ARCHITECTURE FOR A FREE SUBJECTIVITY
For David
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real
SIMONE BROTT Queensland University of Technology, Australia
© Simone Brott 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Simone Brott has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identied as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England
Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA
www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brott, Simone. Architecture for a free subjectivity : Deleuze and Guattari at the horizon of the real. 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992. 3. Architecture--Philosophy. 4. Architecture-Psychological aspects. 5. Architecture--Aesthetics. 6. Subjectivity. I. Title 720.1'9-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brott, Simone. Architecture for a free subjectivity : Deleuze and Guattari at the horizon of the real / by Simone Brott. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1995-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-1994-5 (ebook) 1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Guattari, Félix, 1930-1992. 3. Architecture-Philosophy. 4. Subjectivity. I. Title. B2430.D454B76 2011
194--dc22 2011009461 ISBN 9781409419952 (hbk) ISBN 9781409419945 (ebk)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.
Contents
Foreword Acknowledgements
Introduction: Subjectivization
vii xi
1
1
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
15
2
Impersonal Effects
37
3
Impersonal Effects 2
55
4
Guattari and the Japanese New Wave
75
5
Shinohara and Takamatsu: Objets Verité
97
6
Architecture Without Qualities
Bibliography Index
117
123 133
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Foreword
The Return of the Subject
The multiple worlds envisioned by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—by way of their immanentist theory of subjectivity given to material forces, including architecture—are ineluctably compossible, just as they are heedlessly ‘futural.’ In reading Simone Brott’s analytical tour de force the question that returns, incessantly, to haunt this examination of architecture is how the intrusion of such a conceptual paradigm into the discipline can be actualized and imagined— because, in most instances, as soon as these ‘other possible worlds’ arrive they are converted into something else. What always remains, after the careful delineations of a prescient architectural subjectivity specic to architectural surfaces and forms, is the impression that we are, once again, caught at the precipice of architectural representation, with the choice of leaping into the unknown or turning back. The impersonal effects of architecture persist, paradoxically, under these conditions; at the same time, it is also true that representation in architecture has survived Mille Plateaux, regardless of any intentions of Deleuze and Guattari to erase signication in favor of pure affect. In this productive examination of what is real within architectural formmaking—and how such forces are brought into play in architectural composition, or how they are simply discerned in the architectural discourse’s often negative ‘critique of forms’—the cumulative effect of discussing impersonal effects is that they are almost always hijacked or recoded as operative formal agency toward some other means of expression: either the instrumental orders of authorized forms of reality or the inborn auspices of architectural theory (its famous claim to purely autonomous agency as an imaginative art). What is very obvious, however, over the course of reading Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real, is that architecture, in repeatedly surrendering to ideology, suffers from this inability to liberate free forms of architectural subjectivization from embedded that are an unnecessary component of its the historical and representational social condition.orders In certain instances, and in excess of all ideological programs (such as those of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library), these effects simply nd an address within traditional representation, turning worlds inside out and upside down in the process. Yet it is absolutely necessary to remember that this supposed liberation of purely immanent agency in architectural terms is, for Deleuze and Guattari, also always aimed toward desubjectivization, or the ridding of individual or personal agency; that is, it aims to give architecture over to the impersonality of austere material agency. The project is utterly
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
timely (or untimely) for this reason. In revisiting Columbia University in the 1970s, Japan in the 1980s, and Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, we see a trajectory emerging that strangely looks consistent with a nascent historicizing project for determining where postmodernism has taken us, while the fact that we are witnessing its endgame does not permit us to clearly discern where it is that we have arrived. What is more than evident is that the attendant discourse regarding the ‘biopolitical’ regimes of neo-liberal capitalism have reinvented many of the terms of engagement for architecture vis-à-vis ‘the political.’ Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s deeply Foucauldian, “anti-Oedipal” project is as important today as it was in the midst of what Guattari termed the postmodern impasse. The path of Architecture for a Free Subjectivity is, therefore, necessarily tortured. A torturous line is traced from the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari to the Anglo-American architectural discourse of the 1970s, as a type of anarchic force countering then prevalent forms of historicizing postmodernism. Indeed, it is this “postmodern caesura,” to quote Antonio Negri, that is the principal nemesis of Deleuze and Guattari’s project, and Architecture for a Free Subjectivity battles this problem head on—through both that troubled relationship to postmodernism and Guattari’s subsequent voyage to Japan, as well as his encounter with 1980s ‘New Wave’ Japanese architecture. It is in this latter instance that the confrontation with the last vestiges of postmodern guration occurs and a possible way forward is discerned. Yet the outcome is never clear, as renascent forms of late modernism continued well into the new millennium under the cover of Deleuze-inspired forms of a ‘new’ determinism, evident most especially in ‘parametricism,’ in which the subject of parametric architectures is wholly unknown and the machinic élan of the genre has served to erase what Deleuze and Guattari were, arguably, most interested in—the desubjectivization of the alienated late-modern subject under wholly new forms of heterogeneous and de-territorialized systems devoid of the economic, social, and political taint of ‘spent systems.’ Always a double bind, this ‘anima toward’ the outmoded (or apparent ‘lost causes,’ such as humanism), while strangely suggesting an alliance with avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century, is nonetheless a red herring for the very reason that almost all avant-garde movements are expressly ideological. Tracing these impersonal effects isolates and details a range of architectural effects that dovetail with Deleuze’s thinking of a plane of pure immanence and, as a result, a purely immanent set of principles by which architecture might once again attempt to engage the real. This real is also somewhat ominously ‘abstract,’ since itstoappearance here— in poststructuralist experiments with forcing architecture speak a different language (an ‘a-signifying semiotics’) or to admit its own complicity with regimes of repression—commits the effectiveness of impersonal effects to a ‘non-place’ that closely resembles formal agency in and for itself. This productive, indeed generative agency within material orders—and Deleuze is always, to quote Sanford Kwinter, concerned with “matter becoming subject”—is something that has no srcin, because it has always existed as the proverbial ether of architecture. It is only in name ‘primordial,’ while it is also ‘futural.’ The paradoxical operations
Foreword
ix
of isolating it, therefore, require forays into disciplines parallel to architecture, most especially cinema and, to a lesser degree, literature. In the cinematic turn, as applied to architecture as part of the overall poststructuralist experiment, we nd signs of impersonal effects in the gestures toward a wholly realist mode of making images speak ‘of the real,’ which Guattari called “partial enunciation”; for, per André Bazin, cinema creates a heightened reality—it both enlarges the reality of impersonal effects and goes beyond this to create a new world or reality. Lastly, then, what emerges in Architecture for a Free Subjectivity is a sense of yet another turn ahead, after the poststructuralist turn, after the phenomenological turn, and after the theological turn ... One senses that this next turn is actually a ‘return.’ What one hopes in traversing this short history of impersonal effects at the close of the twentieth century is that this next turn might be an emphatic embrace of the actually existing ‘real,’ minus all of the usual turns into new forms of spectral agency, deferment, displacement, etc.—a return to what is and what might be as one thing. Gavin Keeney, New York
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Acknowledgements
This book is a reworking, over several years, of research undertaken at the University of Melbourne, Australia, which built upon the Masters in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Urbanism I completed at the Yale School of Architecture in 2003. I am, rstly, grateful for the Yale Provost Merit Scholarship, the Yale School of Architecture Research Scholarship, and the Foundation for Young Australians’ Centenary Scholarship that I received. These awards made it possible for me to travel to North America and undertake the two-year degree at Yale, where the project was rst formulated. My studies there and my exposure to the east-coast American ‘academy’ became the platform for my research. I woul d like to thank Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, whose Master of Environmental Design program at Yale provided the intense intellectual climate and rigorous roundtable discussions which nourished my early project. I would especially like to thank Peggy Deamer, my friend and Master’s thesis advisor at Yale, for supporting the project until the end. The impetus to propose the book was provided by the publication of an essay based on Chapter 1 of my dissertation, “Deleuze and ‘The Intercessors’,” in Log 18 (New York: Anycorp, Winter 2010), reprinted as Chapter 1 of this book. I would like to thank Gavin Keeney, who spent nine months at Log tirelessly working on draft upon draft, and Cynthia Davidson for the opportunity to contribute to her journal on architecture and the contemporary city. Gavin, further, read my book proposal, and subsequently acted as managing editor on the project. He is present in the book not only as my editor, but also by virtue of his unwavering ideological support for the project. A previous version of Chapter 2 of the dissertation was published as “Close Encounter, Withdrawn Effects” in the Journal of Architectural Education: Performance Architecture, 61/4 (Hoboken: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 6–16. I would like to thank The University of Melbourne for the institutional support
for the research, upon whichPhD thissupervisor book is based. I extend the warmest affection to Greg Missingham, my loyal and champion at Melbourne, who took on my project in an environment not entirely receptive to French philosophy— especially that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, even if whispers of “Deleuze and Guattari” can still be heard in the postgraduate corridors. Finally, I am grateful to Anthony Vidler and John Rajchman for their warm reception and support of the project. I would especially like to thank the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology for supporting the production of my manuscript in my rst year of
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
lecturing. To Paul Sanders, Phil Crowther, Anoma Kumarasuriyar, David Nielsen, and John Frazer, I would like to extend my warmest gratitude for their generous assistance in providing me my rst academic home. Last but not least, I would like to thank Valerie Rose at Ashgate, with whom it was a pleasure to work. To all those who read my srcinal chapters and reviewed my text, and those whose discussion and inuence was operative in my work—I express gratitude: Reinhold Martin, who was among the rst at Yale to encourage my project of subjectivity; Sanford Kwinter, Sylvère Lotringer, Jianfei Zhu, Tetsuo Kogawa, and Gary Genosko; Stephen Wood, Ian Woodcock, and Sean Ryan; Donald Kunze and Daniel Pavlovits; and of course my husband, David Cohen, who proofread both the srcinal PhD and nal book drafts with his expert and astute writer’s eye, and who patiently lived through the entire process. When a book is produced along such an extended and convoluted trajectory, one must also acknowledge the alinear process of its production in order to become worthy of a work as its own form of ‘life’ rather than a mere collection of chapters, and to acknowledge the many lines of escape around which a book project congeals.
Introduction
Subjectivization
This book imagines and articulates an architectural subjectivity privileged as impersonal effects, to be explored in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, by retracing steps taken earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, by cultural and architectural protagonists in the United States and Japan. The following discussions pursue a more abstract and, therefore, timely investigation of the form and function of impersonal effects in the architectural encounter. Subjectivity is, for Deleuze, not a person, but a power given to immanent forces to act and to produce effects in the world. In short, it is the eld of what I call subjectivization, meaning the potential for and event of matter becoming subject, and the multiple ways for this to take place. Deleuze, in fact, tends not to use the word subjectivity, speaking instead of “affects”—the capacity to affect and be affected—and “pre-personal singularities,” meaning those irreducible qualities or powers that act independently of any particular person. To walk, to see, to love—these are general or anonymous capacities that function in a very real sense prior to the personological subject. Singular, here, does not mean specic or rare, but the reverse: the functions to sleep or to laugh are singular because sleeping and laughing always retain a certain abstract quality or impersonality, no matter who sleeps or laughs. For Deleuze, the world is composed of so many singularities, which together resonate silently toward a mystery of something always already yet to come. The subject is understood, therefore, not as identity but as a convergence of singularities immanent to an encounter. Deleuze is critical of both phenomenology and psychoanalysis, as still engaging a classical (Cartesian) notion of subject as individual or free agent, a form of subjectivity premised on the separation of the subject and the object of that subject’s attention. In Deleuze’s worldview, the ordinary identity, the “I” of the representational ego, is a ‘surface effect’ of impersonal processes of differentiation and the repetition of pre-personal singularities. What Iof call the impersonal effects are the inchoate, fragments architectural encounter, as opposed to the personalnot-yet-determined effects of identity, individuality or the constituted collective. Effect is not, in Deleuze’s sense, ephemeral—an effect of something more primary; but rather, like a “magnetic effect,” it is a productive force, an effect that works and creates. By extension, the project here is to nd and express, by architectural means, the image of effects. (Image, here, does not mean a photograph or a media image; but, rather, a live “arrangement” of effects at large in the world, like the realist cinema and its image advocated by André Bazin.) What qualies such a pure (unmediated
2
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
and unmediatic) image is simply the mode in which it causes multiple effects to proliferate. Unlike personal effects (a watch, a ring, a condominium) that cling to the personal body, the impersonal effects of architecture—such as those of a street, a store, or the bathroom at a party—belong to everyone and to no one; they envelop the body from a distance, even when they are up close. However, the impersonal effects can always become repersonalized in their derivative mode where architecture becomes objectied, the object of a proprietary relationship (such as ‘my house’) where subject/object relations are restored. 1 Personal effects in architecture generally produce a formalist typology of effects, invoking a suite of terms such as plan and gestalt—in other words, the entire discursive apparatus of ‘design.’ But this is not to criticize such formalistic measures per se. Only the most rigid and stultifying formalisms (for example, those that prescribe architecture in advance and re-inscribe the proprietary status of building, author, resident) must be avoided when discussing or isolating impersonal effects. Architecture is not merely what is made or planned, what is drawn or built. It also creates, alters, and conditions interlocking subjectivized elds.
Anonymous Encounter
While to speak of the subject in these terms—to rid one’s self of identity—is a difcult thing, we might say architecture is already such a singular encounter and de facto deindividualization of self. There is, as soon as I step into a room, a street, or a town, a palpable mystery of the singularity of the event—‘to walk inside,’ ‘to see an unfamiliar street,’ ‘to explore an unknown town.’ In that moment, each instance echoes and anticipates every other, past and future, of this primitive encounter—a type of eternal return, echoing Nietzsche’s vision at Sils Maria and embedded in Thus Spoke Zarathustra . It is this anonymous sense of a primary realm for the production for subjectivity that lies beyond the individual, spatio-temporal experience I call mine. Such an encounter does not signal an in-between, a space between persons and concrete forms, as troubled for decades by architectural criticism and rst made a tenet of High Modernism—a conundrum stretching back to Immanuel Kant all the aboutofwhat is knowable. it is an event that comesand before thearguments crystallization all things, it is theRather, abstract surface of all singularities coming into being. Neither the ‘space of appearance’ of twentiethcentury phenomenology nor a strange materialization of the Platonic chora, the event of impersonal effects is the unnamable process of architectural and architectonic encounter. Wim Wenders’ lmWings of Desire2 opens with a “singular” image of Berlin, the audience hears a white noise of intimate thoughts, the city as neutral surface for subjectivizational processes. Two angels receive this continuous ow of
Introduction
3
synchronized, live effects where it is no longer specic individuals who speak, but the city that has become singularized, an anonymous “it” speaks. There is in architecture a “singular” movement of the encounter itself—the “it” encounters—a pure generality, by which the loose effects portend other possible connections to other possible registers; by which every encounter belongs to everyone and to no-one. This movement of the encounter comes before the formation of static (nominal) things; it is for Deleuze the entirely neutral and impassive “fourth person singular,”3 thus, in his vivid illustration: “the “battle hovers over its own eld, being neutral in relation to all of its temporal actualizations, … impassive in relation to the victor and the vanquished, the coward and the brave…Never present but always yet to come and already passed, [it is] graspable only by the will of anonymity which it itself inspires.”4 To enter any encounter, in this sense, is to enter into the mysterium of all encounters, without actualizing them. The effects are what give architecture its inherent mystery, the suggestion of another world, something not seen in the instantiation of a simple building. This does not mean that cities, buildings or interiors becomes persons, but that architecture works by entering into anonymous processes of subjectivity— the production of effects that speaks of multidimensionality. Lived experience is altered as a result, and the nature of cognizing architecture and its milieu shifts to a non-discursive, phenomenal ‘space-time’ that is vivid, corporeal, cinematic. For Deleuze, of course, the “new transcendental eld,” 5 having now acquired its own special form of subjectivity, acts like a quicksand from which the individuated subject will no longer be able to be rescued. Here, the drowning subject will be captured, in slow motion, for the reason that in architecture’s discipline the ‘subject’ remains rmly entrenched; the “name” of the subject must be retained, initially, and interrogated. For Deleuze, who is operating from within a long philosophical tradition, and situating it historically, as part of the genealogy of subjecthood and the ongoing crisis of postmodernity, this process is already perceived to be a fait accompli; there is no longer any need to name a subject—the subject, for Deleuze, being “a philosophical concept,” a Cartesian illusion. 6
The Retur n of the S ubj ect
While Deleuze ismetaphysics—and responding to a history of subjectivity that attempted to depart from classical the Platonic subjectivity which marks its 7 beginning (a self)—contemporary architectural theory since the Second World War could be similarly narrated via a history that attempts to extricate itself from modernism and modern subjectivity. The emergence of modernity in architecture has been typically historicized as the dening moment for a certain conception of subjectivity—viz., the subject thought of as autonomous individuality or constituted self—as srcinating agent and will. The epitome of this point of view occurred in German Idealism. Architecture’s contemporary problem of
4
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
subjectivity is precisely the contestation of modern autonomy (of conicting notions of will and agency and its formal independence), and its separation of subject and object—long regarded as insufcient to account for the sheer force and creativity of the architectural encounter. The contemporary project, then, seeks to substitute the modern subject of architecture as self-determination with one that is seen to emerge from and be determined by impersonal systems and processes of production, by internal forces prior to the formation of xed identities. Such a project of substitution reaches its apotheosis in the contestation of the very historiography of the modern subject. The critique of the received conception of modern subjectivity as represented in the work of Sigfried Giedion extends from contemporary and postmodern architectural discussion to the Frankfurt School polemics of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, to which this architectural discussion refers. In this long-standing critique, the rise of modernity is seen to have produced a subjectivity that is not self-determining, but that is fragmented and colonized by the rise of capitalist industrialization and the overwhelming, material processes of production, which are suddenly beyond the grasp of any individual. It is this exacerbated subject— dispersed across an increasingly bewildering myriad of abstract, somewhat sinister systems—that becomes the essential condition of modernity. In this contemporary, post-Giedion discussion, the humanist subject typically identied with modernism, by contrast, is seen as an ideological effect of modern architecture’s discourse, which denies the real status of the subject.8 The exemplar of this ideological subject is the ctional character Howard Roark, Ayn Rand’s vision of modernist autonomy and self-interest, in The Fountainhead.9 The construction of a modern, heroic subject was later seen as a compensatory mechanism for the corrosive and dehumanizing processes of modernization. The real, splintered and compromised condition of the postwar subject can be thought to lead directly to a form of cultural resistance that seeks to salvage a humanism lost. This attempt to recuperate autonomous humanist subjectivity, manifest in the very insistence of a unied modern subject, which suggests a third model that is perhaps closer to the subjectivity of the central narrator in the lm Fight Club: a subject who, having lost all identity (he no longer has a name), creates an allknowing avatar named Tyler Durden, the image of pure autonomy—a self-styled superhuman he wishes he could be, yet simultaneously believes he has already become.10 It is the simultaneous wish and failure to sustain the image of the autonomous subjectofhere—the very failure to re-insert the classical subject—that becomes denitive the modern project. Attempts to rehabilitate the humanist subject are not simply disconnected quarrels of historiography, nor are they mere theoretical paradigms; they are, rather, the key to understanding architecture’s contemporary productions of subjectivity. The historical failure to retire the humanist subject, from the 1970s to the present, and the failure of the contemporary program of substitution, represents 11 the dening problem of architecture’s “postmodern caesura.”
Introduction
5
After World War II, various instantiations of phenomenologically inected architecture attempted to salvage the eld of the subject, which was thought to have been undermined by modernism, by addressing some of its neglected conditions; viz., feminist, environmental, social, and populist concerns. Yet phenomenology in architecture did not alter the aesthetic formula of a Cartesian subject who stands outside a passive object of contemplation. Phenomenology, premised as it is on a representational schema of a subject who is inserted into a transcendental eld of knowledge from which she decodes or extracts meaning, posits a representational schema of subjectivity that can be seen to have survived all deconstructive postmodern formalisms, and to have led only to the insistence of the subject. If Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism re-inserted the humanist subject, centered by a constituent place that stabilized identity, and postmodern historicism reproduced a time when the subject was secure, even the work of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown could be seen as an attempt to humanize the banal American highway and strip mall, to re-insert the phenomenal subject as a constituted reader of the landscape of mid-century American cities.12 These socalled postmodern movements were, literally, an attempt to re-insert a subjectivity that had been stripped from architecture and culture—from the ethos of postwar corporate modernism to early-1970s formalism.13 If modern architecture has been valorized or criticized for placing the subject in crisis, then postmodernism could be seen as a disappointed or melancholic reaction to the failed, serial re-inscription of the humanist subject traceable to the inherent utopian premises of modernity. For this reason, Fredric Jameson has attempted to suggest the emergence of a post-postmodern modernity, albeit one that is stalled by the postmodern caesura. Outside this internal phenomenological discussion in architecture there is a vast external literature on subjectivity—from philosophy to psychoanalysis and social theory—that has been called upon to aid in the war against the modern subject—beginning with Freud and Nietzsche and leading to a family of French theorists, including Lacan, Foucault, Sartre, and Derrida. These poststructuralist thinkers have, each in their own manner, pursued the indiscernibility of the subject in the object by broadly addressing the subject’s encounter with representational (ideational) systems. For Lacan, the subject is a signifying effect of the unconscious,14 while in Foucault the subject is a discursive function of power structures and an institutional In Derrida subjectofislanguage, a “function of language,” apparitionmechanisms. or specter caught in thetheaporias of ‘textuality’—she becomes a subject only by conforming to the system of rules within language, by conforming to différance, the very gap in representational orders between the symbolic and the real. 15 In the 1980s, deconstructivist architects and theorists reading Derrida attempted to rework the problematic of architecture’s lingering modernist subjectivity within the framework of ‘textuality’—a set of formal relations, in the architectural encounter, by which a building can be decoded or read (or by which it ‘decodes
6
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
itself’ by the very agency of representational values). However, even the so-called decentered subject of deconstructivist architecture reproduced an absent subject. If modern architecture reproduced a mythical, centered subject, the typologies of deconstructivism generated a missing subject as spectral aporia or doubt (which hovers ghostlike about its tangled planes). All postmodern formalisms, in turn, premised as they are on representational schemata, fail to grasp the real subject productions immanent to architecture, the anonymous architectural subjectivity irreducible to an individuated subject, or to the building as edifying ‘object’ or constituted whole. What is important here is that the architectonic nature of representation automatically suggests one form or another of the subject, whether reducing it to “trace” (in the rejection of all forms of dening ideological content) or to ultra-mediated captive of semi-sinister forces. The articulation of the posthumanist subject in architecture has only succeeded in proving the persistence of its humanist double. The routine de-territorialization and re-territorialization of the subject in formalist architectures since modernism’s collapse is inextricably bound to its past iterations, as unresolved crisis. In this way, past architectures haunt present-day architectures, and the necessity of an elective amnesia (as, for example, formulated within modernist architecture) is seductive. It is, instead, something else that is required—in other words, impersonal effects. The question arises: how were these poststructuralist theories inadequate to architecture’s crisis of subjectivity? The argument cannot be that the architects misinterpreted or misunderstood Lacan or Derrida, though some claim they did. In architecture the problem was consistently narrated as an overvaluation of the text, of linguistic codes, the reduction of subjectivity to textuality, and a severance from the very materiality of the architectural encounter in which the real productions of subjectivity take place. But the weakness of textuality as a model for architectural thinking sidesteps a more fundamental error: namely, the investment in the subject, even a decentered one, which by its very grammatic artice always isolates subjectivity from architecture in a representational schema that, like a digital loop, always reproduces the same humanist subject. Architecture’s problem of subjectivity can be thought of in this way, as a reex of the mechanism of representation, which guarantees the return of the lost subject.
Dissolution of the Subject
Deleuze and his collaborator, the Lacanian psychiatrist Félix Guattari, offer architecture (both then and now) a substantially different version of subjectivity than that of their contemporaries, a schema that escaped architecture’s attention during the intense reading of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism in the 1980s, which Deleuze and Guattari stridently opposed. Deleuze and Guattari eschew the linguistic conception of subjectivity, and provide architecture with a model that speaks to the material, aesthetic basis of all subject productions—counter to the overwhelming discourses on textuality now synonymous with postmodernism.
Introduction
7
What is unique in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking is their conviction in an immanent subjectivity of the aesthetic object itself, unmediated by any interpretive content. To be clear, Deleuze and Guattari declare that the aesthetic object does not merely take part in the production of subjectivity, but that it constitutes its own, as non-sentient subjectivity. The fertilization of an egg, a wild bushre, an architectural work—these all can be thought to constitute veritable subjectivities, in the sense that they are self-driven and produce substantive effects. Subjectivization under such conditions means the creative facility to generate something new—that is, the potential to produce real effects in the world. 16 If the Foucauldian subject (however grotesquely mediated) is produced by the institutions of schools and prisons, and the Lacanian subject exists as a remnant in the schema of desire as manque (“lack”), for Deleuze there simply is no longer a subject; there are only physical expressions driven toward specic productions —in other words impersonal effects that populate somewhat unpredictable or constantly changing elds of subjectivization.17 There is no problematic of substitution here, because subjectivity is no longer a by-product of objecthood (the other of the object/thing) but, instead, purely immanent to the real. Deleuze and Guattari’s schema of an impersonal subjectivity speaks to architecture’s long-standing crisis of subjectivity even as it reformulates it. As a step beyond poststructuralist paratactics, this effects-based formulation of subjectivity brackets the spectral effects of the representational orders privileged in the more rigorous and abstract forms of postmodernism. What emerges, however, by way of revisiting Deleuze and Guattari, is an order of effects that sees the dissolution of the normative subject, and, as we will see in 1980s New Wave Japanese architecture and European and American postmodern cinema, a new formulation of subjectivization that tests the very premise of architectural subjectivization derived from actually existing effects.
Wh y Not Deleuze?
Deleuze has been of central interest to architectural discourse since the 1980s, nourishing important debates on architecture’s contemporary questions of process, form, technology, and information. Manuel De Landa, the artist and philosopher, for example, andofthe architects Cache on andarchitecture Greg Lynn,and contributed dominant body work, of the Bernard last 15 years, Deleuze, to thea unwavering and explicit focus of which was Deleuze’s philosophy of Henri Bergson on time, virtuality and movement. 18 Despite the, albeit relatively few, works on subjectivity produced by contemporary Deleuze and Guattari scholars involved with architecture, 19 a theory of subjectivization has never gained signicant ground within architectural discourse or practice, and in many senses Deleuze has been summarily abandoned by many of the protagonists who rst adopted him 20 years ago. Those endangered
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
architectural publications that directly engaged Deleuze’s theory of subjectivity were produced in a self-consciously oblique manner to the dominant American architectural discourse of their times,20 the focus of which was science and technoscience, the rapture of the virtual, and all that emerged under the pseudo-scientic veil of “emergence” in late-modern architectural theory. This neo-liberal architectural discussion surrounding Deleuze lies parallel
to and is associated discursively with a longer, left-leaning afliation between architecture and Deleuze tracing back to the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s, which engaged the then (and still) unanswered questions concerning subjectivity, the modern city, and the metropolis in Guattari and Deleuze’s radical thought.21 The now distorted relationship between architecture and Deleuze, which miraculously sweeps aside the problem of subjectivity central to Deleuze and Guattari’s radical project, invokes by omission or distortion architecture’s long-standing complicity with forms of subjectivization and subjection. What has been manifestly left out of the discourse is subjectivity—although subjectivity is arguably the chief concern of Deleuze’s philosophy. From his rst book, Empiricism and Subjectivity, on Hume’s philosophy of the “practical” subject,22 to his writing on Bergson’s theory of consciousness in the Bergsonism, to The Fold, on Baroque architecture and subjectivity,23 to his fanatical collaboration with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (the post-Freudian, post-Marxist critique of capitalist subjectivity, and its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus24 which ushered in the new eld of subjectivization)—Deleuze’s entire oeuvre can be read as an obsessive and compulsive exploration of subjectivizational processes. The question remains: why was the question of subjectivity not permitted? The refusal of subjectivity in the dominant theoretical discourse of architecture’s recent past invokes two key historical moments surrounding the reception of Deleuze. The rst is the postmodern lacuna of the 1970s and 1980s that engaged a generation of French poststructuralist thinkers on the left, namely, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, and Virilio—but not Deleuze or Guattari. Why, in the 1980s, when psychoanalysis was de rigueur, were Deleuze and Guattari, for whom the question of subjectivity was paramount, omitted from the architects’ discussions on subjectivity? One possible response—and this is pure speculation on my part—is that when poststructuralism was the dominant theoretical framework for architecture, when the anxious problem of the subject could still be posed, Deleuze and Guattari were perhaps seen as had stillalready belonging the kind(in of the radical left,discussions Marxist afliate to which architecture beentoexposed critical of the 25 1970s) and had consciously left behind. As Rajchman writes: “The moment was no longer right for A Thousand Plateaus, and Deleuze was disappointed with its reception.”26 Psychoanalysis and French poststructuralism, alternatively, provided the framework for reworking subject/object relations, unburdened by the unanswerable questions of Marxist and post-Marxist critique. The second moment occurred in the early 1990s, with the emergence of the so-called post-critical movement, and continues today. This politically
Introduction
9
conservative architectural movement was more given to formalistic motives of another order than those of the postmodern moment, to which the former’s protagonists developed a decidedly anti-theoretical leaning. Deleuze and Guattari were and are ‘here,’ in name at least, but the post-critical movement and its scientistic and pseudo-realist ethos evacuates any question of subjectivity along with anything else that is not immediately present. The last ten to twenty years could be described as a shift away from the questions of subjectivity and the social, which were traditionally associated with theory and cultural studies, toward a neo-conservative discussion concerned with architectural form and its means of genesis. This formal discussion focused on process (diagram and genealogy), time (iteration and sequence), and information (the post-critical, new determinism). The movement included the architects Rem Koolhaas, Ben Van Berkel, Lisa Anne Couture, and Hani Rashid, and the theorists Manuel De Landa and Bob Somol. By the early- to mid-1990s, the thoroughgoing indictment of both poststructuralism and the exorbitant theoretical investments of postmodernism that had already swept through architecture led to a rapid turning away from subjectivity, and, further to this, the questioning of the validity of theory itself. 27 Deleuze, who espoused a realist, anti-postmodernist stance, was ushered into architectural discourse at this exact moment—one that some celebrate as the end of theory.28 The fatal error in this conservative discourse, however, is that for Deleuze, subjectivity is real and not abstract whatsoever. This is, further, not a simple matter of the architects taking Deleuze in another direction, as some have argued;29 it is the bleeding dry of Deleuze and Guattari’s antifascist project, in which the question of the subject is central. The friends of today’s postpolitical discussion dismiss the role of ideology in contemporary architectural production, as if all forms of ideation are suspect. Their quotation of Deleuze, avant la lettre,30 depicts the market economy as an all-engulng, decentralized or rhizomatic structure to which architecture coolly responds without the interference of critique (which has become a synonym for ideology). This self-styled, independent discourse is clearly an example of what was once called “ideological smoothing,”31 but for this very reason—in its glib disavowal of ethics and its embrace of neo-liberal values—it is strongly ideological. The smoothing of the concept rhizome as a new architectural paradigm, counter to Deleuze and Guattari’s proto-anarchic formulations of rhizome, functions as a new metatheory (the economy) that might miraculously account for everythingthe desirable neo-liberal worldview and, worse, permit anything—including closing in ofthe multiple worlds to one unitary model given over to global capital. In one of the earliest English publications of the essay “Rhizome,” in On the Line ,32 capital was theorized as a vast, uncontrollable, self-driven organism; however, Deleuze and Guattari’s Marxist critique called for the articulation of new forms of subjectivity, not its repression and passive submission to capital. The conservative articulation of an immanent eld of immaterial capital as penultimate program for architecture, displacing Tafuri’s “ideology of the plan,”
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10
is nonetheless on the wrong side of ideology33—it is regressive. As such, and at best, the anti-Marxist, post-critical eld is ultimately determined by melancholia and cynicism. At its worst, it might actually usher in everything it claims to be opposed to. The disavowal of theory and the necessity of critique is in itself what permits the neutralization of the subject and the anaesthetization of a radical philosophy devoted to the singular interrogations of subjectivization. A subterfuge holds sway wherein Deleuze and Guattari are paradoxically invited to authorize the construction of a mythical world of disembodied ows and markets, but once they arrive at the party—they are not permitted to speak. These are precisely the historical conditions that make subjectivization important now.
Notes 1
2 3
4 5
6
7
Personal effects, by the same token, are free to become impersonalized: a ring can be stolen or lost and travel to a pawn shop where it is passed on, then liqueed to make another ring—or something else. Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin ), VHS (1987; New York, 1988). Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense , ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London, 2004), p. 116. Deleuze is quoting Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “Uses of Poetry” and essay “Poetry as News.” Ibid., pp. 116–18. I am thinking rst of the book on Hume and the idea of empiricism that opposed transcendentalism as a methodology; namely, Deleuze’s critique of Husserl’s transcendental eld—for Husserl the eld or region of pure consciousness ( das reine Bewußtsein ) of a transcendental subject. For a discussion of the “new transcendental eld,” see Deleuze, Logic , pp. 118–19. “A Philosophical Concept …” is Deleuze’s essay title and response to Nancy’s question “Who Comes after the Subject?” See Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Who Comes after the Subject? (New York, 1991). To be precise, Deleuze’s critique refers to Descartes’ cogito : the ego, selfconsciousness, and its foundation in the self-certainty of “I think, therefore I am.” Yet it is presumably meant as a critique of the Greek as much as it is of the modern concept of the subject. (Nietzsche,seems for example, bothand in his sights). Deleuze’s of prepersonal singularities to inverthas Plato’s Aristotle’s subject: theconcept substrate (viz., the logical-grammatical subject, that of which something is predicated), that is, that which is independent and self-supporting, that which bears properties. The modern subject, in turn, can be seen to be a transformation of the classical subject but still dependent upon it. The ego is also independent, self-subsistent; it has or acquires properties (a character, experiences, etc.) but does so environmentally or deterministically. Leibniz’s monad may have been the last instantiation of a ‘premodern’ soul in philosophy.
