perspective, transduction also implies the structure and the operation of a continuous dislocation, a constant ‘becoming-imperceptible’, that produces either an active or a reactive subject, depending on the ways that it dissipates in its milieu, becoming one with that milieu or closing in on itself. Meillassoux’s distinction between an active and a reactive individual highlights why stuttering can be understood as a practice that wishes to assist any transductive process. Through spatial stuttering, a niche emerges where both virtual and actual structures and operations can be informed by propagating information about the milieu that affords them. The moment when an architect stutters, she dislocates herself, affording the potential of intuiting a novel sign, a different sense information, that can assist in modulating novel structures that can change the very operational affects of a space that has yet to be actualized. However, no individual alone is capable of transduction. It is only when an individual is considered as inseparable from its Umwelt – what Simondon calls its associated milieu – that it becomes capable of transductively becoming-other. An individual, therefore, is ‘neither absolute nor illusory but relative; it has the reality of the relational act.’75 In its relationality and in the reticularity of its technicities, an individual can follow a line of flight. As such, an individual is a pioneer; its existence is a bridge because it abandons all the habits that would just maintain its negentropy, that would merely assist in its gradual enclosure, and instead opts for opening to its milieu.76 In doing so, though, it invents novel milieus. As Simondon claims, the ‘pure’ individual does not belong to a colony but ‘it is inserted between two colonies without being integrated in either, and both its birth and its end reach an equilibrium to the extent that it emanates from one community but engenders another; it is relation.’77 A relation that continuously invents itself through the ways in which it informs itself. A relation that can make a spider fly. As Uexküll puts it, the spider’s web is certainly formed in a ‘fly-like’ manner, because the spider itself is ‘fly-like’. To be ‘fly-like’ means that the body structure of the spider has taken on certain of the fly’s characteristics – not from a specific fly, but rather from the fly’s archetype. To express it more accurately, the

120  Architecture on the Limit

spider’s ‘fly-likeness’ comes about when its body structure has adopted certain themes from the fly’s melody.78 The archetype of the fly, its melody, is the shared transductions between it and the spider; the shared trans-individuation that they both undergo through an informational propagation within their milieu, which they modulate and which, in turn, modulates them. The fact that the spider can become a fly means that it can produce signs that are meaningful to the fly; and to produce such signs means that it can inform itself from the disparate signals that produced the fly. The spider anticipates the flight of the fly, spinning its web in a dimension that the flight cannot perceive. It produces a novel dimension, a resolution of disparates that lures the fly straight into the web. The spider can adopt the point of view of the insect, hence becoming a fly itself; from the discreteness of two separate entities, to the immanently analogue flight that makes them become literally one: parts of the same ontogenetic melody. The spider’s web, an individual in its own right, produced by the spider’s technicities in a manner that differs only in degree from any architectural technicity, ‘implies that there are sequences of the fly’s own code in the spider’s code; it is as though the spider had a fly in its head, a fly “motif”, a fly “refrain”.’79 The fly within the spider and the spider within the fly, in their melodic coming-together, formulate a new plane that will produce new points of view, belonging neither to the spider nor to the fly, but nevertheless being eternally indebted to both. With each new point of view, a new individual is about to emerge. This aboutness, this not-yet-here-and-now, which nonetheless has always been here-and-now, is architecture’s greatest potential. If Simondon thought of the limit as the here-and-now of individuation, then architecture, aiming at the production of new processes of individuation, has to deal with the reticular practice of finding new ways to stutter and intuit a play of the membranic limits. 3.2 Bells and Whistles There is something that binds a bell and a humming whistle together. Mournful or joyous, in the bright night sky of early spring or in the corner of a small bedroom, among hundreds of people or just by yourself. That what binds them together is fundamentally architectural. If, eventually, architecture deals with the production of new lines of subjectification, new individuations, new lines of flight, then we have to understand precisely what a bell and whistle share. As the common phrase goes, bells and whistles refer to everything that a thing has, but that is not essential to it, enhancements that add something to it, something difficult to point at with a digit. Nonetheless, it should not be understood in a pejorative way, as the popular use of the phrase does. All these non-essential features of a thing are precisely what gives it an essence, what makes it meaningful – in a non-signifying way. In the sound of the bell, where the cosmos meets the return of yet another year, yet another death,

Architecture on the Limit  121

yet another spring and yet another life, as well as in the minute sound of a whispering whistle, one that affirms a thought, a quick-paced walk or a fearful night, all the individuals involved, the whole milieu that they form, become one, even for a split second. They become imperceptible through the pure perception of their affective harmonies, which perceive signs of information that transduces them, producing at once a new dimension that was never seen before, and yet, has always been here. Between a bell and a whistle stands a rhythm and a refrain of enunciations, of assemblages and their affective technicities, of multiple individuations, of an architecture that stutters and intuits. 3.2.1 An Artisan of Rhythms

In Schizoanalytic Cartographies, a short, yet extremely rich text, Félix Guattari provides his own, schizoanalytic account of what architectural practices stand for. Guattari opens his text with a bold statement: architects no longer know which saint they should pray to.80 The increasing complexity of issues attached to architectural production, issues that are ecological in the sense of both an actual and a virtual ecology, that of the individual and its preindividual milieu, force architecture to distance itself from its Umwelt – as in the case of theories of architectural autonomy – to claim a return to any past that appears glorious – as in postmodernism – or to pretend to be the true bearer of an utopian future – as in the case of parametricism. For this reason, Guattari claims that to reinvent architecture, relaunching a style, a theory or a school of thought that seeks to make architecture great again, would all be futile attempts. If architecture wishes to reinvent itself, it has to dislocate itself from itself and become one with the milieu that produces it and which it itself produces; it is through a recomposition of architectural enunciations that architecture may be reinvented.81 In Guattari’s approach, enunciation stands for the assemblage that any micro- or macro-architecture is made of, its kinetic and dynamic aspects, the assemblages that it structurally couples with, as well as the informational affects that it possesses, its expressivity. In this sense, Guattari claims that 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 … become an artist and an artisan of sensible and relational lived experience.82 Guattari insists that any architectural assemblage attains its consistency not through the production of functions, but crucially, through the production of percepts and affects: novel ways of perceiving and being perceived as well as novel ways of affecting and being affected – or, using one word for both terms, the production of affordances. On that basis, Guattari claims that architecture is capable of constantly being different from what it is. Quoting philosopher Henri van Lier, he points out that ‘every signifying architectural

122  Architecture on the Limit

work grasps itself as able to be different than what it is. An adobe is never the adobe but it refers to the adobe; it is one of its possibilities, appearing as such.’83 Architecture, with its capacity to produce new affordances through its affective technicities, assists in the propagation of information in a milieu. Thus, architecture is a transductive practice that manipulates and introduces singular elements – germs – that can produce new resolutions of disparate tensions. An adobe, a brick, is always ‘more than’ a brick, in the same way that a building is always ‘more than’ its geometry, its construction or its functions. In this sense, when placing one brick next to another, we are not placing matter on matter but rather effect on effect, force on force, relation on relation.84 Through architectural transductions and the technicities that assist them, a reticular generalization or concretization process occurs, one that is itself disparate and inherently implies the emergence of a novel dimension for its resolution. This dimension is none other than the built environment itself, in a radically pragmatic sense: neither as only materiality nor as mere discourse, but as architecture here-and-now. In tandem, and noting that their population is essentially infinite, Guattari identifies eight architectural assemblages. Of these eight assemblages, one is of particular interest to us. Guattari claims that of the infinity of architectural enunciations, we may establish the following particular assemblages: a geopolitical enunciation, an urbanistic one, an economic enunciation, a functional assemblage, a signifying enunciation, an enunciation of existential territorialization, and a scriptural enunciation.85 When referring to the enunciation of existential territorialization, Guattari positions architecture as an operator between the transductive processes that transform one structure to another, manipulating the ‘objects of the outside and the intensities of the inside.’86 Simultaneously, in an allagmatic argument, Guattari claims that architecture transforms not only structures, but also operations, since through existential (de)territorializations, ‘the built, the lived and the incorporeal find themselves rearticulated with one another.’87 Guattari recognizes the aspect of architecture that deals with individuating transductions as ethico-aesthetic: architecture beyond the digital distinction, beyond the reification of the design decision, and beyond the moments that chunk space and time. Once architecture is reinvented as an ethico-aesthetic practice, it is dislocated from its hegemonic self that dictates matter, and is positioned a praesenti and au milieu in an ethology of affects and their informational capacities. It stands now in a zone of a not-yet-determined dimension that will emerge through singular seeds and molecular transductions. Guattari underlines that ‘the specificity of the architect’s art would be his capacity to apprehend these affects of spatialized enunciation.’88 How is it, though, that architecture, under the rhythmic transductions of an existential territory, can apprehend affects? How do affects, rhythm and territories connect with one another through the membrane and its individuations? To examine this, we need to focus on the relationship between milieus and rhythm and how they themselves transduce and individuate to an existential

Architecture on the Limit  123

territory composed of ritornellos, of individuating refrains. It is through this sonic approach to space that a vibrational mode of individuation is brought forth, one that places the membrane as the here-and-now of architectural practices. For Deleuze and Guattari, milieus are explicitly connected with rhythms. As they claim, ‘from chaos, Milieus and Rhythms are born.’89 For them, chaos – understood as the intransitive pre-individual – is the milieu of all milieus, the one that virtually contains all individuations, while itself remaining open to transformation based on the ways that the disparates resolve their tensions. In this sense, chaos becomes rhythmic within a milieu, while milieus are the ‘becoming rhythmic of chaos, the interlocking of different milieus together as rhythm.’90 When claiming that the milieu is not unitary, Deleuze and Guattari aim at fragmenting the concept of Umwelt: to dislocate the milieu from itself, to transduce it.91 Their answer to the somehow unitary notion of Uexküll’s Umwelt is a fourfold understanding of milieus. As they point out, any individual ‘has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and action-perceptions.’92 The exterior milieu refers to all the material components, all the other individuals that surround an individual. Every milieu, in this regard, depends on multiple assemblages that are exterior to it. We should proceed with caution though: claiming that something is exterior to an individual has nothing to do with a notion of spatial proximity or the lack thereof. The exterior milieu deals with the contingency of encounters that may ethologically amplify or diminish the power of an individual. Because of this contingency, one that relies on the agential force of the encounter itself, any milieu has an exterior that functions as the potential germ that can lead it towards a new individuation, a new line of flight: the encounter with exterior molecular materials.93 Next to the exterior aspect of a milieu stands its interiority. An interior milieu consists of the internal components and regulatory principles that arrange the articulation of transductions within an individual.94 Both the notions of the exterior and the interior are relative, since what appears as an interior milieu in relation to an exterior one, is, consequently, the exterior milieu for its own internal components, for the individuals that it consists of. As Deleuze puts it, ‘the outside is not a fixed limit, but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.’95 The limit where the inside becomes outside and vice versa is the membrane, or what Deleuze and Guattari call the intermediary milieu. The membrane is inseparable from the fourth aspect of the milieu: the annexed or associated milieu through which sources of energy and information pass. Without the presence of an associated milieu, as regulated by the membrane, the individual may sustain itself, but it does so in a strictly austere negentropic way. Through an associated milieu, energetic and informational sources are captured, individuals find meaning in each other, new lines of flight are

124  Architecture on the Limit

produced: the spider can fly. Associated milieus inform individuals, they determine their form: since the form depends on an autonomous code, it can only be constituted in an associated milieu that interlaces active, perceptive and energetic characteristics in a complex fashion, in conformity with the code’s requirements; and the form can develop only through intermediary milieus that regulate the speeds and rates of its substances; and it can experience itself only in a milieu of exteriority that measures the comparative advantages of the associated milieus and the differential relations of the intermediary milieus.96 As such, the associated milieu is not a spatial concept, but rather a regime, a technicity of energetic and informational exchanges between individuals. Those exchanges occur across the membrane, which regulates them. Interestingly, Simondon claims that an individual that has an associated milieu is an individual that has an absolute origin.97 The associated milieu indicates an individuation that surpasses crystallization: not just mere repetition, but rather the repetition of a differential. The reason why an individual with an associated milieu has an absolute origin is due to its emergence: unassignable yet perfectly determined, from a mobile and intensive difference. Precisely because of a differential that repeats itself, whenever an associated milieu forms, life becomes quasi-crystalline. It is a matter of contingency, of how worthy an individual is of the affective event, that an individual can manipulate its milieu – in all four of its aspects – in order to become-other. In addition, individuals who have associated milieus possess the capacity not only to manipulate them but also to leave them and introduce themselves to other milieus. Close to Simondon’s claim that any pure individual is an invention, Deleuze and Guattari state that a line of flight can occur only by changing associated milieus. The line of flight that deals with a rhythmic change from one associated milieu to another is a line of intensive individuation. It is due to its intensity that ‘when the seas dried, the primitive fish left its associated milieu to explore land, forced to stand on its own legs’, making thus any individual ‘more a fleer than a fighter, but its flights are also conquests, creations.’98 However, the same forces of chaos that pass through the associated milieu, the pre-individual potentials that allow for an intensive and radical individuation that makes a fish walk, simultaneously and continuously threaten the milieu with exhaustion. How does a milieu respond to the threatening exhaustion of entropy? Rhythmically, since rhythm is the milieu’s answer to chaos.99 At this point we should avoid asking what rhythm is; instead, we can follow an approach that uses minor questions: when is rhythm? Deleuze and Guattari claim that ‘there is rhythm whenever there is a transcoded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus, a coordination between heterogeneous space-times.’100 They further clarify that

Architecture on the Limit  125

transcoding stands for transduction: the manner in which one milieu serves as the constitutive basis for another.101 There is rhythm whenever one milieu transduces to another. Rhythm occurs whenever the structure and the operations that take place in all four aspects of a milieu (its interior, its exterior, its membrane and its energetic and informational patterns) transduce to another milieu. Why does rhythm occur whenever a transduction takes place? Precisely because any transductive process – involving both modulation and allagmatics – is plastic and contingent.102 While a periodic repetition stratifies a milieu, in the sense that it makes it recognizable and therefore open to digital counting, the rhythm produced in a transduction between milieus is ‘the Unequal or Incommensurable, always in process of transcoding.’103 The crucial distinction between rhythm as the repetition of the same and rhythm as the repetition of difference is also the decisive moment where my approach differs from most rhythmanalytic efforts within architectural theory. 3.2.2 It Comes with the Territory

The term rhythmanalysis was coined by Brazilian philosopher Pinheiro dos Santos. This term is vital in his attempt to formulate an ontology of vibration, where a vibration at the molecular level formulates the fundamental movement of matter.104 dos Santos’s account of a quantum level of materiality is akin to a Lucretian account of physics: his vibrational approach echoes the abrupt movements of the clinamen. Nonetheless, since dos Santos’s text remains unpublished, much of this remains at the level of speculation. Despite this, the concept of rhythmanalysis has not gone unnoticed. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s adoption of the term has proved to be a great influence on Henri Lefebvre, who then introduces it to architectural discourse proper. For both dos Santos and Bachelard, rhythmanalysis extends to three levels: physical, biological and analytical. In addition, Bachelard further develops the concept of rhythmanalysis as a critique of Henri Bergson’s concept of duration. It is no coincidence then, that Bachelard introduces the concept in his book The Dialectics of Duration.105 Bachelard establishes his rhythmanalytic account by claiming that if a particle ceased to vibrate, it would cease to be. It is now impossible to conceive the existence of an element of matter without adding to that element a specific frequency. We can therefore say that vibratory energy is the energy of existence … It should not be said that substance develops and reveals itself from a rhythm, but rather that it is regular rhythm which appears in the form of a specific material attribute.106 Crucial in Bachelard’s approach is the importance he places on rhythm’s regularity. Bachelard focuses on both rhythmic equilibrium and harmony, asserting that the success of life consists of the formulation of well-ordered times,

126  Architecture on the Limit

both vertically – as superimposed instants – and horizontally as the perfect cadence of successive instants.107 Henri Lefebvre, adopting the notion of rhythmanalysis from dos Santos and Bachelard, develops what he refers to as a ‘rhythmanalytical project’. His main concern is to take the concept of rhythm and turn it into ‘a science, a new field of knowledge: the analysis of rhythms; with practical consequences.’108 Throughout his rhythmanalytic approach Lefebvre focuses extensively on the importance of rhythm as inseparable from time, particularly when it comes to temporal repetition. The repeating beat and other forms of musical measure become crucial for Lefebvre in examining various biological and habitual rhythms; he claims that the rhythmanalyst has to use the human body as the first point of analysis. As he maintains, the ‘body serves as a metronome.’109 Close to Bachelard’s critique of Bergson, Lefebvre understands rhythm as a composition of ‘instants’, ‘moments’ and ‘crises’.110 It is with an understanding of rhythm that divides space and time into instances (not surprisingly, since it is an analytical, and thus digital, approach) that Lefebvre comes up with various rhythmical variations: from isorhythmia and polyrhythmia, to arrhythmia. A precise analysis of each is beyond the scope of this argument. What is nonetheless important is to understand why rhythmanalysis does not suffice to address the issue of rhythm, especially from an architectural perspective: it is the fixation on a metric approach that undermines rhythmanalytic accounts. For dos Santos, Bachelard and Lefebvre, rhythm is conceptualized in a state of equilibrium, composed of instants that are later taxonomized based on their harmonic recurrence and their repetition. Rhythm is seen as a distribution of singular points. The tempo of repetition is what essentially gives them the ability to influence and determine the habitual patterns of the individuals who experience them. How is it then that anything new occurs? How can one, rhythmically, think of emergence? How does the individual and its milieu transduce themselves if their rhythms are only those of repetition? Of course, I do not suggest that the efforts of rhythmanalysis should be dismissed. However, rhythmanalysis is an epistemological project that deals solely with closed systems, and is thus unable to engage with the intensive and the intransitive. Another minor question might be helpful in order to highlight why rhythmanalysis is insufficient in dealing with rhythmic issues: how is rhythm? Deleuze and Guattari remind us that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence, there is nothing less rhythmic than a military march … Meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it … ties itself together in passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by heterogeneous blocks. It changes direction … Rhythm is never on the same plane as that which has rhythm. Action occurs in a milieu, whereas rhythm is located between two milieus, or between two intermilieus, on

Architecture on the Limit  127

the fence, between night and day, at dusk, twilight or Zwielicht, Haecceity. To change milieus, taking them as you find them: such is rhythm. Landing, splashdown, take-off.111 Simply put, the body is not a metronome and rhythm is not a distribution of singular points. On the contrary, rhythm is a distribution of differentials; the night and the day, a bell and a whistle, a fly and a spider. It is not a harmony that pleases through its repetition, through the fact that it has become predictable. It is ‘difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which nevertheless produces it: productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter.’112 The possibility of a transindividual informational transduction – as a signal and sign disparate – suggests that there is a commonality of rhythmic pulsation.113 A singular point emerges in the rhythmically distributed differential between heterogeneous milieus. Its singularity lies in its position between the rhythmic relations among milieus and the rhythmed individuals themselves. However, this singular point is never given in advance nor can it be taken for granted. Fully contingent, the individual and the milieu must conquer the singular germ. If they wish to avoid both the exhaustion of entropy and the stagnation of extreme negentropy, they need to modulate each other, so much so as to obtain new affects. In this sense, milieus are about what happens where, while rhythms are about how and when something happens in and between milieus.114 Rhythm, as the propagation of differential information among individuals and milieus, provides a non-unitary structural and operational consistency: the consistency of remaining formally and relationally inconsistent. This is the reason that rhythm alone is not enough. It needs a territory. Due to its openness to the intransitive that guides its rhythmic transductions, a milieu is not yet a territory. In the act of becoming a fly, the spider and its milieu construct a territory through the affective and expressive power of their reticular technicity. The territorial construction of the spider passes through the spinning of its web. Once the web is spun, it no longer serves just a function – to catch a fly – but rather constitutes the expressive haecceity of what it means to be a spider (paradoxically, in the spider’s becoming-other). The branch of the tree or the dark corner of a wall occupied by a spider, is never the spider’s own, unless its web is spun: the expressive is in primary relation to the possessive.115 All forms of expression, from a spider’s web to the sound of a bell to the house we live in, constitute a form of possession that is more profound than just a form of being. If a milieu is an assemblage that has gained a certain level of non-unitary consistency through rhythm, a territory is created through forms of expression that affect milieus. Territories are the product of an expressive act, a leap of faith, a process of territorialization. However, any territorialization is an ‘act of rhythm that has become expressive, or of milieu components that have become qualitative.’116 From the quantitative aggregate of individuals, to their rhythmic yet fragile transformation in a milieu, to the qualitative emergence of their territory.