Introduction
8
9 10 11
12
13
14
15 16
11
For an illuminating discussion on this issue, see K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p. 13. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (Indianapolis, 1968). David Fincher, Fight Club , DVD (1999; Beverly Hills, 2000). See Antonio Negri, “Modern and Postmodern: The Caesura,” in The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics , trans. Noura Wedell (Los Angeles, 2008), pp. 13–28. Nonetheless, Denise Scott Brown’s studio should not be conated with regionalism or an erudite historicism. Those phenomena were part of the search for meaning thought to be lacking in modernist architectural production, but here she and her colleagues sought to nd it in popular culture—that is, Pop. See Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA, 1972). The structural-linguistic model for architectural objecthood produced in formalist architecture of the 1970s (including Rossi, Scarpa, Stirling, and Hejduk) was criticized by certain Marxist critics (for example, Tafuri, Cacciari, Scolari, and Francesco Dal Co) as disregarding the subject and the social eld in its overvaluation of the hermetic architectural object—that is, Tafuri’s “architecture of the boudoir.” See Manfredo Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” Oppositions 3 (1974): pp. 37–62. Tafuri expanded upon this negative critique of architecture disconnected from actually existing subjects and actually existing social conditions in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: AvantGardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s , trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA, 1987), rst published as La sfera e il labirinto: Avanguardia e architettura da Piranesi agli anni ’70 (Turin, 1986). Note that Lacan considered himself a structuralist, and his project was to translate Freud’s work into structural-linguistic terms. The subject is constructed from the presubjective drives, but they are immaterial (psychic) conditions based on ‘loss.’ Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), pp. 1–28. Arguably, architectural historians have always been aware of architecture’s productive capacity. But in almost every schema, the subjectivity of architecture is made subservient to the production of subjects by the architecture. The kind of immanent relationship between subjectivity and the aesthetic image does appear much earlier in
the German aesthetic theories the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—the Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte so-called Vienna School (the of ), which included Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfin, and Wilhelm Worringer. The school was instrumental in establishing a “formalist” art history , though its members did not agree on the key notion of what constitutes ‘the real.’ With Riegl, in particular, the idea of “artistic will” (Kunstwollen ) remains the lynchpin of all questions regarding representational orders. He identied two types of artistic volition: one that is constructive; and one that is optical or subjective. The former attempt s to “subordinate the world to its will,” while the latter “wishes to receive the world.” See Margaret Iversen, “Aesthetics of
12
17
18
19
20
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
Disintegration,” in Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 32–47. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of objecthood conjures this earlier historical discussion, and they cite Riegl in A Thousand Plateaus . The idea of an impersonal subjectivity residing in pure immanence can be seen in Foucault’s concept of the impersonal voice of discourse, which as mentioned earlier Deleuze adopted in Logic , p. 116. See also Jean-Paul Sartre, “La transcendance de l’Ego. Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique,” in Recherches Philosophiques 6 (1936–37): pp. 85–123. He wrote: “We should like to show here that the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another” (my translation). The most memorable Deleuze books in this vein included Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London, 2002); Sanford Kwinter, Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001), Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York, 1999); and Bernard Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories, ed. Michael Speaks, trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge, MA, 1995). These books have received so much exposure that they do not require further exposition or introduction. A coherent account of Deleuze’s project of subjectivity is provided in John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA, 2000); see also Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, 2002), which addresses Deleuze’s concept of virtuality as a model of consciousness; Massumi, ed., A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (New York, 2002), including Massumi’s introduction, “Like a Thought,” Ibid., p. 17; Paul Bains, “Subjectless Subjectivities,” in ibid. and Gary Genosko, ed., A Guattari Reader / Pierre-Félix Guattari (Oxford, 1996), although it could be said all of Genosko’s work on Guattari is immersed in subjectivity. The book by Anthony Vidler,Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2000) is a rare collection that frames the architectural production inuenced by Deleuze from the perspective of psychoanalysis, importantly tying Deleuze to the problem of subjectivity in modern architecture, and situating The Fold vis-à-vis the architectural subject. See also Georges Teyssot, “The Mutant Body of Architecture,” in Flesh: Architectural Probes, ed. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scodio (New York, 1994), where Teyssot adopts a FoucauldianDeleuzian model of the body to discuss the psychoanalytica lly inected work of the then theoretical-academic practice of Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scodio, both teaching at Princeton University School of Architecture (where was also Chair of Architecture from 1990 to 1993). Teyssot can be linked to theVidler longer Foucauldian trajectory and discussion from the 1970s that does not feature in the recent architectural discussion surrounding Deleuze. Genosko, to reiterate, has written at length on Guattari’s revolutionary project toward an impersonal architectural subjectivity. Today this discussion continues in the movement in the contemporary Left, surrounding the book by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2000), and regarding globalization, technology, and urbanism. What is missing in
Introduction
22
23 24 25
26 27
28
29
30 31
32 33
13
these discussions, however, is an examination of the aesthetic object, a reformulation of architectural encounter. Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume (Paris, 1953), translated by Constantin V. Boundas as Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature (New York, 1991). Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque , trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, 1993). Originally published as Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris, 1988). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (London, 1988). The unremitting indictment by the Venice School had more or less left architecture paralyzed. This, of course, is not to say that Foucault and Derrida were politically conservative, only that Deleuze was more strongly associated with radicality, with Anti-Oedipus and the ‘post-’68’ moment of French Marxism. Rajchman, Deleuze Connections , p. 25. In French, as Lotringer points out, there is no such thing as theory— only pensée , meaning thought. See Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen, eds, French Theory in America (New York, 2000). This conation of French thought and theory has an historical signicance in the sense that the rejection of French thinking within architecture and the disavowal of theory came to be one and the same thing. The proponents of the so-called postpolitical era—for example, Robert Somol, Stan Allen, Sarah Whiting, and Michael Speaks—celebrate a shift from theory (within modernism) to “intelligence” (in the current supermodernism), dismissing the role of ideology in contemporary architectural production altogether. This postpolitical posture was the subject of the controversial Projective Landscape Stylos Conference held at the Delft University of Technology, March 16–17, 2006. Ironically, the term postpolitical , adopted in this discourse, is, in fact, a revolutionary term used by the Italian Autonomists of the 1970s, but exploited here for totally different purposes. Deleuze, of course, encourages his readers to take whatever they like from A Thousand Plateaus and to make something new, to treat it like a “toolbox.” But the screening out of subjectivity—given architecture’s longstanding neurosis with subjectivity, taken together with Deleuze and Guattari’s sustained polemics on subjectivity—is neither incidental nor unimportant. Here the use of Deleuze is indirect, contrary to the earlier direct appropriations of the essay “Rhizome” or the book The Fold . Hays, “Architecture Theory, Media, and the Question of Audience,” in Assemblage: Tulane Papers: The Politics of Contemporary Architectural Discourse , no. 27 (1995): p. 44. Deleuze and Guattari, On the Line , trans. John Johnston (New York, 1983). What we are seeing today is a hijacking of Deleuze by the Right—precisely what Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his essay, “The Pedagogy of Philosophy,” in Radical Philosophy 75 (Jan.–Feb. 1996), p. 44, depicted in his observation of a yuppie in the Paris underground reading Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy?
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Chapter 1
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
Gilles Deleuze has enjoyed signicant notoriety and acclaim in American academia over the last 20 years. The unique disciplinary focus of the contemporary discussion has derived from Deleuze the architectural possibilities of biotechnology, systems theory, and digital processualism. While the persistence of Deleuze’s theory of science and the formalist readings of A Thousand Plateaus and Bergsonism 1 have dominated the reception since the 1990s, few are aware of a much earlier encounter between Deleuze and architects, beginning at Columbia University in the 1970s, which converged on the radical politics of Anti-Oedipus and its American reception in the journal Semiotext(e) , through which architecture engaged a much broader discourse alongside artists, musicians, lmmakers, and in tellectuals in the New York aesthetic underground, of which Deleuze and Guattari were themselves a part. This early reception of Deleuze’s work was widespread yet subterranean and imperceptible, as was typical of the 1970s anarchic-aesthetic bloc to which it rst spread, and eventually attached itself to architecture. Through a series of individual discussions with John Rajchman and Sylvère Lotringer, the founding editors of Semiotext(e) , and Sanford Kwinter, an editor of Zone , an oral history of the early Deleuze scene can be assembled 2—tracing the multiple trajectories, publications, and individuals that not only brought architecture into contact with Deleuzian ideas, but, as these stories demonstrate, provided Deleuze with an important entry point into the American academy. 3 This, of course, is not to say the early American reception of Deleuze was exclusively architectural, or that there is something inherently architectural in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. 4 The immediate question is: Why Deleuze and architecture— an institutional terrain par excellence , which is a principal target of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic polemic of the 1970s? Why did a discipline that valorizes its orthodoxy (its histories), its interiority (its putative autonomy), become simpatico with what is essentially an anarchic phil osophy of subjectivization? What distinguishes the early architectural reception precisely the disciplinary milieu; namely, the ’70s art scene by way of whichisarchitecture adopted Deleuze and Guattari. By historicizing the travails of Deleuze in America, mirrored in architecture’s disciplinary problematic, a retrospective of this order provides clues to the sympathies between architecture and Deleuze today.
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
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Italian Autonomia
Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators … Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It’s a series. If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express themselves without me: you’re always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own. (Gilles Deleuze)5
Deleuze entered architecture via what in Pourparlers he called the “mediators,” the cult-assemblage of various characters who pursued their own activities around Deleuze. The question of the relationship between Deleuze and architecture is misleading, because Deleuze had very little to do with architecture. He never appeared in architectural fora in the manner of his contemporary Jacques Derrida, whose personal involvement in architecture since the 1980s is well known: Derrida participated in two of the Anyone conferences in the early 1990s;6 he was also a close friend of Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman; and, of course, his theory of deconstruction had its architectural analogue. Not so with Deleuze. John Rajchman: The lecture Félix [Guattari] gave when he came to New York was on singularizing space. It was at Columbia, an event sponsored by the architecture school. Deleuze did not travel. First of all there was his health, which then turned into a principle. He said he didn’t travel. Derrida came here; Deleuze, never.7
Deleuze wrote very little directly on architecture. There was The Fold, on Leibniz and Baroque architecture; his instruction of Bernard Cache, and citation of Cache’s book Earth Moves; and the references to urbanism and space in A Thousand Plateaus—albeit as the uneasy objects of his and Guattari’s critique. Indeed, the longer afliation between Deleuze and architecture arose neither by his direct interest in architecture nor by architecture’s immediate affection for him. It evolved through, to use his own phrase, les intercesseurs, the “intercessors” or interceders—those gures, events, and mobile connections that were accessories to his involvement in architectural discussion. He said they “can be people—for a philosopher, artists or scientists—but things too, even plants 8
or animals.” Deleuze’sand interceders were, Foucault,writers with whom Deleuze had a close discussion afnity, as wellrst, as afliated and artists, and their collaborations in the wider Foucauldian debate on cities—through which Deleuze’s project of subjectivity found its most important philosophical lineage. Rajchman: It turns out that Deleuze and I both wrote Foucault books published around the same time. We had a mutual philosophical friend who came to me and said “Deleuze likes your Foucault book; he wants to meet you and he wants to know what you’re working on now.” So I said, “Tell him that I’m thinking of
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
17
writing on him.” Deleuze said, “I don’t like people who write about me, I don’t like people who write sur. But in your case [I don’t mind], as long as [in] writing about me you satisfy two criteria: one, that you are accurate; and two, that I will be unable to recognize myself in the result.”
Deleuze’s debt to Foucault manifests itself in the citation of the Society of Control in “Mediators,” the theory of a “City-State” 9 in A Thousand Plateaus, the book 10 Foucault, and in numerous interviews with Foucault discussing urbanism, space, and power. But more than any of these, Deleuze’s Foucauldianism is embodied in Anti-Oedipus, a text that contributed to the broader Foucauldian debate on urbanism and subjectivity. Therein Deleuze and Guattari gave voice to a suite of theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre, Jean-François Lyotard, and Lewis Mumford, all of whom were also attempting to reformulate the problems of subjectivity, space, and the social. In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault describes Deleuze and Guattari’s project as the “connection of desire to reality”; he says it is the concrete expression of subjectivity in urban form that possesses revolutionary force. Whereas Foucault is mainly concerned with the institutional subject, Anti-Oedipus extends this to the creative generation of subjectivity in concrete social and cultural forms. Deleuze’s Foucauldianism, importantly, goes back to the Italian Autonomia (autonomy) movement surrounding Antonio Negri, the Marxist and Spinoza scholar. Autonomia was the underground theoretical and political movement of Italian Leftists in the 1970s. It attracted French poststructuralists, Marxist anarchists, and a miscellany of artists and writers, and could be said not only to have provided Deleuze and Guattari an entry point to America, via the afliation with Foucault, but also to have produced its own singular Deleuzo-Guattarian autonomist following in Italy. The Italian Marxists had adopted Foucault’s critique of the repressive functions of the capitalist city and his analysis of architecture and power. They developed it further using Deleuze’s model of the “body without organs,” the decentralized political formation that replaces the city as state, where capital is essentially dematerialized. Foucauldian autonomia emphasized the self-organizing power of everyday life practices, such as architecture and urbanism, in nonhierarchical structures, and emphasized Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking on the aesthetic, productive nature of desire.11 Italian by reception via Guattaricritics and Negri 1970s, was in turnThis inuenced a groupof of Deleuze, Marxist architecture from in thethe Venice School— 12 13 14 Manfredo Tafuri, Massimo Cacciari, and Georges Teyssot —who, while not agreeing on the role of Deleuze and Guattari in architectural criticism, were responsible, at least by the 1980s, for bringing French poststructuralist thought to light in America via their own debates and translation activities. 15 Rajchman: Negri was, in Italy, associated with Tafuri because the group around Tafuri, the Italians, had an important role in introducing French thought to
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architecture. Foucault and Georges Teyssot, who helped introduce Foucault, had a big impact intellectually and politically in Italy on a very specic source. All the work about micropolitics got translated … I think in Foucault they found the model of politics that no one else was working on, and that got translated into an Italian politics … Guattari founded Le CERFI (1975–1976), a research group focused on the topic of cities, and for one of their meetings they invited Foucault and Deleuze to speak on the subject of cities.16
Deleuze and Guattari are intercessors in this longer Foucauldian trajectory, whose locus turns out to be the architectural debates in Italy. In practice, this Italian movement of the 1970s was a fringe phenomenon, and the introduction of Deleuze into academic discourse was a troubl esome, even traumatic process. Publication was difcult, as there was political resistance to Deleuzian thinking and conicts of borders (personal, political, and geographic), which all contributed to what Foucault would later anticipate as the “Deleuzian century.” 17 The intercessor is not simply a conduit for information, a silent mediator like Leo in The Go-Between ,18 but a political act or intervention, literally a “going between.” The intercessor does not install herself between two xed points, in order to bridge or conciliate, but plots her revenge against an already existing condition from which she ees. The intercessor ’s address is not one of mediation, but what Deleuze calls the ligne de fuite , or “line of ight”; she communicates only her own escape— fuite or “ight/leak” should be understood as a loophole that allows one to create. Rajchman: Of course, Negri was arrested in Italy and then escaped to France, where he was supported by Deleuze, who wrote the preface to the French edition of Negri’s book, L’anomalie sauvage .19 Written in prison, this is a really interesting book on Spinoza and the idea of [subjectivity] as multitude 20— which later plays a big role in Empire, where it is developed. Deleuze and the French Spinoza scholars wrote prefaces to the book, partly to help Negri in his political situation. They were, in effect, saying: We French Spinoza scholars think this is very serious work … Negri later returned to Italy, which involved his being imprisoned [again] because he was in political exile in France.
While Negri was received by Deleuze and the other French Spinoza scholars in the latein1970s andRajchman early 1980s, GuattariPlateaus did not nd easy reception France. saysDeleuze that Aand Thousand was an received poorly. “The political climate had changed. Postmodernism was being ushered in; there was a different mood in France, politically, that made Mille plateaux unacceptable. Deleuze thought it was his most radical book but it was seen as post-Marxist”—still rooted in the post-’68 working through of Marx and Freud that postmodernism was attempting to leave behind. It was in the Englishspeaking world, particularly North America, that Deleuze found a warmer reception.
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
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Sylvère Lotringer: In France, of course, with its long history of over-centralization and bureaucracy, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories were pure science ction. But on the other side of the Atlantic, they were uncannily realistic: New York, as it moved toward the 1980s, was the laboratory of capital and a natural destination for the two theorists, even though they’d never set foot in the city.21 Sanford Kwinter: Sylvère is a very interesting character. It was said of him the minute he got tenure he started turning up to class in jeans and leather jackets and never taught another academic, “eighteenth-century” seminar.22 Still, in the late ’70s the literary establishment in these Ivy League universities was still formally hostile to this stuff, including Foucault, who is the least wild … As I used to see it, Columbia was the Foucauldian/Deleuzian school, and Yale and Johns Hopkins were Derridean. But because I was at Columbia I started to identify with it.23
Brian Massumi recalls that Yale initially rejected his dissertation, the English translation of Mille Plateaux, which was eventually published by Athlone as A Thousand Plateaus.24 According to Kwinter, “Derrida was just starting to teach at Yale, but the French department started to become very Derridean, which is essentially why Massumi had such a rough time.” Kwinter: It was unorthodox to accept a translation. On the other hand, Massumi’s translation is worth two PhDs. The groundwork he did, it is a masterpiece. He read almost all the source material. When you look at the footnotes, the foundations of Mille Plateaux … I was aware of Massumi’s problems, he used to call me up.
Semiotext(e)
Kwinter: We’re looking at ’76/’77. It was totally cutting edge. This is the environment I came to. I left Paris to come to New York. Okay, there’s Sylvère, and there’s [Edward] Said and the work he’s doing in the English department, and there’s October magazine,25 and especially what John Johnston did. This essentially turned into the great Deleuzian cauldron, and it was absolutely focused at Columbia in New York, and that’s thanks to Sylvère.
Lotringer and Rajchman published some of the earliest English translations of Deleuze and Guattari in Semiotext(e), among them “Rhizome” and “Nomadology.”26 Rajchman: Semiotext(e) had an important role in introducing the ideas of Deleuze in a climate that was dominated by literary theory, and so it’s not an accident that it happens in a French department. In the early issues of Semiotext(e) … there was Mario Gandelsonas talking about semiotics and so forth. He was interested
20
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
in Julia Kristeva and the idea of architecture as language. On the fringes of that there could be a Deleuzian thing. So, you had Yale dominated by Paul de Man and deconstructivism, while Sylvère wanted to introduce something else, which was Deleuze.
The rst issue of Semiotext(e) in the winter of 1974, entitled Alternatives in Semiotics , included essays by Lotringer and Rajchman, Guattari, Kristeva, and Denis Hollier. By the fourth issue, the focus shifted away from semiotics to “schizoanalysis,” Deleuze and Guattari’s quarrel with psychoanalysis, and the Foucauldian polemic on state mechanisms of control and repressive subjectivities. The issues that ensued opened with the statement: “ Semiotext(e) is the selfsupporting, non-prot journal of a group analyzing the power mechanisms which produce and maintain the present divisions of knowledge.” Semiotext(e): Anti-Oedipus,27 published the same year that Viking published the English translation of L’anti-oedipe , featured essays by Lotringer, Jean-François Lyotard, Rajchman, Antonin Artaud, Guattari, Deleuze, and Guy Hocquenghem. The next issue, Nietzsche’s Return,28 was followed by Schizo-Culture,29 which included a dizzying array of authors: Kathy Acker, Lee Breuer, William Burroughs, John Cage, Deleuze, Richard Foreman, Michel Foucault, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Jean-François Lyotard, Robert Wilson, and others. In 1975, Lotringer hosted his now infamous schizo-culture conference at Columbia on schizophrenia and radical politics, whose many participants included R.D. Laing, Foucault, Guattari, Lyotard, Cage, Derrida, Rajchman, Deleuze, and William Burroughs. Kwinter: Now the conference that you asked me about—this was the year in which New York turned all of their schizos and mental patients into the streets, deciding no longer to conne them. Foucault got spat on and roughed up when he was here in New York … Sylvère invited all the schizos living in the streets to the conference. The Village Voice published something totally erroneous saying Foucault is a KGB agent. People came—it was a madhouse from what I understand.30 Lotringer: The conference escalated into the last-gasp “countercultural” event of the 1970s.… Activists, academics, feminists, and reconstructed Marxists 31
argued three days, sometimes violently. While [Joel] was[Ti-Grace] speaking, half theforaudience departed to listen to Foucault andKovel Guattari; Atkinson chased Guattari from the podium.32
Exchanges between groups like the Ramones and radicals such as Foucault and Guattari most likely served to broaden the reach of what was otherwise (and elsewhere)—in France, for instance—a ‘cult.’ Deleuze’s success in America was precisely an effect of such exposure to hybrid aesthetic blocs where the
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
21
early Deleuzian underground emerged as a subculture and “not just an academic outt.”33 Kwinter: There was a cult thing that happened. Sylvère Lotringer had a seminar in 1978. It was Deleuzo and post-Deleuzian, but you knew it was a Columbia seminar. Everybody sat around a table. They would talk incomprehensibly for an hour and a quarter, then there would be this and that. They were cryptoDeleuzians.
Sylvère’s seminar students formed the younger generation Semiotext(e) crowd, and included Kathryn Bigelow34 and Michael Oblowitz (lmmakers who produced the graphic design of some of the later Semiotext(e)s), Rajchman, Michel Feher (“who was doing sort of philosophy and literature” 35), Jonathan Crary (an art historian), John Johnston (also an art writer), Manuel De Landa, and Kwinter—four of them (Rajchman, Foster, De Landa, and Kwinter) would later become architecture theorists. Kwinter: We met Guattari, we hung out with him at his parties, we met his daughter. We had dinner with him … A bunch of post-’60s hippies hanging out. For Sylvère the whole thing has always been a big intellectual party, he never separated the two … He would bring in pimps, whores, dominatrixes, and schizophrenics to Columbia … They were culturally and politically schizophrenic, inherently radicalized human beings, and they were brought to us.36
In 1980, Semiotext(e) published the rst issue of its Intervention Series, Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics,37 a tribute to Negri that returned the Italian discussion to America. It included the essays Negri wrote in jail, Deleuze’s “Open Letter to Negri’s Judges,” Guy Debord’s “The State of the Spectacle,” as well as papers by Guattari, Eric Alliez, Cacciari, and Virilio. Lotringer: Autonomia investigated the Italian mass movement that had been extending the project of 1968 by reinventing the rhizome politically across ideological divides, extending the postmodernist wing in Bologna to the “Volci” collective—Marxist troglodytes with whom I squatted for a while in Rome, 38
researching for the magazine. Zone
Kwinter: It was a post-’68 kind of a place. Out of that seminar, at one point came Zone … Zone was born from a different generation.39 Sylvère was from the war generation … still working through ’68. It was Jonathan Crary, an art historian, Feher, and myself. Another important person was John Johnston, [who] had
22
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
worked on many Semiotext(e)s. He wrote a fairly notorious article in October on the Spiral Jetty of Smithson and [Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow.40 … It was the most exciting thing, in a weird way, that had happened in literary studies … Why? Because it was a combination of French philosophy, American literary aesthetics, and American art. I was writing for Art in America. In New York City in the ’50s, ’60s, and absolutely in the ’70s, right into the ’80s, you could not be an intellectual without engaging art. It’s hard to imagine from today’s perspective, but art was radical, profound, and serious. It was also extremely organized and coherent in the sense you could discuss historical movements in a scientic way. Art was a form of political, historical research; it wasn’t just like doing anything. Today you do whatever you want, who cares? It’s amusing, you can put it in a gallery, someone will try and sell it for you. It was one of the best ways also, for me, for taking this philosophy that I had learned in France, and nding an incredibly adequate venue for developing the concepts. I didn’t want to be part of a sort of arcane literary avant-garde. Nobody in America had read the new ideas, yet the European ideas of the late ’50s through the ’70s and the new art in America—minimalism, post-minimalism, and all the stuff that ensued from that—in my mind, can only be understood from using the new body of concepts.
The importance of Zone for architecture lies, of course, in its thematization of the city in the rst issue, Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City.41 Rajchman explains the architectural dimension of the Zone discussion as an interest in urbanism via the art historians in the editorial group: “First Jonathan Crary was interested in cities—his own research—a tradition of art history which was always interested in the city, so that’s a part ofZone.” The rst issue included Virilio’s essay, “The Overexposed City,” followed by contributions from the Zone team: Alliez and Feher’s “Notes on the Sophisticated City”; texts by Kwinter, Crary, and De Landa; Deleuze and Guattari’s “City-State” (reprinted in A Thousand Plateaus); and, surprisingly, Christopher Alexander’s “A City is Not a Tree.”42 The back of Zone 1/2 included statements by architects and theorists—Kenneth Frampton, Peter Eisenman, Richard Serra, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas, Krysztof Wodiczko, and Herbert Muschamp.43 Zone 1/2 set a clear agenda: to dene a political regime of the city. The urban model implicit in these essays is Deleuze and Guattari’s reformulation of capital and their vision for a decentralized or “rhizome,” concretized into specic questions of how the subjectivity, shifts in urban, economic,but andhere social realities after 1968 reformulate the city vis-à-vis the emergent neo-liberal economy of the late 1980s.44 This attempt to rework the previous discussion brings about an important modication of the thinking of the city—specically, it suggests a semi-abstract urban subjectivity as opposed to the personalized explorations of sex, gender, and psychoanalysis in Semiotext(e). In the words of Kwinter and Feher’s foreword, Zone 1/2 aimed “to trace a genealogy of the city and to develop analytic models
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
23
based on its power to affect.” Deleuze’s use of l’affect/affectus via Spinoza inects the concept of the city here, not only as something to be passively inhabited by “subjects,” but as a powerful entity in its own right—an anonymous production that hovers above its inhabitants and buildings. 45 Zone also marked a shift away from psychoanalysis and the question of subjectivity. Rajchman: The Zone people, for me, didn’t think the problem of psychoanalysis was very important. They were very fascinated by science and the biophysical dimension of Deleuze. It’s not wrong or uninteresting, only Guattari was involved as an actual therapist. Sylvère was much more involved with the kind of battle between Deleuze and other gures like Derrida or Lacan … But for this younger, or second, generation … that’s just not a struggle they were interested in. They weren’t Derrido-textualists, they weren’t [Freudians], and yet they wanted to have some kind of theory and were interested in the larger problems of space and time … A focus on scientists and techno-scientists is what they found interesting in Deleuze.
“Rhizome”
Kwinter: The essay “Rhizome” came out [in book form] in French around 1977, published by [Éditions de] Minuit, the normal publisher of Deleuze. I had the book. I was reading it. I was meditating on it. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I got to New York around 1978, and … on the art scene something new had emerged called postmodernism. No one knew what it was. By 1979 there were the Nouveaux philosophes [New philosophers]—Bernard-Henri Lévy, André Glucksmann, Jean-Marie Benoist, and others [who had broken with Marxism and poststructuralism] … Meanwhile, at the IAUS [Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies] they held a seminar and invited Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Sherrie Levine—and it was moderated by Christian Hubert, a friend of mine who used to teach at Yale. Something new emerged in the art world [postmodernism]. Sherrie Levine was taking photos of other people’s photographs and presenting the work as her own. In the rst issue of Zone, there wasn’t a single mention of the word [postmodernism], except once in my own article, where I sort of denounced it. That’s when it occurred to me that “Rhizome” most succinct existing vision ofspace. what Itwas because thiswas was the a description of the new emergent wasimportant not what then you were reading about, all these people still reading their Barthes and their Derrida. I suddenly realized, it’s … rhizome.
“Rhizome,” the paper, was rst presented at the schizo-culture conference by Deleuze, who, in Lotringer’s account, “managed to present an outline of his concept of the ‘rhizome,’ which had not yet been discussed in print, but in French, very slowly, while drawing diagrams of root systems and crabgrass on a
24
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
blackboard.”46 Later, it became the rst chapter in A Thousand Plateaus. The rst English translation of “Rhizome” was published in 1981 in the journal Ideology and Consciousness,47 but it only started to receive attention when included in On the Line, one of the “little black books” published in Semiotext(e)’s Foreign Agent series in 1983. Kwinter: We’d all read Anti-Oedipus. But Anti-Oedipus is not the same thing as “Rhizome.” Anti-Oedipus is a Hegelian, Freudal-Marxist interpretation of history. Deleuze is developing the production model of desire, but it hasn’t turned into a whole reection on historical space, as it gets developed in the second volume. “Rhizome” is an incredible departure in thinking.
A rhizome is the horizontal root structure that Deleuze and Guattari used to supersede the “arborescent” model of traditional epistemology, which proceeds vertically from an srcinating Grund (ground). “A rhizome is not answerable to any structural or generative model, being by nature foreign to the very idea of a genetic axis, or a deep structure,” they write. “Any point on a rhizome can be connected with any other, and must be.”48 The rhizome, in its later context as the opening chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, becomes a model for the decentralized state and thinking of subjectivity without constituted subjects. Its project is radical subjectivization. Deleuze rst professed his love of America in “Rhizome.”49 It was also his rst concept to travel across the Atlantic, when he visited Columbia University; and it was the rst Deleuzian conceptual “object” to become available—to be read and taught—in America. Deleuze writes: “Everything of importance that has happened and that is happening proceeds by means of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, the subterranean mobs and gangs—all successive lateral shoots in immediate connection with an outside. Hence the difference between an American book and a European book, even when the American sets off pursuing trees. A difference in the very conception of the book: Leaves of Grass. Nor are directions the same in America: the East is where the arborescent search and the return to the old world takes place; but the West is rhizomatic, with its Indians without ancestry, its always receding borders, its uid and shifting frontiers.”50 Kwinter: It was the only thing that had come out … They brought it out as a A Thousand Plateaus separate andessay] it wasn’t until 1988 that the full book came outbook, … [The “Rhizome” was published by [Éditions de] Minuit as a tiny book, and then four years later my friend John Johnston translated it. It was an incredible little book. No one knew what to make of it. It hit me like a brick. Christian Hubert came uptown to ask me about postmodernism and I had an epiphany.
But it was only by chance. I wasn’t in architecture. I was interested in it, but I was doing literature, linguistics, philosophy, art; and it was an architect that
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
25
came and asked me the question, and it played an amazing role. The American reception was essentially driven by architects. Even the fact that I was dragged into the Deleuze seminar … The architects were always the ones who brought the issues to my attention. When Sylvère published it in English, it meant I could start teaching “Rhizome” in New York … I also taught “The Smooth and the Striated.” Massumi was sending me chapters of his translations so I could make suggestions and I was probably teaching that to the students. They were all architects. Half the class went on to do Masters degrees at Columbia. I taught an entire course on that text at the New School, and I was teaching a Deleuzian reading of twentieth-century American art. Somewhere between ’81 and ’83. I also started teaching at Parsons. I taught theory seminars at that school. I taught a class on Deleuze. “Nomadology” came out and I taught an entire course on Mille Plateaux around ’84. A few people started coming to the seminar I was giving, like editors of Assemblage … It was largely thanks to Bob McAnulty, an editor of Assemblage (which was then totally anti-Deleuze) … He knew it was important and helped change the attitude at Assemblage.
But the use of “Rhizome” in design pedagogy exceeded its availability or translation. It distinguishes itself from the family of concepts in Anti-Oedipus as a graphically biological image of subjectivity, involving bees, wasps, rats, monkeys, and roots. Rhizome, as a species of creative subjectivity for Deleuze and Guattari, presented a new means of getting past structural linguistics as an exclusive model for subjectivity. Thus, in their famous example, the parallel “codes” of the wasp and the orchid are mutually infected in the production of a joint subjectivity they describe as a “becoming-wasp of the orchid.”51 For architects and art historians, the image of a biological “becoming” permitted nonhuman entities such as landscapes—in the later issues of Semiotext(e) and Zone—to qualify as their own subjectivities: to live, to act, and to transform.52 The distinction between Anti-Oedipus and its sequel lies precisely in the shift toward processes of subjectivization: from the nineteenth-century institutionalized subjects of Foucault, to the de-territorialized subjectivities of A Thousand Plateaus—the city, the territory, and the forest. Later
Rajchman: I got a call from Peter Eisenman inviting me to the ANY conferences [in 1991]. I thought Deleuze could have a really interesting impact in these debates in architecture, because part of what had happened to this Derridean stuff within architecture had led to a loss of a sense of reality; drawings were just as real as buildings … What was interesting about Deleuze, when he had
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
smooth and striated space and all that apparatus, was that he was really giving an account that could speak to the way architecture actually worked. Since Eisenman nally had a problem with Derrida, they found in Deleuze something interesting, and this, in my point of view, is how the two things came together.
In 1992, Semiotext(e): Architecture was published in the Autonomedia Series,53 with essays by Guattari, Catherine Ingraham, Diller and Scodio, Hani Rashid, Jesse Reiser, Lebbeus Woods, and Robert Somol. The previous Semiotext(e) editors had little to do with the issue, and Lotringer told me he didn’t like the graphics, which he found to be too polished, “too architectural.”54 Indeed, the dominant American reception, toward the end of 1980s and in the 1990s, marks a turn away from the radical, interdisciplinary ethos of Deleuze. At the point that Deleuze was being directly taught in architecture schools by American theorists such as Kwinter and Somol, along with architects such as Greg Lynn, the interest in his work could be said to have enveloped the beginning of a more distinct architectural milieu, what later would be observed in the group surrounding the ANY publications and conferences—a theoretical praxis that began to close in on itself, leading in time to an evacuation in extremis. When I refer to a Deleuzian milieu, here I do not mean “middle,” as per Deleuze’s usage, but a disciplinary complex per se, xed by a locale, a discourse, and autonomized around a set of concepts—here “rhizome,” there “the fold,” and elsewhere “the smooth and striated.” Such concepts, in turn, should not be viewed as having been appropriated by architects, but as elements that enabled the transformation of the milieu. Here is another version of postmodernism, distinct from the one usually associated with 1970s architecture. In many ways it is more theoretically developed. The two key texts that brought Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts into focus and stimulated this unique early-1990s following were the last chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” 55 and Le pli, which was rst published in French just after A Thousand Plateaus came out in English (1987), and later translated as The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993).56 “Th e Smooth an d the Str iated”
Kwinter: How did Deleuze’s picked up by mainstream architecture? It was absolutely “The Smoothproject and theget Striated.” “Rhizome” remained an obscure text that required much too much imagination, interpretative imagination … “The Smooth and the Striated” dominated architectural theory in the 1990s in a 57 way that nothing else had since Colin Rowe’s essay “Transparency.”
There is a sense in Kwinter’s recollection that “The Smooth and the Striated” did not require translation in its entry into the architectural imaginary: the essay privileges space as the critical model with which to think of the contemporary
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
27
problematic of capitalism and subjectivity, and it reformulates the traditional city as logos with an urbanism that resides in the city’s impersonal will to produce effects, irreducible to a formed urbanism. For architects, perhaps the most powerful effect of the essay was the substitution of space with a new leitmotif, the surface. “The Smooth and the Striated” converts space into a sequence of dynamic surface expressions that begin to suggest preliminary architectural subjectivities.58 Th e Fold
Rajchman: Well, I remember when Deleuze published Le Pli, I wrote something about it that I sent him … He said, “This is very funny, because in reaction to this book there are two groups that I never expected to respond: surfers and architects.” So, I think … Deleuze, who wrote not so much directly about architecture, you know, was surprised and interested that this phenomenon had emerged.59
Deleuze’s The Fold explores the critical simultaneity of organic matter and subjectivity in Leibniz’s Monadology.60 For Deleuze, the fold is an irreducible relation of subjectivity by which organisms are “strictly coextensive” with their habitats. Similarly, in Lynn’s 1993 AD editorial, folding in architecture involved “the intense integration” or “folding” of architectural elements into their environment.61 Citing the Cardiff Bay Opera House project, Lynn proposed a “pliant” and submissive building that implies “a dependence on external forces for self-denition.”62 This reformulation of The Fold advances not just a new species of object for architecture; the fold tacitly suggests a new subject—to be precise, the building as a subject of its environment, and whose modalities are “smooth, pliant, compliant,” and “submissive.” The building-as-subject in Lynn’s thinking is constituted as a remainder of the technological procedures that are its reason for being. Indeed, Lynn’s early work presents one of the few philosophically coherent experiments in architecture’s project surrounding Deleuze; but it is precisely the robustness of such an architectural schema that draws attention to its unannounced productions of subjectivity. Folding in Architecture63 reaches for an impersonal subjectivity of architecture, whichasit ego does in anwhat interesting way; it re-Oedipalizesonthe in the built form —and emerges as abut techno-organism, thesubject one hand, and its weak double, a passive building subject, on the other, are “compliant” with the technological eld of production which subsumes them. The debate that surrounded The Fold can be summarized as the claims by theorists toward a misreading of Deleuze. Lynn himself argued that “Le Pli undoubtedly risks being translated into architecture as mere folded gures.”64 Yet the ‘misreading,’ for architecture—if there can be such a thing—lies not in any formal articulation but in the peculiar re-territorializations of subjectivity.65
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“Th e Actua l and the Virt ual”
According to Massumi, “Deleuze’s thought offered an alternative path to architecture at the time it was just starting to feel the full force of the drive toward computerization and had to start grappling with the notion of the virtual. The moment when Deleuze entered architectural discourse was when ‘virtual reality’ was the buzzword.”66 The decade-long Anyone Corporation conferences and publications (whose participants included Rajchman, Massumi, Kwinter, De Landa, and Somol) provided a critical forum for the 1990s architectural discussion around Deleuze. By the late 1990s, ANY magazine published two issues inuenced by Deleuze: The Virtual House,67 guest edited by Rajchman, which reprinted Deleuze’s “The Actual and the Virtual,” alongside essays by Alliez, Elizabeth Grosz, and Virilio, as well as a series of design proposals for a “Virtual House”; followed by Diagram Work, guest edited by Ben van Berkel. 68 In 1999, Lynn’s Animate Form was published;69 its central focus was Deleuze’s concept of the virtual in what was the earliest architectural articulation of his Bergsonism. The assertion of a virtual design space—whose substance is information—and the formal practice it entails were developed along different lines. While Lynn was more interested in the biomorphic conception of formal evolution (blobs), there were practitioners focused on movement and animation, and others interested in data or information in the process itself, such as Asymptote’s Information Space or MVRDV’s Data Town, which translated statistical data into “datascapes.”70 There is, in this contemporary architectural project, an unmistakable attempt to recuperate the personological subject; the building itself strives to become a live entity, yet subjectivity is never raised in this discussion. If the early anarchic reception addressed Deleuze and Guattari’s project of subjectivity via a broad disciplinary complex, the later architectural milieux unwittingly pervert or renaturalize this project by rehabilitating identity, ego, and individualism. “Who comes after the subject?” has been answered with “Another subject.”71 Kwinter: You are absolutely right. You can summarize Deleuze’s philosophy, on the one hand, and can also summarize everything that is impoverished within contemporary Deleuzianism in architecture around this one particular problem—that allisofdescribing Deleuze is the research matter matter becoming subject. Deleuze’s entire enterprise waysinto in which becomes subject and multiplying the possibilities for matter to become subject. Don’t let people think it is about anthropomorphism. It is not about becoming a person … “Subject” is a coherent organization of forces that has organized itself toward a creative end. When matter is seized by complete forces in order to produce something, you have the process of subjectivization under way.
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
29
You can look at it through Deleuze’s eyes or you can look at it through capital’s eyes. If you look at it through capital’s eyes, you’re essentially just giving the ofcial interpretations of reality, accepting what capital says is real as real. If you’re looking at it through Deleuze’s eyes, you’ll see it as essentially comprised of subjectivizational processes that can be made explicit. You can descriptively show that what we’re looking at is not a building but a subjectivization process. But we have failed to see that it is that. Exiting De leuze: The Retu r n of the Subj ect
The accounts given here of the late reception provide not so much evidence of a growing afliation between Deleuze and architecture as of a swift divorce. The investment in severed philosophical schemata and the evacuation of subjectivity by the discipline, will no doubt be viewed as the screening out of the protean antifascist project of Deleuze and Guattari, wherein concepts such as the rhizome rst gained currency as political “tools” or “machines” for producing a new kind of subjectivity. The publication of essays by Deleuze alongside architects’ design statements (often as a “montage”) and the styling of architectural critique with Deleuzian language or allusions could further be said to have lent to Deleuze a primarily authorizing function in what has been called architecture’s neo-conservative formalist project (in which the subject is anathematized). But it must also be said that Deleuze not only authorizes the architectural assimilation of a lateral conceptual apparatus, he is also made to authorize an entire disciplinary complex through which such concepts are reied within architectural theory. In a bizarre reversal, Deleuze’s apparatus is then sadistically stripped of its radical lining: it is Deleuze sans organes. So who, then, is the subject? It is not that the architects misappropriated Deleuze—an accident of reading. Rather the betrayal of Deleuze can be seen to emerge from within architecture’s tragic relationship to subjectivity since the beginning of modernism, which has come to dene the very failure of the postmodern project. The evacuation of subjectivity in the later reception nds its source in architecture’s disciplinary unconscious and the repressive mechanisms designed to protect its interiority. But it could also be said that the very attempt to realize (to re-naturalize) the image of subjectivization activates mechanism representation, which, like a reex, guarantees the return of thethelost subject, asofwitnessed in the contemporary iconic project. Nonetheless, the architectural project on the Deleuzian Right—the placing of Deleuze on the wrong side of the spectral mirror—in its acritical address and exaggerated re-inscription of the modernist subject, raises the stakes for a new critical project. The technologies that convert architecture into a subject suggest the possibility of a more expansive thinking of an unconstituted architectural
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
subjectivity, which does not seek to rehabilitate the ego or the self. Deleuze’s philosophy suggests an architectural subjectivity always yet to come. Notes 1
2
3 4 5
6 7
8 9 10 11
12
Mille plateaux,
published in French in 1980, rst appeared in English as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, 1988). It is the second volume in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, following on L’anti-oedipe, rst published in 1972; and later in English as Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York, 1977).Le Bergsonisme was rst published in French in 1966. I am grateful to John, Sanford, and Sylvère for their stimulating conversation. Excerpts from my dialogues with them appear interspersed throughout this chapter, distinguished with each interlocutor’s name followed by his words (set in italics). The American reception intersects with those in Italy, France, and Australia, as well as Japan and Brazil. An equally interesting account could be given of the reception of Pierre Bourdieu or any of Deleuze’s contemporaries after 1968. Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations 1972–1990 , trans. Martin Joughin (New York, 1995). Original interview with Deleuze, “Les intercesseurs,” in Pourparlers 1972– 1990 (Paris, 1990). An earlier treatment appeared under the same title in L’autre journal 8 (1985). See Anyone and Anywhere, ed. Cynthia Davidson (New York, 1991 and 1992). Interview with author, New York, February 2003. The exception is Deleuze’s participation in the schizo-culture symposium at Columbia. All of Rajchman’s comments here were made during this interview. Deleuze, “Mediators,” p. 71, n. 125. Published initially as Gilles Deleuze, “City-State,” in Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City (New York, 1985). Deleuze, Foucault (Paris, 1986); published under the same title in English, ed. and trans. Seán Hand (London, 1988). See Sylvère Lotringer, Christian Marazzi, eds, Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics (New York, 2007), srcinally published in 1980. The notions of productive desire and the Anti-Oedipus, which Guattari transported to the Italian “desiring within autonomia,machines” cite Georges Bataille’s thinking in the 1930s, in which desire is a form of human “consumption.” Consumption, in turn, is something that has to be created; it is the “production of consumptions.” See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 4. Tafuri was opposed to the use of Deleuze in architectural criticism, which he feared would dissolve the boundaries of ideology: “We rmly believe it necessary ‘not to make rhizomes’ of those groups.” See Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p. 11.
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
13 14 15
16
17
18 19
20
21
22 23
24 25
31
See Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven, 1993). See Teyssot’s Deleuzo-Foucauldian essay on the body, “The Mutant Body of Architecture,” 1994. Tafuri connected to Deleuze through his Marxist framing of “form” in terms of social processes of production. However, Tafuri retained the constituted “subject” as the socius, a product of material
forces. CERFI (Le Centre d’Études, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles) was founded as early as 1967, and imploded around 1987. Its middle years (circa 1976) included government-sponsored research on the question “What is a city?” Author’s communication with Anne Querrien, September 2009. The full citation for this oft-cited sentiment, referring to Différence et répétition and Logique du sens, is: “I believe that these works will continue to revolve about us in enigmatic resonance with those of Klossowski, another major and excessive sign, and perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.” See Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Sherry Simon (Ithaca, 1977), pp. 165–96. L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (London, 1953). Antonio Negri, L’anomalia selvaggia: Saggio su potere e potenza in Baruch Spinoza (Milan, 1981). For Deleuze’s preface to the French edition, see Deleuze’s preface in Negri, L’anomalie sauvage: Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza, trans. François Matheron (Paris, 1982). For the English edition, see Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, 1991). Negri writes, “The production of singularities [which constitutes ‘multitude’] is also the singular production of a new subjectivity … Multitude is, at once, subject and product of collective praxis.” Antonio Negri, “Pour une défnition ontologique de la multitude,” trans. François Matheron, Multitudes 9 (May–June 2002): pp. 40–1. An English translation by Arianna Bove is available at: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/ initiativ/agp/space/multitude.htm Lotringer, “Better Than Life,” 2003. All citations, passim, from the online version, http://www.semiotexte.com/documentPage/myEighties.html. But, neither was it the case that Deleuze was incontestably accepted in the United States. The East-coast academy remained predominantly Derridean and rooted in literary criticism. The prevailing academic seminars, in Kwinter’s account, were those on “Marquis de Sade, [Maurice] Blanchot, everything that was sort of2003. fashionable.” Kwinter, interview with author, New York, January All comments by Kwinter were made in this interview. There were exceptions to this bias: papers by Deleuze and Guattari were included in Yale French Studies and MLN, Modern Language Notes (Johns Hopkins University) in the 1970s. Brian Massumi in discussion with the author, New Haven, October 2002. October was founded by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson in 1976 after both departed Artforum in 1974. The launch was in part sponsored by the Institute
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for Architecture and Urban Studies. For a timeline of the IAUS (events, players, symposia), see Log 13/14 (Fall 2008): pp. 154–8. See Deleuze and Guattari, “Rhizome,” and interview with Deleuze, “Politics,” trans. John Johnston, in On the Line. See also Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York, 1986). Both “Rhizome” and “Nomadology” were published as small books prior to their appearance in A Thousand Plateaus (1988), the latter became the 12th “plateau.” In “Politics,” Deleuze proposes
27 28 29 30
31 32 33 34 35 36 37
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the post-Marxist position of using capitalism from within, rather than opposing it, by “redirecting the creativity and multiplicity of its ows.” Sylvère Lotringer, John Rajchman, et alia, eds, Semiotext(e): Anti-Oedipus from Psychoanalysis to Schizopolitics, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977). Lotringer, ed., Semiotext(e): Nietzsche’s Return, vol. 3, no. 1 (1978). Nietzsche’s Return included essays by Derrida, John Cage, Deleuze, Foucault, and Kenneth King. Lotringer, ed., Semiotext(e): Schizo-Culture, vol. 3, no. 2 (1978). Possibly an apocryphal tale or a staged agit-prop provocation; no one seems to know. The srcin of the KGB rumor is apparently a web-based text by John Bell Young, “ My Adventures as a Chat Room Hooligan: Confronting Hypocrisy and Snobbism in Classical Music” (srcinally posted in 1999, and no longer available). Young will neither deny nor conrm the statement in his online tale and refuses to be quoted without permission (which he will not grant). In essence, Young claims that the socalled Ontological Hysterical Theater (members of which attended the symposium) insisted Foucault admit participation in gruesome experiments carried out with the involvement of the CIA and French Government during the 1950s. These experiments allegedly involved psychological and physical torture. To paraphrase the text, Foucault replied aptly: “It was not the CIA I worked for. It was the KGB.” Radical psychiatrist and author of White Racism: A Psychohistory(New York, 1970). See Lotringer, “Better Than Life.” Ibid. See Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days (1995; Beverly Hills, 1997), and, most recently, The Hurt Locker (2008; Santa Monica, 2010). Kwinter, interview with author. For more on this, see François Paraldi, ed., Semiotext(e): Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1 (1980). Sylvère Lotringer, Christian Marazzi, eds, Semiotext(e): Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980). The srcinal was reissued in 2007, in book form, by Semiotext(e), Brigades.” with a new introduction by Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Lotringer, “Better Than Life.” In Rajchman’s account: “So at Columbia … Sylvère had his students, the people that would found Zone—including Jonathan Crary, Sanford Kwinter, and Michel Feher, who had studied with Deleuze—and wanted to found this new kind of publishing project.” Zone Books was founded in 1985.
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”
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41 42 43
44
45
46 47 48 49
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See Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and John Johnston, “Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty,” October 1 (Spring 1976): pp. 65–85; and “ Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty, Part 2,” October 2 (Summer 1976): pp. 71–90. Sanford Kwinter, Jonathan Crary, and Michel Feher, eds, Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City (New York, 1986). Alexander’s prize-winning 1965 essay argues that a city is a “semi-lattice” (that is, a rhizome). Perhaps the most architectural dimension of Zone was the materiality of the book itself, which, according to Kwinter, was the rst such academic publication to be delivered as a designed object, compared with the ‘dissident’ aesthetics of the rst Semiotext(e)s. He says it was the graphic design of Bruce Mau that guaranteed Zone its wide exposure. The increasing aestheticization of the text within the New York publishing scene around Deleuze can also be seen in later issues of Semiotext(e), from the Italian issue, designed by Bigelow and artist Denise Green, to Semiotext(e): Oasis, vol. 4, no. 3 (1984). For these two versions of the city, see Guattari and Negri’s “Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance” and Alliez and Feher’s “The Luster of Capital,” in Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City. Both essays were rst published in 1985. For the former, see Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. Michael Ryan (New York, 1990), a translation of Nouveaux espaces de liberte (Paris, 1985). Guattari helped found Le Centre d’initiative pour de nouveaux ́ espaces de liberté (CINEL) in 1977; it was disbanded in 1981 upon the election of François Mitterrand. See Gary Genosko’s introduction in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London, 2002), pp. 19–20. See Deleuze’s description of impersonal subjectivity as a “battle” hovering over its eld in Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London, 2004), p. 116, which he equates with Ferlinghetti’s “fourth-person singular.” (p. 118). Rajchman species it was the Foucault lineage, not the Lefebvre/Debord context, out of which the Deleuze discussion emerges: “In Foucault there is already a lot about architecture and the city and Paul Rabinow—space and architecture—and there was kind of a debate around that … Their discussion of architecture and cities, from my sense of intellectual history, is very different from the Baudrillard/Debord situationists. That’s the earlier Lefebvre, Marxism kind based on reication—abstract space is modernist and therefore bad. This energy—this discussion came from more poststructuralist sources.” Lotringer, “Better than Life.” Deleuze and Guattari, “Rhizome,” trans. Paul Foss and Paul Patton, Ideology and Consciousness: Power and Desire Diagrams of the Social 8 (Spring 1981): pp. 49–71. Deleuze and Guattari, “Rhizome,” in On the Line, p. 24. Deleuze and Guattari, “Rhizome,” in On the Line, p. 43. The reference is to Walt Whitman’s poetic masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, srcinally published in 1850 (Boston, 1897). Rajchman comments: “Deleuze, unlike Derrida, had a strong interest in American matters, on the superiority of American literature. He liked [Charles
34
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52 53
54 55
56 57
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Sanders] Peirce, he liked pragmatism, English philosophy, he loved American literature.” Deleuze and Guattari, “Rhizome,” in On the Line. Ibid. The orchid forms an image of the wasp and vice versa, in the sense that the wasp “becomes a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus.” It is a rhizome: neither a wasp nor an orchid, but a pure “becoming.” This would seem to be derived in part from the surrealist Roger Caillois’ essay, “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” Minotaure 7 (1935). An English translation of the essay, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” trans. John Shepley, was published in October 31 (Winter 1984): pp. 16–32. Callois was a member of the dissident Surrealist circle that included Georges Bataille, Michel Serres, and Gaston Bachelard. It is instructive that this circle rebelled against the psychoanalytical bias of the surrealists led by André Breton and embraced, instead, an anarchic and materialist libidinal economy. The terminology of subjectivity as “becoming”, nourished a wider debate among feminist theorists concerned with gender, sex, and identity. Hrazten Zeitlian, ed., Semiotext(e): Architecture, vol. 3, no. 2 (1992). The editorial described the issue as a collection of “complex texts struggling with architectures intended to drag you into a visual and conceptual maelstrom.” Lotringer, interview with author. Deleuze and Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in A Thousand Plateaus. Part of this chapter was printed earlier in Deleuze and Guattari, “Nomad Art,” Art and Text (Australia) 19 (1985). Later, in the mid to late 1990s, an interest emerged in Deleuze’s concepts of “virtuality” and the “diagram.” Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzsky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” Perspecta 8 (1963): pp. 45–54. The essay was later included in Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1976). In “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” Deleuze and Guattari identied two conceptions of space: nomos, the smooth space of nomadism, or the desert; and logos, the striated or sedentary space of the city, expressed through the traditional idea of the polis. The essay also engaged a critique of the city, the “striated space par excellence,” forwarding a new conception of urbanism based on movement and materiality (after Negri’s The Savage Anomaly). See Deleuze and Guattari, “1440, ” p. 481. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 487. They conjure smooth spaces such as felt, or striated spaces such as patchwork and woven fabrics, and three-dimensional sponge See also Log Alejandro Zaera-Polo’s of “faciality” in2009). “The Log 16 (Spring/Summer Politics surfaces. of the Envelope,” 13/14 (Fall 2008) anddiscussion The primacy of the surface is so widespread in recent architectural production that it can scarcely be reduced to any one event. The interest in the surface is, of course, fundamental to architecture, and arguably predates the received modernist discourse of space. In describing the primacy of surface, Deleuze and Guattari cite the “the reduction of space to the plane” in the aesthetic theories of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, who they recognize as precedents in the thinking of smooth space. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 492–3.
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61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68
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In 1993, the year that Deleuze’s The Fold appeared in English, the London journal AD published the special issue Folding in Architecture, guest edited by Greg Lynn, which reprinted its rst two chapters, “The Pleats of Matter” and “The Folds in the Soul,” alongside a series of design projects that experimented formally with digitally generated, physically folded surfaces. Included are projects by Kas Oosterhuis, Bahram Shirdel, and Lynn, with essays by Deleuze, Rajchman, Lynn, and Jeffrey Kipnis. See Greg Lynn, ed., AD: Folding in Architecture, vol. 63, no. 3–4, Architectural Design Prole 102 (1993). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Robert Latta (Oxford, 1898). Leibniz’s model was crypto-scientic and—reputedly— Rosicrucian. It came at a time when moral philosophy and natural philosophy were only beginning to be separated; the latter became empirical “science.” Lynn, “Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple,” AD: Folding in Architecture, p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid. Ibid., p. 13. As a result of this dispute, the name “fold” disappeared, but the “folded” surface remained an enduring trope, long after the passing of Le pli. Brian Massumi in discussion with the author, New Haven, October 2002. Cynthia Davidson and John Rajchman, eds, ANY 19/20: The Virtual House (1997). Cynthia Davidson and Ben van Berkel, eds, ANY 23: Diagram Work (1998). The issue included contributions by Hubert, Stan Allen, Somol, De Landa, Deleuze, Massumi, Lynn, and Kwinter. Lynn, Animate Form (New York, 1999). A fourth group returned to the “responsive surface” via engineered surfaces programmed to react to given stimuli, including dECOi and Rhett Russo. These diverse projects are united in one particular way: each implicitly ascribes to the architectural project a status of subjectivity, where the building is described as selfdetermining, or rendered open to experiences and affects, either at the level of the design process or the built form. See Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Who Comes after the Subject? (New York, 1991), p. vii.
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Chapter 2
Impersonal Effects
Then suddenly there is a click. The subject breaks away from the object, divesting it of a part of its color and substance. There is a rift in the scheme of things, and a whole range of objects crumbles in becoming me, each object transferring its quality to an appropriate subject. The light becomes the eye and as such no longer exists: it is simply the stimulation of the retina … The subject is the disqualied object. My eye is the corpse of light and color. My nose is all that remains of odor when their unreality has been demonstrated. My hand refutes the thing it holds … It implies the simultaneous existence of the subject with the object, whose mysterious relationship to himself he seeks to dene. But subject and object cannot exist apart from one another since they are one and the same thing, at rst integrated into the real world and then cast out by it. (Michel Tournier)1
The extraordinary event, for Deleuze, is the object becoming subject—not in the manner of an abstract formulation, such as the substitution of one ideational representation for another but, rather, in the introduction of a vast, new, impersonal plane of subjectivity, populated by object processes and physical phenomena that in Deleuze’s discovery will be shown to constitute their own subjectivities. Deleuze’s polemic of subjectivity (the refusal of the Cartesian subject and the transcendental ego of Husserl)—long attempted by other thinkers—is unique precisely because it heralds the dawning of a new species of objecthood that will qualify as its own peculiar subjectivity. Deleuze in fact lets go of the term subjectivity and all of its epistemological baggage, in order to pursue his reformulation of impersonal subjectivity as “production.” The term impersonal effects encapsulates Deleuze’s shifting terminology on subjectivity—namely “perceptions,” “singularities,” and “emissions.” Each of these terms in Deleuze denotes a component “power” such as a mouth or a breeze, to produce something; not an effect of a cause, but an effect as non-sentient,and self-mobilizing agency, writes, at once“Subjectivity producer andisproduced. Indeed, in Empiricism Subjectivity, Deleuze determined as an 2 3 effect,” viz., the effect of saying “I,” while the term is never formalized into a concept of subjectivity in itself. Nonetheless, the word “effect,” when its causality is neutralized, precisely captures Deleuze’s productive model of subjectivity, and can be used toward the reformulation of architecture (For Deleuze-Hume, causality is itself an effect derived from experience, from the repetition of similar cases.4) For architecture, the effects are the indeterminate products (contents) of the architectural encounter,
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the irreducible moments of a pure visuality prior to unied persons, buildings, or any whole whatsoever.5 A reading of Deleuze’s critique of subjectivity and theory of consciousness and perception in Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), Bergsonism (1966),6 and The Logic of Sense (1969),7 shows how the impersonal effects—what he calls the new transcendental eld—takes the place of both the classical and modern subject. Deleuze’s starting point is the reformulation of Husserlian phenomenology, but the question asked here (the one never asked elsewhere), is: how does Deleuze specically reformulate the question for architecture? How do the impersonal effects advance architecture’s own articulation of phenomenology toward a new subject for architecture? Architecture’s troubled appropriation of phenomenology (and its usual recourse to a Heideggerian reading of being) notwithstanding, the intention of rewriting the code of subject-object relations for Deleuze and Guattari does not involve the privileging of a seemingly archaic subject ( Dasein) but, instead, demolishing the entire edifying discourse of subjects suspended in signifying chains.
Impersonal Effects When music cries, it is humanity, it is the whole of nature which cries with it. Truly speaking, it does not introduce these feelings in us; it introduces us rather into them, like the passers-by that might be nudged in a dance. (Henri Bergson)8
Deleuze does not recognize the transcendental ego as a valid paradigm for subjectivity. One cannot forget his response to Jean-Luc Nancy when asked “who comes after the subject?”—in short, that there is none.9 There is, for Deleuze, no constituted subjectivity in the way of an individuated subject with xed traits. From the earliest schemata, there is no “I,” a self-conferred master of a perceptual apparatus, or otherwise a receiver (perceiver), the subject rendered a passive landing site for falling or passing perceptions; rather, in Deleuze’s thinking, subjectivity is an emergent phenomenon, wholly immanent to the ongoing production of perception. The “practical” or affective subjects in the books on Hume and Bergson are gures conceived strictly within Deleuze’s critique of phenomenology, in which Husserl’s transcendental subject will be systematically denied. It is precisely the early theory of perception that claries the sense in which the personological subject is derivative for Deleuze. In this early conceptual apparatus, perceptions are conceived of as unique material powers that come before the subject. In Empiricism and Subjectivity, the “empirical subjectivity begins from … an animated succession of distinct perceptions”;10 and in Bergsonism it is not the subject who stands outside perception but perceptions and memories as pure, mobile effects that will constitute subjectivity in and for themselves. This radical
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thinking of perception as essentially autonomous, forming its own individuating capacity (temporal agency), is the basis for the impersonal theory of subjectivity. Such a peculiar idea of perceptions as autonomous capacities, detached from their masters, can, however, only be made intelligible if it is understood that perceptions in Deleuze’s thinking operate at the level of presence, a point belabored from as early as the formulation of an empirical subject. In Bergsonism there is no “difference in kind” between perception and matter, only a “difference in degree,”11 because for Deleuze perception is not representational but substantive12—perceptions and impressions do not represent something more real or srcinal ‘outside’ themselves, but are continuous with matter. In Empiricism and Subjectivity, “every perception is a substance, and every distinct part of a perception a distinct substance.”13 This intimate relationship between perception and matter is intensied in Bergsonism, where perception “puts us at once into matter, is impersonal, and coincides with the perceived object.”14 Subjectivity, then, as a production of perception, is never a negotiation between an inside and an outside (a phenomenal interior and an empirical, external world), but rather a creative production of real parts, effects that span multiple levels— perceptual/psychological and corporeal. As a result, an architectural subject emerges (freely or otherwise) from this uid and dynamic eld of effects. What is the site of these perceptions? For Deleuze, perceptions, thoughts, and impressions do not take place inside a mind that produces them. There is no “container” for subjectivity as such: in Deleuze’s critique of Hume, the mind is understood as a continuous production of thoughts; it is only the collection and succession of ideas in or for themselves. 15 These perceptions, therefore, do not mediate between a subject and an object; rather, perception takes place in a third register, what might be called an absolute outside or exteriority, which in The Logic of Sense he calls “a zone of … objective indetermination.” 16 The theory of perception in the Hume book is never developed into the explicit theory of subjectivity; rather, it ramies into other texts such asThe Logic of Sense, whose synonymous concepts—(“pre-personal”) “singularity,” “nomadic points,” and “emission”—are much more expansive than the terms in Empiricism and Subjectivity taken from Hume, viz., “thoughts,” “perceptions,” and “impressions,” which still attend to the solitary subject. A “singularity” is any singular impersonal power that establishes a local connection in order to engender transformation of a subject (to engender
subjectivization desubjectivization). Theaccomplished rush of adrenalin, the demolition of a building, theand winning of a race, are all by a series of critical connections that when extended over a certain line of actions give rise to a particular situation, or set of conditions. Prepersonal singularities in this way travel “in a determined direction over a line of ordinary points.”17 He writes: By singularity, we mean not only something that opposes the universal, but also some element that can be extended close to another, so as to obtain a connection; it is a singularity in the mathematical sense. Knowledge and even belief have
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then a tendency to be replaced by notions like “arrangement” or “contrivance” (agencement and dispositif) that indicate an emission and a distribution of singularities. Such emissions, of the “cast of the dice” kind, constitute a transcendental eld without subject.18
The impersonal singularity is thus determined by its singular capacity to connect
with others in a eld of singularities distributed about a potential. For Deleuze, the world is “teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and preindividual singularities,” which constitute the new “impersonal and pre-individual transcendental eld.”19 Every singularity exists within a series20 and there is a potential (phenomenality itself) that vibrates across all the series, like a drag race which brings several trajectories, cars and competitors alongside each other, each series bearing a certain potential to crash or to swerve around the other, to be taken over by, or to gain on another. Deleuze calls subjectivity a nomadic eld because the potential drives toward any given connection are variable, and the singularities mobile. He calls such an arrangement of singularities a “non-personal individuation,” which includes persons, but also other non-personal or impersonal collections. A war, a cloud, and a party are self-moving, impersonal individuations that may connect with persons, but are never restricted to the personal. They exist anyway, and do not require a subject per se. Within this schema, and in terms of cognizing operations, the person itself (distinct from the I or the ego) is not eradicated, but is understood to “envelop a nite number of the singularities of the system”by which it is constituted.21 A pure outside (the impersonal eld) comes,in time, into contact with subjects. The subject ‘yet to come’ is the subject that has to rst be freed from the circular and often malevolent forces that command the dominant chain of signication (that is, so-called authorized reality with its manifold illusions, desires, forms of confabulation, and discord). “A person is only one of many possible individuations such as “a life, a season, a wind, a battle, 5 o’clock,” each dened by its own autonomous consistency andstyle of composition. Subjectivity, for Deleuze, is precisely an effect of such impersonal processes of individuation; it is “what makes the individuality of an event.”22 In Empiricism and Subjectivity, “subjectivity is determined as an effect ... the subject is an imprint, or an impression, left by principles that it progressively turns into a machine capable of using this impression.”23 This elucidates Deleuze’s sense of effectinas a machinic part 24 thatworks, which he compares to an “electromagnetic effect” Proust and Signs —clearly he does not mean semblance or ephemerality. The personal identity, for Deleuze, is such a working effect of the repetition of a particular set of pre-personal singularities; saying “I” is a machinic part whose “habit” crystallizes the personal identity. He writes: “We should not ask what principles [of the mind] are, but rather what they do. They are not entities; they are functions. They are dened by their effects.”25 As such, personal identity is one set of effects among a multitude of effects that constitute the new eld of subjectivization. A subject, to a degree, chooses which effects to embody.
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It is by a strategic and necessary detachment that each effect asserts itself—by which it allows itself to be repeated—and is thereby compelled to enter into a vague series. The primary effect of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts) weeping in the nal scene of Mulholland Drive,26 to the piercing sound of Rebekah Del Rio’s detached voice, singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish might be described as “an anyone crying.” It is the capacity to cry which insists itself even where the actualized motive has been cancelled—when the staged ‘singer’ collapses onstage, and the voice effect eerily continues, its own impersonal subjectivity, a pure performance detached from any performer.The voice-effect is compelling precisely because it is mobilized as a pure production freed from any body. Impersonal effects as production are thus elaborated, doubly: as a power and as a partial (preliminary) body. There is not a circularity here in the sense of alinguistic deferral given to classical epistemology, but rather the effect of a recursivehabitus that propels itself into the future via a series, and which, in turn, presages other events. What remains to be executed in bringing such ideas to architecture is for the phenomenal effects and arrangements to be directed toward real ends, versus new ctions and new forms of domination. The visualization of this new transcendental eld of pure effects in architecture involves both the critique of rachitecture and the renunciation of certain formal procedures that condition architecture for the subject. This latter conditioning is typical of the manner in which architecture is complicit in forming representational orders that further control and channel the purely immanent eld of its productive agency. The demolition of certain orders seen in various iterations of the architectural avant-garde, historically, is undermined, as processes of reication are always present in the historical process itself—if only in the sense that forms of architecture once considered innovative or new fall again and again to the same forces complicit in dening and categorizing architecture (including the discipline of architectural history). It is not accidental, then, that functionalist architecture in its heyday was an authentic attempt to recongure the subject, even if the subject was unwilling to attend to this project and rebelled. What Deleuze seems to have in mind, and what Guattari nds in Japan in the 1980s, is a passage out of this historicizing game toward the liberation of a new architectural subjectivity.
Surround Effects: Villa Savoye What is neither individual nor personal are, on the contrary, emissions of singularities insofar as they occur on an unconscious surface and possess a mobile, immanent principle of auto-unication through a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from xed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the syntheses of consciousness. (Gilles Deleuze)27
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Stretching from one room to the next, surfaces follow me, approaching and receding, while I attach and detach myself from one effects-series to the next—a conjoining of perceptual and built fragments in an indivisible series. But there is only one surface of architectural experience, viz., the progressive contactsurface generated via each encounter with built fabric in a series of vivid effects that jump from the visual, haptic, and olfactory registers to the mental, affective, and psychological registers—and back. Architectural encounter is produced as an abstract surface spanning parallel series of impersonal effects, which places me at once into matter and slowly gives rise to a silent subjectivity for architecture. The surface-effect made with the oor covering I experience, or generate traversing a oor, forms a series (‘footsteps’) that coincides with another: that is, the succession of views and glimpses I extract from the surrounds while walking, scanning a eld of vision: a haze of empty rooms passed by quickly while I pursue a particular one; the gleam of a door handle drawn close to the hand that nds it; and, upstairs, a stand of trees sudden behind the long strips of ribbon-window glass which bring them close to me. What is often described as the subtle ambiguity in modernist architecture between the interior and the exterior is not just an effect of architectural transparency, but is instead germane to a wider series of effects that brings into relation singular components from multiple registers. They are effects because they are potent and autonomous, but also transient, disappearing as quickly as they appear—the free façade effect so thin it is forgotten the moment I enter the interior, itself an effect of open space. Modernist space often dissolves and blurs such impressions and distinctions, in its attempt to access a real that nonetheless remains elusive. What initiates this conjoining of the effects into a temporary, yet vivid coherence? In every case there has to be a catalyst that commands a group of architectural effects, beyond the intention of the architect, the planner, or any form of intentional agent. The architectural encounter is not random or even relative, but rather there is always an architectural motive—rooted in circumstance, or eshed out by the very commingling of the effects—in the subjectivizational horizon that we call ‘architecture’ or ‘house.’28 The classic architectural promenade that connects a series of loose effects does so by a diagonal ramp, the motivating complex or vehicle by which all the effects circulate and are given mobility at once.