128  Architecture on the Limit

The marker that determines a territory is an expressive quality that simultaneously determines its ‘owner’. The owner of a territory, as Ronald Bogue notes, is not a pre-existing subject. Subject and territory are synchronously formulated through the delineation of an expressive quality.117 The moment an individual claims a piece of land, either by constructing a web or by constructing a building, an interplay between the expressive and the possessive is initiated. The importance of such an act is the absolute autonomy of both the expressive qualities and the rhythms that assist individuals in expressing them. Every process of territorial formation implies a parallel act of territorial deformation; territorialization and deterritorialization go hand in hand. As Bogue puts it, the coloration of the tropical fish must be divested of any fixed connection with sexual or aggressive stimuli if it is to serve as a territorial marker. In the case of the brown stagemaker, if leaf plucking were a constant periodic activity, then all places would be indifferently littered with leaf debris, but since leaf plucking has a certain autonomy and indeterminacy, one space may be differentiated from all other and established as a territory.118 If we recall the abstractly concretized wall, there is a simultaneous process of deterritorialization and territorialization: what used to be a function becomes an expression, subsequently transformed into a function of another order. It is the same activity that Bogue describes. The sexual organ is no longer an organ attached to sex but an organ of demarcation; the leaf is no longer part of a tree but rather a means of seduction. Each of these individuals flees in a line of flight, only to land in a new territory. This constant process of deterritorialization and territorialization – of coding and decoding, from the molecular to the molar and vice versa – happens to the extended architectural mind as well: what was once minor will be major, just to become minor again. This zigzag movement is determined rhythmically by distributed differentials in a continuum, while – in its very happening – it produces a rhythm of rhythms: the ritornello. The ritornello, or the refrain, makes possible the establishment of a territory through an ‘unfixing of qualities and rhythms and a subsequent recoding of those qualities and rhythms in terms of a specific domain.’119 The actions that produce an expressive ritual imply the presence of an intransitive and pre-individual field in which differential disparates are configured. The rhythmic pulsations between the pre-individual and the milieu, as well as between milieus themselves, establish a relation between the differentials. The possibility for the demarcation of a territory lies in the rhythmic resolution of the tensions between the differentials, claimed through the expressive signs that this resolution produces: the ‘zig’ of the male stickleback fish, when moving towards a female, is a remnant of an attack impulse, while the ‘zag’ towards its nest is a product of sexual drives.120 As Bogue claims,

Architecture on the Limit  129

the two movements are combined and given a new function in the dance, which itself assumes a role in a complex sequence of actions: she appears, he dances, she courts, he leads, she follows, he shows her the nest entrance, she enters the nest, he trembles, she spawns, he fertilizes the eggs.121 The signs produced by the fish during his zigzagging dance are fundamentally different from, for example, its change of colour as a warning of aggressive or defensive behaviour. Such signs are solely functional and action-oriented, and for this reason, tied to the milieu. Contrary to this, territorial signs are extracted from a milieu, they are signs that have become external, ready to be picked up as a mark from another individual and therefore, through their affective expressivity, through their dance, claim a territory. In this sense, territories and refrains do not emerge from conscious actions or decisions, but from a system of signs. Both the structure and the operations of an individual are part of their milieus and rhythms, but the moment the signs produced in their allagmatic transduction – from structure to operation and vice versa – become a mark for another individual, then a territory and a refrain are formed. Consequently, constructing a building, a shelter, is not only for the protection against heavy rain, cold winters, direct sunlight or aggressive predators. It is there due to an assemblage of rhythms that through signs repeats itself not as the coming-again of the same, but as the coming-again of intensive differences. It is the functional ‘zig’ of aggression and the expressive ‘zag’ of seduction that form a refrain which regulates internal impulses and a territorial counterpoint that responds to external circumstances.122 The refrain composes neither the internal nor the external, neither the inside that protects nor the outside that expresses and connects, but rather the territorial claim that makes a radically novel line of flight possible: architecture as an ethicoaesthetic enunciation of existential territories. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, these disparate contrapuntal relations join planes together, form compounds of sensations and blocs, and determine becomings. But it is not just these determinate melodic compounds, however generalized, that constitute nature; another aspect, an infinite symphonic plane of composition, is also required: from House to universe. From endosensation to exosensation. This is because the territory does not merely isolate and join but opens onto cosmic forces that arise from within or come from outside and renders their effect on the inhabitant perceptible … House and Universe, Heimlich and Unheimlich, territory and deterritorialization, finite melodic compounds and the great infinite plane of composition, the small and the large refrain.123 This is why architecture is the first art, the first act of expression, environmental manipulation and production of novel affects and percepts; art does

130  Architecture on the Limit

not begin with the flesh but with the house, with the manipulation of the transduced limit. This is also the reason why architecture needs to be able to tap into the symphonic plane of composition, into the refrain, for the purpose of determining the planes that it is made of. What are these planes and how can we manipulate them? 3.2.3 Ritornerà

Let me approach this issue by first examining the second question: how can an individual manipulate the planes that the refrain regulates? In a nutshell, this can be achieved by a territorial play of distances. All the signs that mark a territory as they are picked up by another individual, constitute a regulation of critical distances. They deal with repelling a threat and inviting an alliance. A handshake, a goodbye kiss, a stone thrown at an animal, a window in a wall, are all variations of a rhythmical manipulation of distances. A territory, first and foremost, is the critical distance between two individuals that will come together or stay apart. Each of them, through their affects and their expressive signs, assists in the propagation of information that transduces the membranic limit which controls their distance. The appropriated mark is a mark of distance maintenance, since ‘what is mine is first of all my distance; I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards.’124 Once again, the expressive is in a fundamental and reticular relation with the possessive. This play of distances, however, is at once virtual and actual, involving forms of seduction and defence that express both what is already here-and-now and a line of flight that comes directly from the pre-individual: both the leaves that set the stage for a bird’s performance and the long march of lobsters across the ocean floor, both the humming of a child afraid in the dark and the flight of monarch butterflies to the north. It is the refrain itself, the symphonic plane which allows for a manipulation of distances in an actual and a virtual sense. Through the territorial play of distances, two different planes come together and form a refrain: a plane of functions and a plane of forces. As Deleuze and Guattari write, the territorial formation has two substantial effects: a reorganization of functions and a regrouping of forces. When it comes to functions, we may directly approach them under the Simondonian notion of operations. In this way, it might be easier to understand why territorialization deals with a reorganization of operations. In a clearly allagmatic form, through a determination of distances the territory establishes new structures that assist in the transformation of operations, while newly emerged operations reticularly transform already given structures. Since any territorial act is the deployment of an affective technicity, we may argue that a territory is a set of technicities and their signs, both assisting in the emergence of territorial functions. When the aggressive ‘zig’ couples with the seductive ‘zag’, they bring forth both a new structure and a new operation: an allagmatic moment that propagates novel information in the milieu of an ocean, a portion of which now becomes

Architecture on the Limit  131

the territory of the stickleback. The same way that the elevation of the earth in the function of a table resembles nothing before it, the territorial zigzagging of the stickleback creates a new function: a subjectifying dance. Simply put, functions are not capable of explaining territoriality. Rather, it is the other way around. The relation between functions and territories is asymmetrical, since these functions are organized or created only because they are territorialized, and not the reverse. The T factor, the territorializing factor, must be sought elsewhere: precisely in the becoming expressive of rhythm or melody, in other words, in the emergence of proper qualities (color, odor, sound, silhouette …).125 Echoing both Uexküll and Simondon, Deleuze and Guattari claim that there is no mechanistic account of emergence, be it natural or artificial. The only account that does justice to emergence proper is an account based on the production and consumption of signs, along with the affects that assist it and which are transductively altered by it. The silhouette of the people gathered in the night, the smell of burning candles and spring flowers, the sound of the bell that marks the gathering, all belong to the territory that claimed them out of an infinity. These expressive qualities do not ‘belong to a subject, but … they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them.’126 The issue, consequently, is not whether form follows function or the opposite, but rather that both form and function follow a territory. In their production from a territory, form and function – or, better, structure and operation – undergo an allagmatic transduction that blurs and distorts the boundaries between the two. Architecture as a practice of distance manipulations is what binds form (structure) and function (operation) in an ‘expressive–possessive’ information propagation. In this sense, architecture assists in a natural drift: providing not the supposed best solution (be it typological, organizational or ideological), but rather assisting in the formation of an affectively ‘good-enough’ territory. In its problematic field, this territory may not only enhance the affects of its individuals, but also allow them to form new alliances. It is in this regard that the alliance between a church, a mass, a bell and a candle is deeply architectural; so is the alliance between a walking stranger, her whistling, a pavement, an umbrella and the falling rain. They are fundamentally architectural because they posit an explicit territorial claim; they are formed by a rhythm of rhythms, by a refrain that transduces functions and forces, simultaneously grounding them to the earth. Accordingly, architecture was, is and will always be ‘geomorphic’: its rhythms are those of all the elements that make up the territory, the territorializing process being built through any architectural assemblage in an autonomous refrain that expresses the patterning of the ensemble of territorial components.127

132  Architecture on the Limit

However, if a territory manages to reorganize functions, how is it that it succeeds in regrouping forces? While it is important to emphasize the distinction between milieus and territories, it is also necessary to underline that there is a continuity of trans-individuations that trespass on it. The continuity that binds milieus and territories together is the refrain. If rhythm is a distribution of differentials, a distribution that organizes and determines a milieu, then the refrain is a distribution of differential rhythms: it is the becoming of the virtual, a domain where difference differs in itself. As Bogue asks, where is the refrain? Is it in the contraction of the octopus’s muscular pocket or in the water the octopus expels as it swims? … The refrain is the differential rhythm constituted in milieus, the relation between milieu components, and though one can speak of the melody of the octopus and the countermelody of the water, their contrapuntal relation is the refrain, one that belongs to both and in a sense to neither.128 Consequently, we can argue that the refrain belongs to the field of virtual, preindividual relations. If milieus and rhythms concern an initial, fragile selection from chaos, then the refrain is what can cross through chaos, through the fragility of milieus and rhythms, and eventually ground them. Once again, we should be cautious not to draw a distinctive line between milieus, rhythms and territories. The transversality of the refrain ensures both the formation of a territory and its deformation: its enclosure and its openings to the outside. This means that we can – simultaneously and through the refrain that carries them – meet three different forces in a territory: intransitive forces of a metastable, pre-individual chaos, rhythmic forces of the cosmos (as the heterogeneous play of difference between territorial assemblages) and the territorial forces of the earth (as the affective materiality of an individual and its territory).129 These three forces correspond to three different operations of the refrain and their corresponding structures: the creation of a point of stability, a circle of expressive property, and an opening to the outside. As Bogue summarizes, three examples will suffice to indicate the basic ways in which this process takes place: (1) A child afraid in the dark sings a song to reassure herself, and in so doing establishes a stable point in the midst of chaos, a locus of order in a non-dimensional space; (2) a cat sprays the corner of his house and the trees and bushes in his yard and thereby demarcates a dimensional area that he claims as his possession; (3) a bird sings an impromptu aria at the break of day, and thus opens its territory to other milieus and the cosmos at large.130 Through the production of expressive signs there is first the creation of a ‘calm and stable centre in the heart of chaos.’131 Once such a calm centre has been created it must be marked by an allagmatic process – as is the case with the

Architecture on the Limit  133

cat spraying its yard. Finally, through the refrain new alliances may be formed, new lines of flight, which necessarily re-introduce the intransitive chaos in the established territory, bringing back pre-individual memories, questioning an individual’s segmentarity and furthering its individuation. The refrain has directional components (forming a centre), dimensional components (forming a space) and molecular components (forming an alliance). Nevertheless, these three processes should not be examined in cardinal terms. They should not be understood as three successive moments but as three aspects of one and the same thing.132 Out of the metastable field of antecedent, intensive and intransitive forces, information expresses itself, encounters a stable point, and makes it its home by territorializing it, only to form a new transductive alliance and lodge in the cosmic chaos once again. In this regard, the refrain is what simultaneously determines an assemblage, marks its territory, connects both its kinetic and dynamic aspects (its internal impulses and its external circumstances), identifies, specializes and allagmatically transforms its structure and operations, while also collecting and liberating chaotic, cosmic and territorial forces in order to either rigidify an assemblage or open it to the outside by following a line of flight.133 Therefore, despite the fact that the refrain is the most deterritorialized element of a territorial assemblage, it is what manages to hold it together.134 The refrain, through all its effects on a territory, but especially through its capacity to regroup forces, formulates a centre that is synchronously at the heart of the territory and yet outside of it. The disparity between an intensity that is internal and yet determined by a force of the outside is constantly resolved in the individuation of a territorial assemblage, an individuation that also determines the subjectification processes of the individuals that are territorialized in it. It provides them with a consistency of a higher, metastable order that complements the consistency of an individual when examined in relation to its milieu. It is no longer a matter only of an affective consistency that depends on the contingent encounters that a milieu provides but rather a matter of a transductive consistency: a consistent way of individuation in relation to one’s own futurity. This is why hearing distant melodies, we can set forth from the zone we inhabit, never to return. Salmons at breeding season leave the territories where they live and return to where they were born to lay their eggs and die. Periodically the lobsters of the Caribbean march off in single file into the open ocean; biologists believe that their long march follows the advance of glacial periods on Earth, the last one ten thousand years ago. Migratory birds, responding to the seasonal tilting of Earth in its orbit, follow the lines of the Earth’s magnetic field.135 Put another way, what holds the assemblage together is the radical shift from the functional to the expressive: the exodus of salmons, the lobsters’ march, and the migration of birds are all operations that cease to be merely

134  Architecture on the Limit

functional and have become expressive. Each constitutes a style that belongs to the assemblage itself: its affective technicities, its physical and technical individuals, its germs and disparates, its lines of flight, and, above all, its territory and the refrain that determines it. If the refrain, as its most transversal element, holds the assemblage together by putting it in a direct relation with its own virtual, pre-individual, intransitive and metastable futurity, the question would be where, when and how we can manipulate the refrain. In what follows I will claim that it is on the membrane – on the limit – that such an attempt can prove successful. 3.2.4 It Doesn’t Fold Because You Say So

Conceptually inherited from Deleuze and his book on Leibniz, the concept of the fold has a long history in architectural theories and practices. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, this history does not approach the fold as a primarily architectural problem. In other words, the fold remains a purely philosophical concept that conventionally has had a merely metaphorical use in architecture. During the 1990s many architects made efforts to distance themselves from linguistics and Derrida-influenced deconstructionism. The result of deconstructionist practices was an extensive concern with the ‘production of heterogeneous, fragmented and conflicting formal systems.’136 According to architect Greg Lynn, a proper response to deconstruction – within the realm of architecture – can be found in the concept of the fold, since it offers a fluid logic of connectivity in place of deconstructivist formal fragmentation.137 Lynn focuses on the supposed capacity of the fold to produce heterogeneity through the coherent connections of differences rather than only formally representing differences and fragmented elements. In his words, ‘if there is a single effect produced in architecture by folding, it will be the ability to integrate unrelated elements within a new continuous mixture.’138 For Lynn, examples of such an application of the fold within the practices of the 1990s can be found in Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997) and in Peter Eisenman’s Rebstock Park project (1993). According to Lynn, in both cases differences could be incorporated in a smooth and coherent structure, which would formally highlight a continuity rather than a fragmentation of space.139 Nevertheless, none of the so-called folding projects during that early stage of post-deconstructivist architecture managed to address the issue of folding as a proper architectural issue. Architecture theorist Michael Speaks is right in saying that ‘when a theoretical concept (the fold) … is used as a blueprint to generate an architectural form, architecture becomes applied philosophy, and necessarily gives up all claim to singularity and creativity.’140 Hence, the importance of the fold is not to re-introduce the binary opposition between the smooth and the striated, but on the contrary, to abolish it. Neither deconstruction nor folding addresses architectural issues as issues of individuation. They both address them in a formalist and representational way that claims

Architecture on the Limit  135

to either disconnect and highlight differences, or to connect and incorporate them. With the exceptions of architects such as Lars Spuybroek and Jeffrey Kipnis, the fold has always remained on a formal level that literally translates it to folded surfaces and blobs. In this sense, Speaks is once again right to point out that if the fold has any importance, then that would be in folded architectural practices and not in folded architectural forms.141 I should clarify that my intention is not to reinitiate a discussion on folding as an adequate architectural form; such a discussion would be of no help for the understanding of architecture that I am advocating. Rather, I intend to follow Speaks’s suggestion and focus on the potentials of a folded architectural practice: a practice that explores how architecture could place itself on the membranic limit so as to tap into the intensive and the intransitive, the possessive and the expressive, the refrain and the individual that vibrates in its passing. Even though the ‘folding architecture’ of the past two decades has mostly been a formal exercise, it nonetheless implies an architectural approach with a long and influential trajectory. In simple terms, to claim that the fold connects is precisely the same as to claim that architecture disconnects through any early, so-called ‘postmodern’, language-obsessed interpretation of deconstructivism. Both are fundamentally digital in their conception and practical application; both can be understood as either a synthetic coming-together or an analytic breaking-apart. In addition, neither deals with difference as distributed in the rhythm between milieus, or with the differentials of difference as determined and expressed in the all-binding refrain. In this sense, the territorial claim (what makes architecture the first art), is nowhere to be found. Deeply modernist in their logics – and for that reason, digital – both, folding and fragmentation, in their presumed connectivity or discontinuity, imply an operation of ‘inhibited synthesis’. As accelerationist philosopher Nick Land puts it, modernity lives in a profound and uneasy relation to an outside that both attracts and repels it, a relation that it precariously resolves within itself from a position of unilateral mastery. … The paradox of enlightenment, then, is an attempt to fix a stable relation with what is radically other, since insofar as the other is rigidly positioned within a relation it is no longer fully other. If before encountering otherness we already know what its relation to us will be, we have obliterated it in advance.142 Be it under a supposed connection through fold-like volumes or through a fragmented arrangement of différance, the premise of an already established relation is always there. This relation, which is what produces any architectural input that turns into an output, is a relation between the inside and the outside. Understood in such terms, any architectural individual is always an object that passes through a subject. This is also why modernism did not end in the demolition of a social housing project. For most contemporary architectural theories and practices the architectural world is exactly that: a world, a

136  Architecture on the Limit

totality, which appears only with the premise of a self that produces the inputs that the totality will happily receive as the outputs of its mythical, industrial or software-based modes of production. Their ontological assumption is that of an ‘outside that must pass by way of the inside.’143 The value of the fold, of the membrane, when examined as a proper architectural problem and not merely as formalist gesture, is that it can collapse the architectural world, the architectural subject and all the binaries that they presuppose. In the membranic limit, the stuttering and the intuition of a folded architecture express the intransitive forces, the milieus and the territories that produce any architectural subject; in the thresholds of the fold, the vibratory affects of both rhythms and their symphonic composition pulsate in order to produce surpluses of energy that can resolve the potentials of an architectural becoming. Space and time, that which produces architecture and is produced by it, the smooth and the striated, minor and major architectural minds, no longer stand digitally opposed but individuate among the architectural technicities that we need in order to individuate. On the membrane and on the play of limits that it implies, we may witness the folding and unfolding of a reticular event: on the one hand, a vibrational modulation and on the other, a membranic transduction. The informational propagation of the refrain finds in the membrane the possibility of a point of convergence. As the limit in which the interior, the exterior and the associated milieu meet each other, the membrane and its vibratory individuations bring forth both a modulation of the interior–exterior relation, and the production of an energy surplus. There occurs, therefore, both the continuous allagmatics of a territorialized individual, in the modulatory determination of an intensive interior driven by a futural outside, and the regrouping or redirection of energetic forces in the transductions of the limit itself. In the membranic folds, the reticular event takes place, providing the possibility for modes of speculative extrapolations and environmental manipulations, providing the possibility for the development of a technicity. The membranic event belongs simultaneously to the membrane – also to the territorialized individual understood now as the limit – and to the refrain. Consequently, it belongs to the territorial assemblage as well as to all the forces that are gathered and liberated from it. For that reason, the membrane manages to express both the singularity of a given individual and its territory, and the universality of the forces that are in constant play on it. This duality, of an impersonal personalization and a singular universalization, as expressed in the membranic event, has two consequences. First, one can examine an individual and its territory as a singular product – avoiding any form of essentialist or typological, hylomorphic or digital thinking. Second, it can elevate the informational and affective agency of the event to a level that is independent of the singular assemblages that expressed it. In doing so, we can potentially address affects and information as autonomous from their actualizations. We can approach the virtuality of the pre-individual refrain without the need of a method: we can stutter it and intuit it.

Architecture on the Limit  137

The membrane acquires such an importance because through its vibratory affects it can actualize both rhythms and refrains. In addition, due to its vibrational capacities, when a rhythm or a refrain returns to the membranic limit, carrying a cosmic or chaotic potential, the membrane can counter-actualize their virtuality. For precisely this reason, the membrane can be understood as the intensive intermediary between the virtual and the actual. It manages to capture and produce both the vibrations of the actual and the vibration of vibrations that the virtual propagates. If becoming operates on a subtractive basis, via both metastable disruptions and disconnections from an infinite flux, then a territorial claim is fundamentally a break of flows. This break, something that may be understood as a detour, happens on the membrane: it is produced there, while simultaneously catalysing its differential return. Accordingly, Meillassoux is right to suggest that such a detour can be conceptualized as a wave.144 From the vibrations of the membrane and the countervibrations of the refrain, a wave emanates and returns as a self-displacement, as a dislocation constitutive of any individuation. As Meillassoux puts it, to be pregnant with its past, if one might so speak, as well as with its future – to detain one and the other, enveloped in its actual-being – this is what is proper to the wave. Now, the detour is not materially distinct from the wave – since it itself is made of matter only – but its displacement must be, since its temporality is hazardous.145 Meillassoux claims that both the materiality of the detour (the dimensional territoriality of a line of flight) and its displacement (the molecularity of a line of flight), correspond to two different temporalities: the first belongs to Chronos, the time of the individuating actual, the second to Aeon, the time of the pre-individual virtual. Moreover, he suggests that for anything novel to emerge, both Chronos and Aeon need to meet each other in the fold, since ‘the language of unforeseeable creation will be … a language of folding – of the fold’s becoming-virtual: a language which would be, ultimately, a topology, or rather a geology of the virtual.’146 Meillasoux concludes by asserting that becoming and folding are synonyms, since to claim that ‘there is becoming is to say that there are virtual folds, or that there is folding.’147 If, as we have seen with Simondon, becoming is the operation of a system possessing potentials in reality, then becoming needs to occur on the threshold of an intensive difference between those potentials. This threshold, the membranic limit, is where the vibrations of a metastable Aeon meet the vibratory affects of an actual and individuating Chronos, with the refrain itself as the imperceptible line that binds them.148 3.2.5 Un-frame the Veil

Out of all the attempts to introduce the notion of the fold in architecture, it is Bernard Cache who manages to move beyond merely formalist concerns.