It is no aaccident to nd in this circulation is overdetermined, combining spiral stair thatthat turns in onhouse itself,the with a diagonal ramp alongside that disperses everything around it—two circulations, in an effect of compression and doubling, to facilitate not just the literal movement from one level to the next, but the sequence which snaps from one effect to the next. The promenade architecturale, in other words, is a systematic program of effects, and the house a machine for synthesizing dissonant effects. The diagonal ramp, in this way, sets in motion architectural space-time and catalyzes the effects cinematically. It is
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precisely this facility to produce effects that qualies architecture as a form of subjectivity. There is, in the architectural encounter, an unmistakableagencement that preexists all personal agents navigating space; the most apt translation of this Deleuzian term might be “arrangement.” In this capacity, it is an anonymous architecture as pure indifference that seizes us, and not the reverse, a subjectivizing agency prior to the constitution of any building or subject. The selection of effects is accomplished by a certain savagery that transcends personal choice or personality. The glimpseeffect of the roof garden at the top of the ramp causes the spiral stair to vanish, just as a person appearing on the other side of a sheet of glass—transparent or opaque, as recognizable subject or as shadowy form—pulls my gaze through the glass. Every architectural effect produces itself by destroying all the others. A subjectivity of architecture does not mean that the building becomes a person; rather, it confers upon my perceptions, and the accumulation of effects that condit ion my experience, from which I derive my own particular relation—viz., the sense of individuation and reception of an outside derivative of the entire distribution of effects that constitutes my trajectory. The “I” becomes an after-effect, something that crystallizes through the habit and repetition of walking around a house. The roaming subject fatally links the architectural series to an “I” (a receiver), mistaking singularism for identity; or, conversely, the series takes the subject in, a subterfuge and overturning of “I” and “You.” To be clear, the “I” itself is not a real illusion, but an effect. The illusion lies in philosophy and the metaphysics of agency, in thinking that the “I” is constitutive; that it precedes the effects. As such, there hovers a cloud of architectural effects which constitute what might be called the architectural real, or that from which every particular series is crystallized. Walls, objects, and other components clustering around us are teeming with loose effects, and what emerges is an ongoing accumulation of a particular selection, or arrangement. Architectural effects are “mobile,” displaced as a “nomadic distribution” within an indeterminate pool of possible experiences. Every encounter is born via a complex selection procedure which renders it unique for each person, even if it replicates an authorized reading, reiterating the same effects for anyone, anytime. If “I” have a subjectivity, it is a general and anonymous power to attract perceptual arrangements, to envelop a series of aesthetic, social and other effects, like anyone else. But it is also the phenomenon of having been selected, of an unconscious leaning for thisset of effects. Theallpropensity of any set belongs architectural hovers above such primary locations giventotoanperception andsubjectivity, its games ofwhich concordance or disequilibrium. What sets the effects in motion might be a single component, such as the singular effect of a ramp—thus effects initiate their own series. The catalytic event might be a couch, a window, or a view; or a color, act, or sound. It may even be a singular historical event, such as a re, a revolt, or some other unexpected thing. Architectural effects are not static representational values of an order of exteriority and nality—the utopian idealist dream, modernist or otherwise; but, rather, streaming, live arrangements of components set in motion
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by catalytic effects. The putative subject is essentially de-subjectivized by way of stepping into this stream. While the modern subject sees a construction, the real subject is subsumed by the event of architecture, playing out the consequences of the effects mutually determining one another, outside of or beyond pure rational agency. Unhinged from formed objects and subjects, architectural subjectivity unfolds as an abstract perceptual surface across multiple registers. Collision or explosion, the effects nonetheless merge. Such an abstract surface constitutes its own unconscious register that hovers above the sequence of actual built surfaces and the perceptual and bodily assimilation to an “I.” Architecture is exactly the “fourth person singular” of Deleuze-Ferlinghetti, 29 given by a surface that collapses heterogeneous effects and contrives to produce a feeling of continuity and seamlessness even in the most fragmented and distracted of encounters. Continuity is really the individuation of effects by sequence and repetition; as Deleuze might say, there are only the detached effects.30 When architecture is truly inhabited, given its own subjective residence, it is as if the architecture begins to inhabit us. Impersonal effects occur without the ego’s intervention. When I see a bedroom door, I am, by that very event, suddenly joined to it, by a line that is invisible but which allows me to see. An architectural theory of effects rejects gestalt and any overarching syntactic or formal structure in favor of a nomadic distribution of point effects mobilizing dynamic events in the real world. A theory of effects is not schematic or an abstraction, but real. To state it in the terms of Deleuze’s Bergsonism, every architectural perception produces a denite substance—and it is this actual presence that is at stake in the surface of architectural encounter—not a villa, for example, delivered optically or phenomenally as object to subject, but an anonymous Villa Savoye, a series of concrete architectural effects that have no more specic unity than the series itself. This unnamable event erases the name of the object. It is said that Le Corbusier achieved the promenade architecturale by deemphasizing the façade.31 For architecture, this is tantamount t o the stripping away of normative identity (removing the mask), because in terms of impersonal effects a house is no longer reducible to a personal façade or any other totalizing element that might dominate or denominate a system of dispersed effects. Le Corbusier’s aestheticized functionalism was a means to effecting the emergence of the modern subject, a subject liberated from historical detritustoward of ‘traditional’ architectures and congested urban orders. Histhe villas were sailing the future insofar as they were machines for living or ocean-going vessels headed for tomorrow.
Phenomenology and Impersonal Effects The impersonal architectural effects reverses Husserl’s phenomenological schema of subjectivity, premised as it is on a constituted subject. The subject no longer
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inserts herself into a sign-system in order to establish meaning, but emerges from within the architectural series by a production of singular effects, in a series with which she lies on a continuum. It is an agencement or subject-arrangement that ensues—whereby the conuence of effects is non-programmatic, and the interpretive apparatus of subjects under the spell of linguistic or noetic factors is shut down.
This does not mean that there are no longer signications or fantasies, only that these spectral images function on the level of a secondary subjectivity— effects which adhere to a personal history, to a subject who decodes architecture, and forms architectural projections, excuses, hallucinations, and so forth. This secondary schema includes the residual effects of individuated consciousness and all of the specular forms the real world takes under the inuence of attenuated psychic states (neurotic or otherwise). To embrace the real in this manner means to leave behind the pathologies of the subject. Notwithstanding this break with traditional epistemology, impersonal effects are phenomenological insofar as they situate the architectural encounter as the locus of subjectivity. The theoretical and linguistic treatises of the twentieth century concerned with signs (semiotics, structuralism proper, etc.) might all broadly be said to have understood perceptual and empirical cognition as the primary eld of architecture’s subject-production—its site of interpretation as well as its often grotesque ideological instrumentalization—bracketing the form of subjectivity that is pure thought or idealism as such. Phenomenology, the critical austerities and negative contortions of the Venice School, and the various regionalisms or vernacular biases, on the one hand, and postmodern historicism, poststructuralist semiotics, and textuality, on the other, are necessary starting points for situating and qualifying an architectural theory of effects. The key gures in the architectural-theoretical axis appropriating phenomenology toward architectural criticism include the Norwegian theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz (in the 1970s and 1980s) and the French philosopher and historiographer Gaston Bachelard (in the 1930s through the 1950s, and rediscovered in the 1960s and 1970s). There are also the later architectural movements surrounding Aldo Rossi (primarily in the 1970s) and Bernard Tschumi (especially in the 1980s), and their respective conceptions of forms of subjectivity entailed in the architectural event and the city. In Norberg-Schulz’s phenomenological project, meaning is what structures the architectural encounter and and permits it totobeexpression read—viz.,inthere is a self-organizing latency that both inhabits comes all architectural forms, 32 including settlements or cities, in built form. In this sense, architecture’s purpose is to visualize the distinct character, or what he calls the genius loci of a site, making that expressive mysteriousness of place evocative and self-evident through the manipulation of a series of discrete environmental elements: for example, mountain, river, plain, or forest. These primordial impersonal effects come to be expressed via a number of incorporations, many of which remain subliminal, lending a city or town a hidden complicity with that which has often been erased
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or subsumed over the course of settlement. Architecture creates meaning for the individual subject for whom a series is crystallized, or, in other words, made into an image, and the architecture is rendered an agent, a conduit for information that is otherwise imperceptible, if not abstract. Architectural form materializes the genius loci and converts it into an image to be decoded by the subject. The critical term genius loci is understood by Norberg-Schulz as architecture’s dialectical other; he claims “it is that ‘opposite’ man has to come to terms with, to be able to dwell.” 33 In the model of effects, the architectural series is not a Heideggerian gathering or containment of a prescribed ‘outside,’ but a creative seaming together of point effects. Rather than producing meaning for an inert, constituted subject, a Deleuzian architectural subjectivity is wholly immanent to the architectural series itself. The phenomenological excess of the landscape does not so much gure in the production of that agency as it shapes that agency after the fact, whereby the genius loci (whether or not it even exists) might be converted into an architectural condition atop the purely phenomenal affectivity of impersonal effects. Because the idea of genius loci has often been criticized as an anthropomorphic projection of human agency into the landscape, it registers as an example of the fantastic elements that circle pure agency ( objet petit a). If it is truly real (or of the real), it is part and parcel of the operation of incorporating impersonal effects. As such, it need not be addressed directly. If, however, it is phantasmatic, it returns only insofar as the subject brings it back to the new subjective eld formed by the architectural encounter, effectively re-imagining it as surplus affect. Yet genius loci, in its architectural incorporation, and while arguably anchored to an actually existing place, is an impersonal power, detached from any particular body or construction, expressed as a singular “emission” of autonomous elements. Norberg-Schulz describes genius loci as the unique “character”—what he also calls the Stimmung (mood)—of an environment, prior to it being visualized and converted into physical form. Its detached characters (mountain, plain, forest) are clearly effects or agencements (arrangements). “Character changes with the seasons, is mutable, is particular to the landscape, etc.”34 It begins to suggest, rather than an environment with which the architecture exists in a representational schema, the conception of architecture as a exible component that enters into a mobile series with other elements. But in terms of impersonal effects, the Stimmung, if real, would not form “a background to acts and occurrences”35 proper, but rather be granted the facility to act(to of its own accord toward was embedded in its autonomous agency enclose, to delimit, to whatever traverse, end etc.). Genius loci, for this reason, remains outside the primary address of impersonal effects: either before it, as the shadow of a primordial, predetermined whole forming worlds; or in excess of it, as phantasmatic surplus consistent with the remnants of symbolic and discursive orders within the subject’s psyche. For Bachelard, architecture is something that shelters or hides meaning and human values below its surface, within its constructive order. Similarly, in many instances of Barthes’s Mythologies, this hiding confers on cultural systems a
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fugitive discursive order that improperly informs subjects or waylays them en route to integration in a paradigmatic order.36 Here, in many senses, we see the demented side of high structuralist readings of “place.” However, Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace (The Poetics of Space)37 also hints at a schema of effects in its dialogue with literature and the “detached image,” both of which he endows with an affective power and, in this sense, understands to have the status of free subjectivity. For Bachelard, the aesthetic image, the phrase, the verse, or the stanza … must be “seized with its unique reality.” 38 He implores us to “take the image in its very being.”39 But whereas Bachelard conceives of the image as the product of a consciousness which constitutes it—this being the axiomatic essence of phenomenology—impersonal effects or part-subjects constitute subjectivity directly and not through the circuit of representational orders. What Barthes and Bachelard provide, en route to later exiting this very conundrum (after providing a metacritique of associational consciousness), is a phenomenology of the image with its constituted consciousness at the center of an aesthetic system, alien to an impersonal subjectivity. But the consciousness of the image, to use Bachelard’s poetic phraseology, “shimmers” from beneath his phenomenological analysis. What emerges is the thinking toward a potent, autonomous image with its own facility to produce; in other words, the beginning of an effects schema. These earlier phenomenologies of architecture popular in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and eventually losing ground in the 1980s, were vindicated by a variety of new discussions in the 1980s that continued to engage the problem of meaning in architecture, each with their corresponding models of an essentially anarchic architectural subjectivity. In Rossi’s L’architettura della città (The Architecture of the City),40 the dening condition of the city is yet the mysterious agency ofgenius loci. In his version, it is the impersonal spirit or character inhabiting a place that emerges as witness to the cumulative, historical incisions made in the urban terrain over time—a form of interlocutor for the architectural assemblages and historic monuments that exist as a mnemonic tableau. Each architectural moment—fabric, landscape, or monument—is a signier or point of purchase for this dialogue, which is itself a dialogic encounter that proceeds by ts and starts. Each moment embodies the collective human will or spirit (agency) that produced it, in accord with or in opposition to the genius loci, and, when joined together in a series, gives rise to the particular urban character or mnemonic subjectivity that is its “genius of place.” Citiessubjectivities in this sense collect and synthesize discordant memories, while new architectural implanted in their midst have the ability to perform a type of reconciliation (or what Jean Nouvel would later call “acupuncture”), revitalizing distressed or discordant assemblages of architectural facts held in tension by virtue of their shared identity and place. There is also a sense in which the architecture is understood to be properly cognized in the circumambulation between points, in the circuit proper, or in the historico-existential function that is perhaps Rossi’s real site for architecture. The assimilation of the city by physically traversing its terrain (crossing a type of
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architectural eld) is dened by Rossi as the acknowledgment of something integral to cities that transcends personal or individual journeys or pilgrimages—a process that reenacts historical processes, and, counter-intuitively, contracts this temporal signature into a single present moment or image. While Rossi’s urbangenius loci is an immanent “spirit” of architecture, the schema of an effects-based impersonal subjectivity of architecture does not valorize human agency, accumulation, and cultural memory. Even Rossi’s postmodernist depiction of the urban subject remains faithful to a humanist conception of architecture at the service of an ego that is its reason for being. In the case ofcultural memory, we may be dealing with a collective ego, even a super-ego, but we are still in the realm of the cognizing subject; and forms of memory (cultural and otherwise) are, in part, invented or constructed.
The E lective Élan of Par c de la Villette A wholly different schema is proposed in Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette project, built between 1984 and 1987, a formal grid of follies, plus cultural facilities and thematic gardens built into the serpentine elevated promenade, rising up from a gestalt that generates architecture as a formal series. While in Rossi’s schema it is the postmodernist, historical subject who strings together f ragments of architectural styles across time and space, in La Villette, it is a decentered subject who inhabits the spaces between the points—a dislocated subject untethered from the logic of traditional or postmodern architectural composition. No longer at the service of a subliminal genius loci, the dehistoricized subject of La Villette (site of former slaughterhouses dating to circa 1867) submits to a formal, modernist grid drained of historical determination. The grid is an abstract machine populated by the fragmentary effects of the follies and gardens. In fact, the most common and generic maneuver of this time was to impose a grid and then deform it (or shift it in relation to other forces, which then generated a system of dislocated and often useless parts). Parc de la Villette, like other modernist and postmodernist agitations, is now ineluctably caught up in its own mytho-historical fantasies that fall like a second, invisible grid atop the rst. Ironically, designed to attempt to exclude this very historicizing process itself, Tschumi’s most famous project has suffered the fate of being reabsorbed into the architectural discourse, with permanently its diachronicsuspended bias placing the parkmachinery within the of register of transitional projects between postmodernism and the ‘now.’ 41 For La Villette, the design of the follies ( point-folies) was based on the erasure of meaning—what is, in Tschumi’ s discourse, the strident refr ain of a formalism lifted away from any programmatic base. This maneuver in literature, most famously carried off by Alain Robbe-Grillet, produces the same repetitive and often nonsensical chorus of effects. The erasure of meaning, which was part and parcel of the poststructuralist inquisition of ideation, had direct consequences
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for the form of subjectivity explored in La Villette, a dislocation and fracturing of semantic and syntactic expression inuenced by Tschumi’s collaboration with Derrida and amplied by the fact that this is a park and not a text. Given the size of La Villette—one of the largest urban parks in Europe—the expansiveness of its somewhat forlorn state further enhances the alienating effects of the affective regime deployed. 42 In La Case Vide , Derrida famously states that Tschumi’s architecture makes “a spacing” for the event; 43 it deploys the series in order to open a space for something to happen. This performance of architectural spacing or absence, he writes, “leads to a radical questioning of the concept of structure—to its decentering.” This, in essence, is Tschumi-Derrida’s conception of the decentered architectural subject—a subject not anchored to structure, to formal “presence,” but one that occurs in the in-between spaces (between subject and object in the representational corridors of a dismantled and defamiliarized grammar). 44 One can hear the deinstrumentalization of formal agency, given to literature which inects Tschumi’s architecture and Derrida’s deconstruction of texts, in the echoing spaces of La Villette. Additionally, one can see the cinematic effects of Tschumi’s appropriation of montage and mise-en-scène in the subsequent superimpositions of discordant systems over and atop the mostly destitute site in Paris’ 19th arrondissement. The spacing between the follies, plus the cinematic promenade, can be seen to be not so much a matter of formal absence as a statement about the desubjectivization of the urban subject, in Tschumi’s non-place where the subject exists only as a projection of l’absence between the follies. This thinking of a subject that is no longer constituted by named or instrumentalized processes—no longer phenomenologically conjured by way of representational systems (in parks, typically, recognizable forms of cultural anamnesis)—is, in part, the reason for La Villette’s slightly desolate condition, as it is also a result of the sheer size and location of the park. 45 Notwithstanding this progressive shift of subject-forming agencies, the impersonal effects do not leave a blank space, hole, or affective void; rather, the desubjectivization of the subject engages a new primary subjectivity in which individual consciousness becomes a positive, newly freed component or actor in a wider eld of production of forces expropriated from signifying chains. What is often missed in th e criticism of Tschumi’s grid of expansive “green non-places” is the fact that each one has 46
the potential be somethi ng else from one e to another. what separates 47 Deleuze fromtoDerrida and other theorists of tim l’absence is thatBut there is no need to decenter the subject, because to reinvoke Deleuze’s refrain, there simply is none: no subject, and, therefore, no lack or hole to ll with recuperative, therapeutic representations. Derrida, a contemporary, of Deleuze, was himself immersed in the critique of the constituted subject—an important rite of passage toward a wholly free subject for an entire generation of F rench thinkers of which Deleuze and Derrida were a part. Derrida’s “Point de folie” already reveals the desubjectivization
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of the subject toward an impersonal eld of architectural effects subject.
prior to the
And if this happens to us , we must be prepared to revive these two words … It does not happen to a constituted us, to a human subjectivity whose essence would be arrested and which would then nd itself affected by the history of this thing called architecture. What happens through architecture both constructs and instructs this us. The latter nds itself engaged by architecture before it becomes the subject of it: master and possessor.48
“Human subjectivity,” here, is derivative of an architectural historicizing process. This retrospective historical gaze rationalizes completely disparate and discordant historical singularities, or, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, it constructs a totally facetious tableau toward present ends—only interrupted in deconstructivist schemas, as the ground for such processes is erased or entirely deformed. Personal identity can only emerge as a subjective product haunted by these effects. One might even say that a defective subjective agency is formed in the crucible of the lie. For Derrida, this operative impersonal subjectivity has a circularity that makes architecture part and parcel of the production of meaning and sense; and it is meaning and sense (or non-sense) that is its “master and possessor.” Architecture remains within the haunted house of representational orders, and exchange value is what holds sway—in other words, the allegiance to Heidegger and Husserl, in which even La Villette remains self-avowedly within a discourse of textuality and hermeneutics.49 Derrida emphatically returns to the formulation of meaning via the event of the subject as it cognizes all other events from this interior maelstrom of effects, be they distended, attenuated, detached, or what have you. For this reason, deconstruction was a fun-house mirror of extended affectivity, in service nonetheless to representational orders but also to the production of a way out of the same. We can never forget that for Derrida, and the adherents of ‘textuality,’ architecture was understood to be a kind of text. The follies, he says, “deconstruct the semantics of architecture,”50 they destabilize meaning. La Villette exists as a discourse or narrative, “a narrative montage of great complexity,” 51 or that great poststructuralist montage called contextualized discursive praxis. Indeed
La Villette 52 catalyzed prolic and, after what did The Manhattan Transcripts propose aother thandiscourse; that architecture is aall, grand ction? La Villette is based, in part, on Tschumi’s book, which formed the conceptual script for his design. Tschumi says the transcripts are not supposed to represent, “they are not mimetic,”53 but “attempt to play with the fragments of a given reality.” However, such elusive works necessarily remain deconstructive operations. They propose a heterogeneous series in place of a homogeneous state, and the follies, in this sense, organize a theory of effects. But rather than mobilizing the effects as
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an individuation of material forces, Tschumi is concerned primarily with forms of semiological conict and disintegration embodied by the follies. This effectively grammatical structuralization of architectural and architectonic form has been demolished with the advent of the event as simple subjectivizing power given to the real versus the ctitious. Even in Rossi’s vision of the positive presence of urban structures, there is a dialectical struggle between the intangible, half-real genius loci and the historical forms that instantiate it. Impersonal effects, alternatively, operate at the level of presence—not absence or its analogues in distortion and dissonance. Deleuze and Guattari’s positive vision of formal agencement animates this path toward both heuristic and actually existing forms of impersonal effects. It is the former that inhabit affective territories of subjectivizing agency such as literature, art, and cinema, while it is architecture that is ‘the real thing’ and, for this reason, the most highly coveted and contested prize. The futural address of impersonal effects is to create something new, thus marking a radical shift and wholesale departure from the 1980s theorists of l’absence, where architecture’s purpose was to reproduce a lack at the center of the system, calling into doubt guration itself. This non-productive agencement approaches but stops short of engaging actually existing objects or elds of productive force. There is also an entirely compelling, literary quality to this event, while the fact that La Villette is a real park is uniquely unsettling. In Tschumi’s case, the follies are laid out in a strict grid that the subject is asked to traverse and re-cognize, and what is produced and repeated with each traversal is the formal grid which reenacts itself identically with every journey. Any existential function that might be attributed to such architecture takes place in the phenomenal interior of the solitary subject, whose role is to ll in the blanks— an automaton or cultural nomad who traces the same semiotic dissimulation ad innitum, reproducing its irrational desuetude with every journey. Architecture’s project of deconstruction argued the self-dismantling nature of structure, revealing a foundational condition (founding crime or act of primary scission) concealed or repressed within the architectural object. What emerged was an eschatological deformation—the inversion of all teleological purposes in favor of absences and echoes, whose irruptive nature was a radical and liberating force in the exegesis of Walter Benjamin (and, today, Giorgio Agamben), forever ploughed back under to generate new deformations, as if it might serve as seed for a new harvest. Deconstruction returns always to an empty srcin, a procedure sworn by 54
theofrelease of its progenitors and copyists to be its dening creative act. With impersonal effects, and the retreat from the poststructuralist project critique, something new has arrived—the suggestion of something that lies beyond such specular determinations associated with the crisis of the subject. Such a model of architecture based on wholly free material effects, while not proposing any reductive formalism, nor specic architectural outcome (utopian or otherwise), nonetheless raises mostly unanswerable questions about architectural ends. These ends, in fact, announce the end of all styles, toward the release of the purely formative ‘will to form’ secreted in architecture as a form of subjective
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agencement for architecture, and as enemy and nemesis for all manufactured chains of structural and rational aims applied to architecture. These ends come to reside uneasily in the notion of the architectural image, that merely apparent unit in the current discourse surrounding the architectural real.
Notes 1 2 3 4
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13 14 15
Michel Tournier, Friday, trans. Norman Denny (New York: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 94–6. Originally published as Vendredi, ou les limbes du pacique (Paris, 1967). Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, 1991), p. 26; See also p. 113. In Empiricism, personal subjectivity is an effect of habit and repetition. See Deleuze, Empiricism, p. 67: “The real content of causality—registered by the term “always”—cannot be constituted in experience, because, in a sense, it constitutes experience.” By encounter I mean precisely the event that captures a particular series of effects. Traditionally, the personal subject is independent of and, in some senses, antecedent to the encounter. Here, the encounter has primacy, and through it the individual subject is constructed. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, 1988). Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York, 1990). Here I cite this earlier edition of The Logic of Sense, versus the 2004 Continuum edition cited in the Introduction. Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, with the assistance of W. Horsfall Carter (Westport, 1974). First published as Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion in 1932. Cited in Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 110. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes After the Subject? (New York, 1991), pp. 95. The idea that there is “no subject” here refers to Deleuze’s critique of subjectivity based on the transcendental ego, and the “fascinated submission of psychoanalysis to the paradigm of the ‘subject.’” Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept …” in ibid., p. 94. Deleuze, Empiricism, p. 87. Bergsonism, p. 25. Deleuze, “Ideas are not the representations of objects, but rather of impressions; as for the impressions, they are not representative, nor are they adventitious; rather they are innate.” See Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 88. Ibid. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 25. Italics added. The mind is only ideas in the mind, and “we use the terms imagination and mind not to designate a faculty or a principle of organization, but rather a particular set or a particular collection.” Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, pp. 87–8.
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29
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33 34 35 36 37 38 39
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“A singularity is inseparable from a zone of perfectly objective indetermination which is the open space of its nomadic distribution.” Deleuze, Logic (New York, 1990), p. 113.” See Who Comes after the Subject?, p. 95. Deleuze, Logic (New York, 1990), p. 109. Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept … ” p. 94–5. Deleuze, Logic (New York, 1990), p. 102. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., p. 109. Deleuze, “A Philosophical Concept … ” p. 95. Deleuze, Empiricism, p. 113. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, eds Michael Hardt, Sandra Buckley, and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 2000), p. 153. Deleuze, Empiricism, pp. 132–3. See David Lynch, Mulholland Drive, DVD (2001; Universal City, California, 2002). Deleuze, Logic (New York, 1990), pp. 102–3. Deleuze, Empiricism, p. 104. In Deleuze-Hume’s usage there is a precise relation between motive and action inextricably tied to a set of circumstances. Relation, he says, is “that particular circumstance, in which, even upon the arbitrary union of two ideas in the fancy, we may think proper to compare them … Circumstance gives the relation its sufcient reason.” Ibid., p. 103. Deleuze states, “Singularities are the true transcendental events, and Ferlinghetti calls them ‘the fourth person singular.’ Far from being individual or personal, singularities preside over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a ‘potential’ which admits neither Self nor I, but which produces them by actualizing or realizing itself, although the gures of this actualization do not at all resemble the realized potential.” Deleuze, Logic (London, 2004), p. 118. The dream, for example, while dreamed, is de facto experienced as continuous by the unconscious, whose mechanism is to join the images together; yet upon awakening, one often remembers only a series of disconnected images. Daniel Sherer, “Le Corbusier’s Discovery of Palladio in 1922 and the Modernist Transformation of the Classical Code,” Perspecta 35 (2004): pp. 20–39. “The purpose of the work of art is to ‘keep’ and transmit meanings.” Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York, 1980), p. 5. Norberg-Schulz, Genius loci, pp. 10–11. Ibid., Ibid., pp. p. 8.10-11. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1979). Mythologies was rst published in Paris, by Seuil, in 1957. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York, 1964). Originally published as La poétique de l’espace (Paris, 1957). Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. xxiv. Ibid., p. xxx.
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Aldo Rossi, L’architettura della città (Padua, 1966). English edition, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA, 1982). I am aware that La Villette is seen as a cardinal point for deconstructivist postmodernism in architecture, but here I am referring to its formal and reductive intent, which remains essentially modernist in spirit. Tschumi’s great project, residing at the cusp of the end of the ‘reign of the sign,’ however discloses more than it intended; it speaks to the long-running novel that is modernist architecture and its troubled relationship to site, especially urban sites. Jacques Derrida, “Point de folie: Maintenant l’architecture,” in Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide: La Villette, 1985(London, 1986), p. 5. While walking in the park, it becomes clear the architecture lies not in the structures themselves but in the encounter of the gap, that arises in walking from one to the next. La Villette famously eviscerated such expectations for urban parks and urban subjects programmed by such parks. See Anthony Vidler, “Trick-Track,” in La Case Vide, ed. Bernard Tschumi, p. 20. The decentered subject of immanent materiality clearly transcends the personological subject, but it remains a grammatical elision leading to a type of haunting of texts and architectural forms. Derrida, “Point de folie,” p. 5. Ibid. Derrida writes: “If what happens to us thus does not come from outside, or rather, if this outside engages us in the very thing we are, is there a maintenant of architecture and in what sense [sens]? Everything indeed comes down to the question of meaning … a question of what happens to meaning … and so this is the event.” Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 11. Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts (London, 1981). Ibid., p. 8. This is intended on the level that structure always pursues its own srcin, is selfdriven, and has a creative movement, however insular or self-referential.
Chapter 3
Impersonal Effects 2
What the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indenitely into the universe. (André Bazin)1
Deleuze famously adored images. His books, Cinéma 1: L’Image-mouvement and the second volume L’Image-temps, were love letters to twentieth-century lm.2 He believed that the cinematic image could be used to reformulate philosophy, and was, importantly, involved with the circle of writers and lmmakers surrounding the Nouvelle Vague and its journal Cahiers du cinema , edited by André Bazin.3 Deleuze likened the new “image” of philosophy to the de-territorialized cinema of Jean-Luc Godard with its atemporal and disconnected spatial effects, and “rhizomatic” visual structure, where a free subjectivity could be released. Perhaps the most important thing Deleuze absorbed from the French New Wave was the realist lm theory of Bazin, with whom Deleuze held an avowed allegiance; and, the Bazinian conception of the cinematic image as not a picture or representation, of something else, but a lucid entity that exists at the level of presence like a color or a movement. An exploration of European and American cinema and architecture, at the horizon of the real, brings us into contact with what I call an effects-image (that is, the stream of effects) produced in the architectural encounter—and which subsists in varying states according to the degree of the indiscernibility of the subject in the image, and the autonomization of the effects-image as it comes to life.4 To be clear, in a realist account of lm, the production of subjectivities and events in a lm are seen to be real. This is not an amplication of a projected reality; according to André Bazin, cinema participates at a higher level of reality— it is a privileged form of reality. 5 What is real is the unwitting movement-toaffect by the architectural effects in lm (and no less in life); that is, the affective situation established in the compressed space of the cinema, and the determinate effects which arise in the cinematic encounter itself. The effects-image invokes parallel realities, in atoprocess that is wholly radical, given its intensity unnerving propensity formulate worlds. Its promise is to liberate new formsand of subjectivity; its curse, its misappropriation to hijack subjects. In screening architecture’s own fascinated history with the cinema, from postwar to late-modern and the contemporary historical moment, architecture has long turned its gaze from the glare of what is real in the cinema, eliding the realist account of the architectural image, in favor of the formalist lm avantgarde. From Sergei Eisenstein, the architect-turned-lmmaker and father of the Soviet montage movement in the 1920s—who famously compared the Acropolis
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to a cinematic sequence6—to Le Corbusier’s friendship and collaborations with Eisenstein, and the lm he co-directed with Pierre Chenal to advance the Villa Savoye; and, later, Bernard Tschumi’s own extension of the cinema in architectural works to manipulate “sequences” and cinematic “superimpositions” in space— the cinematic image has been singularly deployed in this internal architectural trajectory as an analogy for formal progression in space and the enactment of the modern and postmodern subject. 7 Notwithstanding its denitively formalist srcins, Eisenstein and Vertov used montage as a means of emphasizing the revolutionary subject (the non-individual, collective force of multiple frames of reference); and Tschumi’s architecture, both then and now, as seen in the striking Acropolis Museum, develops a different time or amplied sense of reality; it is its own “pure cinema.” Looking, elsewhere, to the contemporary literature on architecture’s presence in lms, the architectural image has been forever rendered a metaphor for human subjectivity (and this problem goes well beyond the architectural academy). Consider the Architectural Design Proles, AD: Architecture and Film I and II, published between 1994 and 2000. 8 In these collected essays, architecture is either a symbol for the psychological states of individual characters (as in the essay on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion 9), or it is a character in the lm that exposes the madness of a culture, town or community 10—its own madness is never posited. In the essay on Playtime, Meantime, and La Haine, the modernist housing block is given as an enemy called to account for its reductions and complicity in the production of poverty and alienation.11 Ironically, the closest architecture comes to constituting its own independent subjectivity in such contemporary lm is in the genre of disaster movies. But here again the impersonal agency is converted into psychoanalytic projection, a personal terrorism or apocalypse to render planet earth a wasteland. Oddly, modernism was not always caught on this reef of purely negative or symbolic substitution. In the 1920s, for example, architecture in lm entered into a proto-anarchic relationship to the anticipation of worlds through expressionist lm.12 If Eisenstein, in the late 1930s, was obsessed with the cinematic perambulations of the human body in physical space; for the German art historians Herman G. Scheffauer and Erwin Panofsky in the 1920s, the new realism of cinematographic space revealed the camera’s power to convert space itself into a moving body. 13
Its confrontation withthethe real and self-movement of space, Panofsky’s account, engendered reality of a the spatial effects mechanism. Theinpoint here is not to valorize any naked realism among the early German genres. The famously stylized lm set in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari14 typically associated with expressionism wields a palpable architectural subjectivity despite or precisely because of its stylistic irreality. It is the affective realism in the early German cinema that is at stake and not the irreality of any style or architectural set. A possible reading of this early German discussion is the birth of an impersonal subjectivity of matter, undisguised in lm from 1920 onward. Even
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if not stated explicitly, it exists de facto, both within the wild panorama of the genre as affective entity and the discourse that surrounds it—the same affective regime that animates much of German aesthetic theory of the late 1920s admired by Deleuze and Guattari.15 Nevertheless, the central object of early German cinema, starting from the late nineteenth century, is the privileging of pure space and ipso facto the modern conception of subjectivity devoted to its relationship with space as other (subjectobject). Indeed, this early discussion and experimentation with lm has been situated as the platform for the very denition of modernism.16 What ensues from this remarkable discovery, enabled by the traversing of two disciplinary codes, and what can scarcely be concealed or separated from the early lm discussion of architectural space, is the necessary blurring of subject and object toward something entirely repressed; namely, the free subjectivization of architectural space without recourse to metaphor, typology, or re-instrumentalizations of capital. Asking after the real image of effects, as autonomous architect ural subjectivity, to put it in Deleuze’s terms, is tantamount to asking, what does it do? This is because image does not refer to the concatenation of components into a new constituted whole; rather, the effects-image is the way in which architectural effects are set into motion—it is the way the singularities repeat themselves, and imagine a future.
Close-U p E ffects
In Ingmar Bergman’s Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly),17 we see Karin touch a wall; a moving reection of water appears on a square region of patterned wallpaper, and the pattern starts to react to her touch, as if the fabric separates from the wall the moment Karin herself begins to separate, to fragment. The wallpaper shimmers in the moving pattern of water, and the touch of a surface becomes the affective singularity for the discovery of schizophrenia. The close-up does not refer to a single-point perspective or view; rather, what is close up are the effects themselves in relation to each other. Film then functions not to reproduce a literal close-up image with the movements of the camera; what -image. The image enlarges is close up is not a formal entity enlarged, but an effects
in a small region of paper: a touch, a pattern of of light, paisley fabric, wonderment, the voices in the wall, the moment submission, etc.18 the look of It is precisely the architectural close-up, by isolating the event of contact between a character and an architectural series, that makes manifest a blurring of subjectivity, Karin’s discovery that her subjectivity is not an individuation, an occupation of space, but emerges from the very materiality of the effects-image. It is no accident Deleuze considered the lm close-up to be the exemplar of what he called the “affection-image;” what it renders up close is the affective merging of subject and object. In the Movement-Image Deleuze says:
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Affection is what occupies the interval.… It surges in the center of determination, that is to say in the subject, between a perception which is troubling in certain respects and a hesitant action. It is a coincidence of subject and object, or the way in which the subject perceives itself, or rather experiences itself or feels itself ‘from the inside.’ 19
But in this case, it is not from any phenomenal interior that Karin feels. Rather, it is strangely from inside the wallpaper that she suspects herself, in another reality, as a choir of mufed voices emanates seemingly from behind her touch, beckoning her to join them on the other side. The wall close-up draws the character in, and thereby “suspends individuation”20—but not in the obvious sense that Karin cannot speak. For Karin, it is the unspeakable itself—‘Where am I behind the wall?’— and the lure of the unknown—‘What happens next?’—that the image captures, that grips her. The moment of decompensation is not a climax; rather, it signies a strange future, something else that cannot be fathomed. The architectural close-up departs from Deleuze’s thinking on the lm closeup which turns on the human face. According to his concept of visagéité , or “faceication,” 21 when the human face is zeroed in on by the camera, it becomes anonymous or “dehumanized.” Deleuze admired Bergman’s thesis regarding the close-up: “Our work begins with the human face.… The possibility of drawing near to the human face is the primary srcinality and the distinctive quality of the cinema.” A character has abandoned his profession, ren ounced his social role; he is no longer able to, or no longer wants to communicate, is struck by an almost absolute muteness; he even loses his individuation. 22
In the architectural close-up what takes place, rather, is an architectural faceication, where the architectural visage, the surface of encounter, is subjectivized and incorporates the individual subject. Here, close-up means the architectural subjectivity itself isolated and laid bare as the features of a face. For Deleuze, the human face is it self already a close-up, prior to any movements of the camera, because of the anonymous power of its features, its effects, which endow it with the character of bringing near. The architectural close-up envelops the entire psychokinesthetic situation between subjectintends and thein material encounter. Its visuality is “haptic” in the sense thatthe Deleuze his discussion of Riegl, for whom haptic “does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulll this nonoptical function.”23 This “close-vision-haptic space” that Deleuze discovers in Riegl can be likened to the effects of Villa Savoye, whose architectural subjectivity is a visual blanket which envelops one’s body. It might be called a surround sight. In Barton Fink, this process of faceication begins when the eponymous Fink attempts to x a dripping section of wallpaper back onto a hotel wall that drips
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and sweats, colonizing his subjectivity.24 To be clear, the close-up is irreducible to a psychological fantasy or projection; neither is the image a mirroring of my subjectivity, or the codication of subjectivity within a space that stares back at me like Lacan’s “sardine can,”25 or what Sartre called the “look” in Being and Nothingness.26 The architectural effects-image departs from the “gaze,” the Lacanian dialectic of looking and being looked at—a re-stylization and extension of the mirror stage that rst produces a subject. Subjectivization is a real event, and the close-up produces a corporeal entity. Deleuze restates the Hungarian lm theorist Béla Balázs’s position: “the [lm] close-up does not tear away its object from a set of which it would form part, of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal 27 The wall objet, as in coordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity.” Bergman, is introduced to the audience asa new character, but it does not actin the lm like the other characters—it hovers above Fink and has primacy precisely in its status of detachment. When Fink merges with the wall, there is an attenuation in power, an affective transition in the situation of bodily disgust, which Deleuze, in his reading of Spinoza, called the “affectus.”28 Fink loses autonomy (he is unable to write), while the paper gains a palpable power; this result of the affective transaction DeleuzeSpinoza called the “affectio.” The close-up of Fink is not primarily about a look but about getting one’s hands wet. Whereas the ‘‘regard xe’’ is frozen in its paranoiac oscillation between subject and object, the close-up blurs this distinction in the exchange of bodily states and uids. If, for Husserl, perception involves an unwitting grasping or reaching out for a real object to produce meaning here, the self-movement of the effects-image reaches out for a real subject—because itcan. It connects a person watching the lm in a series with effects inside the lm which constitute a real subject-production in relation to the viewer, who becomes a part-subject. (While the effects emitted include fantasy, interpretation, and other effects that circulatearound the close-up— glue-yellow-dripping, and sweat-otherness-disgust—the close-up is irreducible to any overarching structuralist system.)
Withdr awn Effects 29
In last scene ofvilla Michelangelo Antonioni’ a girl, Daria, stares Point at atheWrightesque in the desert outsides Zabriskie Los Angeles until it blows itself up; the same shot is then repeated in a series of mysterious slow-motion explosions. The image unable to satisfy itself or reach its goal must replicate itself, machinegun like, to pursue its effects. The initial explosion sequence causes the screen to slowly ll with debris, with furniture and other ying pieces from inside the villa, a spatial and temporal ‘blow-up’ shot in slow motion to the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd. The audience is taken inside the explosion in what is a blurring of the effects-image itself.
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If the close-up elaborated earlier is distinct, assertive, and successful, there is concealed within it another type of image that it strains to avert: a less sure image, which falters or blurs in its ascent.It is not always clear what the image wants. The uncertainty of this image, as will be seen, is none other than a necessary confusion between the individual subjectivity it engulfs, and the rise of a free impersonal subjectivity. Antonioni’s vast effects-image not only takes in the audience, but Daria—who is supposed to have catalyzed it—and everything else. Yet given the hazy contours of lm, one does not quite know whether the explosion mobilizes itself or takes place, instead, in Daria’s mind.As the explosion prolongs itself, through slow-motion and seriality, the character undergoes a manifest disappearance in what is a confusion of agency and erasure of identity. Even if she did fantasize the explosion, or organize it for real, she is what Deleuze might have called a vanished character in “any-space-whatever.” The affect, rather than grafting itself on to the subject—like the wallpaper close-up inBarton Fink—is here withdrawn, concealed in the very process by which it absorbs and de-territorializes the subject. Here Antonioni is staging the same disappearance of the subject he used in L’avventura.30 Deleuze favored Pascal Augé’s term espace quelconque(“any-space-whatever”) to describe the “emptied spaces” of an extinct personal subjectivity. But it could be argued that in any-space-whatever, the personal subjectivity is only extinct insofar as she is absorbed into the eld of subjectivization. For Deleuze, absorption in espace quelconque means literally “an effacement,” yet we might say that in the effects-image absorption is production. While the close-up is accomplished via surfaces that colonize the character from the outside by emitting effects, in the architectural space of pure withdrawal we could say the effects-image engulfs all other effects in order to produce a situation of what I call withdrawn affect. Any-space-whatever produces affect precisely by its mechanism of withdrawal. In Cinema 1, Deleuze examines the movement from the close-up (or the “affection-image”) in Bergman to the “faceless” emptied spaces of Antonioni, such as the desert.31 In Zabriskie Point, however, it is not Antonioni’s desert, a pure annulment that is any-space-whatever, but the positive effects-image of the explosion itself—its vacuum. Inside the space of the explosion, there is little difference between a table leg and a human one, between burning plastic and a television. Here the effects-image withdraws all, but only to produce something new, anextinction “amorphous which has eliminated whichespace happened and acted in it. 32 It is an or aset disappearing.” Deleuzethat imagines quelconque thus: The amorphous set in fact is a collection of locations or positions which coexist … independently of the connections and orientations which the vanished characters and situations gave to them…. The any-space-whatever retains one and the same nature: it no longer has coordinates, it is a pure potential, it shows only pure Powers and Qualities, independently of the states of things or milieux which actualize them.33
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The close-up event of the explosion in the calm gaze of a university student only retains the loose effects stripped of their former organization. In the desert, Daria is a student radical, estranged; but while the explosion unravels, she is no one. The moral of Zabriskie Point , if there can be one, is that submission to Death Valley is insufcient. To mobilize a radical agenda, to forget one’s bourgeois individuality, to lose one’s self, something has to be made —or, in this case, blown up. Antonioni’s lms circle around this same problem, as they sweep moodily over an array of modernist villas, new towns, and industrial estates. The trilogy, L’avventura (The Adventure), 34 La notte (The Night), 35 and Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert) 36 are suffused with the effects and withdrawn image of early1960s subjectivity that An tonioni was attempting to make visible. An architectural work of this order—575 Broadway , Rem Koolhaas’s SoHo Prada store in New York—exerts its own impersonal subjectivity by producing a powerful feeling of absorption. The entire set of effects (what Deleuze might call the “expressed” effects of architecture), rather than being “reected,” is withdrawn into a blur of soft, hazy surfaces and theatrical communal spaces. The surfaces of 575 Broadway induce a negative pull, drawing one inside them, in what can be described as a ‘dulling,’ whose withdrawn character owes itself to the spongy materials and blurry detailing of the store. Unlike the traditional hard and reective surfaces of deluxe emporia (polished granite, brass, or glass), the surfaces of 575 Broadway are soft, porous, and non-reective. Even the metallic panels are matt or perforated, and what rst appears to be solid turns out to be foam, fabric, and drapery. The whole ensemble, as Prada agship boutique, dissolves—just like the wicked witch of the West melts into the oor. Consider by contrast the surface quality of Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion: the glossy onyx and mirror-like chrome columns that capture reected views of the interior. The impersonal effects of 575 Broadway are no longer a unitary house of mirrors, as the Miesian villa or skyscraper, but the inverse: anti-reective, dissembling, and withdrawn. Entering the store from the back stair at Mercer Street, one sees the mirrored reection of a three-foot-high timber partition in the distance, and a grey metallic vertical member somewhere in front of the panel, perhaps a duct or a column. Walking over to the stair one nds the huge timber skate-valley that lls the room and sometimes carries shoes. What one sees is not a reection, but the upturned wooden oor curving away. Moving around the valley, it becomes apparentcylindrically that what appeared be a (courtesy duct or column is Blaisse) a chain-mesh drapery hanging from the to ceiling of Petra and falling away behind the hill. This proliferation of surface effects leads to a heightened sense of dissolution of normative architectural syntax. Like so many of Koolhaas’s projects (the Wizard of Prada), the parts are never stitched into a whole but oat within the necessary frame, distorting reality. The architect’s axonometric speaks a cogent formal arrangement—a doubleheight space delineated by the cut-away valley, the narrow mezzanine walkway, and cylindrical elevator mass, etc.—while the experience itself is of a total loss
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of space, zero coordinates, a liquefaction of edges and boundaries. 37 The street overhead is transparent to those inside, recalling the May 1968 Situationists: Sous les pavés, la plage! (beneath the paving stones—the beach!) but recast here: under the paving stones—the store? The intoxication of this space lies in the liquefaction and giddiness of surfaces accessed visually, but felt intensely, as vertigo, distraction, disorientation. Unlike the close-up in cinema, which colonizes the character, here the effectsimage produces a more subtle attenuation of power; where one becomes alien to one’s self, merging helplessly with the architecture. Koolhaas explains the “psychological” functions of his projects for Prada: As the noise level increases (see Times Square), the demands on our nervous systems … accelerate. The ultimate luxury is focus and clarity. Museums are popular, not for their content, but for their lack of … you go, you look, you leave. No decisions, no pressure. Our ambition is to capture attention and then, once we have it, to hand it back to the consumer.38
But one might say that the customer’s attention isn’t pursued so much as the customer’s disappearance into the architecture. Unlike the over-determined spaces of the American shopping mall, where signs and objects loudly compete for attention, what causes distraction here is the tacit seduction of surfaces that are almost not there. There are few options in the store and little merchandise on display. So it is not the clothing but the architecture that mesmerizes through the dissolution of the self that “attends,” the self that can be “commanded.” Luxury here is over-attention. It could be read alternately as an attempt to produce the ideal disinterested consumer, one that might nd themselves in a ‘Prada State of Mind’ (a de luxe, minimalist state of mind), willing to return one day for that one over-priced Prada garment that will complete the resubjectivization underway. It is not only the customer who is consumed in this immersive environment. Here the architecture as “over-desiring production” subsumes the clothing, too, the latter rendered surplus value of the architecture. The fashionable Prada clothes and Prada accessories remain understated, under-determined, understocked and unremarkable. While there is a simple, unitary system of circulation conforming to real building codes, 575 Broadway does not appear to dictate any paths within or exact of egress. formal diagrams, conguration of seemingly objects andindeterminate volumes is clearlypoints expressed in theThe published while in actual experience. One of the surprisingly formal objects is the cylindrical elevator, which appears in this blurry space to be too articulate—and thus almost articial or irreal. With no substantive background to foreground itself against, its intersection with the ground plane seems exaggerated, almost on the wrong side of signication. The srcinal 2 × 4 39 wallpaper, a black and white mural, no longer exists. It consisted of a series of large repeating black smudges stretched across the
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entire 200-foot length of the inner wall, and was vaguely reminiscent of Warhol’s Flowers series (1970). But these graphic smudges present more of an aftertaste of Warhol, the expressive effects of the ower image partly forgotten—a Rorschachtest blot that refers almost only to itself. It may have once been a proper ower pixilated to be rendered unreadable. Almost … but it remains on the side of the effects, not signication. The close-up and the withdrawn image oscillate between surface and depth, enacted and reenacted in the desubjectivization of the subject. While the closeup surface undermines deep space as it grafts itself onto the character, the withdrawn images of 575 Broadway and exploded effects of Zabriskie Point oat anonymously in any-space-whatever, pulling the subject into its world across multiple time frames and registers of disconnected effects.
Archi tectur e as Pure Im age Within a given plane, I no longer know if I’m looking at the virtual image or the real image. If I look at the façade … I can’t tell if I’m looking at the reection of the sky or the sky through the glass.… If I look at a tree through the three glass planes, I can never determine if I’m looking at the tree through the glass, in front of it, behind it, or the reection of the tree. (Jean Nouvel) 40
In 2002, Jean Nouvel called for a “pure architectural image” in The Singular Objects of Architecture,41 instantly recalling the postwar cinematic movement and idea of the pure cinema—which, put simply, argues for the primacy of the cinematic image over narrative or exposition proper—or, image as instrumentality.42 Nouvel’s pure image internalizes this cinematic discourse après la lettre just as it evokes Deleuzian desubjectivization and Deleuze’s dialogue of postwar “pure cinema,” drawing it in as if it were in the air. But the idea of a pure architectural image already declares an allegiance with Deleuze, if only because Deleuze was drawing his conceptual apparatus from the same cultural ether. The famous blurring of the formal limits of the architecture in the Fondation Cartier, for example, built between 1991 and 1994, and in the Tour Sans Fins, intended for the La Défense district in Paris but never executed, serves to highlight what is arguably the real production in Nouvel’s work, a proliferation of effects—and theSans primacy Nouvel’s Tour Fins,ofispure rstimage. and foremost a positive effects-image. The proposed building was to be dark at the base—placed in a black-lined moat— becoming progressively lighter and lighter toward the top, until it merged with the clouds. While Nouvel claimed that he was attempting to embody disappearance in architecture, the reverse might be true; viz., the architecture reinhabits or reorients itself in getting lighter and lighter, and, by that very fading away, fullls its own image. Where the glass becomes transparent, the effects-image is amplied—even distended.
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In Nouvel, the effects-image comes into focus wherever formal articulation is undermined, distorted, or cloned, to interrupt the image of a complete architectural object. This is the image of modernity—of seriality, obsessive detailing, and modern renement—for which the architect is known, plus something else eating away at that very modernity. Nouvel’s work is not about concealment or magic, as has been proposed, but rather a willful short-circuiting of the modernist agenda. It is this character of the effects-image that singularizes the Tour Sans Fin, what gives it its mystery, and the introduction within his modernist palette of tools for destroying closure that marks his most ingenious projects, such as Anděl in the working-class district of Smichov in Prague, where an angel (Bruno Ganz), clouds, and snippets of Czech poetry oat across the pristine façade. The fading-away effect captures what is general and immortal in the series itself, lending to the architecture its character or vividness. What is at stake is the articulation of an ‘it series,’ the pure anonymity of repetition, which the fadingeffect breaks open and plunders. Then there is the effects-image achieved through façade—façades that are independent of formal totalité and that are each assigned a peculiar affective facility. To encircle the Institut du Monde Arabe(Arab World Institute) one’s desire for form or gravitas remains unrequited; sheet-like and mysterious, the building provides two autonomous façades. The famous side, a highly rened grid of optical lenses, stands opposite the curved façadewhich runs along the Seine and has, etched into its glass, images of Viollet-le-Duc’s drawn sections of the gothic cathedral of Notre Dame. Notwithstanding this whimsicality, the Arab World Institute is highly organized, because it controls and organizes the architectural image, irrespective of any formal logic given to modernism. All this is accomplished by drawing together a series of effects into an abbreviated plane in which the series coheres. Such works operate on a level of ongoing selection for the capture of detached, free-oating components of the encounter. A certain cinematic consciousness is required. For an architect to control and modulate such effects demands an approach to composition that actually negates the normal architectural outcome of building types. The modernist image of articulation, seriality and resoluteness, whether functional or typological, isreplaced by a dispersed arrangement of vague parts. Against the protocols of such architectural composition, impersonal effects engage and deploy the pure image, which grafts itself onto the viewer to generate wholly new, unseen, and unheard-of effects. In the case the of Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, doesarchitecture not know where exactly reected tree or building is, itwhile couldthe be spectator said that the 43 just as the afrms more than it knows. “The façade is larger than the building,” architecture extends beyond itself in order to capture effects from the sky and elsewhere. It is what Bergson calls “duration,” a virtual space in which the partimages, or effects circulate freely: Duration is not merely lived experience, it is also experience enlarged or even gone beyond; it is already a condition of experience. For experience always
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gives us a composite of space and duration.… We are thus able to ‘preserve’ the instantaneous states of space and to juxtapose them in a sort of ‘auxiliary space.’44
Importantly, the effects-image is indivisible into its component effects. 45 Deleuze quotes Hume’s example, that a grain of sand is logically divisible into many parts but the idea of a grain of sand “is not distinguishable, nor separable into twenty, much less into a thousand, or an innite number of different ideas”46 In Nouvel, thus, the reection of the tree and all its iterations form a single image. Its coherence depends on its aftereffects (the affective changes in state of the bodies involved)—what it produces and promises, what reality the image evinces. As Deleuze says in Foucault , the rule for the “catalytic” effect to release a free subjectivity, is to separate itself from the “code,” “and no longer have an internal dependence on it.” 47 It is t he technology of a dissident effect that permits the image to subsume the protagonist and everything in its path. In Nouvel it is through the ‘cut,’ where the tree appears inside his building, that an architectural image is formed.
The Winning Image
Jacques Tati’s Playtime, almost devoid of dialogue, consists of an unforgettable sequence of images of modern architecture. There is the vast opening shot of the airport interior, the exhibition room of modern appliances, the high-rise apartment interiors naked to the outside world, and the brute surveillance of the impersonal city through the naïve, curtainless (transparent) curtain wall. Tati’s polite satire, and the preliminary image-series of a facile modernist order, is terminated in the nal restaurant scene, a sustained pandemonium culminating in the ceiling being torn down, several explosions, and the smashing of the glass entry (on Hulot’s head as he enters). Here is a pure effects-image that has won out over all the others, and reveals at once a war that has been quietly progressing from the start of the lm, between the dimensionless images of modernity and the subjects rendered its polite extras, in a surface world they glide across without ever touching. 48 Playtime is not a satire about the aesthetics of modern architecture, but a war of images and
theirSelf-consumed inherent subject-production. by an image-tired culture, the effects-image in Tati is one literally exhausted of space—space here meaning that mysterious site for the production of modern images. Unlike the modernist image which connes and paralyses in its dull reproduction of space, the effects-image destroys the structural envelope of the lm frame or room, in its break with the dominant image-series of Playtime. The group crammed into the bar-restaurant joyously pull down the ceiling panels as this closing image tears through the restaurant like a wildre, overtaking the dominant image series that preceded it.
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The captive subjects of modern architecture rebel against Playtime’s image regime (a spatial organization and plan), no longer contained within the image but released from it like projectiles, as part-subjects who together will partake in a future image that is already underway. Subjectivization is war. For Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, it is the usurpation of a tree (reputedly planted by Chateaubriand) from outside the building and
its spectral reemergence inside that installs the effects-image of the reective architectural screen. The empty courtyard, in turn, marks the paradoxical state of the triumphant effects-image relying on the subsumption of all other effects. In Playtime, the demolition of an interior is a sole oceanic “wave” that, like Deleuze’s analogy in The Fold “‘excels’ over the others and comes to 49 The pandemonium in consciousness,” the others being only nascently perceived. Playtime cancels out all the other images and, as voyeurs, we accept Tati’s premise insofar as we nd this nal image cathartic. It is as if, captured by a particular subject-production that grafts itself on to our ownunderstanding and experience of the city, we are momentarily de-subjectivized, deep inside the image.
The Im age is Not a Ph otogra ph
This effects-based model of image as production, brings into focus emerging discussions of ‘effect’ in current architectural debate, as they reject the epistemology of the postwar architectural image. Nonetheless, the effects-image distinguishes itself from two enduring typologies of image in contemporary architectural discourse: the image as photograph and the image as sign . These two models can be seen to emerge out of a broader set of discussions in architecture traceable to Walter Benjamin and the abiding problems of reproduction and representation, respectively concerned with the material production of architecture, and its dissemination through the media. For Benjamin the power of the photographic (camera) close-up is to reveal new modes of the subject; but in his account, which is deeply rooted in concepts of authenticity (counter to the realist method in the project here), a photograph is always “depreciated”; and what is “jeopardized,” is “the authority of the object.” 50 The effects-image of architecture, turns away from the “mediatic” image as formulated by Beatriz Colomina in Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media ,51 one of whose principal arguments, following Benjamin, is that the media image takes one away from the srcinal experience of architecture, from reality. The status of the effects-image being advanced here, however, should be understood as equivalent to that of the Lacanian “Real”, retained by Deleuze and Guattari, before its conversion into the circuit of reproduction and representation (the world of culture and signication or what Lacan called the “Symbolic”). The power of the architectural photograph, therefore, with its own unique phenomenology and generative power, is possible precisely because of
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the primary architectural image prior to any constituted image or spectator. The Deleuzian real survives all incorporations. This holds true as well for ‘unreal’ mediatic work, insofar as the drawings, images, models, and such already inhabit a milieu that sustains them. The so-called avant-garde is yet to learn this unpleasant fact of architectural life, and the neo-avant-garde has more or less simply absorbed the entire futility as a surplus affect (a resigned position vis-àvis the loss of any potential for architecture as media image to have any concrete effect whatsoever). The architectural encounter is already a machine for producing architectural images in situ; a pure phenomenality that stitches together architectural effects mobilized as immanent subject-production. The seamlessness of spatial experience is a construction in the real, yet it proceeds against the grain, even seemingly backward, to normative means of representing and effectuating architecture. The effects-image is, and remains, the primary experience of architectural subjectivity. In this sense, the photograph merely indexes the same in a semi-static form—and, in turn, mistakenly attributes its own formal agency to the ‘subject’ of architecture. What gives a Loos interior its quality of pure image? The living room in the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung interior analyzed by Colomina coheres as an indivisible set of effects. In Loos, the furniture is no longer contingent, but necessary, and the image printed in our minds just as the furniture clings to the structure. Similarly, in the Müller house, in Prague, it is the continuous surface of joinery that lends this heightened coherence to the interior where even the carpets and fabrics appear to be structural. The living room derives its power not as a construction of architectural photography—a sleight of hand, as theorists of architectural media have argued— but by the ultra-real mise-en-scène established by Loos, where, for example, simple carpets have become insistent, and the compression of space (Loos’s Raumplan) permits an entirely coherent, albeit intricate, continuous surface to override the formal apparatus of the modern architectural interior. This is not to undermine the productive power of photography to transform its objects. Indeed, Colomina argues the couches in these photographs are contrived to be as if permanently unoccupied. However, it is the photograph’s effect of capturing the empty couches in this way that reveals their own mysterious production over their visitors—they are in this sense always occupied or self-occupied. (The function of the not photograph is to enlarge what is anonymous and singular in of theindividual furniture itself, to dissemble or “jeopardize.”) It is this self-designation elements and the silent movement of an interior toward a coherence of effects that gives the interior its autonomy of image. To reassign Loos’s expression, we might say it is the architecture itself that “truly feels.”52 In Colomina’s Loos, the Müller house exerts its gaze on the interloper, a paranoid architectural subject, who in turn gazes back at the “spectacle” of the interior, a partial subject within the group subject designated its “public.” 53 If the real subjectivity of architecture for the media theorists is architectural
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representation itself, or the “context of production” (its milieu) in subjectivization there is no such context, because the site of production, to invoke Deleuze’s phraseology, is none other than the effects themselves. There is no outside because there is no distinction between singularities that come from within or from without. Subjects are not even required (subjectivization does not discriminate between a private and a public—the effects-image is ruthless). What Deleuze’s thinking accomplishes for architectural theory is exactly the shift from reproduction to pure production—to self-generated form. Hardly engendering formlessness, form can be thought of, instead, as pure immanent agency (in the Deleuzian sense of agencement ). Yet the more recent instantiations of this model are digital and remain aloof from the principal issue at stake—the ability of such architectures to produce a free subjective condition.
Th e Ima ge is Not a Sign
Roland Barthes once described the Eiffel Tower 54 as a “pure signier,” and “pure glance: it watches over all of Paris… the only way to escape its gaze is to dine in its restaurant, to be inside it.” Severed from all of Paris, it stands outside, “sovereign” of “seeing and being seen”55—because, without function, it exists as a permanent gaze, emptied of content. The Barthesian image as autonomous signier, is a pure objet , lifted from the system of all other objects; and it wallows in the tension between meaning and utility that lls its empty cage. For Barthes, architecture becomes the reproduction of a lost utility resurfaced as tyrannical signier. Similarly, for Benjamin, mechanical reproduction compensates for the loss of “aura,” which it re-territorializes in the attened surface of the modern Kunstwerk , a Deleuzian “body-without-organs” drained of its former social and religious organizational corpus.56 No longer attached to a building or even a community, reproduction re-territorializes meaning as an abstract process of repetition at the level of surface. Barthes’s Tower is an impotent gaze, watching alone—a building converted into its own ego, and thereby remaining within the orbit of the perceiver and the perceived of a classical-liberal subjectivity. In another model, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s study of commercial vernacular American architecture yielded the classic architectural image of semiotics. Learning from Las Vegas privileged iconography and signage
over yet it also rendered the highway as a and series, where signs 57 makespace; connections among many elements, far apart seen fast.”“styles Whatand separates the highway from the Eiffel Tower is that the subjective eld emerges as series and event. But in architectural subjectivization, the effects-image is impervious to communication; if anything, it withholds information or silences it. Venturi and Scott Brown were aware of the latent effects mechanism of the highway, but linguistic and iconic substances serve to dominate Las Vegas, to direct, and to discipline one’s vision on the road. 58 But this sharpens the point: it is never space per se that is dominated, but subjects. Venturi’s driver is a subject of the
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signs, and the highway bears no potential for anything altogether unique to occur. It is a programmatic strip negotiated by the captive subject of linear visuality and semiological doublings. Learning from Las Vegas celebrated the vernacular American strip at a time when the austere and abstract strictures of modernism were collapsing. It is part and parcel of that time when almost anything would sufce to turn architecture’s attention elsewhere. The effects-image is not sign-based; neither is it an end run on modernism. Its possible silencing of derivative discursive orders is part of its majestic potential for sweeping aside architectural languages per se and creating a rupture in the pervasive semio-logic that is its semiotic surface. Such a notion of pure visuality can be situated in relation to the social theorists of the image, including Baudrillard, Virilio, and Alliez, for all of whom the effects-image has a relation but is necessarily distinct. The effects-image does not reside in the “hijacking” of subjectivity by capitalist “signiers,” nor, as Alliez describes it, in the literal “capture” of the subject (as per the etymology of subject , to be literally “thrown under” or captured).59 In its worst instantiation, an image can always be seized, to discipline subjects. The effects-image, however, ultimately has the capacity to open up new forms of subjectivity and not conne, terrorize, or subjugate— though it might be employed to those ends as well. For Baudrillard, signs signify a “cultural bad conscience” in all their inauthenticity and grasping after a lost srcin, a truer time, when the object was complete and the subject secure.60 Baudrillard’s coercive image is unleashed by a virulent mass media, its “message…[is] mass consumption, spectacularization… misrecognition of the world, and the valorization of information as commodity.”61 But in subjectivization there can be no misrecognition or misinterpretation, because its task is not to signify (there is nothing to misread); and, more importantly, the effects-image does not concretize nostalgia or fantasize about the lost subject. It does not care for lost causes. In this way, it is evenly and adventitiously ‘neutral’ in terms of political, social, and economic means to ends. The later “simulacrum” further bears no relation to any reality, but is the entire circuit of simulation, in Baudrillard’s musical refrain “never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.”62 The endlessly nihilistic, poetic image determines my subjectivity in advance, and guarantees my submission to capital a fait accompli. Baudrillard’s negative vision as homage, and the appearance of a for hollowed-out copy The of Simulacra in the lm and Simulation The Matrix were this reason telltale. logical outcome for all systems of over-determined signs (codes) complicit with dematerialized subjectivity is the proverbial wasteland. 63 The effects-image mobilizes its own subjectivity via a productive eld that can yield multiple, non-programmatic, new existential horizons. It interrupts the stupeed orbit of the simulacrum, creating an optimistic window into the real, by way of subjectivization. For architecture this possible end to the suzerainty of the sign (linguistic codes) is simply unparalleled.
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Notes 1 2 3
4
5
6 7
8
9 10
11 12
13
14
André Bazin, “Painting and Cinema,” in What Is Cinema? (Berkeley, 1967–1971), p. 166. Here Bazin is opposing the frame of painting with that of cinema. Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement(Paris, 1983) and Deleuze, Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps. (Paris, 1985). Deleuze wrote the seminal essay on Godard “Three Questions About ‘Six Fois Deux,’” in Jean-Luc Godard, Son + Image 1974–1991, eds. Raymond Bellour and Mary Lea Bandy (New York, 1992). In Bazin’s view, spectators of lm encounter objects that stand in a transparent relationship with reality, and when we see an image we interact with the real object seen in it. Bazin distinguishes his conception of a “true realism” as “the need that is to give signicant expression to the world both concretely and its essence … [versus] the pseudorealism of a deception aimed at fooling the eye (or for that matter the mind).” Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, p. 12. See Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, p. 14. Here he says: “The photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being, after the fashion of a ngerprint. The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.” Sergei M. Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture,” Introduction by Yve-Alain Bois, Assemblage 10 (December 1989): pp. 110–31. The former who is programmed to realize a formal reality given in advance (Giedionian space-time); and, the latter, for whom reality is simulation or surface of inscription (Jamesonian space-time). Maggie Toy, ed., Architecture & Film, vol. 64, no. 11–12, Architectural Design Prole 112 (1994); Bob Fear, ed., AD: Architecture & Film II, vol. 70, no. 1, Architectural Design Prole 143 (2000). Roman Polanski, Repulsion, DVD (1965; UK, 2001). Tobe Hooper, Poltergeist, VHS (1982; Culver City, 1990); Stuart Rosenberg, The Amityville Horror, DVD (1979; Los Angeles, 2005); Clive Barker, Hellraiser, DVD (1987; Troy, 2007); and Bernard Rose, Candyman, DVD (1992; Culver City, 2004). Jacques Tati, Playtime, DVD (1967; New York, 2001); Mike Leigh, Meantime, VHS (1984; andofMathieu Kassovitz, VHS (1995; 1995). Haine, Vidler, For an Canberra, exhaustive1989); account this discussion, seeLa Anthony “The Paris, Explosion of Space: Architecture and the Filmic Imaginary,” Assemblage 21 (1993), was published one year before AD: Architecture and Film. See Herman G. Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” Freeman 24 (November 24– December 1, 1920). Reprinted as: Scheffauer, “The Vivifying of Space,” Introduction to the Art of the Movies, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York, 1960). Robert Wiene, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Doktor Caligari), DVD (1920; London, 2000). Panofsky argued against the unreality of decorative
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15
16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24
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lm sets, advocating rather a “confrontation with the real” by the movements of the camera itself. See Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York, 1985), p. 218. Panofsky’s essay was rst published in Princeton University’s Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology (1934). Deleuze admired the thinking of Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer, for each of whom, in his account, abstract forms wield “an intense life and expressionistic value, all the while remaining inorganic.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, 1988), p. 574, note 32. See Vidler, “The Explosion of Space,” p. 45. Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly, DVD (1961; New York, 2003). The architectural close-up extends Deleuze’s idea of the “lm close-up”—for him the exemplication of the affection-image in Cinema 1: The Movement Image—but reformulates it via the close-up surface; surface here is that of the primary, physical effect (dripping wallpaper); but it extends, more abstractly, to the entire set of disconnected surfaces whose effects collectively act upon the subject as a unity. The close-up departs from Deleuze’s conception in that it not only engages ‘narratives’ of action-reaction, subjects reacting to situations (that is, Deleuze’s “movementimages”), but it also initiates the dissolution of the subject in the image (closer to Deleuze’s “time-images”). See Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis, 1986). Deleuze’s timeimage, or the question of temporality, is therefore not at issue, because in the effectsimage it is the subjectivization of the affective surface and objects contained therein that matter—not a discussion of space, time, or movement. The architectural close-up involves a bodily situation as per the movement-image, but it begins to leak beyond this, permitting effects of memory, imagination, psychosis, and the intrusion of “pure optical and sound situations, in which the character does not know how to respond.” For Deleuze it is the time-images in which the subject-image distinction is completely eliminated, not the movement-images, where the subject still exists in a relation to the object to which she reacts. But here the subject is retained initially, precisely because the close-up raises the very problems of subjectivity peculiar to architecture; that is, those very conditions that have frequently been left out in the appropriation ofCinema 2’s time-image. See Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London, 2005), p. 261. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 67. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 101. See also Bergman, “Chacun de mes lms est le dernier,” Cahiers du cinéma 100 (October 1959): p. 50. Deleuze and Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 492–3. Joel and Ethan Coen, Barton Fink, DVD (1991; Beverly Hills, 2003).
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25
In the famous example of the shermen, Lacan is seized by a feeling of selfconsciousness the fantasy of ‘standing outside’ that causes one to be brutally watched, by that which cannot watch (the sardine can, the unfamiliar social milieu). “Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it! Well, it doesn’t see you! ” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977), p. 95.
26
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London, 1957). Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 98. Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, 1988), pp. 48–9. Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point, VHS (1970; New York, 1991). Antonioni, L’avventura, DVD (1960; New York, 2001). Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 123. Ibid. Ibid. Antonioni, L’avventura. Antonioni, La notte, VHS (1961; New York, 1998). Antonioni, Il deserto rosso, DVD; (1964; New York, 2010). See Rem Koolhaas, Jens Hommert, and Michael Kubo, eds, Rem Koolhaas: Projects for Prada, Part I (Milan, 2001). Koolhaas, “Luxury is Attention,” in Projects for Prada. 2 × 4 are the designers of the mural. Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture , trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis, 2002), p. 8. The book was based on the dialogue that took place in the Urban Passages conference in 1997 and 1998. See also “Truth or Radicality in Architecture,” in Andreas Papadakis, ed., Truth, Radicality and Beyond in Contemporary Architecture(London, 2000), pp. 6–81. Baudrillard and Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture. Examples of pure cinema are Alfred Hitchcock, Chris Marker, and Wim Wenders. I am indebted to my brother Tal Brott for his dialogue with me on this subject, and idea that the earliest pure cinema is that of Buster Keaton. See Deleuze, “On the Movement-Image,” in Negotiations, 1972–1990, p. 52. Deleuze proposes the rise of the pure image (the “time-image”) in Cinema 2, in the shift from pre-World War I to post-World War II cinema. It is “a pure optical and aural image” that creates a
27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
41 42
43 44 45 46 47
strategic and plot. disconnect between the image and the characters, threatening both characters Baudrillard, “Truth or Radicality in Architecture.” Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, 1988), pp. 37–8. Ibid., p. 27. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York, 1991), p. 91. Deleuze, Foucault, ed. and trans. Seán Hand (London, 1988), p. 101.
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48 49 50
51 52 53 54
55 56 57 58 59
60
61 62 63
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Even Hulot is an extra in Playtime. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, 1993), p. 88. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reections, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1968). Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA, 1994), pp. 246–7. Ibid., p. 64. Loos uses the expression “truly felt.” Ibid., p. 244. Roland Barthes, “The Eiffel Tower,” in The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1979). Also see: Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London, 1977), p. 15. Ibid., p. 5. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA, 1972), p. 9. Ibid. See Eric Alliez and Michel Feher “The Luster of Capital,” in Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City, eds. Sanford Kwinter, Jonathan Crary, and Michel Feher, (New York, 1986), pp. 314–59. Jean Baudrillard, The Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the Modern Object and Its Destiny, 1968–1983, trans. Paul Foss and Julian Pefanis (London and Concord, MA, 1990), p. 37. Ibid., p. 89. Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulations, ed. Jim Fleming and Sylvère Lotringer (New York, 1983), p. 11. Nouvel and Baudrillard, The Singular Objects of Architecture. In this later discussion with Nouvel, Baudrillard asks whether there is an image that can resist hyperreality.