138  Architecture on the Limit

I will not provide an extensive account of Cache’s theories, but instead I will focus on three crucial moments in his thinking: the inflection, the vector and framing. While these are significant contributions towards a folded architectural practice, I will claim that they need to be expanded and complemented. Cache, influenced by Deleuze’s books on cinema, bases his theoretical endeavour on the concept of the image – as ‘movement image’ and as ‘time image’. For Deleuze, images are understood as the affective perceptions of what occurs in a milieu. Images can be understood as another term for what Simondon refers to as information: they arise in the resolution of disparates. Following such an approach, Cache interprets images as always including ‘an element that exceeds the intentions and functions of such making and link an image to an environment or milieu that is “before man”.’149 In his words, we can give image its widest meaning, designating thereby anything that presents itself to the mind, ‘whether real or not.’ In this way we pass from visible objects to visibility itself. The word ‘image’ then places us in a purely optical register where effects are produced without reference to any given object. But these effects are not deceptive illusions, for perception is not an anterior image of exterior objects but stands for things themselves. Our brain is not the seat of a neuronal cinema that reproduces the world; rather our perceptions are inscribed on the surface of things, as images amongst images. We ourselves would be nothing other than these optical haloes that are drawn at the intersection of the radii of curvature that fold the surface of images.150 We can already note two issues with Cache’s approach that will eventually prevent him from developing a full-fledged account of architectural folding. First, Cache approaches perception as a matter of synthesis, in which perceptions are inscribed in things – images among images – by a subject that is composing its perceptions in a purely optical register. Nonetheless, as we have seen with Meillassoux’s subtraction, perception is not about synthesis but rather about ascesis: from an infinity of flows, through the rhythms of milieus and the territorial claim that the refrain makes possible, a subject is formed, disinterested in the very infinity that gave birth to it and rather focused only on a selection of perceptions that correspond to its affective repertoire. The subtractive approach to perception comes close to the conceptual genealogy I have exposed thus far, giving priority to meaning – in its ethological sense – when it comes to examining an individual’s relation with its milieus and territories. Instead, Cache conceptualizes images and their foldings in terms of surfaces. He proposes the following classification of primary images: inflection, vector and framing.151 Cache borrows the concept of inflection from mathematics, in which the inflection of a curve is where the curvature changes direction. The inflection point is a singularity: it stands for the points in the neighbourhood of which the differential relation changes sign. Cache claims that the change in

Architecture on the Limit  139

a differential occurs due to a vector. Once more, borrowed from mathematics, a vector stands for a tendency that is directed. Here is where Cache’s approach leads to a dead end. The vector is not what drives a change in difference, on the contrary, it is an effect of the resolution of differences. The vector, a purely epistemological tool, is nothing but an inscription of what has already occurred. It is not a tendency, but a trace of it: as a trace it does not suffice to escape the representational logics of mapping and find itself in the intensive vibrations of diagramming. Only by examining these two concepts, inflections and vectors, does it become clear that Cache is interested in two aspects: singular points and their effects. For that reason, his notion of framing, functioning as a combination of the two, comes closer to a rhythmanalytic account, in which rhythm is a distribution of singularities instead of an account that understands rhythm as a distribution of differentials – with the refrain as that which differentiates difference in its vibratory becoming. The act of framing involves an inflection, a vector and a frame: a singular point, its directionality and a stabilizing effect. The frame stands as a stabilizing effect insofar as it separates, selects and smoothens the tendencies of each singular point. In Cache’s account, the most important attribute of the frame is that it is able to establish an interval through which already selected vectors can relate to each other and produce more singular effects.152 For Cache, the frame is not predefined, as would be the case with a canvas, but rather ‘the tensions of the surface now lend a relative stability to the articulation of the frame’, with its material elements mobile and their ‘equilibrium resulting from the play of tensions that run through the system as a whole.’153 Once again, Cache’s concern with surfaces is apparent. Moreover, another problem arises: as described earlier, what holds an assemblage together is not a supposed unitary totality – the system as a ‘whole’ – but rather its most transversal element: the refrain. The materiality of an assemblage is not a result of tensions placed within a system that acts as a container, but rather, the temporary resolutions to the problematic individuation of the assemblage itself. These tensions – or vectors in Cache’s vocabulary – are not confined to the interiority of a system, neither do they merely pass through it and find themselves on its surfaces, giving rise to new singularities. These tensions are metastable and pre-individual, referring to orders of magnitude that at once address the intransitive, the milieu and the territory. For this reason, the refrain, as that which binds them together in its vibrations, is in an asymmetrical relation with framing. Yet Cache argues that architecture is the manipulation of the frame.154 However, in the territorial zigzagging, the refrain does not become embodied in a process of inscription, cutting or addition, but rather in the impersonal event of the encounter itself. In other words, architecture is not to be located solely in the window that frames the landscape, framing an image that makes the inside–outside reversible, as Cache claims.155 Put succinctly, the impersonal event in which the refrain is expressed through the vibrations of the fold – the vibrations that claim territories, form subjects and compose new alliances – is not exhausted only in the act of framing. To imply that

140  Architecture on the Limit

architecture is what makes the inside and the outside reversible, via an act of framing, presupposes the recognition of an inside and an outside. Such a distinction between an inside and an outside, if done in extensive terms, leads nowhere but to another variation of digital discreteness. On the contrary, as should be obvious by now, inside and outside can only be approached in intensive terms: namely, as the kinetic and dynamic elements of an individual, its affects in relation to both a pre-individual memory and to its futurity. In this sense, while Cache addresses the issue of the fold, he does so in a way that cannot completely escape the logics of discreteness. His focus on the distribution of singular points and their organization (via framing) is one that attaches itself only to the directional aspect of the refrain: the formation of a centre. Despite being a centre that craves to be dislocated from both the inside and the outside, it fails to address the other two crucial operations of the refrain: the dimensionality of a territorial formation and the molecular transductions that a line of flight catalyses. The interior of a house and the landscape it connects to via the framing of a window simply create an optical centre for a constituted subject to acknowledge their inseparability. However, the fact is that their connection comes alongside the dimensionality of an expressive– possessive act and the contingent alliances between all the individuals – from the concrete slabs to the glass panel, the chair and the mountains slopes – that in forming an affective technicity catalyse a novel line of flight. The directional fixation of the frame can be also explained with Cache’s own architectural practice, closely related to digital design techniques. As a matter of fact, both the frame and the act of framing are close to the ways that the grid – even in its Albertian conception – operates. However, if the resolution of a grid is pushed to the extreme, then its squares become points, or as Cache would prefer, pixels.156 Using the pixels of the grid, an image can be optically translated in a frame of lines and dots (vectors and inflections) that can be manipulated later on as a set of numbers.157 On the surface of points and lines that compose a grid (familiar to the user of any design software), the inflections can be algorithmically manipulated through vectors and their directionality, resulting in framing parts of the grid’s infinity in surfaces that, while remaining two-dimensional (thus, solely directional), give the illusion of three-dimensionality. In this sense, it is no coincidence that the main functions of the frame can easily be placed next to the basic swarm behavioural rules of parametricism: cohesion as stabilizing (steering towards the locally perceived centre of the flock), alignment as selection (steering towards the average heading of local flock mates), and avoidance as smoothening (avoiding collision with local flock mates).158 The grid patterns of software-aided design are populated with pixels that, according to the directionality of the vectors, drag, pull and distort the surface of the grid, now potentially able to be fragmented into an infinite amount of smaller surfaces – with areas of any shape – and whose framing gives rise to supposedly new forms. Moreover, as anyone familiar with such software would attest, the surface-formed volumes, resembling a

Architecture on the Limit  141

crystalized veil, not only merge with each other but can also merge with subtracted volumes through so-called Boolean commands: the interior of a blob that exteriorizes and becomes the interior of another, the trace of this reversal being visible as an interior cavity, open to the exterior. There is therefore no question that the grid, especially when approached with Cache’s framework, is no longer the grid of the military camps of the Roman empire, but rather a grid that indeed operates as a framing machine. It is precisely because of the grid’s potential to frame that framing alone proves inadequate to address the membranic nuances of the fold. 3.2.6 What Happens on the Membrane, Stays on the Membrane

Despite that fact that Cache’s theories, as well as certain aspects of parametric design, are able to shift focus from architectural thinking and doing that operate on the basis of typological and essentialist binaries, they still remain on a level that approaches space transcendentally. Even though they both focus on the fold, they do so by conceptualizing the fold as divider, as a curtain, between an inside and an outside. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the membrane itself is nothing but the limit, the intensive threshold through which meaning is produced and propagated. The limit, as pure intensity, as differentials and their differences, cannot be manipulated in extensive terms, those of an outside, an inside and the operations of framing that connect the two. The inside and the outside, when examined on the limit, are unable to stand in opposition, simply because the information that transductively propagates on the membrane does not operate on such terms. For the membrane, ‘an Outside, more distant than any exterior, is “twisted”, “folded” and “doubled” by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior.’159 The digital decision of interior/exterior analysis and synthesis will always remain transcendental, precisely because it is immanently produced by the analogue vibration of a membrane that cannot be captured in any representational way. One cannot manipulate the membrane in extensive terms, one can only become the membrane, become the limit, individuate along the individuations of its folded encounters. If expressions, affects and information are autonomous and independent of any subjective signification, they are so because the membrane is autonomous. What makes the membrane autonomous is its own membranic technicity – its own concretization – in relation to its vibratory affects and the vibrations of the refrain as it transverses through milieus, territories, rhythms and forces. In this sense, architecture is not just an act of framing; architecture is the becoming of the refrain. What is crucial in understanding the membrane, especially when approaching it as an architectural problem, is to keep in mind that the membrane has no specific beginning or end. The membrane surpasses the binaries of any digital distinction, since it is not on the boundary or on the limit, but the limit itself. When speaking of the membrane, Simondon never does so in

142  Architecture on the Limit

spatial terms. He defines it as a regime of energy transfer between individuals, their milieus and territories. The membrane and the associated milieu stand together as the pattern of energetic exchange that occurs through the transductive propagation of information.160 In this sense, there is no associated milieu without a membrane; not a membrane that separates an interior from an exterior, but one that in its vibrations regulates the affective encounters between individuals. Through these encounters, energy and information are bound together and modulate their individuations. The question then is what the relation between the individuals and the membrane is, given that the membrane resembles nothing outside of itself. To approach this question, we have to think in ethological and intensive terms. In these terms, there is no distinction between any individual and the membrane. If the membrane is understood as the transductive and modulatory limit in which differentials are differentiated in the continuum of singular and ordinary points, then any individual is of the membrane and never set apart from it. An individual is of the membrane in the sense that it is of the limit, a limit that can fold its intensity in a manner that is kinetic – as relations of different speeds – and synchronously fold in a manner that is dynamic – as its affective tonality. The membrane is the vibratory plane where kinetic intensities and dynamic affects modulate each other in the passing of the informational refrain, resulting in a space not yet bifurcated in any digitalized Euclidean way. As Massumi puts it, ‘we do not live in Euclidean space. We live between dimensions.’161 This is why the bell and the whistle, as expressions that form a possessive territorial claim, can fold into each other. Their folding crosses any spatial or temporal boundary, precisely because they emerge from a membrane that is meant to produce modal boundaries by their intensive abolishment. The sound of the bell is not just that; it is the Sound of the Bell. The sound of whistling in the rain is never only a distant melody; it is the Whistling in the Rain. Like the infinite succession of dice throws, they remain both unassignable yet perfectly determinable, reaffirming change every time, appearing as experiential fragments of the same unique modulatory vibrations of the membrane. Numerically one but formally multiple, the membrane modulates both a pre-individual memory and a molecular futurity through the affective folding of the event. We always find ourselves in the fold of experience.162 Via the ascetic subtraction of an infinity of chaotic forces, their rhythmic modulation between milieus and the possessive expression of a territorial claim, we eventually fold ourselves into a niche; a niche that we manipulate through speculatively extrapolating the ways that it can bring both the metastable past and the molecular futural encounter together in a present that is modulated by the affective technicities of the membrane itself. Consequently, the membrane is not what sets individuals apart or what brings them together. The membrane is the autonomous individuation of all individuals. If it were not thus, then its intensive manipulation would be impossible. As the individuation of all individuals, the membrane in its autonomy establishes the possibility for affective encounters between both physical and technical individuals, between both

Architecture on the Limit  143

the organic and the inorganic. In simple terms, the membranic folds make technicities possible. As Deleuze, following Simondon, writes, any organization (differentiation and integration) presupposes the primary topological structure of an absolute outside and inside that encourages relative intermediary exteriorities and interiorities: every inside-space is topologically in contact with the outside-space, independent of distance and on the limits of a ‘living’; and this carnal or vital topology, far from showing up in space, frees a sense of time that fits the past into the inside, brings about the future in the outside, and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present.163 As such, the fold cannot be approached in terms of cutting through or putting together, analysis or synthesis, but only in terms of its longitude and latitude: what it possesses and what its affects are. It should not be understood in terms of its thickness or depth – as a boundary – but rather, as Spinoza would say, as a finite yet infinite continuum where everything pertains to a process of individuation (including the membrane itself). This is what Spinoza has in mind when he refers to the ‘face of the whole universe’.164 In the original Latin, Spinoza uses the word facies, derived from the verb facio – to fashion or to make; the making of the whole universe. However, the word ‘face’ implies a surface continuum that expresses finite modes.165 Each individual is composed of many other individuals, forming a series of increasing complexity, similar to the way in which multiple cells and micro-organisms make a fish, multiple fishes, plants, stones and water make a river, multiple rivers, mountains and land make up the earth, multiple planets make the universe and so on.166 In his own words, ‘if we proceed this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual.’167 A finite yet infinite continuum where everything pertains to a process of subjectification. The membrane is genetic both in spatial and in temporal terms, with its chronogenetic capacities unfolding alongside its morphogenetic capacities. As such, the vital and carnal topology of the membrane is always etho-topological. Space and time fold in a larval causality determined by the omnipotent porosity of an affective amplification (or an affective disempowerment) that proceeds by means of successive membranic encounters. As philosopher Anne Sauvanargues puts it, life does not depend on specific chemical constituents, but only on the differential disposition of matters which are not perceptible on the physico-chemical plane. Vital subjectivity is never anything more than a topological arrangement: a spatial enfolding translated by a chronogenesis. It does not emerge in the form of a sudden rupture, in the form of special structural or energetic conditions, but due to a simple torsion of

144  Architecture on the Limit

materiality. It proceeds on the basis of an entirely spatial individuation, the apparition of a specific tissue equipped with the chemical property of functioning as a limit endowed by a selective permeability: a membrane.168 Therefore, the membrane cannot be broken apart or put back together. It does not operate based on a digital modality, but on the contrary, it is what makes the digital possible. In this sense, the membrane is neither fragile nor rigid, but porous and permeable. Its porosity, nonetheless, is not one of gaps, obstacles and cavities. It is a porosity that remains purely intensive and only after its etho-topological selection, transduces in any extensive form. In a similar way, the permeability of the membrane is an informational permeability: fully relational, the membrane ‘selects’ through its torsions the polarities of meaning that can generate both an encounter and an event, leading to their resolution that brings forth an individuation. Its porosity is polar, a differential selection in both centripetal (kinetic) and centrifugal (dynamic) directions that allows meaning to be generated through the virtuality of an encounter that is just about to come.169 This does not mean that the membrane rejects some types of meaning in favour of other types of information: the membranic selection is not exclusive but inclusive. Membranic disjunction is the most profound form of inclusive disjunction, a continuous ‘and … and … and’ that never ceases to transduce and modulate itself and its torsions through the propagation of information that spreads on the membranic infinity: shuddering and shivering from a self-blown wind. The fold, when approached in intensive instead of extensive terms, is neither merely spatial nor merely temporal. It is both at once, but also, it is what allows space and time to emerge as categories. In this sense, the fold is purely experiential, but as an experience that precedes, transcends and determines individual experience. At the level of the polarized membrane, the interiorpast and the exterior-future confront each other, while as Simondon claims, this confrontation in the operation of selective assimilation is the present of the living being, which is formed by this polarity of passage and obstruction between past substances and substances to come that are present to one another via the operation of individuation; the present is this metastability of the rapport between interior and exterior, past and future; the exterior is exterior and the interior is interior relative to this mutual allagmatic activity of presence.170 Consequently, the membrane brings forward a radically new understanding not just of space, but of time as well. The interior is no longer what is separated spatially from an exterior. It is rather a past that cannot exteriorize, that individuates in a rhythm so weak and slow in tempo that it is imperceptible: the past as a torsion of the membrane that is less affectively susceptible to the passing of the refrain. What matters, then, is how we can expand the affectivity of the past, how we can become (on) the limit that would catalyse

Architecture on the Limit  145

an encounter that can literally cause the past to transduce. It is obvious that such an encounter, as well as all that accompanies it – from its milieus to its territory – comes from the future: interior-past and exterior-future, that is the polarized vitality of the membrane. As a result, any individual in its individuation is in the continuous limit of its interiorized past and its exteriorized futurity, the stasis of its being and the movement of its becoming: the interior as implicated affects and the exterior as explicated encounters. Conceptualizing the membrane as such implies a radical reconsideration of what architecture can do. If architecture is the production of processes of individuation, then we may expand architecture beyond a mere organizational (analytic or synthetic) operator. With no boundary between interior and exterior, with porosity understood as a porosity of affects and information, architecture can be approached in terms of its capacities to catalyse a future that will explicate an interiorized past. In the development of an architectural technicity, in the reticular generalization and concretization that architecture catalyses, there is literally no space that is outside architecture (nor a space that is only architectural). The folding of the bell and the whistle hint at a movement that is at once affective and auto-affective: it can catalyse encounters that in their contingency cause a new subject to emerge while individuating the affective capacities of all the assemblages that have been temporally interiorized. Architecture, as the becoming of the refrain, is what liberates new individuations by allowing them to navigate the torsions of the membrane at an absolute speed. Hence, the territorial claim as the first architectural act is not only the condition of an emergent subjectivity but also the formation of new affects and, crucially, new meanings; even if one insists on approaching architecture in organizational terms, then at least this organization should be an organization of meanings. Nevertheless, and this is why I attach such importance to the reciprocity of stuttering and intuition, the meanings that architecture organizes are never predefined. Architecture, aiming at the production of new individuations, should be able to address both an interiorized past and an exteriorized future. Since the membrane, as the limit itself, cannot be manipulated in extensive terms, and since any modulation between interior-past and exterior-future happens on the membrane, architecture should start from the intensive and only afterwards, in the form of a bifurcating cascade, end in the extensive. When stuttering, architecture dislocates itself, becoming incompatible with its interiorized past (crystalized typologically); when intuiting, it manages to speculatively extrapolate on an exteriorized future (quasi-crystal and nontypological). Therefore, the binary opposition between an architectural input and a built output is exchanged for an architectural zigzagging, a reticular technicity of stuttering and intuiting, that amplifies an individual’s affects so that an unfolding on the limit can occur. Bringing together bells and whistles, unassignable and yet perfectly determinable, architecture (and the possibility to speak of it) lies not at the crossroads of a discrete design decision, but at the disjunctive synthesis of rhythmic membranic torsions. Informationally

146  Architecture on the Limit

permeable, an architectural structure transduces an architectural operation and that operation transduces another structure, individuating alongside that which individuates it. In the architectural allagmatics we may examine what is fundamentally architectural about them: the passage from structure to operation, and vice versa, implies that the singularity of architecture lies in its capacity to catalyse the emergence of novelty. In the carnal topology of the membrane we will now see how larval space unfolds. Notes 1 Jakob von Uexküll, ‘The New Concept of Umwelt: A Link between Science and the Humanities’, trans. Gösta Brunow, Semiotica 134 (2001): 118. 2 Jakob von Uexküll, ‘The Theory of Meaning’, Semiotica 42 (1982): 26. 3 Brett Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, MerleauPonty, and Deleuze (New York: SUNY Press, 2008), 30. 4 Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society (London: Continuum, 2006), 22. 5 Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, 30. 6 Uexküll, ‘Theory of Meaning’, 64. 7 Ibid., 65. 8 Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Life and Technology: An Inquiry into and Beyond Simondon, trans. Barnaby Norman (Lüneburg, Germany: Meson Press, 2015), 26. 9 Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 208–9. 10 Barthélémy, Life and Technology, 219. 11 Ibid. 12 Simondon, Individuation, 319. 13 Mare-Pier Boucher, ‘Intra-Psychic Individualization: Transductive Connections and the Genesis of Living Technique’, in Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology, ed. Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, and Ashley Woodward (Edinburgh: University Press, 2012), 95. 14 Simondon, Individuation, 8. 15 Alberto Toscano, The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 138. 16 Muriel Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, trans. Thomas LaMarre (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 4. 17 Ibid. 18 Anne Sauvanargues, ‘Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality’, in Gilbert Simondon, trans. Jon Roffe, ed. Arne de Boever et al., 57. 19 Sean Bowden, ‘Gilles Deleuze, a Reader of Gilbert Simondon’, in Gilbert Simondon, ed. Arne de Boever et al., 145. 20 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 2001), 246. 21 Toscano, Theatre of Production, 139. 22 Gordon Locke, ‘Peirce’s Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36, no. 1 (2000): 137. 23 Toscano, Theatre of Production, 176. 24 Ibid. 25 Sauvanargues, ‘Crystals and Membranes’, 60. 26 Simondon, Individuation, 391. 27 Brian Massumi, ‘Technical Mentality Revisited’, in Gilbert Simondon, ed. Arne de Boever et al., 26. 28 Ibid., 26. 29 Ibid.

Architecture on the Limit  147 30 Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 106. 31 Ibid., 107. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Pascal Chabot, The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation, trans. Aliza Krefetz (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 79. 35 Ibid., 79–80. 36 Simondon, Individuation, 16. 37 Barthélémy, Life and Technology, 32. 38 Ibid. 39 Simondon, Individuation, 687. 40 Chabot, Philosophy of Simondon, 52. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 53. 43 Mario Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), ix. 44 Ibid., x. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid., 5. 47 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222. 48 Mario Carpo, ‘Tempest in a Teapot’, in Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York: Anyone Corporation, 2005), 106. 49 Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, 40. 50 Ibid., 47–48. 51 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 19. 52 Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, 97. 53 Anne Sauvanargues, Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, trans. Suzanne Verderber and Eugene W. Holland (Edinburgh: University Press, 2016), 65. 54 Simondon, Individuation, 393. 55 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 20. 56 Ibid., 222, 246. 57 Simondon, Individuation, 11. 58 Barthélémy, Life and Technology, 36. 59 Simondon, Individuation, 12. 60 Ibid., 11, emphasis in original. 61 Chabot, Philosophy of Simondon, 85. 62 Ibid. 63 Simondon, Individuation, 13. 64 Sauvanargues, Artmachines, 69. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 28. 69 Simondon, Individuation, 32; emphasis in original. 70 Ibid., 661. 71 Barthélémy, Life and Technology, 204. 72 Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, 14. 73 Simondon, Individuation, 664. 74 Ibid., 160. 75 Combes, Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual, 21. 76 Chabot, Philosophy of Simondon, 93. 77 Simondon, Individuation, 182; emphasis in original.

148  Architecture on the Limit 78 Uexküll, ‘The Theory of Meaning’, 66. 79 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 314. 80 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 231. 81 Ibid., 232. 82 Ibid. 83 Henri von Lier, Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. II (Paris, 1985), 554, cited in Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 233. 84 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 204. 85 Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, 233–36. 86 Ibid., 236. 87 Ibid., 237. 88 Ibid., 238. 89 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 90 Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, 174. 91 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 50. 94 Arjen Kleinherenbrink, ‘Territory and Ritornello: Deleuze and Guattari on Thinking Living Beings’, Deleuze Studies 9, no. 2 (2015): 213. 95 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 96–97. 96 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 52. 97 Simondon, Individuation, 344. 98 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 55. 99 Ibid., 313. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid. 102 Kleinherenbrink, ‘Territory and Ritornello’, 214. 103 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. 104 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 85. 105 Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000). 106 Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration, 138. 107 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 87. 108 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), 3. 109 Ibid., 19. 110 Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 87. 111 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313–14. 112 Ibid. 113 Steven Shaviro, Discognition (London: Repeater, 2016), 183. 114 Kleinherenbrink, ‘Territory and Ritornello’, 214. 115 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 316. 116 Ibid., 315. 117 Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), 20. 118 Ibid. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid., 21. 121 Ibid. 122 Ibid.