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Chapter 4
Guattari and the Japanese New Wave
The “New Wave” was the moniker Félix Guattari guardedly1 bestowed upon a generation of Japanese architects following on the late-1950s and early-1960s metabolist movement, a loose-knit group of avant-gardists inuenced by Team X and Archigram, and including Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, and Fumihiko Maki. The late-modern metabolist vision of an organic, mega-structural city of impermanent and changing systems faded quickly with the rise of postmodernism in the early 1970s. By the time Guattari had arrived in Japan, this post-metabolist generation had already turned away from postmodernism and was, as a result, two steps removed from late modernism per se. The dominant postmodernism of 1980s Japan, with its overwhelming emphasis on semiotics, was rejected in the advanced guard of Japanese architecture in favor of the nascent models of “desire” and “desiring machines” developed from Deleuze’s writings and architectural theory at large. The idea of the “machine” among these architects was not a literal mechanical model, but, as per Anti-Oedipus, a productive, generative assemblage that works. Despite their aloofness from metabolism and Japanese postmodernism, Guattari included among the New Wave three generations of architects, including: Kazuo Shinohara; Kazuhiro Ishii, Minoru Takeyama, Hiromi Fujii, Mayumi Miyawaki, Takefumi Aida, and Team Zoo of Waseda University (Tokyo); and Tadao Ando, Kito (Monta) Mozuna, Kijo Rokkaku, and Shin Takamatsu.2 What is remarkable about this Japanese encounter is that Guattari expressed his “ethico-aesthetic” project in the context of an architectural dialogue; but, even more, that he inserted himself into that dialogue and its milieu, engaging in architectural criticism and the creation of srcinal architectural concepts to mobilize his sociological project. Guattari’s critique of Takamatsu’s work, “The Architectural Machines of Shin Takamatsu;” and Shinohara’s statement for the design of the Tanigawa House, “When Naked Space is Traversed”3 suggests a theoretical milieu which openly interrogates normative subjectivity just as it as it encircles the theorization of an architectural subjectivity in excess of human subjects. In these parallel dialogues there is an ever-present movement forms towarda the encounter itself—a yearning for the realization of a new image—that third, unspoken voice connecting Guattari and the architects.
Guattari and Japan
The affair between Guattari and Deleuze and the New Wave began long before Guattari’s stay in Japan during the 1980s. Deleuze and Guattari had already been
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in circulation in Japan, via the translation activity surroundingAnti-Oedipus, from as early as the 1970s. Individual essays from Anti-Oedipus and Mille plateaux were all available in Japanese by the early 1980s, before the books were translated into English in their entirety. According to Tetsuo Kogawa: In 1982, Gendai-Shiso (one of the most enthusiastic theoretical journals in introducing the newest Western ideas to Japan) had a special issue on Deleuze in which extracts from L’anti-oedipe, Mille plateaux (Body Without Organs), and parts of Spinoza and Différence et répétition were translated from the French, accompanied by commentary from Japanese scholars and critics who were interested in them.4
Guattari’s own texts, too, were available in Japan prior to their English reception: The 1990s saw the publication in Japanese translation of Guattari’s seminal texts Psychanalyse et transversalité (Seishinbunseki to oudansei: Seidobunseki no kokoromi, 1990); La révolution moléculaire (both editions—Bunshi Kakumei: Yokubou shakai no mikuro bunseki, 1988; Seishinbunseki to kigou, 1996); L’inconscient machinique (Kikaijou Muishiki: Sukizo bunseki, 1990); Les années d’hiver (Tousou kikai, 1996); Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Bunretsubunsekiteki Chizu Sakuseihou, 1998); and multiple editions of Les trois écologies (Mittsu no ekorojii, 1991; 1993; 1997) were published, in addition to several srcinal Japanese titles. The bulk of the translation work has been undertaken by Masaaki Sugimura of Ryuukoku University in Kyoto.5
But Kogawa argues that the inuence ofAnti-Oedipus happened well before it had been translated into Japanese. When the Anti-Oedipus book was translated into Japanese, I would like to respectively say that it came out too late. Most creative persons at the time were already aware of Deleuze-Guattari’s thought as early as in the mid 1980s and were starting to use it for their own purposes…. Also… the terms “odansei” (transversalité) and “kikan-naki-shintai” (corps sans organs) were frequently used by those who apparently never read Deleuze-Guattari’s texts, because the terms were very inspiring and imaginative by themselves. This is not against 6
Deleuze-Guattari’s intention.
Guattari’s direct presence then carried with it allthese resonances, active prior to his entrance. It is relatively unknown that Guattari spent several years in Japan during the 1980s theorizing the function of architecture and urbanism in late-industrial capitalist society, what he called Integrated World Capitalism (IWC). In 1985 7 Guattari travelled to Tokyo and presented his paper “L’impasse post-moderne,” a lightly anachronistic condemnation of the Euro-Asian proponents of postmodern architecture and what he alleged to be its submission to capitalist subjectivity.
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Guattari’s somewhat belated response to postmodern architecture, here in Japan, invokes the critical architecture lament that hadcome out of the Venice School in the 1970s. What distinguishes Guattari’s polemic fromTafuri or Adorno, however, was that he does not render contemporary architecture in negative terms. Architecture, for Guattari, is a mobilizing power for radical activity. Guattari believed architecture was responsible for “carrying out the 8 What contemporary productions of subjectivity” in the twenty-rst century. is remarkable, therefore, is not Guattari’s address to 1980s postmodernism per se, but the very interrogation of architecture’s subject-production that he would bring to the New Wave, and that was, in itself, a response to the problematic of subjectivity in postmodern Japan. Guattari’s rapport with the architectural New Wave in 1980s Japan can be understood precisely in relation to the desire to create a new subjectivity, to “open up new existential territories”—and it is this goal that becomes the locus of his reception. The architect and theorist Kengo Kuma once described Takamatsu’s architecture as a “oating head decapitated from its body by a sword;…suspended in the air…it knows not its condition.”9 Deleuze might have called this recourse to violence and severed heads a psychotic’s rather than a neurotic’s speech. In terms of speech acts, however, it signals the endgame underway in Japan for any new forms of accommodation via postmodern pastiche; and, importantly, it expresses the emergence of a milieu that nds itself inexorably drawn to the question of the subject (in contrast to say Deleuzianism in New York). 10 This is not only evident in dark gures of speech, but in the very problematizing of the question of subjectivity in Lacanian terms by architects such as Takamatsu, who openly declared the emergence of subjectivity in his own work:11 and his objective to “subvert identity” and create an anonymous architecture “which loses its name.”12 The production of architectural absence, is in many ways a leftover condition of postmodern nihilism. For Guattari, a Lacanian analyst—who at the time was deeply engaged in the problem of subjectivity and contemporary architecture— the stakes are necessarily different. Guattari speaks from a post-psychoanalytic position regarding processes of subjectivization; and, the transference he sought within the maddening architectural discourse of modernism and postmodernism was yet to occur. Any effect of psychoanalysis in the Japan architectural discussion would have a complex genealogy beyond the exposure to Guattari or Deleuze—such
as the European intellectual adopted in Japan as aEuropean lasting effect of modernization, and whose keyheritage turns out to be contemporary thought. ‘Deleuze and Guattari,’ as a cultural import, had begun to circulate in Japan in the 1970s alongside a line of thinkers including Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and, later, Lacan, Derrida and Irigaray. What Guattari roused in his stay in Japan was not psychoanalysis per se, but this entire chain. The distinguishing feature of the Asian reception of Deleuze and Guattari is precisely its regard for this chain, characterized by the then-advanced milieu that produced the so-called double articulation of Marxism and psychoanalysis, in which Deleuze and Guattari’s
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Anti-Oedipus rst obtained currency. Nonetheless, the French afliation with the New Wave was energized and amplied by Guattari’s intercession, which brought the Japanese work home to France. In 1987 Guattari hosted an exhibition with Christian Girard in the SymbolFranceJapan competition, an exhibition that later reappeared in the Belgian exhibition Europalia ’89 Japan. That same year, Guattari and Girard engaged in a discussion about architecture and “singularity,”13 a concept Guattari used to describe the latecapitalist Japanese subjectivity as a hybrid of modern andarchaic Japan. Through the multi-disciplinary Europalia festival, Guattari brought the work of Takamatsu and 14 other architects, the dancer Min, and the photographer Keiichi Tahara to Europe. Guattari was driven by the radical possibilities of all these creative activities, but it was architecture that provided the primary stimulus for his project. The Japanese affair with Guattari saw the direct assimilation of his conceptual apparatus by architects, including Takamatsu and Shinohara, who often cite Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of “becoming” and “transversality” in theirdesign statements. Guattari was known to be complicit in this very process, as in the case of the architect Hiromi Fujii, who claims to have consulted Guattari, and to have 15 followed Guattari’s prescriptions in his design for a psychiatric hospital. Yet the designed or built work is as radically distinct from anything Guattari proposed directly as it is from the preliminary statements made by both Takamatsu and Shinohara regarding their own intentions. Its signicance lies rather in the attempt to imagine an impersonal subjectivity for architecture (an effects-image) and its confrontation with both contemporary Japanese architecture and Japan’s ancient and still-present cultural and historical traditions. The invasion of the effects-image in Japan, ironically, could be said to have culturally mirrored the effects-image’s own strident ahistorical, primal surface. The question remains: why was a radical philosopher such as Guattari taken up by the Japanese architectural avant-garde during the 1980s, in a famously conservative political context no less, and long after the cessation of any radical political movements such as the New Left in Japan?16 Kogawa describes the political atmosphere of Guattari’s late reception, in which he appeared together with Guattari in a Nagoya city-planning conference: Guattari talked radicalism at a conservative institution with suit and tie. When Guattari visited in 1980 and 1981, only activists and a very few theoreticians were interested in him. Strangely enough, orthodox of French literature and philosophy intentionally neglected him. scholars Mainstream media never mentioned him either. However, after his third visit, the situation was changed, because (in the meantime) a kind of Japanese counterpart of the “New Philosopher” had appeared. The star was Akira Asada. He did not remain in the closed “New Philosopher” type conservatism, and tried to bridge … radical activism and conservatism. Also Anti-Oedipus was the primary source for his bestseller book. In this context, even big corporations and city ofces became interested in Guattari, in promoting their cultural politics.… The city ofce of
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Nagoya invited Guattari.… At that time, when Japanese corporations enjoyed [the] bubble economy of the late 1980s and early 1990s, they accepted the otherwise impossible planning of events. And sometimes a kind of [“countercooptation”] happened. 17
By this account, it was the conservative and somewhat reactionary socio-political condition of postmodern Japan that aided and abetted Guattari’s “integration into institutional discourses,” but, ironically, by architects rather than philosophers. The postmodern caesura that Guattari opposed, with its attendant role in eviscerating radicality, provided him with an entry point to Japan. It was a radical orthodoxy.18 This somewhat bizarre, postmodern encounter between European radicality and Japanese conservatism has a longer trajectory that broadly plays out in Japanese architecture through the topology of contemporary Japanese architects after Japan’s defeat in World War II, and four generations of postwar architects that were in varying degrees subject to the inuence of Western modernity vis-à-vis postwar Japan and its half-conscious need to embrace its other.19 We might speculate that the second generation, the earlier 1960s metabolists, could not court Guattarianism, given the homogenizing tendencies of metabolism and its appeal to a technocratic utopianism. In essence, the debut of Western architectural values was already too late. In the 1970s, in turn, the next postmodern generation had overcome the metabolist project but were still affected by the last traces of modernism and its ideological fallout, its failure. Only by the early- to mid-1980s, when this ideological battle had waned, was the tie to modernism sufciently loosened for Guattari to gain admission to Japan’s architectural intelligentsia, with an admittedly anti-modern agenda in tow. The fourth generation, the youngest architects of 1980s Japan, such as Takamatsu, grew up in a period that was no longer called postwar and for whom the question of war was said to be “irrelevant.”20 This politically disaffected generation had managed to extricate itself from the memory of the war and the shadow of modernism cast on the previous two generations. Guattari was admitted precisely at the transition from modernism to postmodernism, when radical political activity had retired and a murky historicism was afoot. The lapse between the arrival of Guattari’s writings and his debut in Japan represents, structurally, the amount of time it took for postmodernism to be properly established, intellectually and institutionally. Postmodernism needed
to be properly admitted, at the level of institutionality, before could nd a foothold in the discussion; and for Japan, this took place wellGuattari after 1968. This lapse illustrates the nature of Deleuze and Guattari’s project, insofar as impersonal effects cannot be privileged in either the modernist or postmodernist lexicon. Impersonal effects are the way out of l’impasse post-moderne. Their very substance and instauration of subjectivization is at war with modernist objectivization and its accessory—postmodern restitution of subjectivity. But what might seem to be a collision between Guattari and the late-postmodern architects, a misadventure of architectural history, nds in the focus of subjectivity
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present in the intellectual vanguard of the Japanese New Wave, a parallel project of subjectivization facilitated by this postmodern condition (that albeit provided the context for the betrayal of Guattari’s politics in the United States).
Existential Territories The real Territories of existence … drift in relation to each other like tectonic plates under continents. Rather than speak of the “subject,” we should perhaps speaks of components of “subjectifcation,” each working more or less on its own. This would lead us…to re-examine the relation between concepts of the individual and subjectivity, and… to make a clear distinction between the two. Vectors of “subjectication” do not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something like a “terminal” for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data-processing machines, etc. Therefore, interiority establishes itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other, and, if need be, in open conict. (Félix Guattari)21
In Guattari’s Marxist critique of identity and individuality, subjectivity is partial, plural, and “polyphonic”—a structuralist term Guattari borrowed from Mikhail Bakhtin, meaning “not constituted by a dominant, determining factor that directs other factors according to a univocal causality.” 22 Guattari rejects what he claims to be the structural-linguistic model of subjectivity produced under capitalism, which he argues reduces desire to representation, enforcing dualisms such as subject/object, and thereby severing subjectivity from the social sphere, which for Guattari is the real locus of subject-production. 23 Importantly, he believed that only an aesthetic paradigm could reconnect subjectivity with the complex surface of social life from which it had become disengaged. For Guattari the eld of signication is in fact a direct analogue of subjective individuation:24 It was a serious error on the part of the structuralist thinking to claim to bring together everything concerning the psyche under the sole direction of the linguistic signier! Machinic transformations of subjectivity constrain us to take into account a heterogenesis, rather than a universalization and reductionist 25
homogenization of subjectivity.
Guattari valorizes aesthetic systems of “semiotization” over the “signifying regimes” (strictly representational systems) of capitalism, opposing the “a-signifying modes of encoding” of aesthetic production with those of “speech and writing.”26 For Guattari, signs and things have a primary force that comes before the relation between signier and signied, prior to the individual utterance that connes them to representation, and the instrumentalized systems given to regimes of power.
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He argues that a-signifying forms of media such as cinema, radio, architecture, dance, and photography might liberate a new “machinic subjectivity” that “does not bend to the double articulation of language,” or the signier/signied duality.27 In Les trois écologies (The Three Ecologies ), he writes: “Other institutional objects, be they architectural, economic, or Cosmic, have an equal right to contribute to the functioning of existential production.” 28
Guattari privileged the cinematic image, quoting the lm theorist Christian Metz thus: “Its matter of content extends … b eyond traditional encodings, since the semiotic alloy that composes its matter of expression is itself open to multiple systems of external intensities.” 29 The cinema, in other words, does not reduce subjectivity to identity. It is for this reason that architecture and cinema might, under certain conditions, share a common agency in isolating and releasing impersonal effects. Architecture, in The Three Ecologies , has the capacity to “escape the semiologies of meaning and to participate in the collective arrangements of desire.” 30 It is composed of “polyphonic spatial strata,” which are “the generators of a breakaway or dissident subjectivity,” attractors for a completely de-territorialized or partial subjectivity (“polyphonic” meaning having multiple phonetic values). To de-territorialize subjecti vity does not mean to disintegrate a whole; r ather, it is the bringing together of detached components of “subjectication” for an srcinal purpose, a mobilization that does not produce a new totality, but sets up a “pulse” within a continuum of subjectivity surging across many splintered levels. In this way Guattari narrates Takamatsu’s view of Kyoto as an organism that “pulsating on every level in an extraordinary slow movement, must therefore nd itself secretly rejoined, recreated, reinvented through each compone nt of its architectural machines.” 31 A city is an example of such a non-sentient vibration of subjectivity infused with a complex of motivations and powers traveling across multiple components and networks. It is the irreducibility of Kyoto’s network of impulses that hovers imperceptibly over Takamatsu’ s buildings. In Cartographies schizoanalytique , Guattari describes architectural forms as “catalytic operators releasing chain reactions amon g the modes of semiotization which we draw out of ourselves and open us to new elds of possibility.” 32 The emergence of architectural effects, “partial components of subjectivation,” invites new forms of subjectivity to crystallize around them. He writes of Takamatsu’s buildings: The objective remains the same in each case: to arrive at a point where the building becomes a nonhuman subject, one which is capable of working with segments of both individual and collective human subjectiviti es. Paradoxically this “becoming machine” of subjectivity can only be obtained through the crossing of a threshold.” 33
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To cross a threshold means to touch multiple levels at once; i t is the liberation of diverse semiotic matter passing through the building, what Guattari thinks of as a terminal for multiple codes (aesthetic, social, material, cinematic, corporeal, and erotic). It is architecture’s capacity to engender many levels of semiotic code which opens up “an existential autoreferential effect ” or “the beginnings of a protosubjectivity.”34 Architecture, thus, catalyzes itself via fully autonomous processes of production, or subject-less agency. Its so-called autonomy is not formulated in the usual sense of a building severed from its culture. Rather, Guattari understands the relationship between archit ecture and its urban effects to emerge precisely from its subject-production in which it asserts its singularity. He uses as an example Takamatsu’ s Kirin Plaza, in Tokyo, where t he contextual relati on is a self-moving, “auto-referential” effect. While this idea of a non-sentient architectural subjectivity might seem fantastic to a Western audience, the concept of ‘no self’ or ‘the self that is not a self’ nds an alliance in Asian thinking and epistemology. It is a thinking entirely familiar to Japanese philosophy and central to the traditional Japanese conception of Space. Augustin Berque, cultural geographer and French scholar of the Kyoto school of philosophy, maintained that the thinking of Japanese spatiality is based on the de-individualization of the subject, a condition that he explains is already operative within Japanese grammar, which permits the fusion of the subject and object such that there is no lon ger an “I”; and, it is “ the entire scene which is fraught with subjectiveness. ”35 To be clear, Berque’s thinking is distinct from Shamanist traditions or naturebased polytheisms (such as Egyptian, Greek, and Roman) where the subjectivity always attributes an agency. Berque’s image of Japanese space whi ch induces the dissolution of personal identity, is consistent with the Kyoto School’s advanced nihilist philosophy, drawn from both Buddhist and Western sources. The “immanence of subjectiveness, is both a desubjectivation (in the sense that what we know as the Subject disappears from the language and melts into the landscape), and a subjectivation , because the landscape itself is endowed with subjectiveness.” 36 Berque provides examples from Japanese poetry which express this subjectless subjectivity by way of a grammati cal fusion between the subject and object. It is an impersonal voice of speech without an “I” or a “you.” Guattari, similarly, permits us to imagine the nonhuman subject of architecture as a “partial enunciator,” where architectureenunciation enters certain in because order to it produce effects. To be clear, architectural is relations partial not is part of a projected, totalized enunciation, but, in the Lacanian sense, because the entry into processes of subjectivity is as a non-speaking, impersonal subject of communication—only partially represented by the multiple processes that produced it. Partial enunciation is a surplus of the entire processual complex of subject-production. In Molecular Revolution Guattari prescribes the following grammatical construction:
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If we write “it moving” we are expressing a multiplicity in a diagrammatic way. It-moving indicates a complex abstract machine which can appear independent of any subjective tendency—it could refer to an individual, an army, an insect, an object, a machine, an emotion, an idea. It allows for all the possibilities of moving, so that the verb retains its machinic character … 37
His polemic concerns the re-insertion of the impersonality of the existential eld into semiotics as a means to open it up to the social sphere (what could be called a proto-Existentialism). In an interview with Takamatsu he says: For linguists the signied and the signier have an arbitrary relationship. There is no existential relation between pencil as a phoneme and the pencil itself … I want to propose that we should try to grasp another dimension, another level. I call denotation the rst category, signication the second, and I’ve added a third which I call the existential function. For example, this function establishes an autonomous subjectivity for architecture such as Kirin Plaza. The “subjectication” creates an existential domain in the same way that it creates yourself … And this autonomous function must undoubtedly also work for people who live there or who pass by.38
What appears to be a violent fusion effected between architectural and normative subjectivity is compounded by the manipulation of multiple discourses (architecture, revolutionary philosophy, and semiotics). But to be clear, for Guattari it is not meaning proper or semiotics that is the enemy, but rather the absence of the impersonal subject-function in the semiotic equation. Its elision generates the illusion of a phenomenal subject. Guattari thus extends Deleuze’s revision of phenomenology toward pure immanence; but, bringing architecture into conscious focus. Within Guattari’s seemingly impenetrable diatribe encircling and interrogating semiotics, a single thread can be identied wherein architecture (as encounter) emerges as the locus of a new subjectivity.
Transversalité: Shinohara
Shinohara’s essay “When Naked Space is Traversed,” published in Japan Architect in 1976, described the Deleuze’s effect of “transversality” in the architect’s house for and the poet Tanigawa, citing concept of the literary machine in Proust Signs.39 The dwelling comprises a “winter house,” or cabin, above a “summer space,” which Shinohara calls an “anti-space machine,” whose dirt oor and 1.2-meter slope extending 9 meters from the north to the south must be traversed: “The act of traversing expresses a basic function in relation to the combination of site-level differential.”40 This function of the internal space converts the person, through the act of traversing, into the transversal element itself—a catalyst for “transversalization.” The gradient is articulated by a wall of Japanese hemlock-
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framed windows, 2.4 meters high, on the north side—twice the height of those on the south. For this reason, Shinohara imagines the travel of the person going down and up the incline from south to north to south and so on, to produce a simultaneity and joining of detached frames—views which escape the openings on each side of the interior in the oscillation of one’s “vision which alters from perspective to reverse perspective and back to perspective again.”41 Shinohara likens this to Deleuze’s thinking of transversality in Marcel Proust’s
Within a Budding Grove, in the translation of À la recherche du temps perdu
,
whose narrator zigzags up and down the train between windows on opposite sides in order to connect the moving images of the sunrise. He cites Deleuze’s essay “The Literary Machine”:
C’est elle qui permet dans le train, non pas d’unifer les points de vue d’un paysage, mais de les faire communiquer suivant sa dimension propre, dans sa dimension propre, alors qu’ils restent incommunicants d’après les leurs.… C’est elle (la transversalité) qui assure la transmission d’un rayon, d’un univers à un autre aussi différents pourtant que les mondes astronomiques. La nouvelle convention linguistique, la structure formelle de l’oeuvre, est donc la transversalité.42 The Transversalité was of course Guattari’s invention, and methodology for a new subjectivity. Just as the transference is traditionally the central tool of psychoanalytic treatment, transversality would thus analogously constitute the platform for the analysis of the institution (for Guattari, it is not the patient but the institution, in its straightjacketing of subjectivity, that requires treatment). What is required is the traversing of two discontinuous expressions of semiotic code, in order to set up a motion and release new forms of subjectivization. 43 In Shinohara-Deleuze, these are the fragments of detached views annexed in a non-totalizing yet singular movement. They are non-communicating, because each constitutes its own peculiar order or code, viz., physical surfaces, persons, walking, detached views, and rays of sunlight. This forced irrationality is part and parcel of Shinohar a’s masochistic syntax in search of lost time. Shinohara draws a distinction between the status of the transversal and that of the phenomenal process of traversing that space by a subject. Transversalization is initiated by the act of walking up and down the ramp, yet the transversal
itself is irreducible individual traverses the gradedlies earthen oor. As Deleuze argues to in the “The Literarywho Machine,” theortransversal not in the rst or second person, an “I” or “you,” but in a third impersonal voice, whose manifestation consists in the montage of outside views rendered simultaneous in the transversal passage. This is not a grammatical sleight of hand; it serves to convey another order of production that cannot be accounted for in the pronouns of a personal subjectivity. It engages the Guattarian “it moving,” collapsing the effects into a single register triggering pure architectural agency. Shinohara echoes Deleuze:
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The alterations in the condition occur in the rst person. But I am interested in what happens to change the condition of the space when someone traverses it. This takes place in the third person. Alteration in the rst person can easily be included in a general background of phenomenalism; in other words, such alteration can be regarded as a special authority for the recognition of the rst person. The changes that take place in the third person, however, are not ordinary. The survey of physical space is made by the third person.44
A Univer se of Fr agment s
If we travel from Shinohara backwards to Deleuze’s Proust book itself, the philosopher theorizes the aesthetic machine as “a production of partial objects … fragments without totality, vessels without communication, partitioned scenes,” 45 via the dream model, albeit still within his reading of Proust: If dreams appear in this group, it is by their capacity to telescope fragments, to set different universes in motion, and to cross, without annulling, “enormous distances.” The persons we dream of lose their total character and are treated as partial objects, either because a part of them is isolated by our dream or because they function altogether as such objects. Now this was precisely what the worldly raw material offered us: the possibility of isolating, as in a frivolous dream, a movement of the shoulders in one person and a movement of the neck in another, not in order to totalize them, but to partition them one from another.46
Here it becomes possible to observe, in Deleuze, a conation of the aesthetic fragment and the psychoanalytic part-object, concepts with very different genealogies. This usage, no less operative in Guattari’s thinking, is complicated by the different orientations of Guattari and Deleuze to such a double concept. In Guattari’s psychoanalytic revision, the part-object is a political instrument, representing the detached parts of an institution. Deleuze, alternatively, understands the part-objects of Proust by way of the literary category of the “fragment,” derived from the German Romantic movement, surrounding Jena poetry, created by Friedrich Schlegel and his brother Auguste in their journal Athenaeum at the end of the eighteenth century—which Deleuze cites, thereby invoking a chain of authors: Schlegel brothers, theand literary theorists Philippe 47 Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Lucthe Nancy, Georges Poulet, Maurice Blanchot. Of key interest is the image of an impersonal subjectivity within the fragmentary text itself that emerges in the Jena movement, and which Guattari will bring to his architectural project. In The Three Ecologies Guattari describes “the operators of this crystallization” as “fragments of a-signifying chains of the type that Schlegel likens to works of art.” 48 Guattari’s interest in the romantic fragment, though, remains within the ethical paradigm—toward the stimulation of an enfranchising partial-subjectivity. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, in fact, describe the Schlegels’
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project in The Literary Absolute as an ethico-aesthetic enterprise that was grounded in its own politics. Deleuze’s supposed literary focus is similarly complicated and not given to purely historical readings. It is precisely the aesthetics of the fragment and part-object that is put forward by Deleuze-Proust, and jointly by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, as a revolutionary tool, one that can de-territorialize and undermine the totalizing effects of the institution, freeing new modes of subjectivity. Its aesthetic value is its potential to travel great distances and cross multiple scales, wielding a dis-unifying and anti-totalizing function around which congeals Deleuze and Guattari’s project. Deleuze quotes Poulet thus: “the Proustian universe is a universe of fragments, of which the fragments contain other universes, these too, in their turn, in fragments.… The temporal discontinuity is itself preceded, even governed, by a still more radical discontinuity, that of space.” 49 To be sure, this is not a question of formalism or constituted reality but about the transformation of subjectivity. He quotes Blanchot: “If we say fragment we must not only say fragmentation of an already existing reality, nor a moment of a whole still to come … In the violence of the fragment, an entirely different relation is given to us,” “a new relation with the External World,” “an afrmation irreducible to unity,” which cannot be reduced to aphoristic form.50
“Such a world neither supposes nor forms a whole”;51 the high genre of Jena poetry is characterized by Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy as a “necessary incompletion of the text,” (beyond the aphoristic style of Athenaeum Fragments).52 For Jena Romantics, the fragment expresses a precise incompletion that they stipulate is only realized in the subjectivity which forms the very composition of fragmentation —a composition which never arrives at a totality, but, in Friedrich Schlegel’s words, is “forever becoming.”53 The effects-image Guattari pursues is also incomplete, in producing ever new forms of subjectivity. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write: “The unity of the ensemble [is] constituted … outside the work, in the subject that is seen in it, or in the judgment that proffers its maxims in it.”54 The fragment “is inscribed outside the work, and it completes it,”55 thereby reinvoking the Foucauldian “murmur” of Deleuze-Ferlinghetti that accrues to the text itself, and which is mobilized through the act of reading. It is this impersonal voice that Guattari seeks in architecture, wherebyfrom the Romantic fragment is a means of detaching wholly generative agency linguistic conventions. In setting such agency free, whole new worlds come into view. This literary trajectory from High Romantic poetry through Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy to Guattari speaks the enabling power of the fragment and the discovery of an impersonal subjectivity present in textual agency, a discovery that Guattari will bring to his architectural project. Whereas the Schlegel brothers conceived of the fragment always in relation to the “project” or “work” of cognizing the world,
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Guattari’s thinking (as per Anti-Oedipus) focuses on production, on the production of pure image.
The Archite ctur al Ma chines of S hin Takama tsu Cities are giant machines, “megamachines,” borrowing an expression of Lewis Mumford, producers of individual and collective subjectivity. (Félix Guattari)56 Each element of the architectural ensemble (interior or exterior, and whatever its size), every ray of light, each possible shot [prise de vue] must therefore contribute to the total effect.” [Machinic production] consists of passing from one register to another in order to set off an effect of decentering the subject (Félix Guattari)57
In 1994 Chimères printed Guattari’s essay “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” (The Architectural Machines of Shin Takamatsu) in which he presented his idiosyncratic commentary on the architect, departing radically from prevailing literature on Takamatsu, which evinced motifs such as eviscerated bodies, anatomical parts, and violent machines. While Kirin Plaza in Tokyo has been typically associated with the ‘dark’ Japanese underground, and the Japanese archaic and tradition of the samurai warrior,58 Guattari consciously eschewed this approach, theorizing the architecture of the Kyoto-based architect via the antiOedipal model of the machine. On Kirin Plaza he writes: “the essential movement operated by these immobile machines is that of a break, a separation which invites the emergence of new worlds of reference, which themselves in turn engender numerous existential territories and new collective agencies of enunciation,” 59 thus recalling the early anti-Oedipal machine, a “system of interruptions or breaks ( coupures) … related to a continual material ow ( hylè) that it cuts into.” These machinic parts of course correspond to psychoanalytic schemata—the breaks and ows for Guattari and Deleuze are respectively organs and bodily uids, thus the machine “mouthbreast-milk.”60 In turn, the mouth-part is itself an “organ machine that stops a ow” and, as such, every machine functions via its partial machines. This early formulation of the component-machine 1972 was through thetheobjet partiel (partial or part-object), a conceptinDeleuze andelaborated Guattari took from psychoanalytical writings of Melanie Klein to mean the breast or penis, symbolic parts of the mother and father—and, in Guattari’s longer project, culminating in a reworking of Lacan’s schema of desire, via the objet petit a (object little-a). The rst critical features of the anti-Oedipal machines, then, are the “breaks that are a slicing off” ( coupures-prélèvements ) associated with the part-objects—the detaching of signifying parts from their larger context as per the poetic fragment. The other feature of the machine is the code whose breaks are a “detachment”
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(coupures-détachements ).61 “Every machine has a sort of code built into it, stored up inside it.” Here Guattari and Deleuze cite their debt to Lacan, whose discovery of the “domain of a code of the unconscious, incorporating the entire chain—or several chains—of meaning,” they remark, entirely transformed analysis. 62 In a chain that mixes together phonemes, morpheme s, etc., without combining them, papa’s mustache, mama’s upraised arm, a ribbon, a little girl, a cop, a shoe suddenly turn up. Each chain captures fragments of other chains from which it “extracts” a surplus value, just as the orchid code “attracts” the gure of the wasp: both phenomena demonstrate the surplus value of a code … These chains are the locus of continual detachments —schizzes on every hand that are valuable in and of themselves and above all must not be lled in. 63
Guattari’s view of Takamatsu’s Ark I (1981-3) turns on the anti-Oedipal break—a severing and severance through which several machines exchange fragments of signifying chain in a production of desire. Ark I, with its machine-like pistons and stark concrete detailing, has been compared to a locomotive and a crematorium, 64 but Guattari is more interested in what is the becoming-machine of Ark, what he calls its “effect of rupture … and … placing in existential suspension.”65 Guattari’s list of “breaks” or cuts in Takamatsu’s buildings includes: Ruptures of symmetry, the tting-together of decentered forms, horizontal or vertical slits, separation of the building into two superimposed parts in different styles, steep inclines opening onto a void, abyss-like openings … and … ocular structures on the facades and in the interior.66 [An] almost obsessive repetition of vertical lines (the Saifukuji Buddhist temple, Gifu, 1982, or the Ark dental clinic, Kyoto, 1983) … vertical lines [which] are frequently crossed by diverse transversal elements … rays of luminous white light in the interior of the Dance Hall (Nagoya, 1985) or by the beams suggesting traditional constructions in Garden (Kyoto, 1984).67
It is the delay between such patterns of differing registers (lines of electric light and concrete for example) that produces the effects-image Guatta ri has in mind. This crossing is also achieved via what Guattari calls the “tting-together” (structure of decentered forms1978). such What as thatGuattari of a cylinder and ahere cubic l’emboitement in the) Kido Clinic (Kyoto, has in mind is not an intersection but a complete assimilation, as in the Kido Clinic, where the forms are fully merged, and in what he calls the double facade in the Nimura Dyeing Ofce (Kyoto, 1979), “the exterior one angled and the interior one curved.” Guattari further describes the Yamagushi Photo Studio (Kyoto, 1989), as “seemingly devoured by a great cubic buccal arrangement.”68 What begins to emerge in Guattari’s statement, almost obliquely to the formal description of the buildings, is a self-movement toward an anonymous architectural subjectivity.