Architecture on the Limit  149 123 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 185–86. 124 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 319–20. 125 Ibid., 316. 126 Ibid. 127 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 22. 128 Ibid., 74; emphasis in original. 129 Kleinenherebrink, ‘Territory and Ritornello’, 219. 130 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 17. 131 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 311. 132 Ibid., 312. 133 Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, 23. 134 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 327. 135 Alphonso Lingis, The First Person Singular (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 15. 136 Greg Lynn, ‘Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple’, in Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn (London: Architectural Design, 1993), 24. 137 Lynn, ‘Architectural Curvilinearity’, 26. 138 Ibid., 24. 139 Ibid., 27. 140 Michael Speaks, ‘Folding toward a New Architecture’, preface to Cache, Earth Moves, xiv. 141 Speaks, ‘Folding toward a New Architecture’, xiv. 142 Nick Land, ‘Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest’, in Fanged Noumena, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012), 64. 143 Nick Land, ‘Machinic Desire’, in Fanged Noumena, 320. 144 Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory’, in Collapse 3, ed. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007), 92. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 95; original emphasis. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 93. 149 Anne Boyman, ‘Translator’s Preface’ in Cache, Earth Moves, x. 150 Cache, Earth Moves, 3. 151 Ibid., 2. 152 Ibid., 25. 153 Ibid., 109. 154 Ibid., 2. 155 Ibid., 140. 156 Carpo, The Alphabet and the Algorithm, 60. 157 Ibid. 158 Sebastian Vehlken, ‘Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique for Generative Architecture’, Footprint 15 (2014): 10. 159 Deleuze, Foucault, 110. 160 Massumi, ‘Technical Mentality Revisited’, 28. 161 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 203; original emphasis. 162 Ibid., 182. 163 Deleuze, Foucault, 118. 164 Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), IIL7S. 165 Beth Lord, Spinoza’s Ethics (Edinburgh: University Press, 2010), 40. 166 Ibid., 40. 167 Spinoza, Ethics, IIL7S. 168 Sauvanargues, ‘Crystals and Membranes’, 66. 169 Ibid. 170 Simondon, Individuation, 254.

150  Architecture on the Limit

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. The Dialectic of Duration. Translated by Mary McAllester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000. Barthélémy, Jean-Hugues. Life and Technology: An Inquiry into and Beyond Simondon. Translated by Barnaby Norman. Lüneburg, Germany: Meson Press, 2015. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003. Boucher, Mare-Pier. ‘Intra-Psychic Individualization: Transductive Connections and the Genesis of Living Technique’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edited by Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 92–109. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Bowden, Sean. ‘Gilles Deleuze, a Reader of Gilbert Simondon’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edited by Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 135– 53. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Boyman, Anne. ‘Translator’s Preface’. In Earth Moves. Edited by Bernard Cache, translated by Anne Boyman, viii–xi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Buchanan, Brett. Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. New York: SUNY Press, 2008. Cache, Bernard. Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories. Translated by Anne Boyman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Carpo, Mario. ‘Tempest in a Teapot’. In Log: Observations on Architecture and the Contemporary City. Edited by Cynthia Davidson, 99–106. New York: Anyone Corporation, 2005. Carpo, Mario. The Alphabet and the Algorithm. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. Chabot, Pascal. The Philosophy of Simondon: Between Technology and Individuation. Translated by Aliza Krefetz. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Combes, Muriel. Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual. Translated by Thomas LaMarre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. DeLanda, Manuel. A New Philosophy of Society. London: Continuum, 2006. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Goleta. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. London: Continuum, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Guattari, Félix. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. Kleinherenbrink, Arjen. ‘Territory and Ritornello: Deleuze and Guattari on Thinking Living Beings’. Deleuze Studies 9, no. 2 (2015): 208–30. Land, Nick. ‘Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest’. In Fanged Noumena. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 55–80. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012.

Architecture on the Limit  151 Land, Nick. ‘Machinic Desire’. In Fanged Noumena. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, 319–44. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012. Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004. Lier, Henri von. Encyclopaedia Universalis, vol. II. Paris: Ed. Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1985. Lingis, Alphonso. The First Person Singular. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. Locke, Gordon. ‘Peirce’s Metaphysics: Evolution, Synechism, and the Mathematical Conception of the Continuum’. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 36, no. 1 (2000): 133–47. Lord, Beth. Spinoza’s Ethics. Edinburgh: University Press, 2010. Lynn, Greg. ‘Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple’. In Folding in Architecture. Edited by Greg Lynn, 24–41. London: Architectural Design, 1993. Massumi, Brian. ‘Technical Mentality Revisited’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Edited by Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 19–36. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Meillassoux, Quentin. ‘Subtraction and Contraction: Deleuze, Immanence, and Matter and Memory’. In Collapse 3. Edited by Robin Mackay, 63–108. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2007. Sauvanargues, Anne. ‘Crystals and Membranes: Individuation and Temporality’. In Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology. Translated by Jon Roffe. Edited by Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe and Ashley Woodward, 57–72. Edinburgh: University Press, 2012. Sauvanargues, Anne. Artmachines: Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon. Translated by Suzanne Verderber and Eugene W. Holland. Edinburgh: University Press, 2016. Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Speaks, Michael. ‘Folding toward a New Architecture’. Preface to Earth Moves by Bernard Cache, xiii–xix. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Spinoza. Ethics. Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Classics, 2005. Toscano, Alberto. The Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Uexküll, Jakob von. ‘The New Concept of Umwelt: A Link between Science and the Humanities’. Translated by Gösta Brunow. Semiotica 134 (2001): 111–23. Uexküll, Jakob von. ‘The Theory of Meaning’. Semiotica 42 (1982): 25–82. Vehlken, Sebastian. ‘Computational Swarming: A Cultural Technique for Generative Architecture’. Footprint 15 (2014): 9–24.

4

Larval Space

Both spatial stuttering and architectural intuition must be placed on the membrane: it is on its torsions and permeability that they express their potential. On the limit, a play on the thresholds of individuation, stuttering and intuition couple with each other, not to form another binary opposition but to energize a membranic metastable field. If stuttering operates as a triple process (a decomposition, a deterritorialization and a push to the limit), then intuition is not just a complementary function; it is a synchronous act that intersects and transforms, penetrates and attracts. While the membranic tensions are provoked and stuttering as a germ energizes the metastable potential, intuition perforates the membrane. However, it does not do so in a spatial or a temporal sense. The membrane, albeit in space and time, belongs to both and yet to neither: it primarily belongs to the intensive. Its analogue torsions, the manner in which it folds onto and into itself can neither be visualized nor represented. It is not only in the eye of the storm; it is what generates both every storm and every calm moment before and after it. Therefore, if the membrane is pure intensity, then the intuition that perforates it is the intuition of an intensive difference, of a threshold that will be crossed – again and again – yet every time differently and with different effects. It is, in other words, the intuition of a passage, of a refrain that repeats itself without exhausting itself. On the intuition of the refrain, as well as in the territories (the specific membranic portions that produce a subject) and the lines of flight that stuttering opens, architecture becomes ‘absolute’. This ‘absolute’ architecture is not due to the demands of anyone that performs it, but rather due to the capacity of architecture itself to bring together past, present and future while simultaneously abolishing any distinction between them. Architecture moves from Chronos to Aeon and back, becoming not only trans-spatial or transtemporal, but, crucially, trans-affective. In other words, an architecture of the membrane does not constrain itself because of what has already been produced or what it wishes to produce: the only constraint is the constraint of production itself, the larval field where everything is possible and yet only something occurs. Even more, it no longer bothers with the illusion of producing something out of nothing, but rather with the affirmative, impersonal and purely affective selection of this over that, not as a contest of contours, DOI: 10.4324/9781003278078-5

Larval Space 

153

lines and discursive criteria but as a series of consequences that are their own consequence. This dynamism of consequences, this propagation of constraints, is both intensive and expressive; or, more precisely, it is intensive because it is expressive and vice versa. With the technicities that it deploys, it affords the reticular determination of both the subjects it produces and the environments that they manipulate, of a meaning that is shared while it remains autonomous and non-subjective: of a larval space that is at once the beginning, the end and the means. 4.1 Memorie dal Futuro Philosopher William James, the father of radical empiricism, asks us to ‘place ourselves at the point of view of the thing’s doing.’1 If by now we are aware that it is not a subject (or an object) that has a point of view but the other way around, then James’s claim appears even more demanding: it is not a matter of imagination, of picturing ourselves as something else. It is neither a matter of analogy nor a matter of finding the proper metaphor so as to envision or represent the point of view of a thing, more so in its own doing. On the contrary, if points of view are produced on and of the membrane through the ways it folds itself and through the territories that it selects, then the issue at hand is an issue of movement; not any movement whatsoever, but an intensive movement that finds meaning in a novel line of flight, in leaving a territory behind and conquering another, in changing habits and not habitats. One needs to become a nomad to change points of view: to open oneself to the affects that bear the potential to possess and claim a new territory, to possess and be produced by a new point of view. However, to possess one needs to express: there is no possession without expression. 4.1.1 Synaptic Passages

As sociologist Antoine Hennion suggests, it is instructive to examine the etymology of the word expression.2 Initially, it comes from the Latin expressare: ex, ‘out’, and pressare, ‘to press’. Expression then literally means to press out, to squeeze, to extort: expression is a coming out.3 But a coming out of where? Moreover, if to express is to press out, then in what direction is this pressure oriented, where does it lead? What is being pressed, and what affords something to come out of it? It is misleading to conceive expression as pressure in extensive terms. Therefore, it is equally misleading to conceive it in spatial terms, those of discrete individuals where pressure stands merely for the force applied to a surface. Quite the opposite, pressure is not force on surface: pressure is force acting on the membrane and therefore force acting on force. In other words, expression, as the pressure to come out, belongs to the intensive. Ex-pression is an act on the pressurized limit, the limit that has been energetically and informatically charged. It is the act of its crossing, of trespassing, of yet another membranic fold that does not stand apart from

154  Larval Space

those before it but pushes their disjunctive individuation further. Still, one should not confuse that which is expressed with the intensity that led to its expression. As Massumi puts it, ‘intensity is immanent to expression. It is enveloped in the expressed quality that spins off from it. It is not itself expressed as such. Intensity belongs to the immanent outside of the field of emergence.’4 What Massumi claims is that when one attempts to capture the intensity immanent to expression, one effectively annuls it. Intensity is cancelled out when one attempts to quantify it, to divide it into pieces that are representable and therefore communicable. On the contrary, intensity is not to be communicated: intensity is informative, in the sense that it expresses information that will transduce on the membrane. Therefore, there is no exterior that pressurizes an interior but rather a becoming that was confronted with a violent encounter. However, if every encounter is quintessentially affective, then we can understand why Massumi claims that it is only affects that express intensity without annulling it.5 Affects are an immanent differentiation of a field of intensity, since they express the difference made by the differences composing the field itself. Massumi continues by claiming that the issue of affect’s relation to intensity is ultimately tied to the basic Spinozist definition of affect as the ‘ability to affect and be affected.’ This base definition must be always completed by the corollary that the playing out of an ability to affect and be affected coincides with the crossing of a threshold accompanied by a registering of the feeling of that transition … Intensity and affect will be plotted to the two contrasting sides, with ‘intensity’ referring to the field differentials of the affect-and-be-affectedside, and ‘affect’ referring to the expressive regis​terin​g-of-​the-f​eelin​g-of-​ trans​ition​-side​.6 In other words, intensity and affects are in a relation of disparation. Intensity is a signal and therefore metastable, while affects are the signs of an expressive registering. This distinction is neither strict nor irreversible. If it were, there would be no possibility for the emergence of technicities that manipulate and individuate both the intensive metastable field and its expressive affects: intensity and affects are constantly and reticularly determining each other and through their determination their disparates resolve, producing novel pressures that will squeeze out of the membrane novel individuals. What is crucial is that no novel individual is ever separated from the membrane. It might sound rather obscure, at least for the moment, but I will claim that this inseparability is fundamental for architecture: it is what makes possible the production of a space that is not-here and not-yet while operating right-here-and-now. To understand why intensity and affects cannot strictly be distinguished, even though they operate reticularly, it is useful to return to the concept of information. According to Simondon, information is always a product of a resolution of disparates. More precisely, information can be located ‘between

Larval Space 

155

two halves of a system in a relation of disparation.’ Consequently, if both intensity and affects are in a disparate relation, we can claim that, indeed, they produce information. This information determines an individual, depending on the meaning that it has for it and therefore depending on its affective repertoires. This is the crucial point: for Simondon perception is never to be separated from information, since it is not ‘the grasping of a form but the resolution of a conflict, the discovery of a compatibility, the invention of a form.’8 For Simondon, perception is itself in a disparate relation with information, the latter emerging as the resolution of the disparation between intensities and affects. In other words, through this cascade of resolutions – that is by no means dialectical – the issue that emerges is of compatibility; to invent, to bring from the future a compatible form. In this sense, Simondon claims that the perceptual field consists of 7

an intensive diversity that renders the subject-world system comparable to a supersaturated solution; perception is the resolution that transforms the tension that affected this supersaturated system into an organized structure; it could be said that every veritable perception is the resolution of a problem of compatibility.9 Therefore, close to Gibson’s understanding of affordances, Simondon claims that what we perceive is neither outlines nor shapes, but thresholds of intensity. Moreover, at the moment that an intensive threshold is perceived, a compatible form is simultaneously invented. However, the moment a form is invented, intensity is reintroduced, this time as the intensity of an affective potential: the threshold of an action that cuts both ways, merging subjects and objects into an exchange of points of view. Intensity is never cancelled out but rather constantly bootstrapped through the reticularity of affects, information and perception, energizing each disparation and demanding that it take form. Put succinctly, intensity (as pure difference) can simultaneously be in-itself and more-than-itself: affective intensity, informational intensity, perceptual intensity. This is why Simondon points out that sensation – as the coming together of affects, information and perception – is nothing but intensive and differential; it is the ‘grasping of a direction, not of an object.’10 But the question remains, how can we examine the sensation of a direction that does not address the present but rather that which is yet-to-come. To do so, we can approach it as an issue of synapses. To understand why, it is important to return to the refrain: a rhythm of rhythms, an intensity of intensities. A synapse is a junction, an almost imperceptible gap through which an impulse of intensity passes. To put it differently, a synapse is a passing of the refrain. Beyond the modal temptations of placing it in space or time, the synaptic moment (or the synaptic location) is nothing but pure action and therefore, pure relationality: both a material object and a figure of thought, the complementarity of an actual brain and a virtual mind.11 As such, synapses manage to capture both the passage of an intensity (as a synaptic

156  Larval Space

moment) and the formation of an extensity (as a synaptic location). Literature theorist Hanjo Berressem is therefore correct when he describes them as electric thought.12 As a pure relation, synapses manage to remain both inscribed in a system of signification (and therefore belong to modality) while simultaneously being open to the a-signifying and deterritorializing power of the refrain. They are embodied disparation, an intensity that resolves its own problematics by means of further intensification. Therefore, the potential of the synaptic moment lies in the fact that it is at once referring to itself and to everything other than itself: to the interiority of an established becoming and to the violence of an exteriorized encounter. Hence, if the refrain is understood as that which eternally returns, then the synaptic moment is a moment of active forgetting. It allows the refrain to come through again, to rearrange the cosmos without erasing it. As Guattari points out, a-signifying synapses, which are simultaneously irreversibilizing, singularizing, heterogenesizing and necessitating, push us from the world of memories of redundancies embedded in extrinsic coordinates, into Universes of pure intensive iteration, which have no discursive memory since their very existence acts as such.13 For this reason, synapses can be understood as a constraint: they delimit the field of the possible while reinforcing the virtual.14 In examining how a memory of the future operates, constraints will become of crucial importance. For now, however, it is paramount to expand on how synapses facilitate the passage of the refrain. To do so, we can follow Guattari in connecting the function of the synapses with speed. Guattari claims that synapses not only bring together the Chronic and the Aeonic temporal directions, but they also formulate a bridge that connects molar extensities with molecular intensities.15 It is therefore a matter of a disparate relation between the finite speed of the molar and the infinite speed of the molecular; or, in other words, between the slow interiorized becoming and the accelerating exteriorized (trans-affective) encounter. Synapses, as facilitators of the refrain, function also as facilitators of the resolutions that it brings forth: they are helpmates to emergence, assisting in a membranic manipulation that demands the invention of form. Operating intensively among information, affects and perception, synapses are essentially speed regulators. They determine how much, how fast and how intense an individual can sustain a play of limits before crossing the threshold that demands a new point of view: a novel perception and, hence, a novel form. Situated between the molecular and the molar, the outside and the inside, the problematic field of the synaptic moment is that of making the speeds of infinite redundancy of the first hold together with the absolute decelerations of the second, whilst rendering possible discontinuous intensive striations at the crossover between the two

Larval Space 

157

entitarian dimensions. Once again, one comes back to the paradox of the continuous that envelops the discontinuous and the intensive.16 Consequently, as Berressem reminds us, we should avoid the temptation of prioritizing the molecular over the molar, the smooth over the striated, the deterritorializing line of flight over the territorializing striation. Not only will the smooth not suffice to save us, but it is actually the disparate tension between the smooth and the striated that can offer any possibility of salvation: if there is any chance for individuating further, it is because of the tension between the two. In other words, the very promise of a form yet to be invented (a resolution yet to be squeezed out, to be expressed) exists solely because there is a molar constraint of speed and a molecular constraint of directionality. What the refrain manages through its synaptic passages is to bring the two together, since it is a crystal of space–time that fabricates space and time.17 Or, as Berressem claims, the refrain provides a consistent field where memorial traits of earlier states of existence are gathered while simultaneously connecting them with what is not yet actual.18 In the synaptic passages of the refrain, architecture turns into something more significant than the simple construction of space. Through the territories that the refrain makes possible, through the rhythms that literally select a piece of land out of chaos, architecture provides the potential for a novel line of subjectification. Architectural theorist Chris Smith is right when he points out that the material ordering of the world of architecture is much more than the construction of islands of order in chaos.19 If architecture allows us anything it is the promise of returning us to chaos.20 As Smith claims, in architecture we create a bedroom in order that we might sleep soundly and secure ourselves against the dark. But this is only half of the story. We also create the bedroom in order to activate all the intensity of darkness. To fuck and to dream. To feed the germinal forces. To return to the chaos. Architecture, in this sense, is a most marvellous uncertain and fragile centre.21 To put it another way, architecture operates not only because of the synaptic moments, those through which the refrain passes, determining the emergence of a territory that will bring the expressive and the possessive together; architecture is a synapse in its own right. It allows for both the formation of an extensive space – to be lived, experienced, destroyed, praised and condemned – and for the very possibility of intuiting a space-yet-to-come, and consequently, a subject yet to individuate. If architecture is a marvellous uncertain and fragile centre, it is because architectural technicities, in their successive concretization, allow for a certain degree of indeterminacy. As Simondon points out, this margin of indeterminacy allows for any technicity to be sensitive to outside information.22 In brief, architecture (both in how it is produced and in what it produces) is metastable. Because of its

158  Larval Space

metastability, both architectural production and the production of lines of subjectification through architecture are possible. Moreover, the sensitivity of architectural technicities to outside information highlights the nature of this information. While information is like a chance event, it simultaneously distinguishes itself from such chance events.23 Anything archetypical (and hence, stereotypical), any ultra-stable system, not only excludes any kind of novelty, but also excludes all information. The trick that allows for anything architectural to be produced lies precisely in the metastable margin of indeterminacy between architectural technicities and information. As Simondon claims, in order for the informational nature of the signal to subsist, a certain margin of indeterminacy must subsist. Predictability is the ground receiving this supplementary precision, distinguishing it in advance from pure chance in a great number of cases, partially preforming it. Information is thus halfway between pure chance and absolute regularity. One can say that form, conceived as absolute spatial as well as temporal regularity, is not information but a condition of information; it is what receives information, the a priori that receives information. Form has a function of selectivity. But information is not form, nor is it a collection of forms; it is the variability of forms, the influx of variation with respect to a form. It is the unpredictability of a variation of form, not pure unpredictability of all variation.24 Therefore, architecture transforms information into forms by allowing its technicities to affectively open up to the indeterminacy of a differential influx. This influx of differences is nothing but an influx of intensities; it is the refrain itself as the gathering of memorial traits of earlier states of existence. Within architectural technicities one can locate a dynamism, especially regarding the capacity of architecture to invent anything novel. This dynamism entails the reticular synaptic relation between an actual architectural technicity and a virtual architectural product. Their reticularity is neither of a priori forms nor of a posteriori taxonomies, but rather of the a praesenti dynamism of a lived functioning. Paraphrasing Simondon, for an architect to invent is to make one’s thought function as architecture might function, not according to causality, which is too fragmentary, but ‘according to the dynamism of lived functioning, grasped because it is produced, accompanied in its genesis.’25 Thought needs to operate architecturally in order to produce architecture. In this sense, if architecture is understood as a catalyst of subjectification, then architectural thought itself could be acknowledged for what it truly can be: not merely a discourse on formal styles but a discourse on styles of life. Not ‘my’ life versus ‘yours’ but ‘a’ life that we all share even if we do not have anything in common. The reason we share a life is the simple fact that we share the technicities that produced it, that we are able to manipulate them and ourselves so as to manipulate an environment that can, hopefully, produce a

Larval Space 

159

‘better’ us: a collective that is affectively sensitive to the indeterminacy of a world in continuous individuation. However, to be affectively sensitive to indeterminacy means to be able to localize it. Simondon is explicit about this: to receive information (and therefore be susceptible to change) one needs to be able to localize its indeterminacy.26 For architectural technicities to be able to individuate, they need to be able to determine, operate and reticularly structure themselves based on informational relays; or, in better terms, on synaptic passages. Architecture needs to be understood as an open system not because of an intellectual caprice but because of the sheer fact that only open systems can localize the indeterminate critical points and periods, the synapses and relays that afford its individuation. Relays are crucial not only because they allow for a memory of the past to pass through but also because they catalyse transduction: the informational exchange of the intensive with the intensive. Simondon is careful to define a transducer as a resistance (or, as I will claim, a constraint) that can be modulated by an information that is external to its metastable field, that of its actual and virtual energy potentials.27 In short, synapses, relays, transducers can all be understood as constraints that remain intensive enough (or, better said, intensively charged) so that they can mediate between what actually exists and what virtually is about to come. The transducer as a constraint belongs neither to the domain of potential energy nor to the domain of actual energy; it is truly the mediator between these two domains, but it is neither a domain of the accumulation of energy, nor a domain of actualisation: it is a margin of indeterminacy between these two domains, that which brings potential energy to its actualisation. It is during the course of this passage from potential to actual that information comes into play; information is the condition of actualisation.28 This is how stuttering energizes the metastable field: it produces continuous relays, constant constraints that demand the intensive resolution of their disparate tension. Stuttering is transductive precisely because it operates on synapses: what was almost there yet never there, what is about to come but not as we expect it. In this sense, stuttering is an intensive exercise in the indeterminate, expressing a figure that is not yet figured out, a space that can be anything and yet comes to be something. It is the disparate of intuition not because it needs to be placed in a binary relation with intuition but because they both need each other in order to allow for an architecture of the future to inform the present: a virtual affair of architectural states informing an actual state of architectural affairs. They are both the relays of a sense that is transspatial, trans-temporal and trans-affective, and by practising them, one can feel an architectural memory crossing through. This memory, of an architecture right-here-and-now and an architecture not-here and not-yet, has two aspects: it is a memory of the past and a memory of the future. Coming from the past, it is the already realized potential that

160  Larval Space

is stored in a form; coming from the future it is the leftover of potential effectively fed forward for subsequent phases, pre-accelerating them.29 They are both carried by the refrain, encountering each other in a territory while intensively transducing in the subject that emerges from it. Through the synaptic constraints, the certainty of the past is exchanged for the uncertainty of the future, without assigning primacy to either. In other words, there is no certain past and uncertain future (nor the other way around) but rather a constant exchange between indeterminate relays: those that are formally grounded and those that are informationally charged. Consequently, Simondon claims that what links the figure to a ground – or the actual to a territory – is a relation that bestrides the present, diffusing an influence of the future onto it, of the virtual onto the actual.30 Moreover, to invent a form is to take charge of the actual through the virtual, to create a unique, intensive system from both: a technicity that can put the two in a disparate and, therefore, informational relation. For this reason, Simondon points out that ‘forms are passive in so far as they represent actuality; they become active when they organize in relation to this ground, thereby bringing prior virtualities into actuality.’31 What grounds and territorializes forms is the very passage from the virtual to the actual. Reticularly, what deterritorializes them is the passage from the actual to the virtual. Crucially, what binds the two together is the intensive synapses of an extended architectural mind that surveys two directions at once: both minor and major. It is high time to move beyond the distinction between minor and major, especially since the focus is now clearly positioned on the potential of their intensive disparation. Indeed, they each stand for a radically different mode of thought and practice, yet neither of the two would be possible without the other. Furthermore, without their reticular intensive tension, any technicity would also be impossible. As Simondon reminds us, to discover and examine an adequate relation between humans and technical objects, one would have to focus on the unity of the technical world, developing a mode of thinking that would incorporate both the craftsman and the engineer.32 As such, minor practices invent through tools while major practices popularize through technology. In other words, a minor practice is inventive while a major practice is encyclopaedic: the minor energizes the field of any technicity while the major allows for a transductive operation to take place, an operation that informs us of the potential that a novel technical individual brings forward, allowing therefore a synaptic passage. Paraphrasing Simondon, minor practices are an intuitive schematism, while major practices are the conceptualization of sensible qualities.33 In other words, any technicity depends on how the minor and the major within it will avoid becoming reactive closed systems that do not inform each other. It is only under the condition of their disparation that a technicity can individuate. While it might be worthwhile to start from the distinction of the modes of practices of architectural technicities (and the extended minds that they correspond to), we must nonetheless end in the intensive field that catalyses their individuation. Any other approach, any

Larval Space 

161

claim that wishes to reinforce the separation of the two, stands as an obstacle in an affirmative, ethological understanding of architecture – not as a love letter to the good old times or as a self-referential and pseudo-scientific claim to make architecture great again – but as the affirmation of the only thing that matters: a life that architecture can make worthy of what happens to it. 4.1.2 A Melody that Sings Itself

To affirm architecture as a catalyst of life and the architect as a physician of subjectification, we must turn to the architectural act itself: the capacity of architecture to conduct the present into the future. For Simondon, every act is a ‘functional structuration’, a moment where structure and operation meet each other. Moreover, he claims that an act produces and is produced by norms and values: norms and values do not exist prior to the system of being in which they appear; they are becoming, instead of appearing in becoming without being part of becoming; there is a historicity of the emergence of values, just as there is a historicity of the constitution of norms. Ethics cannot be recreated based on norms or based on values, no more than the being can be recreated based on the forms and matters to which abstractive analysis reduces the conditions of ontogenesis. Ethics is the requirement according to which there is a significative correlation of norms and values. To grasp ethics in its unity requires that one accompany ontogenesis: ethics is the meaning of individuation, the meaning of the synergy of successive individuations.34 Architectural norms and values are crucial for developing an account of the architectural act. Nonetheless, Simondon will claim that though they are crucial, they are not foundational. Essentially, Simondon asks for an ethological account of technicities that does not formulate binaries oppositions or presuppose fundamentals, but rather examines their individuation on the principle of individuation itself, in other words, an ontogenetic account of the acts, norms and values that assist in the individuation of architectural technicities. To this, one should add the affective power that emerges out of their assemblage: the potentia and the potestas of a technicity. As Scott explains when summarizing Simondon’s argument, potentia is operational and pre-individual power while potestas is structural and actualized power.35 In his words, ‘structural power (potestas) organizes operational power (potentia) by structuring it; however, potentia is the engendering determination of a determinable potestas, structure.’36 When examining norms and values, Simondon refrains from connecting them to morality. On the contrary, in an ethological manoeuvre, he claims that similar to the way potentia informs potestas and vice versa, norms and values possess no moral degrees. If there is such a thing as morality it may be understood as an event; however, if it is understood as an event, it

162  Larval Space

ceases to be axiological and becomes ethological. This allows him to claim that morality ‘is neither in norms nor in values but in their communication grasped in its real centre.’37 Simondon connects any discussion on norms, values and acts with the technology that provokes them and supports them. In an ethological technicity, Simondon acknowledges the importance of what he calls auto-normativity.38 To explain what auto-normativity stands for, Simondon uses the example of a hiker in a forest. Each step a hiker takes when walking in the woods is its own consequence: it is self-constitutive. The act of walking itself does not include any intrinsic directionality, any form of inherent compass that will orient the hiker.39 Likewise, if the hiker gets lost, it is not possible to depend on any familiar and recognizable exterior norm. In other words, for a hiker in the woods there are ‘no norms, no set rule of direction, every step, in every direction, is equiprobable and equivalent at once.’40 From an infinity of directions, the first step – as the act of hiking-in-the-woods – becomes the norm itself: every step that follows it builds on the relation of the step before it, one after the other leading the hiker to the edge of the forest. This is what Simondon has in mind when he claims that ‘the norm is derived from the act … Every act, anomic from its absolute origin, valorizes itself in an autogenous fashion because it continues and rests, consequently, more and more on itself.’41 In this regard, architectural norms and values are not only co-determinable; they are also contingent. There is literally no ground for them, except for the ground on which an architectural act territorializes. Subsequently, the act itself must allow for the synaptic passage of an architectural memory (the refrain) that will select a territory and will allow it to express and possess a form that is yet to be invented. On the territory and in the architectural act of expression, the technicities that reticularly make a subject, an object and an environment fold in their membranic disjunction, become the eventuating a praesenti of that which is about to come. Therefore, the architectural act as the event becomes a principle, since it is the moment where the a posteriori becomes a priori. The architect does not perform architecture prior to the technicities that afford it, but in and during their operation. As Simondon would have it, the architect fulfils the function of the present and maintains the reticularity of its consequences because her life is made of the rhythms of the technicities that surround her and allow her to connect with them and to connect them with one another.42 However, how can the architect be aware of the architectural act? How can we speak of a certain architectural consciousness that manages to survey past, present and future, the actual and the virtual, the minor and major aspects of the technicities that it deploys and that it is produced of? To examine this, I will turn to philosopher Raymond Ruyer. For Ruyer, consciousness is ‘neither a distinct ingredient, a sort of superadded phosphorescent substance, nor the attribute of a spiritual substance. Consciousness is only the act, intelligent or instinctive … organization according to a theme.’43 In other

Larval Space 

163

words, consciousness is inseparable from action, while both are the operational structuration of a theme. Ruyer’s philosophy of consciousness moves well beyond any mind–body or subject–object binary, while at the same time distinguishing itself from traditional phenomenological accounts. As philosopher Mark Hansen underlines in the introduction to the English publication of Ruyer’s masterpiece Neofinalism, where phenomenology generically takes intentionality, the relation of consciousness to an object or the ‘aboutness’ of consciousness, as a primitive, Ruyer’s philosophy of consciousness insists on absolute sensation as its foundation. Consciousness does not have a visual (or phenomenal) field as its intentional object. It is this field itself.44 Therefore, consciousness is never of something; it is something. This is precisely what I will examine in the following pages: how architectural consciousness is structured and how it operates, how it unites the present with the future when it expresses an invented architectural form out of the membranic disjunctive folds. To do so, I will follow Ruyer’s thought and examine how consciousness operates and structures itself in accordance with two themes: the trans-spatial and the trans-temporal. By complementing both with the trans-affective power of architectural technicities, I will highlight how larval space is not the field of architectural consciousness, but is architectural consciousness itself. Consequently, I will adopt Ruyer’s plea for a renewed understanding of an unpopular philosophical (and biological) tradition, namely, finalism. Ruyer, close to Simondon, does not understand form as static, but rather as dynamically in-formation. To make this clear, he asks us to think of a traveller who dresses up, hurries to the station, buys a ticket, and boards the train. Ruyer then suggests that the description of this movement, understood as a succession of causes and effects, needs to be complemented with a description of the sense and end of the traveller’s activity.45 This sense and end ‘survey’ the unfolding of causes and effects and organise it into a signifying whole. In other words, all the notions we have described are characterised by a unitas multiplex … If the multiplicity is ‘realised,’ then unity has to be considered as ‘surveying’ (survolante). If not, then the unitas multiplex can be expressed with the single word ‘form.’ Every activity, every conscious existence, has a form; and each product of a finalist activity presents the observer with a complex structure. In the product-structure (in contrast to the activity-form), the multiplicity immanent to the form has been ‘realised,’ as in a machine in which the pieces assembled by the engineer propel one another.46 For Ruyer, form is what an entity strives for; it is a longing for individuation, or, in Spinozian terms, the active expression of conatus. Form is sensational,

164  Larval Space

in the manner we have seen Simondon defining sensation: grasping a direction and not an object. Moreover, the invention of a form, either through the power of technicities or biological evolution, involves the resolution of a disparate tension between norms and values. Ruyer groups the two together by suggesting that we can understand them as directing essences.47 Consequently, the issue for Ruyer is to examine how these directing essences can have a direction in the first place: who chooses the direction invention takes and how? What qualifies this form over that? To understand the directionality of novel forms, Ruyer claims that their direction is determined by a mnemic theme. However, he will soon add that this theme does not come from the past. It is a mnemic theme of the future and, crucially, it has no specific privileged subject that embodies it. Speaking of a mnemic theme, Ruyer is clearly influenced by Bergson and his concept of pure memory, disconnected from temporal dimensions. As philosopher Alia Al-Saji suggests, for Bergson, it is not the emergence of a new present, a new actuality, that changes the past. Rather it is the contemporaneous virtualisation of the present – its shadow or memory – that makes the present part of the past, internally intertwined with it, and that changes the past as a result. This transformation of the past implies in each case a reorganisation and redistribution of memories on the planes of the past in question and hence a differently configured past. Far from being a static given, the ‘past in general’ consists of dynamic and transformative planes.48 As such, memory becomes another term for the virtual and the pre-individual: the mnemic theme is a virtual theme. Through the trans-spatial and the trans-temporal, through larval space itself, there is no specific ‘I’ or ‘memory’ but a universal ‘I’ and a universal ‘memory’ that is continuously invented.49 The invention of a ‘universal I’, a rearrangement of the cosmos that does not erase itself, demands that no experience refers exclusively to the present. For Ruyer, any action simultaneously anticipates the future while modifying the past.50 Similarly to Simondon’s hiker, the step-by-step succession of instants builds only upon itself, while also building its future self and constituting the steps already taken as a given path. Ruyer is explicit: pursuing senseful ends, I affirm that my activity has a sense.51 Consequently, what becomes crucial is the act of the step itself: the moment where the cosmos is still undecided as to what it was and what it will be. If every step in the dark cosmic forest is equiprobable and equivalent at once, it is because every step is equipotential. It is not yet what it will become when it is put in circuit with a mnemic theme, with the rhythms of the technicities in the a praesenti of their inventive, possessive and expressive manipulatory capacities. Ruyer claims that what is at stake is how to be able to be placed-in-circuit with themes that are not in space–time.52 How are we able to survey the synaptic passages of the refrain and intuit the individuating lines of flight that they catalyse? Ruyer connects equipotentiality with

Larval Space 

165

what he terms self-survey; in fact, he claims that self-survey and equipotentiality are synonymous.53 However, he does not hesitate to associate both with the technicities that express them, the reticular practices that squeeze out a consciousness that can survey itself and its virtual indeterminacies. In his words, the industrial construction of the steam engine rests on human consciousness, the domain of self-survey whose objective manifestation is the equipotentiality of the cortex, which extends embryonic potentiality. The mechanical ‘step-by-step’ bonds of the machine rest on the primary self-bonding of the embryo. Chemical means and connectionist means in internal-circuit organisation, industrial means in external-circuit manufacturing: these techniques of organisation and behaviour presuppose a primary mode of unity by self-survey.54 Ruyer’s proposition is astounding: biological and machinic bonds share a profound capacity to survey the field of their subjective domains. Furthermore, this field is unitary, not chunked or discrete as any digital account would have it, but simply denser at some parts: there is a bio-machinic field whose fibrous, membranic state differentiates in terms of intensive densities, of synaptic locations where the act of a passage condenses the cosmos by resingularizing it. This is why one can put machines and embryos in the same sentence. Moreover, this is why Ruyer can claim that organic, individual and technological memory share fluid borders.55 What is a tool in some cases is an organ in others, while the brain is but an embryo that has not finished its growth and the embryo ‘is a brain that begins to organize itself before organizing the external world.’56 Once again, the importance lies in the synaptic passages. If each domain is equipotential and yet the field they form is shared and common, then the synapses correspond not only to passages within a single domain but also to passages across domains. From one embryonic area to another; from the organic domain to the psychological; from a mnemic theme to an ‘I-consciousness.’57 This productive indeterminacy of equipotentiality is the sign of an actual and active consciousness. However, since this indeterminacy – the equipotential first step – can be found in any subjective domain, we should dissociate consciousness from the brain and associate it with form itself. This is the first of Ruyer’s ground-breaking conclusions: consciousness is formal. It is formal in the sense that it is informed by the way that a form (an individual) individuates by producing itself while also producing the environment (the territory) that will later claim it as its product. The ‘superiority’ of the brain, therefore, lies in the fact that it is an incomplete organ: an organ that remains sensitive to outside information. By being highly metastable, the brain constantly retains its equipotentiality, an active embryonic consciousness that can become the consciousness of the whole world that it attempts to manipulate.58 Being incomplete, the architectural brain can stutter and intuit, can

166  Larval Space

both disconnect and follow synapses in order to inform itself by forming itself and its environment. Larval space, in this sense, unfolds from the capacity of a subjective domain to survey its own form, bringing forth the emergence of a primary form of consciousness. Ruyer claims that we must start from examining these auto-subjective domains to understand how a multiplicity of individuals can appear (either by reproduction or fragmentation). Moreover, he underlines that the reverse can never be true, since ‘it would be impossible to understand how a subjective domain could be born from … physical beings that are pure bodies.’59 In other words, Ruyer puts forward the same plea as Simondon: to understand individuation we must start from it and not from the individual that is its product. Yet Ruyer moves one step further, claiming that emergence, invention, or any creative composition is possible because its parts do not interact as discrete individuals but as subjective domains that are not totally distinct.60 Creation relies on the synaptic capacity of different subjective domains to inform each other. I would add that creation crucially depends on the trans-affective informational capacities of any domain. What is at stake when it comes to architectural creation is the capacity to survey the synaptic trans-affective constraints and intuit or disrupt a novel field of cross-scale affectivity. It is important to clarify what sort of survey Ruyer refers to. Most traditional accounts of perception ask for an observer that is always situated in an n + 1 dimension. For these accounts, the observer exists in at least one more dimension than whatever is being observed, able to see instantaneously all the parts of an n-dimensional being. However, Ruyer claims that ‘this geometric law, which applies to the technique of perception, that is, to perception as a physicophysiological event, is invalid for visual sensation as a state of consciousness.’61 Put differently, one can indeed describe what is perceived as a list of discrete parts (partes extra partes, in Ruyer’s terminology). Yet, one falls short when the task is to describe not what is perceived but perception itself: to move from an account of photographic observation towards an account of visual sensation. When examining the latter, the ‘I’ does not need to be placed outside of sensation, in a dimension that it is added to; the ‘I’ simply ‘acts’ sensation. The observed table, when we examine not its static representation but its dynamic sense-giving, is no longer a composition of parts but an absolute surface.62 The way that the table is structured, the way it operates, the affective and intensive thresholds that inform the possibility of any action that it affords, are all observed in an absolute unity, which as Ruyer clarifies, is neither a fusion nor a confusion. Sensation is a proper form. 63 Through form, Ruyer connects sensation with consciousness. To clarify this, he uses the example of the very primitive lifeform, a protozoan. Compared with a human being, the protozoan does not have a proper sensory organ that allows it to manipulate its environment and accordingly modulate itself. In this sense, when it perceives itself, it will not perceive external forms

Larval Space 

167

that assist in its self-enjoyment (or, in better terms, that would have meaning for it).64 Ruyer adds that its field of consciousness will only be of its own organic form, which is in principle the entire universe for it … This organic form or primary consciousness is not vague or psychoid. It has no reason to be so. It can never even be ‘myopic for itself’, like a visual sensation in the secondary consciousness, because it is not our occipital cortex that is myopic but our eyes.65 For Ruyer there is only one form of consciousness: primary consciousness as form-in-itself. This primary consciousness is found in every organism and is one with life, since Ruyer claims that every organism is at least capable of surveying its own form.66 Consequently, in the same sense that the brain is an incomplete organ (an embryo, constantly sensitive and attuned to outside information), the secondary sensory consciousness, the one that human beings are familiar with, is nothing but the primary consciousness of the brain; our consciousness is the brain surveying itself. Since the cortex of our brains is ‘modulated by external stimuli, sensory consciousness gives us the form of external objects.’67 Hence, secondary consciousness can perceive the forms that it seeks to survey even when these forms are beyond its own field of survey, while these forms, as (established and intended) norms and values, structure and organize the field itself.68 Having grouped norms and values as directing essences, Ruyer understands them as ideals. However, the guiding ideal is simultaneously the organic type and the Umwelt that is connected to it.69 Ruyer’s account of consciousness stands very close to an ethological account of the environment: not an already-made product that contains subjects and objects, but rather a transaffective field that produces both the subjects and the objects that manipulate it based on what has meaning (what has value) for them. Consequently, he poses the question of how an individual can imitate anything that it perceives in its Umwelt. More than an issue of mechanistic representation of the same, Ruyer’s concern is very valuable for architecture: beyond just copying and pasting, how do we perceive what we wish to imitate? What are the elements that we wish to bring into a space-yet-to-come, and how does imitation select what has value for the individual performing it? To respond, Ruyer outlines the profound isomorphism between imitation and memory. Their isomorphic relation can be traced in four crucial aspects: (1) An individual imitates only what has meaning for it, in the same way that it memorizes only what has meaning for it. In other words, an individual imitates and memorizes affects. A mother’s smiling face that provokes the smile of the child, as well as the memory of the smiling face, is not an extensive mirroring but an intensive, affective and reticular information. (2) Imitation folds the spatial diversity and distance between the imitated and the imitator, just as memory folds the temporal diversity and distance between a primary

168  Larval Space

experience and its recollection. (3) Both imitation and memory present to us an intensive difference between the threshold of recollection and recognition. In other words, we perceive the productive modulation of a threshold and consequently imitate it right before being able to invent it. (4) Finally, memorization is an affective function that allows for the imitation of meaning.70 In their membranic spatiotemporal folds, imitation and memory transduce affects and consequently intensify the synaptic passages, energizing sufficiently to allow for yet another passage of the refrain. Through these fundamental capacities of secondary consciousness, the potential for both an imitation and a memorization of a form is actualized; moreover, and this advances my argument, these capacities allow for an imitation and a memorization of the virtual, a form that is not yet actual. Hence, next to a memory of the future stands a futural imitation. Ruyer does not hesitate to claim that imitation presupposes a detour through the region of the trans-spatial. Focusing on the reproduction of genes and viruses, in his own interpretation of the ship of Theseus paradox, Ruyer wonders how it is possible to determine which of the two copies of a gene that is being reproduced is the model and which is the copy. The lack of individuality or a clearly assigned identity is for both ‘a sign of the two mitigated individualities’ intimate connection with a trans-spatial type.’71 In this sense, according to Ruyer, the issue of resemblance (of either spatial or temporal membranic folds) can only be addressed when positioned in a domain that escapes the actual. In his words, the resemblance of two actualisations of a single memory requires the idea of a mnemic theme; the organic resemblance of two individuals of the same species requires the idea of a specific potential. By the same token, the resemblance of organs between two very distant species, the resemblance of these organs to our tools, indicates that all these similar actualisations are financed by something else, which is situated in the trans-spatial region.72 This trans-spatial region is none other than the virtual: a problematic field, made of differential relations and singularities that are later actualized by intensive processes of individuation, or more precisely, by spatiotemporal dynamisms. It is Simondon’s pre-individual, a field populated with tensions, pregnant with incompatible potentials. Close to Simondon’s account of dephasing, Ruyer claims that the trans-spatial region does not oppose actual space–time in an abrupt way. Thus, there is a population of sub-regions that gradually move from the actual to the virtual and pre-individual trans-spatial: the region of actual consciousness, the region of individual psychological memories, the region of organic memories and the region of norms and values.73 For Ruyer, the question is how one can move through these regions, breaking the parallelism between them when considered as separate domains. The issue is how one can move from the actual to the virtual and back, in

Larval Space 

169

order to modulate and manipulate the actual itself. Defying parallelism is for Ruyer the exemplary characteristic of any intentional action, of any actualization of a directing essence, anything that occurs with a purpose, a goal and a final aim. Hence, if architectural thought wishes to grasp how there can be architectural intentions in the first place, it needs to ask how one designs something with a purpose in mind. It is these intentional architectural lines of flight that afford the actualization of the virtual while simultaneously allowing the accidents of the actual that ‘modify, by an ascending action, the themes that survey them.’74 Nevertheless, we should remember that the interest does not lie in one individual alone, isolated and examined as a closed system. What is significant is how one can examine the breaking of parallelism in an open, metastable system where individuals of infinite extensive forms and intensive affects are reticularly modulating each other and the system as a whole. Ruyer responds by conceptualizing the cosmos as a fibrous universe, claiming that it has ‘a fibrous structure in time, and each fibre represents that continuous line of an individualized existence.’75 The universe is membranic: it folds, in space and time, and what is produced out of its folds is never separated by the membrane itself, despite the fact that it allows the membrane to differentiate and, accordingly, rearrange the manner that its fibres compose it. Every individuation is a fibre of the membrane, composing it and determining it while simultaneously being determined by it, since its very capacity to individuate relies on the membranic disjunction that potentializes its knots, its torsions and folds with other lines of individuation. Therefore, if individuation depends on the fibrous folds of the membrane, then the emergence of anything novel also depends on it. Architecture – as the emergence of a novel line of individuation – depends on its inseparability from the membrane and its capacity to intuit the directing essence of a fibre while disruptively stuttering its potential synaptic locations, the moments that it touches upon other lines. In addition to conceptualizing the cosmos as fibrous and membranic, Ruyer asks us to understand matter as activity. In this way, matter itself becomes inseparable from time; they coincide, since ‘time can no longer appear as an empty and foreign frame; the time of action is inherent to this action as a temporal melody.’76 In the fibrous lines of individuation that compose the cosmos, the activity of their vibrations and folds generates a mnemic rhythm, a refrain that pulsates through them and potentializes their futural movement – as the formation of synapses and as the indication of directing essences. Replacing matter with activity is an essential move for Ruyer, since it is only when matter is understood as activity that his main concern can be addressed: how to differentiate between absolute forms (or, in other terms, between individuals) along their lines of continuity.77 This is Ruyer’s second ingenious conclusion: what is diagrammatically common to all individuals is a domain of absolute survey and activity.78 A molecule, an embryo, the brain and consciousness share the capacity to survey their own form and act purposefully so as to modulate it. However, since the guiding ideal (or purpose)