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In Guattari’s dialogue we never get the sense of any entire building, but only one of scenes and fragments. This is not only a contrivance of Guattari’s style; it is a real effect of Takamatsu’s buildings, which, as in the Syntax building, frequently involve entirely unrelated and autonomous elevations or volumes. There is, further, a precedent in Japanese aesthetics for the machinic arrangement of unrelated parts. Shinohara points out that in Greek sculpture: A continuous development takes place in the expression of the work as the viewer proceeds around it. In Japanese sculpture … let us say the seventhcentury Kudara Kwannon—we notice that, once free of the frontal axis, the viewer is continually surprised by a series of totally unrelated expressions.69
This formal unworking of the façades is only de-territorializing insofar as it releases a partial subjectivity. Thus, in regard to a third technique he attributes to Takamatsu, “horizontal and vertical slits,” as in the Yamamoto Atelier (Kyoto, 1978) and the Koboko Lighting Showroom (Kyoto, 1978), where both buildings appear to have been split vertically in half, and the “split effects” in the Yoshida House (Kyoto, 1982),70 Guattari writes: “this technique is not only a question of destabilizing the dimensions and forms anticipated by ordinary perception but also of putting to work a sort of focus or attractor of subjectivity .”71 Guattari’s inventory, further, emphasizes vertigo in Takamatsu, describing abysses, steepness and vertiginous interiors, as in Pharoah (Kyoto, 1984). For Guattari the vertiginous is a condition that excites action, and the effects he describes often imply falling, as if to fall is the correct response to Takamatsu’s architecture. Not a vertical fall, but a non-gravitational attractor that converts the architecture into a partial enunciation. Guattari also nds vertigo in the cinematic “Yoshida House (Kyoto, 1982), where a dark-colored ground level tends to blend into the context of an old street, while a massive white superstructure intrudes into the landscape.”72
New Wave Pos tm oder n
One response to Guattari’s architectural inventory is to simply say that he is wrong, that these buildings are postmodern precisely in their “split effects” and “superposition of styles.” If it is postmodernism, however, the New Wave is not a happy Venturi-style postmodernism, but a scary postmodernism. In reading Takamatsu through Guattari’s encounter with Japan, it is important to understand that Takamatsu and the other New Wave architects were responding not just to Deleuze and Guattari but to Michael Graves, and the postmodern movement overall; and, in turn, Guattari himself was responding to Lyotard, even if in a mode of resistance. Guattari’s encounter with the architects is clearly tied to the postmodern phenomenon that Kogawa elaborates as a “counter-cooptation.” The sense of the encounter remains a reworking of the remainder within postmodernism
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of modernism, and an exit strategy underway in ts and starts. To side-step the discourse on the sublime of Lyotard, is to side-step the postmodern affective regime of the indiscernible surplus that lingers in all forms of representation. Such side-stepping of postmodernism is necessary in order to re-engage the real. The New Wave architects under the spell of Guattari seem to have set their sights on neutralizing the entire rhetorical operation of postmodernism. Nonetheless, there is a methodological problem in Guattari’s use of architecture to generate philosophical concepts, one that can be compared to Deleuze’s use of lm to engage philosophy. But whereas Deleuze entered a formal analysis of lm, he did not ask lm to work quite so hard as Guattari compels architecture to. Guattari’s ethico-aesthetics is prescriptive and formalistic in its strategy to visualize a new architectural image by releasing what is protoanarchic (autonomous) within it. He may have gone much further than any of the philosopher-savants of the poststructuralist school; but his methodology is nonetheless a Lacan-inected formalism, albeit one that is open to multiple strata. Yet Guattari’s subjectivization of architectural form via an immanent architectural agency clearly changes the methodology here, because it changes the status of the architectural object itself, pushing it out of the charmed circle of hermeneutic maneuvers and challenging, at once, the traditional epistemological coordinates for the making of architecture and its then-amboyant form of representation. As an end to the postmodern caesura, impersonal effects provide an exit ramp beyond the recursive formalist operations given to architectural form-making. To sharpen the point, the superimposition of affects Guattari attributed to Takamatsu’s building does not refer to a hybrid postmodernism or collagist sensibility; but, rather, a shift toward cinematic montage— in the true sense of linking images through ideas. The features presented in Guattari’s surprising schedule of details have a certain lustre and incredulity, as if what he describes are special effects (of cinema); buildings are rendered as a series of cinematic frames, scenes, and break-cuts only joined in the unfolding of a lmic landscape in which the architecture emerges as partial-enunciator. The nature of these juxtapositions is simply the preliminary shift toward a constructive agency, while remaining free of the totalizing quality of paradigmatic orders and the reication of ideational versus real effects. If the importation to architecture of the concept of montage, “the nerve of cinema,” of hassubjectivizational any value, it is in agency. the denotation of multiple registers for theas production Vertov’s revolutionary cinema, Eisenstein’s, sought subjectivizational agency within art and architecture— notwithstanding its formalist srcins. Chris Marker’s exceptional work with documentary lm is intimately aligned with this agenda, as are Bernard Tschumi’s attempts to rewrite the code of the architectural ensemble through montage. What Deleuze and Guattari add to this conversation is clear. The architectural object here is reformulated by the realist cinematic model that Guattari, like Deleuze, brings to the methodology.
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The radical politics embedded in Guattari’s project has come to the fore in recent re-articulations of the very idea of the political—a re-articulation based in the exact same unresolved questions of what constitutes the space of the political. Growing in part out of Foucault’s incomplete project of dening the biopolitical, these recent lines of inquiry tackle the last frontier of the ascendant neo-liberal worldview; that is, the frontier of ‘what constitutes a subject.’ The evacuation noted of such questions by the neo-Darwinian, deterministic forms of architecture based on Deleuze minus the subject (digital formalism, etc.), make all the more pressing the resolution of the enterprise started by Guattari’s inquest of architectural subjectivization. The New Wave encounter with Guattari produces a new architectural image as a partial subjectivity whereby Guattari offers, in the concept of the transversal and its proto-grammar of cinematic effects, the conceptual tools to imagine and perhaps even to make an effects-image, freed from psychoanalytical discourse or the last vestiges of the postmodern impasse. Indeed, the image of architectural fragments in Guattari and Shinohara-Deleuze 73 To nds its genealogy in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Guattari’s late-Lacanism. argue this is to open up a can of worms, insofar as these antecedents are deployed against the very matrices of discursive agency given to Lacanian structuralism and postmodernism. While the latter has often been formulated badly, as a virulent form of accommodation to capital (with its attendant post-Marxist anxiety intact), the former has rigorously prepared the way for the return of the real. It is this return that Guattari identied and problematized in his voyages in Japan.
Notes 1
2 3
“Applying the label ‘New Wave’ to the most inventive architects of the current generation is quite arbitrary given that their diversity is so vast. But it would be even more imprudent to group this generation under the banner of postmodernism because they have escaped the embarrassment of a supercial and eclectic opportunism that generally obtains to this qualication in the United States and Europe. Such labels seem also to go against the pluralism of these Japanese creatives, which I will call their processualism, that is to say the event precisely when it escapes the preestablished modelizations of schools or movements.” Félix Guattari, “The Architectural Machines of Shin Takamatsu,” informally published translation(accessed by Tim Adams and Catherine Howell, 2001, http://www.jya.com/takamatsu.htm 20 October 2010). Originally published as “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” Chimères 21 (Winter 1994): p. 39. All subsequent citations are from Adams’ and Howell’s unauthorized translation. Guattari’s list comes from Botond Bognár, Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Its Development and Challenge (New York, 1985). Kazuo Shinohara, “When Naked Space is Traversed,” Japan Architect 51, no. 2 (1976): pp. 64–9.
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4
5 6 7
8 9
10 11
12
13 14
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity Tetsuo Kogawa, e-mail to author, February, 2004. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Textes choisis (Paris, 1970) and Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris, 1968), published in English as Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, 1994). This reception project has already been undertaken by Christian Girard, one of Guattari’s translators; and, further, the eminent Canadian Guattari scholar Gary Genosko, who has provided an illuminating and exhaustive account of Guattari’s activities in Japan, elaborating in great detail the socio-historical ground of the two essays to be discussed. I am indebted to Genosko, who has generously provided me with much of the unpublished material cited, engaged with me in correspondence that was critical to the development of my work, and introduced me to the theorist Tetsuo Kogawa. See Gary Genosko, “Japanese Singularity,” in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, ed. Gary Genosko (London and New York, 2002); Félix Guattari and Shin Takamatsu, “Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Félix Guattari,” Parallax 7, no. 4 (2001); Guattari, “Proud Tokyo,” http://www. lakeheadu.ca/~ggenosko/proud.html; and Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu.” Genosko, “Japanese Singularity.” The citation here is from a draft of the same provided by the author, p. 2. Tetsuo Kogawa, e-mail message to author, February 2004. Guattari, “The Postmodern Impasse,” in A Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford, 1996). The srcinal French version, “L’impasse post-moderne,” appeared in La quinzaine littéraire (February 1–15, 1986). Christian Girard, “Architecture as Production of Subjectivities,” introduction to Guattari’s “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 128. Kengo Kuma, “L’architecture decapitée / The Decapitated Architecture,” in Shin Takamatsu: Projets d’architectures / Architectural Works, 1981/1989 , ed. Xavier Guillot (Paris, 1989), p. 23. Bognár, Contemporary Japanese Architecture. Takamatsu, “Talking with Shin Takamatsu,” inShin Takamatsu: Projets d’architectures, p. 134. “There are several dimensions…regarding my methodology…archaic fantasy, various mathematical dimensions, references which support the architectural sign system… I have to traverse between the mixture of those …dimensions. …‘Traverse’ has the same meaning as resonance used earlier. However, even when the resonance has a large amplitude there is almost always an instance when it does not work….The various dimensions have become electried and reach a critical point where they face collapse. believe at that point subjectivity establishes itself.” Ibid., p. I29. See also Xavier Guillot, “Realisations,” in Shin Takamatsu: Projets d’architectures, p. 111. “This discotheque has no name. What use would a name be for a place in which we are supposed to forget who we are and what we are, where even words become unreliable, time can be forgotten? Therefore, it has no name, ‘Somewhere to lose yourself.’” Genosko, “Japanese Singularity,” in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, p. 125. Ibid., p. 2 (in unpublished version).
Guattari and the Japanese New Wave 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35
36 37 38
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Hiromi Fujii, “Guattari and Japanese Architecture,” roundtable discussion, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, 2003. Specically, the protest movement, driven by the New Left, against the 1960 United States-Japan treaty. Kogawa, letter to Gary Genosko, January 23, 2003. We could also add that Guattari’s presence at such an event is itself authorizing, which makes it more orthodox than radical. Kazukiyo Matsuba describes the failure of the United States-Japan treaty and its revision in 1970, which led to an ongoing disappointment, furthered by the failure of urbanism and the rapid degeneration of the city. By the early 1970s “avant-garde Japanese architecture was overrun by the Megalopolitan project that modern architects— including the metabolists—had been so eager to foster.” Kazukiyo Matsuba, “Two Mirrors of Contemporary Japanese Architects: War and Postmodernism,” GA Houses: Japan III 20 (1986), p. 18. Ibid., p. 11. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 36. Guattari, “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse,” in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Oxford, 1996), p. 193. Félix Guattari and Eric Alliez, “Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes,” in Molecular Revolution, p. 275. Guattari, La révolution moléculaire (Fontenay-sous-Bois, 1977), pp. 95–6. Guattari, “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse,” p. 194. Guattari, “A Cinema of Desire,” in Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York, 1996), p. 149. Guattari, “A Cinema of Desire,” pp. 150–51. Guattari, Three Ecologies, pp. 56–7. Italics added. Guattari, “A Cinema of Desire,” pp. 150–51. Guattari, Three Ecologies, p. 148. Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 134. Guattari, Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris, 1989), p. 300. Cited in Genosko, Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, p. 138. Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 135. Guattari, Three Ecologies, pp. 56–7. Augustin Berque, “Landscape in Japan as a Symbolic Form,” Zeitschrift für Semiotik 2 (1997), cited Jianfei Zhu, “Another Wayhttp://members.fortunecity.com/zhifan/ of Seeing: Visual Paradigms in PostSong China andinPost-Renaissance Europe,” mypage/archiessay/wayofseeing.htm (accessed 10 October 2010). Berque, “Landscape in Japan as a Symbolic Form,” p. 2. Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York, 1984), p. 141. Guattari, “Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Félix Guattari,” Parallax 7, no. 4 (2001): p. 133. Italics added.
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39
Deleuze, “The Three Machines,” in Proust and Signs, ed. Michael Hardt, Sandra Buckley, and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 2000). Originally published as Proust et les signes (Paris, 1976). Shinohara’s writing on his house has been discussed in detail by Genosko. The need to retrace this path is as a platform for the effects-image that arises in the Guattari-Shinohara-Takamatsu triangle and Chapter 5 on psychoanalysis to which this path leads.
40 41 42
Shinohara, “When Naked Space is Traversed,” p. 68. Ibid. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 168. “It is transversality that permits us, in the train, not to unify the viewpoints of a landscape, but to bring them into communication according to the landscapes own dimension, in its own dimension, whereas they remain noncommunicating according to their own dimension. … It is transversality that assures the transmission of a ray, from one universe to another as different as astronomical worlds. The new linguistic convention, the formal structure of the work, is therefore transversality…”. Code, however, does not refer to a simplistic semiological transcendent, that would produce a formal whole as a result. Rather, it is an autonomous subject-production subjectivized from content. Shinohara, “When Naked Space is Traversed,” p. 68. Deleuze, “The Three Machines,” p. 150. Ibid., pp. 150–51. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, 1988). “A fragment like a miniature work of art must be totally detached from a surrounding world and closed on itself like a hedgehog.” Guattari, Three Ecologies, p. 55, n. 58. Georges Poulet quoted in ibid., p. 184, n. 5. Deleuze, Proust and Signs, p. 185, n. 5. Ibid., p. 123. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 40. Friedrich von Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis, 1971), p. 176, fragment 16. Just as Deleuze and Guattari’s early concept of subjectivity was as a “becoming” in their essay “Rhizome.” Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 40. Ibid., p. 8.
43
44 45 46 47
48 49 50 51 52 53
54 55 56 57 58
59
Guattari,(Nagoya, “Restoration of p. the89. Urban Landscape,” in Proposal from Nagoya, ed. Riichi Miyake 1989), Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 135. See Riichi Miyake, in Shin Takamatsu, GA Architect 9, ed. Yukio Futagawa (Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1990), p. 16. See also Gabriel E. Lahyani, Shin Takamatsu + Gabriel E. Lahyani Architects Associates, ed. Noriko Ueshina (Zürich, 1993). See Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu.” This does not mean human agency; rather, Deleuze’s usage of agencement as arrangement or assemblage, that is, collective assemblages of enunciation.
Guattari and the Japanese New Wave 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73
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Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York, 1977), p. 36. Ibid., p. 39. Ibid., p. 38. Ibid., p. 39. Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 4. Ibid., p. 135. See also Girard, “Architecture as Production of Subjectivities,” p. 127. Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 127. Guattari is not referring to something like the vertical repetition in a high-rise or Gothic building but to the interruption of verticality with the transversal. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid. Shinohara, “Towards Architecture,” Japan Architect, no. 293 (1981): p. 115. Ibid., pp. 137–8. Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 137. Italics added. Ibid., p. 137. The “detached scenes” and “architectural schizzes” in Guattari, “Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu,” p. 139, correspond to the schizo-analytic partobjects Guattari incorporates from Lacan and Klein, alongside the Lacanian objet petit a, central to Guattari’s project.
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Chapter 5
Shinohara and Takamatsu: Objets Verité
Guattari is widely known for his activism in the anti-psychiatry movement at La Borde1 and for his critique of psychoanalysis, but what is often forgotten in the architects’ readings of Guattari and Deleuze is Guattari’s Lacanian background— the years of analysis with Lacan, his practice as a Lacanian psychiatrist, and the late-Lacanism that endures in his subsequent work. From the psychoanalytic polemic of the 1970s—undertaken with Deleuze, via Anti-Oedipus—to Guattari’s involvement at La Borde and the individual writings, Psychanalyse et transversalité and La révolution moléculaire, Guattari’s engagement with architecture is necessarily inected by structuralist-inspired psychoanalytical theory. Nonetheless, the Anglo-American reception of Guattari and Deleuze can be said to have effectively side-stepped psychoanalysis and the problem of subjectivity—eliding the productive Freudian and Lacanian material within Deleuze and Guattari’s project, in what stands as a corrupted reading of Deleuze’s ‘rejoinder’ to Lacan and of Guattari and Deleuze’s ‘anti-Freudianism.’ Guattari’s courting of architecture as the locus for a new image of subjectivity nds its psychoanalytic genealogy in two persistent Lacanian threads, namely, the concepts objet petit a (object small “a”) and objet partiel (partial object), which Guattari used to erect the transversalité.2 Together, petit a and the object partiel could be said to form the lining of Guattari’s entire ethico-aesthetic project. By shedding light on the Freudian and Lacanian remainder in Guattari’s work, we can see at once that the transversal sets the part-objects in motion, that it creates an effects-image—an image that is visualized in some of the poetic spaces of the Japanese New Wave inuenced by his theories, and in others that have tackled the same problems of an immanent architectural subjectivity in a parallel modality. Psychoanalysis in Guattari’s polemics operates, rst, as a privileged object of critique: namely, the anti-Oedipal (anti-Freud and post-Foucauldian) polemic against the institution, in its negative modality; and, epistemically, it is the technique for the analysis of the institutional transference, the transversalité.3 This is the positive modality or attempt to For freeGuattari, from thesubjectivity grip of authorized the affective regime of the effects-image. is not toorders be found in the detached circuit of repressed signiers conceived of in psychoanalysis, but in the “external intensities” of cultural, aesthetic, and social reality.4 The binary operations of structuralist analysis, and Lacan’s triune model of the world of the subject (the Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real) simply did not account for the fact that the main event of subjectivization proceeds by way of impersonal forces. The liberation of the subject could not be carried out within the hot-house of endless signifying chains (the kingdom of the sign).
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Guattari conceives of post-industrial capitalism as a machine that controls subjectivity through its monopoly over representational orders (television, the media, etc.).5 Lacanian psychoanalysis, for Guattari, is complicit with capitalism; it is the spectral instantiation of capitalism par excellence, based as it is in a structuralist linguistics. It is precisely this strategy that renders psychoanalysis symmetrical with capital—it becomes the repressed signier of capitalism and shares in its circuit of representational horrors—that allows Guattari to elevate psychoanalysis to the object of a privileged institutional critique, and its lingua franca: the language of psychoanalysis is Guattari’s technique for carrying out the institutional transference via the Lacanian objet petit a and Guattari’s version of objets partiels—the latter are the detached components of an institution used as the means to liberate a new subjectivity. Traversing Lacanian psychoanalysis is part of the trajectory of the way out of the hot-house where only strange and disturbing owers and fruits might mature.
Dissident Subjectivity
Lacan’s objet petit a was rst derived from Melanie Klein. The Kleinian partobject, already operative in Freud and revisited in Lacan, is a detached part or organ of the mother’s body, such as the breast or hair, which is separated off as ‘part’ in the child’s unconscious. In the infant’s limited perceptual apparatus the part-object takes on the role of a whole object felt by the infant in the singular terms of a satisfaction which the part-object either grants or denies. 6 Unlike the Kleinian part-object, Lacan’s part-object is not ‘part’ because it belongs to a larger totality, such as a body, but because it represents only partially the function that produces it. That is, it is only the pleasure-giving function of the breast that is represented in the unconscious—not its biological function.7 The cause of this separating off or privileging of an organ as part, Lacan explains, is not its functional aspect or organization but the signifying economy of language which produces it.8 Guattari’s part-objects include not only the anatomical objects of Freud-Lacan; they extend to social, architectural and other cultural artefacts, fragments that, in turn, will constitute the Guattarian unconscious: The Freudians had already detected the existence of vectors of subjectication that elude the mastery of the Self; partial subjectivity, takingfaeces, shape around objects in the rupture of meaning, such as thecomplexual, maternal breast, the genitals.… These objects, the generators of a breakaway or ‘dissident’ subjectivity, were conceived by Freudians as residing essentially adjacent to the instinctual urges and to a corporealized imaginary. Other institutional objects,
be they architectural, economic, or Cosmic, have an equal right to contribute to the functioning of existential production.9
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With this expansion into architecture and other existential territories, loose semiotic fragments of chains (the part-objects) are able to recombine with other partial chains and thereby bring about a semiotic production that does not bend to any one signifying system. Here, the Lacanian sense of the part-object in Guattari’s reworking, is more than a formal fragment with a past, it is rather a breaking off or tearing away that opens up new worlds or futures—a sense which is captured in Lacan’s description of part-objects as “projectiles.” Such a dissident partial object can be observed in Takamatsu’s Syntax building,10 a four-storey apartment complex and commercial facility whose south façade, with cantilevered wings, combines strangely with its rear elevation, an open, zigguratlike stair leading to a roof and cantilevered volumes in front. The restlessness of Syntax lies not in any fragmentary assemblage per se, but in the self-assertion of each fragment. While seemingly imposing and monumental, Syntax betrays its totalizing character whereby each elevational object is as if hewn or torn away from another entirely different building. Takamatsu describes the building as “a small sea … on which a otilla of variously elaborated elements aredrifting independently,”11 emphasizing that this is not a collection of parts or a whole which “leases itself out” to the various parts. “What I wanted was for each of the parts to be lled with a strength completely of their own.”12 This production for Guattari opens up new “existential territories” to initiate a partial, impersonal subjectivity, “the beginnings of a protosubjectivity” that is no longer the exclusive provenance of humans. The building, then, could be said to be not syntactical at all, since its relations are severed in order to serve the primacy of part. Syntax works not by collage or joining but by a critical detachment and separation. It turns its back on modernism and postmodernism, all the while suggesting the legacy of the poststructuralist agenda. In analyzing the tortured syntax of the building, one could further isolate elements in each façade that begin to separate out or break away (such as the cantilevers in the south and the cylindrical volumes carved out of the stair, etc.). But the formal condition of the part-objects is only interesting in terms of what they produce, that is, the suggestion of another building, the production of a new function or effect which travels beyond the part and its formal apparatus, or the possibilities entailed in inhabiting a staircase that is the subtraction of the front of the building, and which, in turn, leads to something and somewhere else nominally not part of the dissembling architectural object. Kengo Kuma is alive to the enabling projectile or
dissident element in Takamatsu’s work— to the “otation of severed heads” which make possible a new world. A silent and incongruous feeling takes hold when one stands in the gaze of this massive building, whose part-objects nonetheless carry the sense of remaining loyal to a register that existed before their involvement in Syntax, before the actualizat ion of this one building. The fragments somehow retain their generalness or anonymity. What ripples through the seemingly impenetrable monolith is the mystery of all the other permutations that are not seen in the building, but felt as its electrical charge.
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For Deleuze and Guattari, this annulment by part-objects in their tearing away from signifying agency is an opportunity for rewriting the entire code (the a-causal chain of mesmeric signiers devoid of the real). InAnti-Oedipus they write: “To withdraw a part from the whole, to detach, to ‘have something left over,’ is to produce, and to carry out real operations of desire in the material world.” 13 Between the act of producing and the product, something becomes detached, thus giving the vagabond, nomad subject a residuum ( résidue). The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself.14 The residue or remnant is none other than the Guattari-Lacanian transversal. In one of Lacan’s unpublished seminars in 1963, the objet petit a(utre)—object small-other or object little-a—is a privileged object, a trace from the Real, in the failure of the subject to be incorporated into the Symbolic . The Symbolic and the Real are srcinary states in Lacan’s triune schema of the emergence of the subject (subject here means an infant in the rst eighteen months). “In the seminars of 1962–63 and of 1964, objet petit a is dened as the leftover, the remainder Reste ( ), 15 the remnant left behind by the introduction of the Symbolic in the Real,” the idea being that the child’s entry into the Symbolic, into the world of language and culture, is not entirely successful, that there is always something left over—an imaginary trace of what was lost, whose status lies somewhere in between the Real and the Symbolic. Guattari retains both senses of the Lacanian petit a , as a remainder and as an opening or site of activity. While for Lacan this trace from the banished Real forms the limit condition of psychoanalysis and of the subject—it is the inaccessible void in the Real and non-place to which the subject forever tends but never arrives—for Guattari, petit a does not occupy this liminal position of impossibility, but bears a productive role central to the liberation of subjects. Thus, in Anti-Oedipus, capital is a surface of inscription or signication to which desire always accedes, 16 but there is always an element that falls out of capital’s chimera, a remainder that resists signication and sustains itself in the Real—not the Lacanian Real (which is always spectral anyway), but the Guattarian real of “external intensities” and social life (an intensity is a ow between two strata that produces something new.)17 Petit a, then, is rendered a fall-out (not a dizzying array of signifying specters), an enfranchising opening into the real strata of social life from which the subject has become alienated through the conventional chains of signifying systems.18
Remnan ts in th e Real What is it that is operating in what one sees as the features of a face, a landscape, a body? How do we account for the mystery of a particular look, a thing, a street, a memory? What is actually there to see seems to be concealing something else. What sort of line of escape gives us the sense that some extraordinary encounter might occur? What exactly are these potentialities of some other world, operating by different rules, different codes? (Félix Guattari)19
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Is not the sloping dirt oor in Shinohara’s Tanigawa House (1975) the mysterious opening to “another world”? In Shinohara, subjectivization is initiated by way of an architectural residue that becomes the privileged architectural object. Shinohara has described the exposed earth ramp as a transversal element whose passage permits the joining together of detached views entering opposite sides of the interior. There is in the Tanigawa House, however, prior to the corporeal movement of walking up and down the incline, another kind of movement, what Guattari might call an unexpected violence reverberating between the individual parts—a pure redundancy of movement, begun without moving (an “it moving”). There exists in this dirt-oor house an excessive element that is perhaps more real and terrifying than the forest outside—a forest depicted in Japan Architect as soft and unreal compared with the “savagery” of Shinohara’s “degree-zero space” (terminology Shinohara has lifted from Claude Lévi-Strauss). 20 Yet what is it that lends this interior its mystery, its seduction? Shinohara uses the term “naked space” to refer to the effect of withdrawal in his architecture, where architectural parts achieve a perfect autonomy by referring only to themselves. This withdrawal as auto-affective effect, in turn, illustrates the conation of two worlds symptomatic of the New Wave’s recourse to poststructuralist terminologies and Guattari’s own reworked late-Lacanism. In a statement about the house, the architect remarks: “The earthen oor, the roof, the posts and the braces: all these were meant to have no connotation but their function.”21 But naked space is not felt in the poet’s house as a stripped-back functionalism, or a point-blank brutalism. Unlike any privative logic or reduction to pure signiers, here what is operative is the concrete force of bare elements that have become autonomous openings for an intense mobilization of architectural effects. All other intentions given to the semiological readings of built form have been erased. To Shinohara’s claim that the singular elements have no connotation, we might add that such architecture exists in a suspense— almost on the side of signication—at the threshold where meaning is withdrawn in order to induce something to happen. The acute whiteness of the walls and darkness of the exposed dirt oor lend the house a proto-anarchic character or utterance that fails to form phonemes or discernable sounds leading to language itself. Its surfaces are openings to a condition that exceeds the individual planes and volumetric logic of a house. The Guattarian petit a, as an opening or break into the real, is in some sense inseparable real itself; of the social and the real of which for Guattarifrom are the irreducible to the anyreal univocal symbolic system as desire, language or universal paradigm. Shinohara’s architectural openings are not wall-openings or voids, because they do not function as the result of subtraction or the excavation of architectural space. Instead it is the quiet withdrawal of each surface that obtains to a certain autonomy and disaffection from the delimited coordinates of any specic building; in short it is the encounter with the real and its realization. Guattari is particularly interested in Lacan’s version of the Freudian Real, specically in Freud’s discovery that there is something which lies beyond the
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Symbolic.22 Guattari’s work surrounding petit a can be said to be derived from Lacan’s Seminar XI where “object a [ objet a] is purely topological. It is the object around which the drives move, and refers more specically to the Real, something outside the signifying system of language that produces an effect.” 23 The threat of the Tanigawa House lies in its single premise, that the dirt oor extends outside the house innitely, in all directions, and forever. The roof plane has a similar effect of disappearing endlessly into the forest beyond the volumetric enclosure for which it is intended to provide shelter. The savagery of the Tanigawa House is precisely an effect of such scaleless extension and overall smoothing. In “The Subversion of the Subject” Lacan explains that what allows an “organ” (a partial object) to become an autonomous signier in the unconscious is the “cut expressed in the anatomical mark of a margin or border”—the fold in the skin that delineates an organ visually as part, such as “the enclosure formed by the teeth, the rim of the anus, the tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit formed by the eyelids.”24 Individual elements of the Tanigawa residence can each be thought of in this way as part-objects articulated by an architectural “cut,” while the exposed earth oor is the remnant (petit a ) torn from the Real of the forest that lies outside the house, from which it has separated. The internalization of the dirt oor as a “cut expressed in the border” of the house, produces a negative or reverse clearing unbounded by trees (a new terrain); it is the “lling” or “stufng” that is the objet petit a of Tanigawa. What is peculiar about the geometry of the cut, Lacan writes, is that the partial objects “have no specular image, or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the ‘stuff,’ or rather the lining.” 25 Non-specularizable does not mean the partial object literally lacks a mirror image (a vampire with no reection); rather, it lacks a signifying semiotic double, 26 just as the dirt oor has no outside, because it itself is unbounded, neither inside nor outside. In Lacan’s structuralist model, every signifying object has a counterpart, or other; and otherness, or having an other, is a basic condition of representation (the only “other” to the rim of the penis is empty space which it encloses, in other words a lack or lacuna.) Lacan’s metaphor of optical reection demonstrates this dualistic nature of representation. If I stand in the mirror I see a pure exteriority (an all-outside) the body emptied of its “lining” or “stufng” (its anatomic interior). Otherness, then—other to this exteriority—is what cannot be seen, what doesn’t show up in reection, viz., the inside. Lacan then asks: what kind of objectreverses
thisHe mechanism of reection, which derives a pure exterior) that is, apure interiority? thus proposes the geometry of an orice-edge enclosing a void, what he calls the “rim” or else the “lining” or “stufng”—a pure surface that represents the absolute interiority of objecthood.27 It is all surface without boundary and as such has no complementary surface from which it would derive its image (a pure void or enclosure has no reection).28 This interior surface, such as a urethra, forms the lining of another object, the penis itself, that can be mirrored: “It is to this object that cannot be grasped in the mirror that the specular image lends its clothes.”29 This strange scenario can then
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be used to understand the intimate relationship between the part-objects and petit a, which go hand in hand with each other and are beginning to emerge, in Lacan’s schema, as actually the same object. Shinohara’s architecture begins precisely at the point where such a runaway element enters the space from a wholly different register, in this case given as an encounter that begins in the nominal interior. Here, however, it is not so much that the outside is let loose inside as the building itself is allowed outside for the rst time, accruing to itself a subject-production (with what is real in Guattari’s reformulation as opposed to what is simply phantasmatic). The ground plane functions, in turn, as an opening toward an architectural subject-production that pushes the building beyond its internalizing fantasy—that is, the relationship to the real of the forest serves to vacate the circular or self-referential state of mirroring without mirroring its very form (the Lacanian house of mirrors par excellence). Shinohara’s dirt-oor lining is a lateral slice through the interior where the oor is not actually missing; rather, a second dirt oor covering has been installed (over itself)—a line of escape to a mystery irreducible to the forest or a house. Moving toward the south side of the residence, Shinohara observes: “The house is virtually all roof, more or less a simple galvanized A-frame.”30 Not quite vertical, this galvanized surface appears to engulf the entire house. The roof functions as an autonomous orice tilted toward the sky, lending to the house a character of silent exposedness, or witness to something extraordinary. It is no longer a subject, but the architecture that watches while disappearing under the roof. From this angle, the roof is autonomized, generating an emergent subjectivity which begins to ripple through the broad reective surface. Shinohara is alive to the partial subjectivity that installs itself in the gaze of his architectural schema. He writes: Space in contemporary architecture is read in terms ofthe movement of the human eye. The post-Renaissance space of the West is composed from the standpoint of the ego, the visual prerogative quite naturally being assumed to be on the side of the viewer. But in the context of Japanese architecture, typically the Jiko-in, the very concept of viewpoint is different. We may even say that viewpoint is not integral to the viewer but that it attaches itself to the building.31
What or who is the subject, then, of this house? There is the owner or visitor who walks inside; there is the house’s creator, the architect Shinohara. Yet the primary resident the “automatic system self-reference work,” an “attractor” for all the otherissubject-productions that of revolve around itat(fantasy, utility, economic or 32 architectural pleasure). As this Lacanian reading of Guattari suggests, a singular component of such a house (its canted ground plane or severe roof), or a person walking, may act as catalyst for subjectivization, but it is another impersonal (unconscious) subject of speech that glimmers deep within the dirt oor and around which all the other partial elements revolve. How this is achieved in Shinohara’s architecture is through the raw treatment of surfaces, at once naked, rendered autonomous and
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giving rise to a dual effect of innite extension and retraction, having being torn away from—an epiphenomenon that endows the architecture with its own peculiar sense of motive and self-movement. It is precisely the tension between the concrete effects of naked architecture and its abstract movement toward a wider world of discourse and subjectivization that can be said to give rise to the architectural subjectivity in question. The parallel notion of two innities implies that for a split second a subject stands at the midpoint gazing in both directions before desubjectivization begins. This partial image is the very image of a house, which stands between the innity of the beyond and the innity of all that is within. In this manner, Pascal’s wager on transcendence is grounded in a pure materiality that signals the true intentions of such a program to liberate purely immanent agency in architecture. The subject is not required in an abstract sense, as the subject is consumed by the formative forces of the purely immanent eld engaged. Yet this de-territorialization of the subject is relative to the socius which is, after all, the end goal for all such operations. In freeing material agency, from the totalité, from any delimited physical object, Guattari has pregured not a eld of agural effects but a possible assimilation of what has always resided in architecture anyway, and what has, arguably, always been locked out within the conventions of the same. This theory of a primary architectural subjectivity in Shinohara, while distinct from an architectural occupant, does not preclude private experience produced in the architectural encounter—indeed, the auto-referential effect of the architecture is what sets the fantasies in motion, just as the petit a “sets the partial objects in motion.”33 For Guattari what matters is the detachment from these fantasies. The transversal, or passing the threshold of fantasy or the symbolic dimension of architecture, is precisely the locus of a proto-subjectivity for architecture. Subjectivization does not erase the subject. On the contrary, it is via subjectivization that the individual subject is produced or resubjectivized from the immanent eld—from desubjectivization to resubjectivization, and back. Such architecture can be thought of as interactive in the true sense of engaging the subject in its own subject-production and effectively altering the nature of subjectivity itself.