170  Larval Space

is simultaneously the organic type and the Umwelt, both the survey and the modulation of the form should be understood as a dynamic series of consequences that are their own consequence; or, as Ruyer claims, quoting Uexküll, every organism is a melody that sings itself.79 4.2 The End Is the Beginning Is the End There is a crucial third conclusion that Ruyer brings forward: every individual can be examined as a form that can survey itself at an absolute speed, and intentionally modulate itself and its milieu. How can we approach this intention without undermining or overmining it, reducing it to a mere aggregate of mechanical parts or reifying it as an idealist ‘ghost in the machine’? To respond, Ruyer develops the concept of verticalism. While an organism can be understood as a machine that builds itself, Ruyer suggests that the organism, during its self-construction it manages to function even at stages when it lacks the parts essential to the functioning of the completed machine (such as the human embryo, which manages to survive while ‘building’ the brain, heart and lungs without which it cannot live once it is born).’80 One can easily document the development of an individual as a series of snapshots that capture its gradual growth: from the formation of a hand out of a limb and a building out of the ground, one can a place a horizontal, sequential line that traces its formation. However, as Ruyer insists, if we do not add a vertical dimension to our account, we will be unable to understand individuation as a goal-directed activity, an intentional modulation that coordinates all the different lines of continuity under a unified task. 4.2.1 A Brief History of Architectural Time

A hand or a building is not formed as an aggregation of parts, a collection of snapshots arranged horizontally, partes extra partes. The first brick and the completed building, the emerging limb and the infant’s hand are both the starting point and the end of a single and continuous line of development: they are parts of a melody.81 As Ronald Bogue summarizes: a melody unfolds in time, moment by moment, but the listener only knows it fully when it is completed, and only recognises it as a genuine melody (as opposed to a random sequence of notes) when its overall design is grasped, that design or shape being immanent within the melody from beginning to end. In a sense, the melody as shape exists outside chronometric time, as an idea that manifests itself moment by moment in performance.82

Larval Space 

171

Instead of grasping the melody as the horizontal sequence of consecutive notes on a score one can represent it vertically: the first note folding on the last, Chronos on Aeon, all notes manifested at any line of the performance, all expressed at any consecutive point of the horizontal time line.83 In other words, when performed, the actual melody is nothing but a temporal unfolding of a fibrous, membranic melody-idea. This is Ruyer’s verticalism: a melody-idea that directs any intentional individuation. Nonetheless, this idea is by no means an idealism; quite the opposite, ‘it never loses contact with the spatiotemporal plane, even though it is not constrained to actualize in space, at every moment, the totality of the structure which it is capable of constructing.’84 Either in the hand or in a building, the melody that sings itself exists as a mnemic theme, a virtual form that becomes progressively actualized. In Ruyer’s neo-finalist account, all the individuals of the cosmos are centres of finalist action. In other words, they do not have a nature that is ready-made and given in advance, but they produce their own nature according to an ideal that is itself open to modulation.85 However, between the actual individual and the virtual ideal there is always a fundamental disparation, something that remains ungraspable. As philosopher Ray Brassier claims, between the two there is a unilateral asymmetry as ‘the actual distinguishes itself from the virtual without the virtual distinguishing itself from the actual in return.’86 This is what Ruyer has in mind when he claims that to grasp an ideal means to work according to that ideal and to actualize it in one’s line of individuation and activity. Simultaneously, to grasp a subject, to grasp an ‘I’, can be achieved only in the act of individuation, precisely because individuation enriches the ‘I’: make and, by making, make yourself.87 Therefore, the premise of Ruyer’s neo-finalism lies primarily in its definition of an individual. To be accurate, it lies in its definition of the simplest possible individual, the simplest possible body that one can come across. Relying on a Spinozian approach, there are three different accounts of how the simplest individual is constituted: the finite, the indefinite and the actually infinite.88 The finite approach claims that there is a lower material limit, a building block that is responsible for any material composition. The indefinite account claims that matter can always be analysed further without ultimate limit: it is an account of infinite regress. Against both these accounts, the actually infinite insists that there are indeed terms that are ultimate and cannot be divided further, while these ultimate terms are actually infinite multiplicities: if one wishes to divide them further then this cannot occur without their nature changing.89 Any individual is understood as an assemblage and the assemblage as the minimum unit of reality. Therefore, any individual can be pregnant with the virtual, as a multiplicity that actualizes its potentials, while acting as the building block that will reshuffle the cosmos, changing both its actual nature and its virtual ideals. The manner in which any individual as an assemblage attempts to grasp its actual self and its virtual ideal is expressed in the ways that it modulates itself and its milieu. The expressive aspect of individuation lies in the technicities

172  Larval Space

that an organism develops in order to possess itself, its ideals and a territory that allows both to transform. Therefore, Ruyer distinguishes three different types of technicities: bodily organs as an originary technicity, externalized organs as an extended phenotype, and detachable artefacts that enter into a circuit that is external to the individual.90 The hand, the spider’s web and the house in which they both individuate, are all different levels of technicities, corresponding to ‘an organic formation, an instinctive external circuit, and an intelligent external circuit.’91 What binds different lines of individuation is not only their capacity to act and survey themselves, but also their capacity to express this via different levels of technicities. Moreover, all these technicities share something in common: they are purposeful. In short, there is a finalist aim in fabricating artefacts, in the same way that there is a finalist purpose when the hand is developed or when the web is spun. Using the example of cooking utensils, Ruyer says that ‘it is impossible to recognize a finalist sense in the invention of cooking utensils and to deny it to the organs of ingestion, digestion and assimilation.’92 Still, the third technicity has a decisive characteristic that distinguishes it from the other two. If bodily organs depend on genetic memory and if instinctive generalization depends on epigenetic memory, then intelligent generalization (from cooking utensils to buildings) depends on a different type of memory. This third type of memory is epiphylogenetic: successive epigenetic experiences are stored, accumulated and transmitted from one generation and population of individuals to another in the form of technical objects. In addition to these three types, and binding them, the passage of the refrain through the trans-spatial region (as a stream of affective signs that synaptically crosses domains) is what I have called a fourth type of memory: larval space, the memory of an impersonal individuation that folds and unfolds all the rest through the synchronous act (and its experiential register) of their disparate, actual and virtual differentials. Nonetheless, in the coming together of the four memories – and precisely because of it – there is a moment of radical transformation. The cosmos and its technicities might share the transspatial region, but what distinguishes more complex individuals is that their memory is detachable. As Ruyer claims, the main difference between physical beings and the most complex organisms does not probably derive from the instantaneity or the absence of memory in the former but from a lack of detachment of this memory, which is only ever ‘the form in time’ and does not constitute a trans-spatial ‘reserve’ clearly detached from the actual. In human beings, memory constitutes ‘other Is’ that enrich the actual ‘I’.93 In this sense, Ruyer differentiates individuals according to the degree of detachment of their memory, as expressed in their technicities. While, for example, atoms lack a detachable memory since they do not need it because of their constant uninterrupted activity, more complex individuals make

Larval Space 

173

use of gradually detachable forms of memory. Therefore, the three types of memory can also be examined for the extent of their detachability, reaching its highest level in human technicities. Genetic memory, epigenetic memory (as the memory of the central nervous system) and technological memory are different steps of a progressive detachment. Due to their degree of detachment, human technicities become able to radically transform the relation of humans and their milieu. This is where their reticularity lies, in the generalization of the species and the concretization of the technical objects, as a detached memory that makes the human ‘a living being characterized in its forms of life by the non-living.’94 In other words, technicity gives human individuals access to the trans-spatial, to the refrain of a melody that sings itself. Furthermore, the detachability of memory as expressed in a technicity intensifies the melody: artefacts not only store memory, they also function as propellers of synaptic passages that assist both the invention of a novel technical individual and the concretization of a current technicity. Recalling Simondon’s hiker, technicities have their own technological norms and values that form the synapses and the directing essences of a technological individuation, which simultaneously invents the human. Through technicities, extended architectural minds meet impersonal, imperishable and detached architectural objects, as well as their corresponding norms and values, therefore breaking the parallelism of the actual and the virtual, folding the fibres of the membranic cosmos by squeezing out of it an architecture that is yet-to-come. In the reticularity of an extended architectural mind and an architectural technicity emerges an architectural consciousness which – like any consciousness – has the capacity to act and perform an absolute survey of its domain, making itself by simply making, memorizing and imitating its future form. What is astonishing in the evolution of technicities is that they present an absolute verticalism. While biological evolution manifests the verticality of a long duration, in which different types of memory span throughout time to allow an organism to purposefully make itself, technical evolution operates in a less predictable manner. Emerging architectural styles or techniques of production, forgotten practices of the past and avant-garde parametricism, computer aided design and gothic churches all highlight the rapid individuations of architectural technicities. Certainly, it is accurate to claim that the human being acts as a transducer and assists in pushing forward or blocking these unpredictable shifts in architectural technicities. After all, the architect is always part of the technicity, is always made of the style, intuiting technical assemblages. Nevertheless, it is crucial not only to realize the extent to which technicities operate autonomously, evolving in their own distinctive manner, but also to understand their dissimilarity from biological evolution. The absolute verticalism of technical evolution, compared to the verticalism of biological evolution, consists in the fact that technical objects, as artefacts of detachable memory, have the capacity to operate at an absolute speed. If synapses are speed regulators, then technical objects are their perfect match:

174  Larval Space

they are extreme membranic densities, mobile singularities of memory convergence. In them, all types of memory converge and assist the potential of a passage of the refrain that no constraint can regulate; on the contrary, as we will soon see, technical individuals assist in the resolution of the disparate tension between different levels of constraints. Therefore, their absolute verticalism entails a drastic shift. If their melody can be sung in any key and still make sense, if the start and the end constantly coincide, then technical individuals are not just what allow us to break the parallelism of the actual and the virtual: they allow us to become the future that we do not yet see, the purpose that we do not yet know, the intention that we do not yet have. Technical individuals are from the future even when they are discovered in archaeological excavations. They are from a future beyond chronological time. By no means do I wish to advocate an understanding of architecture that disregards time. On the contrary, when I claim that architecture comes from a future that is beyond time, I am making a claim about how time itself is produced. My point is that architecture produces time. It is of a future beyond time because purpose, intention, and finalist activity operate beyond temporal criteria: they produce our notion of time. The verticalism that an intentional action implies, which folds the Aeon onto Chronos, the start onto the end, produces the experience of a temporal passage as registered in modality: there is no time without purpose. Therefore, the intentional, purposeful production of technical individuals produces both the notion of a passage of time and its perilous twins: nostalgia and progress. To move past them, we should not only acknowledge the production of time through artefacts, but also attune with the fibrous individuating lines of a membranic cosmos that is driven by intentions. Traditional notions of finalism are close to what in biology is known as teleonomy. The term, coined by biologist Colin Pittendrigh, is a combination of the Greek words telos (end) and nomos (law): teleonomy is a lawlike behaviour that is ‘asymmetrically oriented toward a particular target state, even in systems where there was no explicit representation of that state (much less an intention to achieve it) but only a regular predictable orientation toward an end state.’95 Teleonomy radicalizes teleology in the sense that it does not demand a transcendentally fixed final state, but rather acknowledges the asymmetrical nature of individuations that purposefully modulate themselves and their intentional final state. As neuro-anthropologist Terrence Deacon underlines, with teleology in mind, it is perfectly acceptable to claim that ‘a turtle came ashore to lay her eggs’ instead of just mechanistically saying that ‘it came ashore and laid her eggs.’96 This difference between an intentional ‘in order to’ and a mechanistic ‘did that’ allows for an account of individuation that does not exclude the intentions of the individual. Still, there are different degrees of teleonomy, depending on the asymmetric nature of the individuations that unfold in approaching a final state. Processes that occur spontaneously in the non-living physical world fall in one extreme on the spectrum

Larval Space 

175

of these teleonomic differentiations, while the complex individuations of human beings fall on the other. As evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr claims, many movements of inanimate objects as well as physico-chemical process are the simple consequences of natural laws. For instance, gravity provides the end-state for a rock which I drop into a well. A red-hot piece of iron reaches its ‘end-state’ when its temperature and that of its environment are equal. All objects of the physical world are endowed with the capacity to change their state and these changes follow natural laws. They are ‘end-directed’ only in a passive, automatic way, regulated by external forces or conditions. Since the end-state of such inanimate objects is automatically achieved, such changes might be designated as teleomatic.97 There are, therefore, three traditional accounts of finalist behaviour: teleology (implying a fixed end state), teleonomy (implying an asymmetrical process towards an end state) and teleomatic processes (implying an automatically achieved end state). However, as Deacon rightfully points out, all these accounts completely ignore the finalist process itself. In other words, while they all provide their reasoning as to why an individual is attracted to an end state (be it the transcendental logos, the laws of nature or their linear causality), they fail to address how any finalist goal-oriented behaviour is even possible.98 In this sense, Deacon will claim that when we begin from an attempt to understand human consciousness and behaviour or appeal to regulatory devices that produce finalist mechanical tendencies, ‘we are already assuming what we need to explain, and then trying to find the best way to disassemble these phenomena to understand their composition.’99 In this regard, Deacon stands close to Simondon and his plea for a genetic account of individuation that does not start from the end product, but rather individuates alongside that which it examines: one needs to start without any hint of telos but end up with it, not the other way around.100 To do so, Deacon develops his own finalist account, which he refers to as teleodynamics. Crucially for my argument, Deacon bases his account on the concept of constraints. He claims that constraints can be colloquially understood as an external limitation that acts as an imposed factor that reduces options and possibilities: railcars are constrained by the tracks, farmers by climate and citizens by laws.101 I will complement his account by affiliating constraints with synapses, claiming that the synaptic moment and location of an intensive passage of the refrain function as constraints on individuation. The first step is to follow Deacon’s suggestion and refrain from referring to constraints as external, since any extrinsic account of constraints assumes that there is always an n + 1 dimension that imposes them. Instead, as Deacon claims, it is useful to have in mind the etymology of the term: it comes from the Latin constrictus, past participle of constringere and stands for ‘that which binds together.’102 Already etymologically, constraints and synapses are close;

176  Larval Space

they do not form a binary opposition but rather bridge disparates, binding fibres of individuation, regulating the speed of an intensive passage, allowing for the resolution between an interiorized past and exteriorized encounter. Consequently, one way to understand constraints is as reduced variety, as a gradual delimitation of the actual that nonetheless reinforces the virtual. What synaptic constraints do is to allow for a more productive passage of the refrain, in the sense that its effect on a line of individuation is to affectively amplify the individual undergoing it. This might seem contradictory, since reduction in variety implies a decrease in attributes. However, as Deacon underlines, when some process is more constrained in some finite variety of values of its parameters or in the number of dimensions in which it can vary, its configurations, states, and paths of change will more often be ‘near’ previous ones in the space of possibilities, even if there is never exact repetition.103 This is the key to understanding constraints: they allow for a difference to repeat itself, forcing itself to differ so as to cross through a synapse. Consequently, by forcing itself to differ, difference generates the capacity to do work, precisely because it generates the need for the creation of new constraints that will regulate its intensive passages. As Deacon explains, it is only because of a restriction or constraint imposed on the release of energy … that a change of state can be imposed by one system on another. It is precisely by virtue of what is not enabled, but could otherwise have occurred, that a change can be forced … So, the nature of the constraint … indicates which differences can and cannot make a difference in any interaction. This has two complementary consequences. Whenever existing variations are suppressed or otherwise prevented from making a difference in any interaction, they cannot be a source of causal influence; but whenever new constraints are generated, a specific capacity to do work is also generated.104 At this point, Deacon connects the gradual imposition of constraints with the Peircean understanding of habits: when not all states of a process are realized or when there is a bias in their probability of occurrence, there is a habit.105 Consequently, he asks us to understand habits as the expression of constraints. Thus, we can approach a nomadic subject who changes habits and not habitats, as a subject who actively and intentionally works in order to change the constraints that regulate its individuation. Through work, constraints are imposed on one another, folding onto each other due to the reticularity of their consequences. A constraint at one level will assist in the emergence of a constraint on another. Therefore, constraints will beget constraints, habits will beget habits and, as soon will be obvious, form will beget

Larval Space 

177

form. What occurs in all these instances, which I take as synonymous, is in fact a constraint propagation. The propagation of constraints occurs through the disparate relation between the capacity of information to intensively proliferate on the membrane and the metastable condition of certain folds that become sensitive to it. As such, one can examine constraint propagation using the tools that Simondon provided: transduction and allagmatics. While transduction – understood now as the synaptic moment – addresses the operation of the constraints, allagmatics both bind the transformation of one structure to another through an operation, and the transformation of one operation to another through the constraints imposed by a structure. Hence, allagmatics can assist in examining how synaptic constraints assist the individuation of one structure to another through these operations: how form indeed begets form. 4.2.2 One Final(ist) Act

To understand how constraint propagation can be approached allagmatically, I will focus on the ground-breaking work of ecological psychologists Peter Kugler and Robert Shaw. In their paper ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic Engines’, they thoroughly examine individuation in the light of a non-linear coupling between thermodynamic laws.106 Their first point is that of distinguishing between interactions that occur at the same scale and those that occur at a cross scale. While same-scale interactions are relatively simple to follow and imply a linear causality, crossscale interactions have been largely neglected. Kugler and Shaw claim that any system with a complex interior, that is, any complex assemblage, can only be examined through a cross-scale approach. Therefore, they explain that from physics we have learned that predictive models based strictly on interactions between same-scale atomisms may provide successful approximations for the behaviour of very large (celestial) and very small (quantum) scale systems. In these models the predictive power is derived from the identification of symmetries that are invariant over different interactions at the same scale. Unfortunately, the application of this same modelling strategy to the behaviour of psychological systems has not been successful. We suspect that this is because such phenomena are only defined across different scale interactions.107 Kugler and Shaw claim that if we wish to examine the complexity of the meso-scale, neither the infinitely small nor the subliminally vast, but the realm of complex fibrous lines that meet each other, we need to focus on the crossscale interactions between all the parts that in their coming together can be identified as a consistent line of individuation. However, the cross scale exists not only in its actual but also in its virtual dimensions. This is very close to Ruyer’s verticalism and any attempt to develop a cross-scale approach is

178  Larval Space

essentially an attempt to examine how the same-scale parallelism can be broken. Kugler and Shaw set the fundamentals for developing an account of emergent dynamics: they examine the cross-scale symmetries of critical sets provided by the First Law of Thermodynamics that order space under the Second Law. The First Law postulates the conservation of matter and energy, claiming that neither can be either created or destroyed. While they can be transformed and shift from one form to another, the total amount of matter and energy within the cosmos will always remain the same. Consequently, the Second Law (entropy) holds that all energy tends to change itself gradually into more diffused and less articulated forms. As architectural theorist Andrej Radman underlines, the Second Law is ‘nearly ubiquitous, yet not universal. It is effectively an astronomically plausible tendency, rather than an inviolate law.’108 It is a universal rule of thumb, even though its probability of occurring is almost certain. The disparate relation between the absolute certainty of the First Law and the almost absolute certainty of the Second is what allows for the emergence of any form that can survey its domain; life, consciousness, and their technicities. Focusing on the cross-scale symmetries of critical sets between the First and the Second Law, Kugler and Shaw examine the coupling of different constraints and the consequences of this coupling on a line of individuation. For the sake of simplicity and of furthering my argument, I will shift their terminology and use the concept of constraints in place of critical sets. In this sense, the effects of a coupling of constraints can either assist in the preservation of the tendency of the Second Law (increase in entropy) or break, even for an instance, this universal rule of thumb (negentropy). Hence, by following a very simple definition of symmetry, namely that a thing is symmetrical if there is something we can do to it so that afterwards it appears the same as before, Kugler and Shaw define the increase in entropy as symmetrypreserving and negentropy as symmetry-breaking.109 Even though I will soon exchange both terms with more intelligible ones, it is crucial to expand on their implications. Kugler and Shaw state that, if two or more systems interact, then there is a subset of solutions from the union of their total solution sets … that can be used to understand the outcomes of their dynamical relationship … This subset is called the critical solution set and defines an important set of symmetries existing between the two solutions. These symmetries consist of all their shared solutions.110 They continue by claiming that between two systems there must exist critical sets that specify their shared symmetries, their disparate potential for affecting each other’s individuation.111 What this suggests is that the critical sets of solutions between different systems, the constraints that determine their interactions and their individuation, are their affects. In this regard, they claim

Larval Space 

179

that their understanding of constraints is directly influenced by Gibson’s affordances.112 What determines (by constraining) a line of individuation is the shared meaning between it and its Umwelt: only what affects me can constrain me and only what I affectively share can entangle my fibre of individuation with others. Resembling Ruyer’s account, Kugler and Shaw contend ‘that the critical sets governing the interactions of natural systems that perceive, act and exhibit intentional behaviour are the result of just such evolutionary extrapolations to higher-order critical sets.’113 By higher-order constraints, they mean the domain of the pre-individual and the trans-spatial, the trans-affective region of relational potentials. In this sense, their conclusion is astonishing: intentional behaviour (the purposeful whistling of a melody that sings itself) operates by intuiting the virtual, by constantly breaking the same-scale parallelism, and by continuously working towards obtaining a novel point of view via affective amplification. Therefore, they call higher-order critical sets ‘a critical set of critical sets’ (a constraint of constraints) that implies the higher-order, complex modes in which an assemblage might be organized.114 To make their point they return to Gibson. To stay alive, an organism must conserve gas, liquids and solids (as breath, blood and tissue respectively) or else it will fall into the entropic dissipation of the Second Law.115 Therefore, any life-supporting properties of an environment that are affectively compatible with the affective demands of an organism and assist it in its fight against entropy, denote a shared solution among the solutions shared by two or more systems: the organism survives by producing an Umwelt that is reticularly producing it anew. This reticularity between individual and Umwelt protects both the individual and its Umwelt from entropy, acting as a higher-order constraint, an invariant of invariants. Hence, what is at stake in any intentional behaviour that aims to further its individuation via meaningful environmental manipulations (such as architecture) is to intuit the higher-order constraints that will allow it to do so. A memory and an imitation of the future stand for the memorization and the mimicking of higher-order constraints, of transaffective synapses that allow for the passage of an existential meaning that makes (the individual and its Umwelt) by making itself. In this regard, Kugler and Shaw approach any intentional act as a behaviour attracted towards the perception of a higher-order constraint. Consequently, they define an attractor as a solution that is ‘shared by multiple trajectories originating from different initial conditions. The attractor is a global symmetry that relates local trajectories.’116 Nevertheless, they do not understand attractors as teleologically static end-states, but rather as dynamically emergent synaptic transitions between different domains. In their attempt to provide a concise overview of the cross-scale dynamics between these domains and the attractors that emerge in each transition between them, Kugler and Shaw refer to a cosmological ladder, a cascade between different domains that resembles Ruyer’s parallelism and its breaking. According to them, this cosmological ladder is composed of actual space, its geometries, their fields

180  Larval Space

of influence, the thermodynamic and epistemic engines that fuel them and, finally, the systems that intentionally mobilize all the previous.117 For the sake of the argument, I will understand each of these as follows: actual space as a territory, geometries as the fixed territorial points, their fields of influence as the three territorial capacities (the creation of a point of stability, a circle of expressive property, and an opening to the outside), the engines that couple them as their informational and energetic (or, both at once, affective) capacities and, finally, systems as individuals that are trans-affectively individuating. Crucially, they are all bound together by the synaptic passages of the refrain, the constraint of constraints that pulsates their membranic co-individuation and co-determination. For Kugler and Shaw, each coupling makes possible the lawful interactions of modes both across-scales and within the same-scale. It is also important to emphasize that the ‘mechanism’ by which coupling is achieved is autocatalytic or self-assembling, self-regulating, and self-sustaining over the spatiotemporal period required to fulfil a stipulated intention at the ecological scale.118 In this sense, intentionality is the constant seeking of a higher-order synapse that will allow for the passage from one domain to the other, while, as a hiker in the forest, in the very act of seeking, it will produce the norms and the values of its directing constraints: their purposeful inscription that will allow their memorization and imitation. Moreover, Kugler and Shaw claim that for an intention to be fulfilled, an individual does not need to be aware of the far-reaching consequences of its actions, but that the inscriptions of its intentions, the expressive–possessive disparation that determines a point of view is ‘manifest in the long range coupling of the laws that produce the appropriate action of the ecosystem.’119 In other words, intention does not rely on the awareness of its fulfilment but on the absolute verticalism of the technicities that it deploys. As such, an action can be intentional without being intended: form can indeed beget form without it being a fixed end state.120 Therefore, when examining a line of individuation, the question is how it manages to couple the different scales of the cosmological ladder. It is a question of cohomology between local and non-local constraints; local constraints are same-scale constraints within a single domain (for example constraints within actual space) while non-local constraints are the cross-scale synaptic constraints between different domains (for example those between actual space and its geometries). As Kugler and Shaw explain, D’Arcy Thompson suggested that the policy of growth is to be symmetrical. But all growth is not symmetrical, as the asymmetry of faces, fruit and other quasi-bilaterally symmetric objects clearly shows. One interpretation is that the policy of growth is to solve the cohomology problem, so morphology is remodelled over time to fit certain non-local boundary conditions. Asymmetrical, or better, non-cohomological growth is

Larval Space 

181

then deformity – even when it remains within a normal range. When the symmetry-breaking of the non-local constraints is too great, then aesthetic form (e.g., facial attractiveness) and function suffers. Because growth must tessellate space–time in non-Euclidean ways, then there is a non-trivial cohomology problem to be solved by growth processes.121 What Kugler and Shaw propose is that for a line of individuation to unfold consistently (for a melody to sing itself as closely as possible to the tune that it immanently produces) it must continuously resolve the disparate tension between its local (same-scale) and non-local (cross-scale) constraints. The verticalism of any individuation, the folding of the start to the end, entails a cohomology between the actual same-scale tensions and the virtual crossscale synapses. In this sense, Kugler and Shaw are right to point out that this interplay revolves around the coupling of the Second and the First Laws, the almost absolute certainty of entropy and the absolute certainty of matter and energy conservation. The same-scale, local and epigenetic processes that resist entropy must be non-linearly guided (hence, Ruyer’s verticalism) by the non-local, genetic constraints of matter and energy that in its total sum cannot be altered: epigenetic memory is guided by genetic memory, instinctive generalization depends on bodily organs without those, however, pre-determining its outcome. As a result, their non-linear coupling normally achieves a consistent individuation directed by an intentional dynamic.122 What happens, however, when this is not the case? To respond, Kugler and Shaw use a straightforward example: human tooth development. Whenever there is a problem of deformity, a delineation from a consistent line of growth, then extrinsic treatment must intervene. As they put it, if the local epigenetic forces are not properly tuned by genetics to nonlocal constraints, then they must be tuned locally by the orthodontist, who monitors their current effects, in an anticipatory fashion, against the boundary conditions (morphological goals) to be conserved.123 Technicity intervenes: an epiphylogenetic memory that in its absolute verticalism defies space and time comes from the future of intentionality while producing the very notion of time, and acts as a synapse that tunes the local with the non-local, the epigenetic with the genetic, the Second with the First Law. This is the trick of architecture: to assist in the production of a consistent line of individuation whenever the disparation between the genetic and the epigenetic fails to do so. In this sense, architectural technicities, by tuning the local with the non-local and assisting the consistent individuations of the subjects that deploy them, produce both the space that a life covers and the time in which it unfolds. Architecture becomes the pre-condition of human individuation. It does so because it responds to the most basic cohomological problem: how do modular quantities, distributed under only local constraints, fit

182  Larval Space

together globally over the manifold that they attempt to cover? Moreover – and this is where any technicity emerges – how might the shape of the manifold be remodelled so that previously ill-fitting modules now perfectly cover it?124 To make this intelligible, let us consider another example that Kugler and Shaw use: tiling a floor. If we assume that there is a limited number of tiles (First Law), the problem is how to cover a floor with given dimensions using that exact number (Second Law). In this sense, ‘the cohomology problem is how to find a distribution function by which the tiles will exactly fit the room without being added to or subtracted from.’125 The initial condition is always constrained by what the final condition must be, while the boundaries set by the First Law can be satisfied or violated by the Second Law only to give birth to radically unexpected boundary conditions.126 So, within every line of individuation there exist two radically different types of transformation: tendencies and potentials. The first are a direct result of a fine-tuned coupling between the genetic and the epigenetic; the latter, expressed via technicities, is the intentional attempt to fine-tune the genetic and the epigenetic by utilizing the absolute verticalism of technical objects. Their difference is highlighted when one faces the Gordian knot: whether to endlessly struggle to untie it or simply cut it. Consequently, a very broad definition of intentionality might be the following: an individual with intentional dynamics is one with an operator by which local epigenetic tendencies must be cohomologically conditioned by non-local genetic constraints.127 Whenever this fails, intention is expressed in the technicities that assume the role of the cohomological operator as artefacts in possession of an absolute verticalism that functions as a synapse within the cosmological ladder. Simply put, any technicity assists in the production of non-spontaneous change that actualizes a potential coupling of the local and the non-local, which, nonetheless, would have remained only virtual if it were not for the technicity itself. Any technicity involves a local symmetry-breaking process that has non-local symmetry-preserving consequences. To make this clearer, I will use Deacon’s terminology and substitute the two terms: symmetry-breaking deals with contragrade changes and symmetrypreserving with orthograde changes. As Deacon explains, I will call changes in a system that are consistent with the spontaneous, ‘natural’ tendency to change, irrespective of external interference, orthograde changes. The term literally refers to going with the grade or tilt or tendency of things, as in falling, or ‘going along with the flow’. In contrast, I will call changes in the state of a system that must be extrinsically forced, because they run counter to orthograde tendencies, contragrade changes.128 As hinted already, we can understand orthograde changes as tendencies and contragrade changes as potentials. However, we would be mistaken to assume that the first are ‘natural’ and the second ‘artificial’. On the contrary,

Larval Space 

183

contragrade change is the result of an interaction between contrasting orthograde processes.129 In this, Deacon is confirming Ruyer: the tendency of individuals to perform an absolute survey of their fields results in the emergence of potential, non-spontaneous changes both in themselves and their fields. Assuming that, indeed, consciousness is formal, Deacon claims that if an orthograde change just happens, regardless of anything else, then one would be right to interpret it as Aristotle’s formal cause. Simultaneously, if contragrade change is the result of interactions between fibrous lines of orthograde changes, then one can understand it as a reframing of Aristotle’s efficient cause. Deacon concludes that all efficient causes depend on the interaction of formal causes; any non-spontaneous change depends on the spontaneous tendency of individuals to survey their domains and, with the help of technicities, break their parallelism and conduct the future to the present.130 The decisive factor for any such break, as implied earlier, is the amount of effort (or work) on behalf of the individual. To understand why, it is important to briefly expose Deacon’s main argument. At the heart of his account lies the claim that the non-spontaneous emergence of any higher-order complex level of dynamic organization depends on the lower-order spontaneous tendencies of the level below it. Complementing Kugler and Shaw’s cosmological ladder, Deacon focuses on the emergent dynamics within each transition that occurs across scales. In this sense, he identifies three basic dynamics: homeodynamics, morphodynamics and teleodynamics. The first refers to any dynamic process that spontaneously reduces a system’s constraints to their minimum, distributing its properties evenly across it; the second refers to dynamic processes that have the tendency to become increasingly organized but without the imposition of any extrinsic regularity; the third refers to a form of dynamical organization that exhibits end-directedness and consequence-organized features, constituted by the co-creation, complementary constraint and reciprocal synergy of two (or more) strongly coupled morphodynamic processes.131 With the risk of oversimplifying, I would argue that each of these dynamics corresponds to a different type of memory: homeodynamic genetic memory, morphodynamic epigenetic memory and teleodynamic epiphylogenetic memory. We can understand Deacon’s argument as follows: epigenetic memory conforms to genetic memory while modulating itself epiphylogenetically. We can now understand much better what Kugler and Shaw had in mind when arguing that the initial condition is not only constrained by the final condition, but that in attempting to satisfy it, it can give birth to radically unexpected, novel boundary conditions. According to Deacon, we can consider the effect on an open door or window. If the convection breeze is sufficiently powerful, it could blow the door closed. One possible consequence of the tendency for a system to dissipate a heat gradient by shifting some of this work to higher-order constrained dynamics is that it can produce conditions which can act to decrease that rate by organizing

184  Larval Space

local work to introduce a new constraint that incidentally impedes dissipation. This higher-order work can undermine the lower-order work that it depends on.132 In this sense, any effort of an individual to cohomologically couple different dynamics via its technicities will result in a further problematization of their disparate relations, necessitating yet another effort, and another and so on. Thus the consequence of any architectural technicity is an incessant problematization. Jeffrey Kipnis’s argument, as outlined in the introduction of this book, seems clearer now: architecture offers emancipatory potentials by amplifying the problematic field and eventually creating new existential niches via the manipulative abductive interference of a myriad ‘what … ifs’ that are necessary in order to couple different constraints, different synapses and allow for a line of individuation to unfold. As such, we can understand architecture as a teleodynamic process par excellence. Architectural activity can be defined as the dynamical realisation of final causality, in which a given dynamical organisation exists because of the consequences of its continuance, and therefore can be described as being self-generating. Specifically, it is the emergence of a distinctive realm of orthograde dynamics that is organised around a self-realising potential.133 This is why architecture can be described as a consequence-organized dynamic that is its own consequence.134 Furthermore, like any self-directed activity, like any melody that sings itself (especially given the absolute verticalism of the architectural technicities that it deploys), architecture demands a certain amount of work in order to sustain, reproduce and further problematize its synaptic capacities: any teleodynamic process needs to work in order to preserve the constraints it introduced in order to couple the local with the non-local.135 Having replaced matter with activity, as Ruyer proposes, work can be understood as any material modulation that is necessary in order to overcome the tendency to resist change. Therefore, work is any activity that produces contragrade change. However, if contragrade changes depend on orthograde tendencies, this means that work depends on the capacity to become affectively attuned with disparate orthograde tendencies and assist the resolution of their tension. To work means to operate on the limit: to be affectively open to the differences that can make a difference, to the information that can potentialize the pre-individual and break the parallelism of any same-scale survey. In tandem, architectural work is a process of disruption and reconstitution, of stuttering and intuition that attempts to manipulate and produce differences that can make an architectural difference: architectural meanings charged with the affects that can synaptically fold and unfold on the membrane, both as an architectural memory of the future and as its imitation.

Larval Space 

185

However, in the architectural act and the work that it implies, architecture is not only producing its technicities, its norms and its values. The architectural act crucially allows architecture to rearrange itself without actually erasing itself; it allows an architectural refrain to pass through, an impersonal memory of the larval space that is at once genetic, epigenetic and epiphylogenetic. After all, larval space is not hidden in any transcendental realm, in any distant region that would require treating it as something beyond reach, a place meant only for initiates. Quite the opposite, larval space is not a domain, it is not placed next to this or that, a starting point or a destination to aim towards; larval space is where and when the start and the end fold onto each other. For this reason, larval space is everywhere and at once: it is the architectural act itself and its intentional synaptic capacity to fight against entropy while conforming with its own given history, to become other by opening to the world and not by closing in on itself. Any architectural act is larval because it manages to capture and express (squeeze out) the causal openness of the cosmos. This is what the problem of cohomology – and architecture’s capacity to resolve it – teaches us: the cosmos might be materially and energetically closed but it always remains relationally open. In other words, while no matter or energy can be introduced or disappear, there is literally no limit when it comes to the potential differential relations between them: the cosmos is in fact actually infinite. Therefore, according to Deacon, we might speculate that whereas the conservation of laws of science tell us that the universe is closed to the creation or destruction of the amount of possible ‘difference’ (the ultimate determinate of what constitutes mass-energy) available in the world, they do not restrict the distributional possibilities that these differences can assume, and it is distributional relationships which determine the forms that change can take.136 Consequently, and bringing my argument full circle, the casual openness of the cosmos highlights the importance of information. Information is the synaptic bridge that links the affective properties of disparate systems, while at the synaptic moment itself, novel information emerges, this time as the resolution of their tension. Information is the only thing that escapes the natural laws and allows the cosmos to individuate further: information (as a shared, affective meaning) is the only thing that can be introduced to or disappear from the cosmos. Through the transductive repetition of transfers of information (of a difference that can make a difference) from individual to individual, domain to domain, scale to scale and dynamic field to dynamic field, ‘causal linkages between phenomena that otherwise would be astronomically unlikely to occur spontaneously can be brought into existence.’137 Similarly, architectural information and meanings (as the trans-affective field of what produces architecture and what architecture produces) is what allows architecture to further individuate. One step after the other, one architectural act after another, architectural information transductively propagates

186  Larval Space

the constraints that assist the constant effort of coupling the genetic with the epigenetic via detachable, externalized yet concretizing technicities. Paraphrasing Deacon, architectural evolution is not something that belongs to the discursive, a succession of different typologies and ideologies; it is not the story of an imposed design, but rather that of a progressive constraint.138 However, the very possibility of architectural evolution depends on architecture’s ability to capture critical constraints that belong to less complex teleodynamic processes and consequently preserve them and informationally transmit them. Architecture depends on architectural technicities because they, as actual expressions of its norms and values, can be ‘preserved unmodified across changes in dynamics, so that earlier dynamic achievement will not be continually undermined.’139 The detachable memory of architectural technicities and the absolute verticalism that it entails, allows architecture to evolve, since this memory provides architecture with constraints that, while of the membrane and inseparable from it, can inform each other at absolute speed. To put it another way, the capacity of any architectural technicity to densify and intensify the membrane in a manner that connects the local with the non-local, makes possible not only a discourse on architecture but also an architectural act that can constantly begin anew without having to begin from nothing. The architectural information that is stored in architectural technicities, those that make the distinction between a subject, an object and an environment collapse, is, eventually, the ultimate (and only) architectural revolution. Due to its metastability, due to its own architectural consciousness, architecture can take advantage of informationally charged synapses in order to express a novel line of individuation, a novel membranic disjunction, eventually allowing an architectural semiosis to emerge: a population of meanings (syntactical, semantic and pragmatic) that allow architecture to enunciate itself without reducing itself – to a style, a school of thought, a specific agent or any ideology. The larval architectural act dissociates what is immediately present as a tendency from what is almost there as a potential. Through the architectural act, the asymmetry between the actual and the virtual is expressed as a productive potential of an architecture that will always belong to the future – even when of the past, hundreds of years ago, in forsaken ruins and old pictures. The intentionality of the architectural act is what makes architecture able to inform and be informed by a larval space and to address a larval time that is still undecided as to where it came from and where it is going. The architectural act can modulate much more than just the material constraints of an already-given architectural enunciation. It is able to modulate the dynamical constraints, the directing essences that emerge when a population of architectural assemblages stand in disparation. Consequently, architecture is indeed the expression of matter as activity, since it captures both the intentionality of activity and the materiality of intention as an emergent dynamism. In this sense, architectural intentionality and its agency can be understood as a constant informational manipulation, a continuous effort to explore,

Larval Space 

187

produce and take advantage of the constraints that allow for a shared architectural meaning to pass through. Understanding architectural intentionality and agency in terms of information, affective constraints and synapses shifts the problematic field: it is no longer an issue of what an architect is free from but rather what they are free to.140 As such, architectural agency stands for the emergent capacity to modulate lines of individuation in a manner that escapes the tendencies of spontaneity: how things would normally be done, or where they would ‘naturally’ go. In addition, architecture intervenes in the fabric of the membrane, modulates it intentionally while enunciating the persistence of this capacity, the purposeful endurance of its own emergent field of survey. Therefore, what forms an architectural consciousness is not a given, it is not transferred or bestowed by any domain that is either before or after architecture, that either supports or drives it. Architecture is self-catalysing and self-generating, a melody that sings itself in all the different tunes that have been squeezed out of the cosmos thus far and in all those that are about to come. As a consequence that is its own consequence, architectural agency and intentionality depend only on the architectural act and its capacity to be affectively attuned with a shared meaning that can make a life worthy of what happens to it and, accordingly, memorize it and imitate it: architecture is not produced by free will but by free necessity. Notes 1 William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1909), 262; original emphasis. 2 Antoine Hennion, ‘For a Sociology of Maquettes’, in Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies and Displacements, ed. Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie (New York: Routledge, 2016), 84. 3 Hennion, ‘For a Sociology of Maquettes’, 84. 4 Brian Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 41. 5 Ibid., 45. 6 Ibid., 45–46, original emphasis. 7 Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information, trans. Taylor Adkins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 393. 8 Ibid., 259. 9 Ibid., 270. 10 Ibid., 287. 11 Hanjo Berressem, ‘Degrees of Freedom: Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies’, in Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 142. 12 Ibid., 142. 13 Félix Guattari, Schizoanalytic Cartographies, trans. Andrew Goffey (London: Bloomsbury, 1989), 178. 14 Ibid., 165. 15 Ibid., 177. 16 Ibid., 112. 17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 349. 18 Berressem, ‘Degrees of Freedom’, 144.

188  Larval Space 19 Chris Smith, Bare Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 34. 20 Smith, Bare Architecture, 34. 21 Ibid. 22 Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017), 17. 23 Ibid., 149. 24 Ibid., 150. 25 Ibid., 151. 26 Ibid., 153. 27 Ibid., 155. 28 Ibid. 29 Massumi, 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value, 60. 30 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 61. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 105. 33 Ibid., 126. 34 Simondon, Individuation, 377. 35 David Scott, ‘How Do We Recognise Deleuze and Simondon Are Spinozists?’, Deleuze Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 569. 36 Ibid. 37 Simondon, Individuation, 377. 38 Scott, ‘How Do We Recognise Deleuze and Simondon Are Spinozists?’, 571. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Gilbert Simondon, Sur la Technique: 1953–1983 (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 2014) cited in Scott, ‘How Do We Recognise Deleuze and Simondon Are Spinozists?’, 571. 42 Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 140. 43 Raymond Ruyer, La Genése des Formes Vivantes (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1958), 244, cited in Jon Roffe, ‘Form IV: From Ruyer’s Psychobiology to Deleuze and Guattari’s Socius’, Deleuze Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 585. 44 Mark Hansen, ‘Form and Phenomenon in Raymond Ruyer’s Philosophy’, introduction to Neofinalism, by Raymond Ruyer, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), ix; original emphasis. 45 Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 14. 46 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 14. 47 Raymond Ruyer, ‘Raymond Ruyer par lui-même’, Les Études Philosophiques 1, no. 6 (2007): 9–10. 48 Alia Al-Saji, ‘The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a New Theory of Time’, Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 2 (2004): 218. 49 Ruyer, ‘Raymond Ruyer par lui-même’, 10. 50 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 115. 51 Ibid., 7. 52 Ibid., 57. 53 Ibid., 60. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 69. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 73. 58 Ibid., 75. 59 Ibid., 88. 60 Ibid.

Larval Space 

189

61 Ibid., 91. 62 Ibid., 92. 63 Ibid., 93. 64 Ibid., 97. 65 Ibid., 98. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 99. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 129. 71 Ibid., 131. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 135. 74 Ibid., 137. 75 Ibid., 142. 76 Ibid., 149. 77 Daniel W. Smith, ‘Raymond Ruyer and the Metaphysics of Absolute Forms’, Parrhesia 27 (2017): 124. 78 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 162. 79 Jakob van Uexküll, ‘Der Organismus und die Umwelt’, in Das Lebensproblem im Lichte der modernen Forschung, ed. Hans Driesch and Heinz Woltereck (Leipzig, Germany: Quelle und Meyer, 1931): 201. 80 Ronald Bogue, ‘Raymond Ruyer’, in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, ed. Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (Edinburgh: University Press, 2009), 306. 81 Bogue, ‘Raymond Ruyer’, 307. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 Raymond Ruyer, Eléments de Psycho-biologie (Paris: PUF, 1946), 13, cited in Bogue, ‘Raymond Ruyer’, 307. 85 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 228. 86 Ray Brassier, ‘Stellar Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze on the Dice-Throw’, Pli 10 (2000): 205. 87 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 241. 88 Smith, ‘Raymond Ruyer and the Metaphysics of Absolute Forms’, 119. 89 Ibid.,119. 90 Ibid., 122. 91 Ruyer, Neofinalism, 33. 92 Ibid., 19. 93 Ibid., 149. 94 Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: University Press, 1998), 50. 95 Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012), 116. 96 Ibid., 116. 97 Ernst Mayr, ‘Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis’, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (1974): 98. 98 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 121. 99 Ibid., 138. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 192. 102 Ibid., 193. 103 Ibid., 195. 104 Ibid., 198.

190  Larval Space 105 Ibid., 202. 106 Peter N. Kugler and Robert E. Shaw, ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic Engines: A Coupling of First and Second Laws’, in Synergetics of Cognition, ed. Hermann Haken and Michael Stadler (Berlin: Springer, 1990), 296–31. 107 Ibid., 297. 108 Andrej Radman, ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’, in Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), 74. 109 Kugler and Shaw, ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking’, 300. 110 Ibid., 303. 111 Ibid., 305. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 311. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 Ibid., 314. 117 Ibid., 314–15. 118 Ibid., 315. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid., 321. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid., 322. 124 Ibid., 324. 125 Ibid., 325. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid. 128 Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 223. 129 Ibid. 130 Ibid., 232. 131 Ibid., 550–52. 132 Ibid., 263. 133 Ibid., 275. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid., 318. 136 Ibid., 342. 137 Ibid., 397. 138 Ibid., 426. 139 Ibid., 435. 140 Ibid., 480.

Bibliography Al-Saji, Alia. ‘The Memory of Another Past: Bergson, Deleuze and a New Theory of Time’. Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 2 (2004): 203–39. Berressem, Hanjo. ‘Degrees of Freedom: Félix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies’. In Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas, 128–48. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Bogue, Ronald. ‘Raymond Ruyer’. In Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage. Edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe, 300–20. Edinburgh: University Press, 2009.

Larval Space 

191

Brassier, Ray. ‘Stellar Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze on the Dice-Throw’. Pli 10 (2000): 200–16. Deacon, Terrence. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Guattari, Félix. Schizoanalytic Cartographies. Translated by Andrew Goffey. London: Bloomsbury, 1989. Hansen, Mark. ‘Form and Phenomenon in Raymond Ruyer’s Philosophy’. Introduction to Raymond Ruyer, Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi, vii–xxi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Hennion, Antoine. ‘For a Sociology of Maquettes’. In Studio Studies: Operations, Topologies and Displacements. Edited by Ignacio Farías and Alex Wilkie, 73–88. New York: Routledge, 2016. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. New York: Longmans, Green & Co, 1909. Kugler, Peter N. and Robert E. Shaw. ‘Symmetry and Symmetry-Breaking in Thermodynamic and Epistemic Engines: A Coupling of First and Second Laws’. In Synergetics of Cognition. Edited by Hermann Haken and Michael Stadler, 296–331. Berlin: Springer, 1990. Massumi, Brian. 99  Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Mayr, Ernst. ‘Teleological and Teleonomic: A New Analysis’. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (1974): 133–59. Radman, Andrej. ‘Involutionary Architecture: Unyoking Coherence from Congruence’. In Posthuman Ecologies: Complexity and Process after Deleuze. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall, 61–86. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Roffe, Jon. ‘Form IV: From Ruyer’s Psychobiology to Deleuze and Guattari’s Socius’. Deleuze Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 580–99. Ruyer, Raymond. ‘Raymond Ruyer par lui- même’. Les Études Philosophiques 1, no. 6 (2007): 3–14. Ruyer, Raymond. Eléments de Psycho-biologie. Paris: PUF, 1946. Ruyer, Raymond. La Genése des Formes Vivantes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958. Ruyer, Raymond. Neofinalism. Translated by Alyosha Edlebi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Scott, David. ‘How do we Recognise Deleuze and Simondon are Spinozists?’. Deleuze Studies 11, no. 4 (2017): 555–79. Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notion of Forms and Information. Translated by Taylor Adkins. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Simondon, Gilbert. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2017. Simondon, Gilbert. Sur la Technique: 1953–1983. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014. Smith, Chris. Bare Architecture. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Smith, Daniel W. ‘Raymond Ruyer and the Metaphysics of Absolute Forms’. Parrhesia 27 (2017): 116–28. Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: University Press, 1998. https://en​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/ Technics​_and​_Time,_1 Uexküll, Jakob von. ‘Der Organismus und die Umwelt’. In Das Lebensproblem im Lichte der modernen Forschung. Edited by Hans Driesch and Heinz Woltereck, 189–224. Leipzig, Germany: Quelle und Meyer, 1931.

Index

abductive/abduction 57; inferences 66, 74; reasoning 57 Aeon (Greek god) 91, 137, 152, 171, 174 Aeonic temporal directions 156 affective technicity 66, 72, 130; catalyse 140; modes 64; see also architectural technicities affects 72, 82, 89, 93, 95, 106, 154–55, 167; assemblage of 63; environment 90; individual’s 94, 145; informational 121; intensive 108, 169; metastable 115; structural and operational 91; vibratory 136, 137, 141 affordances 57, 96, 114, 121, 155, 179 agencement 86 Alaimo, S. 89 Alberti, L. B. 20–21, 27, 66 allagmatics 116–18, 125, 136, 177 Allen, S. 29, 34 Altamirano, M. 60, 62–63 analogical proportionality 39–40 analogue 73, 76–77, 80; becomings 77; continuous to 73; digit 81; image 71; impulse 80; merging 79; transcendental 84; see also digital spider, analogue flights of ‘Analytic of the Sublime’ 40, 42 antecedence criterion 29–32 architectural intuition 29, 42, 46, 75, 152; domestication 38; singularity of 48; see also intuition; technicities of architectural intuition architectural technicities 59–61, 68, 72, 81, 110, 181; ability to individuate 159; absolute verticalism of 184; architecture depends on 186; as autonomous media of trans-affective manipulations 95; detachable memory of 186; individuation of 161, 173; involvement reticular generalization and concretization 105; locating dynamism 158; margin of

indeterminacy with information 158; modes of practices of 160; population of 92; sensitivity of 158; trans-affective power of 163; see also technicities of architectural intuition Aristotle 1, 10, 81–82, 113 artefacts 58; cohomological operator as 182; detachable 172, 173; development of 64; production and control of 59, 64; prosthetic 63 artisan of rhythms 121–25 a-signifying 82, 114; synapses 156 assemblage 86–88, 90, 133–34; of affects 63; architectural 121–22, 131, 186; houseassemblage 65 attractor 179 Australopithecae 63 auto-normativity 162 autopoiesis 83–84 Autopoiesis of Architecture, The (Schumacher) 83 Bachelard, G. 125–26 Barthélémy, J-H. 116 Bateson, G. 67 Beaucé, P. 113 bells 120; artisan of rhythms 121–25; fold 134–37; membrane 141–46; Ritornerà 130–34; territory 125–30; un-frame veil 137–41 Bergson, H. 1, 6–8, 125–26, 164; intuition 9; problematic and intuitive account 10; theory of pure perception 46 Berressem, H. 156–57 bêtise (ill-timed remark or action) 48 Bhaskar, R. 33–34 bifurcation 67; of flow 47; multiplicity of 44 bipedalism 63 Bogue, R. 90, 92, 128, 132, 170 Boule (ball) 26 Bowden, S. 13

194 Index Brassier, R. 171 Brembs, B. 56–57 Bruno, G. 30 Buchanan, B. 94 Cache, B. 109–10, 113, 137–38; framework 141; theories 138, 141; vocabulary 139 Canguilhem, G. 83 Carpo, M. 61, 111–15 Chabot, P. 70–71, 110 chance-seeking attitude of humans 58 chaos 38, 47, 157; architecture confronts 48–49; becoming rhythmic of 123; forces of 124; intransitive 133; preindividual 132 Chemero, A. 96 Chronic temporal direction 156 Chronos (time of individuating actual) 91, 137, 152, 174 chrysalis architecture 6–9 Clark, A. 22–23 classic Darwinian natural selection 58–59 clay 117–18 closed systems 35, 36, 126, 160 coding 86, 128 cognition 22–23, 58, 90 cognitive niches 58, 90 Colebrook, C. 69, 71–73 co-location, prohibition of 77 Combes, M. 60–61, 106 communication 84, 107, 114; architectural 37; of heterogeneous potentials 108; imagistic 47 computer-aided design (CAD) 70 conatus 30, 163 concrete walls: architectural technicities 59–51; concretized abstractions 56–57, 64–67; manipulative account 57–59; technical object 61–64; undetermined hand 67–72 consciousness 162–63, 165, 167 constraint(s) 13–14, 118, 152, 156, 175–76, 178; affective 187; of common sense 40; complementary 183; constant 159; coupling of 178; dynamical 186; higherorder 179; local and non-local 180–81; molar constraint of speed 157; nonlocal genetic 181, 182; progressive 186; propagation of 153, 177; real 58; of survival and reproduction 92; synaptic 160, 166, 176 contragrade change 182–84 cosmological ladder 179–80, 182, 183 coupling of constraints 178

creation 3–4, 166; absolute 3; architectural 166; of new constraints 179; of point of stability 132, 180 critical sets 178–79 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 40 cross-scale approach 177–78 crystallization concept 106, 110, 124 cybernetic–parametricist approach 113 cybernetics 2, 110–11 Darwin, C. 62; evolutionary model 83 Darwinism 90–91 Deacon, T. 174–76, 182–83, 185–86 decomposition 152; of architectural subject 46; constant 74 deductive reasoning 57 DeLanda, M. 35, 39, 85–87, 104 Deleuze, G. 10–11, 40, 66, 76–78, 93–96, 143; about affects 93–94; about architectural minds 25–26, 29–30; about architecture 129–31; Bowden claims on approach to learning of 13; concept of assemblage introduced by 86; about concept of fold 134; about concept of Umwelt 123; about concepts 14; definition of objectile 113–14; about digital variability 113; about ethology 93; about event 12; about geophilosophy 31–32; about images 138; about individual 115, 124; about intuition 73; about milieus 123; about modulation 117; referring betise 48; about rhythmanalysis 126; transcendental empiricism 41–42; about Ulysses’s ship 24; about undetermined hand 69, 71–72; about virtual field 107 Deleuze: A Philosophy of the Event (Zourabichvili) 78 De Re Aedificatoria (classic architectural treatise) 20–21 De Re Navalis 20 Desert Islands (Deleuze) 29, 32; antecedence criterion 29–32; architectural representation 32–34; signs of disruption 34–37 de-specialization 63, 64, 67 detachability of memory 173 deterritorialization 63, 128, 152 Dialectics of Duration, The (Bachelard) 125 digital(ism) 76–77, 80–82, 111–12; architecture 112; binary opposition 95; exemplary 79; files 112; logics 111, 113; platonic horizontal 113 digitality 76–78, 82

Index  digital spider, analogue flights of 104; disparation 108–11; Eppur Si Individuate 105–8; parametricist scholasticism 111–14; transductive modulations under allagmatic bridge 114–20 directional fixation of frame 140 disagreeable optical illusion 20 disparation 108–11, 114, 154–56, 160; expressive–possessive 180; between genetic and epigenetic fails 181 distinction: between active and reactive individual 119; digital 76, 122, 141; of form vs. function 84; between milieus and territories 132; between minor and major architectural minds 160; of modes of practices of architectural technicities 160; of ontology and epistemology 76; philosophical 76; between rhythms 125; between structure and operation 117 diversity 112–13, 155; spatial 167; temporal 167–68 dominance of vision 69 Doric columns 15, 20–22, 24 dos Santos, P. 125–26 doxa architecture 2, 48 Eisenman, P. 134 entasis (slight convex curve) 20–21, 28; case of 26; design 21; technical understanding 22; use of 21 enunciation: architectural 121, 122, 186; architecture’s special mode of 38; ethicoaesthetic 129; rhythm and refrain of 121 epigenetic memory 91, 173, 181 epiphylogenesis 90–91 epiphylogenetic memory 91, 181 equipotentiality 164–65 ethology 63, 94–95, 104, 115, 122 ethopoiesis of architecture 82; architectural part-to-affective whole 85–90; drift 90–92; reductionist 82–85; Umwelt 93 Euclidean geometry 28, 70 Evans, A. 81 Evans, R. 29, 38, 41 evolution 58, 62, 92; architectural 186; biological 91, 173; definite stage of 65; genealogical 60; human 64; mode of 64; technical 66, 173 expression 127, 153–54; absolute form of 35; atypical 37, 38, 41; of conatus 163; “false problem” 10; of matter 186; of ratio 38; responsive 14; of territorial claim 142

195

extended architectural minds 24–29, 58, 63, 128, 160, 173 fabricational intention 60 fabrilis peritia 20 faculty of imagination 40–41 feature placing 96 ‘feed-back’ device 111 Ferryman of Hades 38; ratiognition 38–40; stuttering to death 44–49; sublime 40–44 F for Fake film (Welles) 43 file-to-factory design 113 finalism 163, 174 fold(ing) 134–37, 143–44; architecture 135; projects 134 Foucault, M. 39–40, 59 framing 138–39 functional ‘zig’ of aggression 129 Galloway, A. 76–78 Gehry, F. 134 generalization 8, 63–64, 72; instinctive 172, 181; reticular 105, 122, 145 genetic memory 91, 173 genetic processes 10, 75, 181 geology 31–32, 137 geophilosophy 31 germ 107, 109–10, 115, 123, 127, 152 Gesture and Speech (Leroi-Gourhan) 62 Gibson, J. J. 58, 96, 155, 179 Goodman, N. 34 Grant, I. H. 30–31 Gregg, M. 95 grid 140–41 Guattari, F. 13, 29, 31, 43, 66, 76–77, 86, 89, 121–23, 126, 156; about architecture 129– 31; concept of assemblage introduced by 86; about concept of Umwelt 123; about individual 115, 124; about milieus 123; about rhythmanalysis 126 Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (Gehry) 134 Gutting, G. 39 haecceity 27, 42, 108, 127 Hansen, M. 163 harmony 39, 104, 125–26 Heidegger, M. 1 Heimlich 129 Hennion, A. 153 hiker 162, 164, 173 holism-effect 109 Homer 19, 24 horizontal digitality 82 Hörl, E. 2–4

196 Index Hox genes 67 Hume, D. 33 Husserl, E. 27 hylomorphic/hylomorphism 4–5, 10, 27; schema 4–5; tradition 4 I-consciousness 165 imitation 167–68 indeterminacy 128, 158–59; singular moment of 44, 45; spatial 46 individual/individuality/individuation 74–75, 105, 107–8, 119, 124, 168–69, 170, 172; knowledge 105; line of 176–81; modulating individual 117–18; ordinal phases 106; ordinal phases of 106; phases of crystal 110; principle of 118; as signal– sign assemblage 115; theory of 105 infinite idealization 84–85 inflection 138–39 information 110, 114, 116, 154–55, 158, 185 inhibited synthesis 135 input–output fallacy 5, 84 intensity 154–55 intentionality 180, 182 internal resonance 106, 107 intransitive forces 29, 33, 35, 59, 135 intuition 7, 28, 73–75, 80, 115, 152; disruption and reconstitution of 184; of folded architecture 136; goal of 7–8; of imagination 43; reciprocity of 145; of refrain 152; reticular technicity of 145; for transduction 73 James, W. 153 Kant, I. 31, 38–41, 69–70 Kipnis, J. 9, 135, 184 Kugler, P. 177–83 Kwinter, S. 87 Lamarck, J-P. 62 Land, N. 135 Laruelle, F. 76–81 larval architectural act 186 larval space 29, 153, 166, 185; architectural act 185; architectural activity 184; architectural information 186; architectural intentionality and agency 186–87; architectural time 170–77; constraint propagation 177; contragrade change 182–83; critical sets 179; line of individuation 181; Memorie dal Futuro 153–60; symmetry 178; verticalism 170 Lefebvre, H. 125–26

Leibniz, G. W. 8, 37, 92, 114 Leibniz’s principle 78 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 62–64 lineamenta (theorem) 27 Lingis, A. 44 Luhmann, N. 88 Lynn, G. 134 macro-architectures 87–88 macroscopic reductionism 85 macro-structural couplings 104 Magnani, L. 58 major architectures 26–28, 50n39 major mind 46–47 Massumi, B. 27–28, 61, 74, 80, 109, 142, 154 material emergence process 74, 75 materiality 59, 60, 70, 84, 137; of assemblage 139; construction-friendly picture of 85; of forces 27; Santos’s account of quantum level of 125; sensual 26 mathesis (learning) 39 matter: binary opposition with form 117; dualism with form 10, 27; hylomorphic juxtaposition of 4; passive characteristic of 5 Matter and Memory (Bergson) 46 Maturana, H. 83–84, 88, 90–92 Mayr, E. 175 McLuhan, M. 88 medium 88–89; digital 76, 80 Meillassoux, Q. 46–47, 137; rarefaction 48; subtractive model 47, 90, 138 membranic/membrane 13, 136–37, 141–46; event 136; tensions 152 Memorie dal Futuro 153; architectural norms and values 161–70; synaptic passages 153–61 memorization 11, 168, 179, 180 memory 91, 159, 164, 167–68; detachability of 173; epigenetic 91, 173, 181; technological 165, 173 metaphysics 1, 6–7, 158; immanent 1, 2; immanent architectural 2, 6; intuitive 8; transcendental 2, 5, 7 metastability 36; disruption of 38, 44, 45, 115, 117; immanent 109; spatial 36, 47, 82, 83 micro-architectures 87–88 minor architectures 26–27, 50n39 minor mind 46–47 modulation: rhythmic 142; temporal 114; transductive 114–20 moulding 117 movement image 138 multiplicity 68, 77, 86, 163; of bifurcations 44; of individuals 166; of powers 96

Index  Nancy, J. 3–4 Navis (ship) 20 Negarestani, R. 59, 84–85, 88 neofinalism 163, 171 niche construction 58, 59 Nietzsche, F. 1, 30, 43, 79 nomad sciences 25, 26 non-linear causality 35 non-linear coupling 177, 181 non-Porphyrian tree 82 norms see architectural norms and values Nuttgens, P. 20 objectile (digital design and architecture) 113–14 Odyssey (Homer) 19 On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (Simondon) 60 ontogenesis 105–6 Ontogeny of Information, The (Oyama) 91 orthograde change 182, 183 Oyama, S. 91–92 parallelism 168–69, 174, 178–79 parametricist: dream 111; scholasticism 111–14; turn 83 Peirce, C. S. 37, 57, 108 Penrose, F. 20 perceptual/perception 138, 155; field 155; theories 46, 58 pharmakon (medicine and poison) 96–97 Pittendrigh, C. 174 Plato 1, 3, 10, 81, 113 Porphyry 39, 81–82 potentia 106, 108, 161 potestas (power or faculty) 106, 108, 161 Proust, M. 15 pure event 12–13 rarefaction 47–48 reactive subject 48, 119 A Realist Theory of Science (Bhaskar) 33 Rebstock Park project (Eisenman) 134 reductionist/reductionism 60, 82–85 refrain 132, 139, 156–57; intuition 152; new alliances 133; operations 140 relatum (thing or term related) 22 relays 15, 159 rhythm(s) 25, 123–27, 138; rhythmanalysis 125–26; rhythmic equilibrium 125–26 ritornellos 123, 128 Ritornerà 130–34

197

Ruyer, R. 162, 164, 167–68, 170; parallelism 179; philosophy of consciousness 163; proposition 165; technicities 172; verticalism 171 Al-Saji, A. 164 same-scale parallelism 178, 179 Santiago theory 83 Sauvanargues, A. 143 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (Guattari) 121 Schumacher, P. 68, 83–85, 88 Scott, D. 161 Seigworth, G. 95 sensibility 36–37, 114 Shaviro, S. 36, 43, 57 Shaw, R. 177–83 signification 104, 115, 141 signs 36–37, 40, 115, 129 Simondon, G. 2, 4, 10, 12, 60, 64–66, 70, 74, 81, 107–9, 111, 114–16, 124; about architectural norms and values 161–62; and constraint propagation 177; crystallization concept of 110; about forms 160; goal of intuition of 7; about hiker 173; about information 154; about membranic folds 141, 143; perception of 155; pointing margin of indeterminacy 157–59; structural coupling with Uexküll 90; theory of individuation 105 Smith, C. S. 25, 157 Smith, D. 40–41 spatial stuttering 7, 29, 35, 36, 38, 47, 74, 75, 119, 152 spatiotemporal stuttering 28 Speaks, M. 134 speculative extrapolation 15, 57, 136 spider fly 119–20 Spinoza, B. 93, 143 Spinozian approach 171 Spuybroek, L. 135 Stiegler, B. 61, 90, 91 stilus (writing utensil) 61–63, 66, 68 structural coupling 84, 88, 90 stutter(ing) 25, 44, 159; to death 44–49; disruption and reconstitution of 184; of folded architecture 136; noises 63; reciprocity of 145; reticular technicity of 145; spatial 7, 29, 35, 36, 38, 47, 74, 75, 119, 152; spatiotemporal 25; for transduction 73 subjectivities 4, 47, 91 sublime 40–44 substantialism 10

198 Index subtraction/subtractive model of Meillassoux 46–47, 138, 142 symmetry 178; attractor 179; unilateral 171 symphonic plane of composition 129 synapse(s) 155–56, 159, 165, 169, 173, 184; constraints with 175; formation of 166; higher-order 180; informationally charged 186; intensive 160; virtual crossscale 181 synaptic passages 153–61, 168, 173, 180 tabula gracilis (designer side tables) 21 taxinomia (taxonomy) 39 technê (art) 59–61, 63, 66 technical object 61–64; autonomy of 60–61 technicities of architectural intuition: concrete walls 56–72; ethopoiesis of architecture 82–97; oldest prejudice 72–82; see also affective technicity; architectural technicities technicity 60–62, 88, 172, 181, 182 see also architectural technicities; affective technicity teleology 174–75 teleomatic processes 175 teleonomy 174–75 telos (intentional actualization of potential) 28, 39 Ten Books (Vitruvius) 70 territorialization 86, 127–28 territorial/territory 125–30; formation 128, 130, 140; signs 129 T factor 131 Theseus paradox, ship of 168 thinking 30–32, 68; architectural 10, 12, 40, 70, 141; assemblage 85, 87; feeling 74; object-thinking 31; serial 82; subject 13, 30; technological 60; typological 10, 39 Thompson, D. 180 transcendental: design rules 61; empiricism 41; metaphysics 2, 7; Platonic participation 10; thought 6

transducer 159, 173 transduction 37, 73, 116–17, 119, 177 Uexküll, J. v. 82–83, 90–93, 96, 104, 111, 117, 131 Ulysses’s ship 19; column, wave, paper and brain 20–24; extended architectural minds 24–29 Umwelt (environment) 82–83, 92–93, 106, 111, 119, 121, 123, 167, 170, 179 Umwelten 104, 106 Unheimlich 129 unitas multiplex 163 urdoxa (first doctrine) 48 van Lier, H. 121 van Meegeren, H. 43–44 Varela, F. 83–84, 88, 90–92 vector 138–39 Vermeer, J. 43–44 vernacular architecture 26 verticalism 170–71, 181 Virilio, P. 24 virtuality 80, 115; contingent 35, 117; of encounter 144; pre-individual refrain 136 Vitruvius 20–21, 27, 70–71 Wagner, O. 68 Welles, O. 43 whistles 120; artisan of rhythms 121–25; fold 134–37; membrane 141–46; Ritornerà 130–34; territory 125–30; un-frame veil 137–41 Whitehead, A. N. 8, 43, 57, 78 Wiener, N. 111 Xenophon 25 Zevi, B. 68 zigzag movement 128–29 zooming function 84 Zourabichvili, F. 30, 36–37, 78–79