Ser ial Effec ts
In “Beyond the Psychoanalytical Unconscious,” Guattari posited the existence of amathemes “schizoanalytic unconscious … made also up not only of typical ‘part-objects’ or like Lacan’s ‘a-object’—but a multitude of singular entities, … uxes, territories and incorporeal universes, making up the functional arrangements that are never reducible to universals.”34 The model of the unconscious here, based on ows and territories, is derived from Freud’s theory of primary processes, which describes mental functioning operative in the id .35 The Guattarian unconscious of The Three Ecologies is similarly constituted by a “pre-objectal” and “pre-personal” logic prior to moral, linguistic, or any other distinctions, and gives rise to a primary subjectivity severed from any spatio-temporal coordinates (a concept which
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already existed in the “schizoanalytic” unconscious in Anti-Oedipus). Guattari acknowledges the Freud-Lacanian process of free association and interpretation as having the enabling “capacity to recognize discursive chains at the point when they break with meaning.” Nonetheless, he criticizes this methodology as failing “to take into account the production of a ‘primary’ subjectivity,” and that “all existing theoretical bodies of this type share the shortcoming of being closed to the possibility of creative proliferation.”36 For Lacan the auto-creative activity of subjectivity lies in the recursive movement of signifying chains which ceaselessly reproduce the same lack that lies at the center of the system. But for Guattari this circularity is insufcient, something new has to be produced, and this can only take place if there is a shift beyond the constituted subject and effects of a psychic interior towards the proliferation of impersonal effects. Shinohara’s House in Uehara37 can be understood to engage an effects mechanism toward the emergence of impersonal subjectivity. As in Tanigawa where an object begins a serial effects mechanism around it, in the Uehara residence it is a bifurcating, concrete bracing element that becomes the privileged architecturalobjet. The threestorey house for a photographer and his children comprises an external concrete shell of beamless plates, combined with a series of reinforced concrete braces on the periphery, and a free-standing, tree-like brace which moves upward, directly from the living-dining oor, blocking trafc from the entrance to the second oor. The branches of this web-like brace do not articulate spaces so much as extend into them, suspended in silent animation and stretching from wall to wall to oor. Commenting on Uehara, the architect describes the effect of the central brace members as producing “detours in passage lines apparent in the plans,” 38 which effects transversalization. But what is interesting about this element is not the trajectory it forces one to travel, in the way of detour or obstruction, but rather the many tiny virtual spaces it mobilizes around itself. New lines of passage implied by the bracing element are converted into lines of inhabitation. The bracing structure can be said to slow down this space while also setting up another motion. As with the stringing together of part-objects in the Tanigawa House, here the concrete tree has a de-territorializing effect of splintering the space by creating new ones. To de-territorialize does not mean to disassemble, but to spark a current of moving effects; Shinohara calls it “ssure space,” which he opposes to “spatial division.” The placement of the brace element and its orientation to the interior lends it
its explicit function space via a creative inux subsequent spaces. This inux to is de-territorialize heightened in the Swedish lmKochuu ,39 of which shows scenes from within the Uehara House of a series of spontaneous functions, both living and work stations, set up around the bracing tree. These partial-spaces are visually imperceptible as walls or enclosures, in the ordinary sense, but are strongly felt once inhabited. The bracing element, albeit physically massive and distinct, creates an entirely hazy schema around it—a “pre-objectal unconscious” or virtual space composed of a “multitude of uxes and territories” which cannot be seen directly or visually delimited. The spaces are not realized by the materiality of
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structure or tectonic presence but, instead, through interaction with the subsequent vagaries of the spatial array, which the web structure simultaneously forms and motivates, in relation to itself, the oors, and adjacent walls. Such partial spaces might be compared to the transitional objects of D.W. Winnicott,40 lying somewhere between imagination and reality, and to Lacan’s petit a: they are derived from the actual brace, but only as a retroactive trace or imprint of the loss of the bracing element in its passage from the purely autonomous function assigned to it by the designer (as a naked structural element) into the discourse of live architectural space; that is, a properly architectural economy that exceeds anything the architect may have anticipated. As with the Tanigawa House, the crucial object is understood by Shinohara to be “auto-referential,” but despite the peculiar colonization of the space it dictates, and resolute autonomization, this privileged objet animates a ssuring of space into a multiplicity of virtualities, thus revealing a spontaneous extroversion and de-territorialization of the surrounding space. It is the petit a or lining of architecture turned inside-out in the separation from an architectural realm of pure formalism—a contrivance of minimalist photography depicting an empty house in JA a year after it was built, where it appears the web is what inhabits Uehara, a pristine objet petit a—to its integration into the cultural and discursive context of real-time architecture inhabited by people, as narrated in Kochuu.41 Uehara House enunciates in two directions: toward the past and future of real-time space plus everything nominally suppressed in the reduction of architecture to simple built form. This cinematic version of an architectural real could be said to be closest to Guattari’s real—an emergent domain of external intensities that provoke the latent forces repressed within architecture, in its institutional mode of an undisturbed formalism. While petit a for Guattari will come to represent the institutional objet, the partobjects, in turn, become the detached parts of an institution, or dissonant elements of a culture that Guattari believed have the capacity to override the dominant, signifying codes of capital. Guattari prescribes the installation of “singularizing” aesthetic interventions, as per the bracing element in Uehara, specically the “freeing of the part-objects.” Just as the Lacanian petit a sets up a motion around which the component drives circle—and that are, in turn, represented by their partial objects—the transversal for Guattari is an element or event that stimulates a pulse or vibration between the detached parts of an institution or unconscious discourse andofits phantasies. Transversality represents the political thecorresponding institution (what it might 42 not know), and is thus adopted by him as the platform for its reworking. Guattari moves from the individual and his/her treatment to the institutional groupsubject in a polemic that seeks to problematize both the institution proper and its investments in the production of subjects. Petit a which sets up the transversal motion is in fact the institutional object itself: “Just as the Lacanian objet petit a is the cause of the subject’s—here group’s desire—and informs fantasy life, the institutional object is what is real for the group subjects.”43 This step radicalizes the
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entire idea of a “lining” that holds within it the apparent chimera of architectural subject-object relations. If petit a is no longer held captive to the circulation of desires manufactured by the disciplinary machinery of architectural production, it becomes under the sign of a new surface the possible srcin of free subjects. To nd this same neutral place in architectural institutions and discourses suggests that the undermining or overthrow of both institutions and discourses depends on locating that ‘something they, or we, do not know’ (the real of architectural production) and freeing it for wholly other purposes. We can see, then, the emergence of the entire possibility of the effects-image for architecture as disciplinary institution and discourse par excellence.
Killing Moon Originally it was a saber and then I decided…that it should lose its identity... In general, I try to obliterate the names and srcins of things. Obviously, I started out with a saber in my hands; on a practical level, however, I had a building to build. In any case, I couldn’t stop there. I wanted it to lose its architectural name and become something else. (Shin Takamatsu)44
Takamatsu’s recourse to a radical Lacanianism isperhaps most rampant inthe building 45 signaling a step into the beyond insofar as the he called Killing Moon II (1985) residual effects of the modern-postmodern games with form require one additional measure—the silencing of those last traces of linguistic content. Takamatsu narrates in micro-detail his own procedures surrounding Killing Moon II. The progenitor of Killing Moon II was a traditional short sword, made by Takamatsu, which was then transposed into a privileged objet without a function; he called it Killing Moon I (1986), after the 1985 song by the Echo and the Bunnymen.46 This curved object without purpose, in turn, was used to generate the plan of the house at Shugakuin II (or the Kinoshita House), which he subsequently named Killing Moon II. It reappeared in a series of projects following the rst house of 1985, such as in the pointed window cut out of the front elevation of Miyata House (1985–86), and the forms and spaces in the skylights surrounding the dome, and over the subterranean spaces, of Origin III.47 This extension forward and backward from the 1986 event of the sword, and across several projects,
illustrates that as thea agency invoked Killing Moon wasproper, processual. Its protoeffect was to operate means of cutting by away formal agency to reveal subjective agency devoid of specic objects. Killing Moon II, then, was completed before Killing Moon I, which already existed as the saber and was only named at the point at which it had lost its function, where it became a trace of something erased which came before. There is in this transposition, from functional sword to useless object, an analogy at play related to the conceptless aesthetic thing of Kant’sCritique of Judgment. As such, and with Takamatsu, one wants to privilege the purposeless beauty of the thing, while
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its liberated, a-functional, aesthetic form, in turn, becomes the means to an end— 48 is the equivalent the production of built form. Killing Moon I, the short sword, of a Guattarian-freed, Lacanian objet petit a, that which mobilizes new productive agency in the real. To be clear, the sword should not be confused with a mere motif or gure; it is articulated in Takamatsu’s building not as a knife form but in the thinking of a real architectural “cut” (just as the tip of the sexual organ-orice is itself articulated by a real “cut,” the margin or fold in the skin). The Killing Moon sword functions as that object which could not and cannot be formalized. It emerges only as a latent residue in the part-objects which it catalyses—the series of buildings succeeding Killing Moon II, the house. The short sword is literally torn away and emptied of symbolic value in order to mobilize a series entirely unforeseen in, and which irrevocably transforms, the srcinal object. What does the severing, then, is not a knife, but the separation from it—its emptying of formal content. Takamatsu’s unusable and abstract sword, or katana, is like the Samurai shai to, “short sword,” also known as wakizashi, traditionally used in Japan for seppuku—the only one for honorable suicide.49 The architect’s katana takes on a special character then, not as a tool for suicide but an entity stripped of identity or self in order to become an architectural device. It is the primacy of the architectural in Takamatsu that should be remembered in light of the many allegations of violence and other connotations imputed to the work. 50 The Killing Moon relinquished its murderous intentions and was put to work differentially, retaining its ability to effect a cutting51 or slicing away of spent signiers buried within architecture’s representation regime. To use Takamatsu’s phrase, the resultant condition of the buildings submitting to his “sword” was an architecture that had “lost its name,” for Takamatsu this is a subversion of Cartesian subjectivity insofar as it is embedded within architecture, and something which he found both in Guattari and Deleuze, and in Nietzsche. 52 The house itself at Shugakuin (Killing Moon II), based in plan on the Killing Moon sword, consists of a narrow block with two laterally enclosing tall concrete walls, one crescent shaped like Killing Moon (the sword), a look-out pavilion, and an elevated external walkway that follows the most complicated path to the house, which, in turn, closes in completely on an internal courtyard. The primary arc of Killing Moon II, in the sweeping external concrete wall, blind to the street, does not slice the building but appears to break away from the spine of the house—a dissident element expressed as a cut delineating the fold or boundary of that the house. interior punctuated by aIfserial detail-fragment the crescent frames The almost everyisvertical surface. Killing Moon II kills,of it is by articulating a certain precision, the coldness which attaches to a luxury house composed as a series of carefully crafted and unique shards (remnants of an order that never was). The operation of the sword in the house at Shugakuin II is not to obliterate, but to leave an a-signi fying mark (in the way of a Lacanian cut), as revealed in the papery, curved, wooden panels cut ush with the plaster to which they are afxed. The walls are sliced at crucial edges and interstices where there is to be an opening or a light xture, and the edge then tted with
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the curved wooden detail of the phantom sword. The serial Killing Moon detail leaves open the extremity of each surface as a cut, thus setting up a pulsating chain of fragments. In the kinship between the Lacanian part-objects and petit a there is always a slight delay; they are misaligned or just out of step with each other. Since there is no one signier that can sufciently represent the primal loss or lack of the subject (the separation from the mother, the Real, in the incorporation into the Symbolic), one signier always gives way to the next, none ever arriving at the actual lack, and thereby producing the surfeit that is petit a. Another partial object is created to make up for this decit or inefciency and the process repeats itself, reproducing the recursive, dening error petit a . Such is the srcin of misrecognition and the never-ending loop in representational orders that suggests the whole system has been corrupted from the beginning. The partobjects thus concatenate with a ghost-train of objets petit a, the surplus register of representational dybbuks multiplied to innity.53 Nevertheless, in Takamatsu, importantly, it is the Guattarian-inspired break or disconnect (the open wound) that sustains transversal production and produces something else : both the break character of petit a and the anti-oedipal part-objects it sets into motion. In Guattari’s semiotic presentation of the process there is a catalytic effect given by “a-signifying points of rupture—the rupture of denotation, connotation and signication—from which a certain number of chains are put to work in the service of an existential autoreferential effect.” 54 Semiotic elements are emancipated from their primary signifying chains via the processes of repetition that formulate a given culture, such as “the repetitive symptom, the prayer, the ritual of the ‘session’, the order-word, the emblem, the refrain, the facialitary crystallization of the celebrity,” 55 and to these we might add Takatsu’s Killing Moon refrain. Killing Moon I (the sword) as architectural petit a, commands a series of architectural fragments (in Killing Moon II and the Kinoshita House), its generative principle is the breakaway detail inscribed as a “mark in the cut” whose operation, in turn, is to multiply and circulate throughout the house. In this way, the part-object or detail remains unrequited in relation to the Lacanian objet petit a, which it never fully recaptures. The instantiation of the detail fragment in each case is a trace of that from which it has been separated—namely, the Killing Moon sword that had lost its meaning in order to generate the part-
objects that circulate it. It sacrices itself to the impersonal effects, whose reverberation can be around heard between all these projects and their architecturally specic components.
Free Subjectivity
Guattari’s reworking of Lacan’s structuralist-inspired terms, part-objects and petit a, suggests a way of exposing within his cr itique of Takamatsu the presen ce
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of what might be called break-cuts—those remainders from the so-called cinematic turn given to much 1980s cultural criticism. In architecture, there is always something left behind, an architectural remnant of the encounter which runs across the structural-formal realm of an architecturally coded system and the primary territories of architectural imagination, memory, and affect. It is the break-character of the architectural remnant that allows it to catalyze effects from wholly different registers, generating a very different instantiation of the real. At the threshold of the formal, it is a dissonant element that disrupts the formal-signifying economy of architecture, ooding it with other partial-codes, inviting new architectural states. The remnant lives in the future, which never arrives, because it already has. It draws a line to another dimension, or “ligne de fuite”; it exists neither in the space-time of the circulating effects nor in the encounter itself. It knows not its condition. The remnant can also be thought of as a rupture or loophole within the pure encounter; not a Lacanian hole or lack, but a projectile from the encounter whose only purpose is to start a chain reaction in the effects-image itself . The remnant no longer circulates around a missing Real, but generates new forms of reality. We cannot prescribe in advance what will or will not be its function in the architectural encounter to come, but only witness its effects and remainders. The remnant, thus, dissolves the last vestiges of the modernist and postmodernist orders based on predetermined part-to-whole relationships, and which Guattari rightly saw as forms of reication of the signifying chains that enslave subjects. Architecture’s complicity with both ideological and socio-economic regimes collapses with the cut. It may be a dramatic political event that sets the architecture in motion, reversing its privileged agency, that is, Bataille’s readings of architecture under the siege of revolution. The runaway element may itself call architecture to account, to engage in conict, or else it may be society that forces architecture to its knees in the sense that its forms and secret agency are summonsed. Nonetheless, even a mute element such as the bracing tree in the Uehara House or a stretch of wallpaper in Through a Glass Darkly may be adequate to launch the avalanche of subjectivization. A furtive element—unsuspected, seemingly autonomous, and inward looking, in short still parading on the architectural level of signiers— may open a window to another reality, another real beyond the so-called real of instrumentalized orders, psychological or otherwise. The encounter given to impersonal effects is an any-space-whatever, a suspension ofexplosion debris from worlds plundered or gone awry—like the withdrawn image of thefull nal in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point or that of 575 Broadway. Not an emptiness or pure extinction, a nihilist gure for nothingness or a tabula rasa—the encounter contains everything, but distinguishes nothing. It is a sheer will of indifference, a pure anonymity, aloof to the effects which hanker after it. Such an event is non-psychological and non-architectural in extremis , even as it has been marshaled to illustrate the exacting forms that subjectivization might take in both disciplines. The crossing of psychoanalytical and architectural terminologies is tantamount to placing both in analysis, while the analysand and
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her chaise longue are no longer there. This is the paradox of Guattari’s project. It also accounts for the difculty in assimilating Deleuze to any determinist project and explains the hijacking of Deleuze in recent and present-day forms of architectural formalism. The endgame is to nally admit that the subject is not a subject per se, but a convergence of effects, “arranged” freely or in chains. Architecture is always autonomized out of effects, whose enoncé is the pure impersonality of the encounter (which itself cannot speak)—the outcome of impersonal effects being pure subjectivization prior to the speech act itself. As such, an architectural unconscious is opened to new formulations and new dreams, making possible another form of architectur e—arguably an architecture that is always present below the “paving stones,” an architectu re always already yet to come.
Notes 1
2 3
4 5 6
La Borde was a radical psychiatric clinic, founded by Jean Oury in 1951, in which Guattari was heavily involved. La Borde interrogated the relations between patients and psychotherapists and importantly attempted to foster the creativity of the patients. See Félix Guattari, “The Vicissitudes of Therapy,” in A Guattari Reader. Guattari, Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle (Paris, 1974). Deleuze and Guattari’s quarrel with psychoanalysis, put simply, is the rejection of the linguistic structuring of the subject through the Oedipal triangle (a signifying chain they call “mummy-papa-me”). This latter phrase comes from a poem by Antonin Artaud. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York, 1977), p. 14. Guattari’s real is distinct from the Lacanian Real; it is the real of social life. It does not hinge on the relationship to and separation from the mother, as in Lacan. Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 47. Hence the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother/breast. On the Kleinian part-object, see: Melanie Klein, “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” in Contributions to Psycho-Analysis (London, 1950); R.D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary (London, 1989); J. Laplanche and J.B.York, Pontalis, of Thought, trans. Thep.Language of Kleinian Psycho-Analysis Donald Nicholson-Smith (New 1974), 134; and Deleuze, “Twenty-Eight Series of Sexuality,” in Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed.
7 8 9
Constantin V. Boundas and trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York, 1990), pp. 196–7. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London and New York, 1996), p. 135. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 56–7. Italics added.
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19 20
21 22
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity Kyoto (1988–1990). Yukio Futagawa, ed., Shin Takamatsu, GA Architect, no. 9 (1990). See Shin Takamatsu, “The Sea,” in ibid., p. 142. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 41. Ibid., pp. 26–7. See Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan, La séminaire. Livre X. L’angoisse, 1962–3 (unpublished seminar, January 16, 1963). “A perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production … so that desiring-machines seem to emanate from it in the apparent objective movement.” Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 11. “The ‘indenite article’ [of] ‘a’ stomach, ‘an eye,’ ‘a’ mouth … expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference.” In other words, there is an intensive difference by which the impersonality of things is nevertheless differentiated, which is none other than the threshold of its power to produce. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, 1988), p. 164. Guattari describes the process whereby capital alienates the subject: “It is its [capital’s] capacity to reorder through a single system of semiotization the most diverse mechanical values which gives capitalism its hold, not only over material machines of the economic sphere (artisanal, manufacturing, industrial, etc.) but equally over the non-material machines working in the heart of human activities (productiveunproductive, public-private, real-imaginary, etc.).” Félix Guattari and Eric Alliez, “Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes,” in Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York, 1984), p. 275. Guattari, Molecular Revolution, p. 154. Kazuo Shinohara, “Towards Architecture,” Japan Architect, no. 293 (1981), p. 15. Elsewhere Shinohara writes: “I am basically concerned with the expression of things in naked states, suppressing the emergence of meanings…[though] I still have not found a certain method for xing aggregations of such things. Consequently, an inclination to move in the direction of unied structures seems to be emerging. I call this contradictory situation ‘savagery’ in analogy with the ‘Pensée Sauvage’ of the cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.” Yasumitsu Matsunaga and Kazuo Shinohara, Essays by Yasumitsu Matsunaga and Kazuo Shinohara (New York,Kazuo 1982),Shinohara: p. 8. Shinohara, “When Naked Space is Traversed,” Japan Architect 51, no. 2 (February 1976): p. 66. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,vol. XVIII (1920–1922) (London, 1955). Zita Marks argues that Lacan’s main inuence in formulating object a is Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
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25 26
27
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29 30 31 32 33
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Ibid. The cause of this privileging of the “organ” as part, for Lacan, further, is not its functional “organization” but the “signifying economy of language which produces it.” In “The Subversion of the Subject” Lacan writes: “That which distinguishes the drive from the organic function it inhabits … [is] its grammatical artifce.” (a drive in traditional psychoanalysis assumes a biological cause and an object of discharge, like the sexual drives). Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection (New York, 1977), p. 314. Italics added. Ibid., p. 315. Italics added. Such an object cannot be incorporated into language, because it lies outside the representational economy of the unconscious in which objects are converted into signiers. Ibid. If a ‘full’ body (a totality) encloses organs, producing a reection of a pure exteriority; the opposite of this is a partial-body (part object or sexual organ such as the rim of the tip of the penis) as surface enclosing a void or a “lack” (the opening of the urethra). He says there is “no Other of an Other.” This should not be taken physically, but as operative within Lacan’s structuralist logic, representation depends on signs or the semiotic duality, signifer/signifed. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” p. 316. Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter, ed., “Introduction” to Kazuo Shinohara (Berlin, 1994), p. 8. Shinohara, “Towards Architecture”: p. 115. Guattari, “Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Félix Guattari,” Parallax 7, no. 4 (2001): p. 134. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” p. 175. In 1977 Lacan dened objet petit a “as the object cause of desire in order to distinguish it from the object of desire. The objet petit a is not what is desired but what sets the partial objects in motion, which in turn dene the drives.” Petit a, then, occupies such a dual position where it both produces the part-objects and is the uncanny result of its own production, re-inscribed as a surplus trace of the activity of the part-objects. It is here that the true sense of partial emerges. These objects are partial because they represent only partially the function—that is, the petit a—that produces them. See also Marks, “Object A,” in A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ed. Zita M. Marks and Sara Murphy Huguette Glowinski (London and New York, 2001); and Evans, An Introductory Dictionary psychoanalysis actistoward the of LacanianofPsychoanalysis satisfaction an urgent need. The suchinstinctual as hunger,drives thirst, in etc., and every drive associated with an objet. Guattari, “Beyond the Psychoanalytical Unconscious,” in Chaosophy: Soft Subversions, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York, 1996), p. 196. In his early essay “The Unconscious” Freud describes the primary processes in the system of the Unconscious (Ucs.): “Exempt from mutual contradiction … there are in this system no negation, no doubt, no degrees of certainty … there are only contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength. The cathectic intensities are much more
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41 42 43 44 45
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47
48
49 50
51
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Architecture for a Free Subjectivity mobile.” The primary processes are “timeless … they have no reference to time at all … [and] the Ucs. processes pay little regard to reality. They are subject to the pleasure principle.” Freud, “The Unconscious,” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,vol. XIV (1914–1916) (London, 1955), cited in The Penguin Freud Library,vol. 2, ed. A. Richards (London, 1984), pp. 190–91. Guattari, Three Ecologies, pp. 55–6. Italics added. Shibuya-ku, Tokyo (1975–1976). Shinohara, “House with Triangular Windows,” Japan Architect 52, no. 2 (1977): pp. 66–7. Jesper Wachtmeister, Kochuu: Japanese Architecture, Inuence and Origin, VHS (2003; Drottningholm: Solaris Filmproduktion, 2004). Donald Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” International Journal of. Psychoanalysis, no. 34 (1953): 87–9. Cited in Guattari, Three Ecologies, n. 41. Shinohara, “When Naked Space is Traversed.” See Gary Genosko, “Félix Guattari: the Life and Work of Felix Guattari,” in Three Ecologies (London, 2000), p. 110. Ibid., p. 114. Takamatsu, “Talking with Shin Takamatsu,” inShin Takamatsu: Projets d’architectures / Architectural Works, 1981/1989, ed. Xavier Guillot (Paris, 1989), p. 29. Takamatsu’s Killing Moon project includes both the Killing Moon Short Sword (1986) and the house at Shugakuin, also called Killing Moon II or the Kinoshita House (Sakyo, Kyoto, 1985). See Genosko, “Chapter 3: Japanese Singularity,” in Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction, (London, 2002), p. 16, for the discussion of the dispute over the name Killing Moon. Botond Bognár, “From Ritualistic Objects to Science Fiction Constructs: The Enigma of Shin Takamatsu’s Architecture,” in Shin Takamatsu, ed. Paolo Polledri (New York, 1993), pp. 46–8. Killing Moon I is often referred to as ‘the dagger,’ but the naming here is important, as with daggers the focus is on the point, and, with swords, on the cutting edge (which determines the curved form). Dr. Hironobu Kitaoji, private communication with Dr. Greg Missingham (Director, Japan Seminar House, Melbourne, October 2004). Riichi Miyake, in Futagawa, ed., Shin Takamatsu, GA Architect9, p. 8. Riichi Miyake comments essential almost theme murderous is always darkness approachedon theTakamatsu: fn de siècle“His with extreme, feelings.”… Takamatsu To the extent that the shape is a curved segment, it is more like a cooking implement than a killing one. Presumably, Takamatsu had in mind the trajectory of a cutting action more like an arc. “Killing Moon,” the song, describes the loss of identity as an assimilation into the amorphous space of the moon, and the prepersonal indifference of its refrain “Fate / Up against your will …”.
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Lacan thinks of the part-objects in this way as symbolic signiers, forming so-called signifying chains in the unconscious. As nothing in this order of subjectivization remains of the Real, except its threat of breaking into the house of mirrors, the subject’s relationship to the world of actually existing things remains endlessly mediated. Guattari, Three Ecologies, p. 56. Ibid.
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Chapter 6
Architecture Without Qualities1
The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well known consequence. The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning and end are sudden. The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being just as sudden as the departure, the arrested word and action are picked up again automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absences, which can be quite numerous—hundreds every day most often pass completely unnoticed by others around—we’ll be using the word picnolepsy (from the Greek picnos, “frequent”). However, for the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped. (Paul Virilio)2
If architectural theory since 1968 could be reduced to a single inquiry, it would be the inquiry after the subject productions of architecture (what Guattari called an ethico-aesthetics). The interrogations of subjectivity, stretching back to the earliest debates held in the East-coast American universities, could be characterized as a disappointed history of the architectural subject rendered both in decit and excess. Both turn on the same unstable ground left vacant by the bracketed Cartesian subject. One indulges the inscription of the void (empty center) while the other indulges the post-phenomenological embrace of the aesthetic as purely given. Since the beginning of modernism, architecture has been put on trial for its various erasures of subjectivity—most extravagantly, of course, in the strident modernisms that would convert the bourgeois subject to an empirical unit, or, more caustically, in the agit-prop provocations of the surrealist and Dada movements, where the subject was simply an automaton. All the while the very notion of a humanist subjectivity established at the dawn of modernity (and lingering long after its passing) has been equally contested. This situation has led to certain ambivalence subjectivity, manifested in thearchitecture. various distortions of asubjectivity prevalenttoward in various strains of contemporary The current status of the subject could be dened, then, by a certain weariness toward the re-inscription of the absent subject of modernism, or the attempt simply to rid architecture of the subject once and for all, leading ineluctably to an almost permanent paralysis of subjectivity, where the question is no longer permitted or even possible. What has been lapsed or disappointed, therefore, over the last several decades is not theory per se—as proponents of the post-political or projective era would
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assert—but a theorization of the subject proper. These are the historical conditions that make subjectivization important now. The question remains: how is Deleuze and Guattari’s model critical for architectural theory and practice today? Why yet another French philosopher, no less problematic for architecture than Derrida, Lacan, or any of Deleuze’s contemporaries, and having already had much earlier receptions in France, Japan and Brazil? As Sylvère Lotringer said, what distinguishes Deleuze and Guattari is that they never attempted to salvage the humanist subject; their reformulation of subjectivity proceeds from purely immanent material forces. Deleuze and Guattari raise the problem of subjectivity in secret, by deindividualizing the subject, and identifying impersonal effects operative at every plateau of life. In so doing, they provide architecture with a proto-ethical-aesthetic strategy to circumvent the long pathology of the absent subject, and to discover something new—an image of subjectivity yet to come. The theory of impersonal effects engages the core events of architectural encounter, without recourse to the subjectivistic relativism of, say, Bachelard, or phenomenology—and without the elision of subjectivity characteristic of traditional formalism. It locates subjectivity not as the exclusive provenance of human beings, but in the entire eld of subjectproduction, including registers as diverse as architectural, social, cinematic, physical, perceptual, and political. This does not mean that everything becomes a subject, but rather that we learn to grasp the primitive murmur in all things, including ourselves. The question that arises is how to express this in properly architectural terms. The theory of impersonal effects necessitates real architectural fragments, but is irreducible to a formalism given in advance (as a tradition or as a set of closed options within a discourse). It is not opposed to formalism per se, but only to the deathly formalism which terminates the creative function of architecture by domesticating form in a representational schema that limits its expression to obedience to programmatic design—or to rote procedures of reication, always the mask for shadowy forms of ideology. To invoke Lacan’s subversive image, we should ask: what is the architecture that has no reection (the non-specular image that is just the lining or the stufng)? What is the architecture with no gure or drive standing in for a lost object, and which does not revert to the mirror stage, srcin of the self-referential subject? The various forms of architecture inuenced by Deleuze and Guattari, as opposed to thoserepresentational we might describe as specular—caught the mirror-games of poststructuralist orders—have one thing inincommon: they do not conceive of architectural forms as types of transcendental ideation antecedent to or outside of the processes of production in which they are conceived. They do not name or reenact a personal subjectivity, because they cannot. Under the weight of architectural representation, architects turned to Deleuze to loosen the grip of the rigid formalist agenda in architecture, and to revise the methodological and epistemological basis of the architectural object. But such a new formalism does not dictate form or the processes of its production; rather, it is achieved by the
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mobilization and multiplication of effects and de-territorializ ation of subjectivity , through entering into the irreducible anonymity that comes before xed forms— the ‘it forms’ of architecture. As a result, the thinking of impersonal effects openly opposes the neoconservative movement in architecture that extracts from Deleuze a prescriptive process of production and a supposedly ‘subject-free’ deterministic formalism. But the project also stands outside the left-leaning discussions surrounding Empire. What has been sidestepped in this broader intellectual debate forming around Hardt and Negri is the encounter with the aesthetic object . Is there, in Deleuze, a critical activity made available to architecture beyond the formal discussion around process or the longer discussion on globalization—one that moves beyond these two polarities, both of which appear to retreat from architecture itself, and from the now anxious questions about subjectivity and the architectural encounter? To frame the question in the ethical-aesthetic terms of Deleuze-Spinoza, How do we make an effects-image? How can we imagine an architecture irreducible to formalism, style, or rote instrumentality? The problem is how to create arrangements that come before the hijacking of territories and the typo-logics of pure forms—in other words, how to rethink the “barbarity” of architectural identity and the “becoming” of architectural form. How do we make an architecture without qualities, erasing socio-economic and humanist forms of subjectivity and subjection? The thinking of impersonal effectsreformulates Deleuze’s model of subjectivity by imagining the discrete fragments of architectural encounter as an assemblage of ‘special’ effects. If it were a lm it would have no stars or even xed actors to play 3 each role, only understudies, “no-name nobodies,” and multiple stunt-doubles. A lm such as this does not envelop any genre, but rather experiments with a general atmosphere of special effects; it is a total set-up, or pure mise-en-scène (not a stage set, but an irreducible relation prior to the actors, the set pieces, and everything else). As such, a new model for architecture emerges—but it does not prescribe a style. The effects are selected across vastly different styles, eras, ideologies, locations, disciplines, and media. Subjectivization is a ubiquitous phenomenon, and is not exclusive to any building, architect, place, or period. Furthermore, there can be no style of effects because the effects-image subsists as a unique form of gural anonymity prior to formation ofwields detailsa and ornamentation, of gestures oror detachment, aesthetic affects; thethe effects-image propensity for the absolutely unknown frontier of architectural subjectivization, it details only a mystery. Therefore, while the schema may not propose a style or typology, it might inspire several. Such an image of pure detachment or anonymity comes easily if we want to imagine the city, which is never grasped as a whole and therefore always retains a certain irreducibility. Furthermore, it can be observed that architecture’s urban discourse and tradition of the city preserves the character of effects within its
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models of urbanism and urbanity (the latter the locus of the ‘urban subject’). Indeed, recently the image of the city has been broadly theorized as an anonymous eld for the production of effects. The model of the city surrounding Hardt, Negri, and theorists such as Manuel Castells is precisely the decentralized space of “ows,” comparable to the effects, yet this is more given to information and data than actual architectural forms—which amplies the problem. It is only when we get up close that we yield to the personalization of things and identities—that we convert them into relations of propriety and identity (my wife, my ring, my name, my self). But the question—how to connect to this irreducible anonymity of encounter at all scales, to engage at the level of effects—remains. The task is to de-individualiz e the pure encounter, before the constitution of the aesthetic object has run its circuit. It is precisely here where the separation of subject and object and the draw of identity are irresistible—where we should remain alert to the primacy of pure encounter. The ethical problem, then, for architecture, is to tune in to the generalness of all things, to reconnect with a mystery that is not simply architecture’s ‘locus’ of production, but a form of pure creativity in and of itself. To make an effects-image means to be complicit with the productive nature of experience.If we understand that experience is an impersonal and creative process—and that to experience, in fact, means to make something—then to design would not mean to formally prescribe the conditions of experience, to create a place, in the traditional phenomenological sense; instead, it would mean opening an effectsmechanism that leans toward another mystery, a new architecture not foreseen in any of its plans or details or schedules of nishes. An architecture without qualities is not a reductivism or simplistic minimalism, in the sense of emptiness as a place of production; rather, it is the installation of positive elements which endow a space with a heightened potential for creating effects—as in Shinohara’s dirt oor in the Tanigawa House, and the bracingelement in the Uehara House. It means changing the way we see architecture—as no longer external to ourselves as object—and, by the same token, changing the way we think about ourselves, no longer as egos (Cartesian thinking machines), but as already born inside of architecture and its subjectivizational agency. There is no outside of subjectivization that comes to us as subjects; there are only the impersonal effects. To de-individualize the architectural object therefore means to open up one’s own non-specicity as immanent subject to that very impersonality that permits one to enter with other Asinto in relations all (im)moral tales,things. a cautionary note is necessary. Subjectivization, posed here as dissolution of the traditional subject-as-individual, as both a theory and critique of subjectivity, opens itself up to the irresistible re-inscription of the ‘subject.’ Subjectivization is never a matter of salvaging the lost subject, and yet this theory, if it were to be taken up by practitioners, would be vulnerable to the same erasures of subjectivity—learned from Deleuze and Guattari—coincident with the unwitting re-territorialization of the subject, a reversal we might think of as the Deleuzian exchange par excellence. This is because the image of impersonal
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effects is something that always has to be made, and the de-territorializationof architecture a war of attrition.
Notes
1 2 3
The title refers to Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (c.1954; London, 1979). Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman (New York, 1991), pp. 9–10. See Todd Solondz, Palindromes (2004; New York, 2005). Solondz takes up this idea of a single character played by a string of different actors. See also Luis Buñuel, Cet obscur objet du désir, DVD (1977; New York, 2001).
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Translated by Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Originally published as Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953. —. A Philosophical Concept.…” in Cadava et al, Who Comes after the Subject?, 94–5. . The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: —University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Originally published as Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1988. —. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Originally published as Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968. —. Negotiations, 1972–1990, translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Originally published as Pourparlers, 1972–1990. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). —. Proust and Signs . Edited by Michael Hardt, Sandra Buckley and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Originally published as Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1976). Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Originally published as L’anti-oedipe. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972. — . “Rhizome,” translated by Paul Foss and Paul Patton. Ideology and Consciousness: Power and Desire Diagrams of the Social 8 (Spring 1981): 49–71. —. On the Line. Translated by John Johnston. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. —. “Nomad Art.” Art and Text (Australia) 19 (1985): 16–24. . Nouveaux espaces de liberté. Paris: Éditions Dominique Bedou, 1985. — —. Nomadology: The War Machine. Translated by Brian Massumi. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986. —. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Originally published asMille plateaux. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980. Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy . Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. —.“Point de folie: Maintenant l’architecture.” in Tschumi, ed., La Case Vide. Reprinted K. Michael ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968 , 566-81. Dluhosch, Ericinand RostislavHays, Svácha, eds. Karel Teige: L’Enfant Terrible of the Czech Modernist Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996. Fear, Bob. AD: Architecture & Film II, vol. 70, no. 1, (2000). Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Edited by Donald F. Bouchard and translated by Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977.
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Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,24 vols. Translated from the German under the general editorship of James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. —.“Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , vol. XVIII (1920–1922). London: Hogarth Press, 1955. .“The Unconscious.” in The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological —Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIV (1914–1916). London: Hogarth Press, 1955. —.“The Unconscious.” in The Penguin Freud Library , vol. 2, edited by A. Richards. London: Penguin Books, 1984. Futagawa, Yukio, ed. Shin Takamatsu, GA Architect 9. Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1990. Genosko, Gary, ed. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 2001. —. Félix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction. London: Athlone, 2002. Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy and John Johnston. “Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty, Part 1.” October 1 (Spring 1976): 65–85. —. “Gravity’s Rainbow and the Spiral Jetty, Part 2.” October 2 (Summer 1976): 71–90. Girard, Christian. “Architecture as Production of Subjectivities.” in Guattari, Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu, 127–8. Guattari, Félix. Psychanalyse et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionnelle. Paris: F. Maspero, 1974. —. Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. New York: Penguin, 1984. Originally published as La révolution moléculaire. Fontenay-sous-Bois: Éditions Recherches, 1977. —. “L’impasse post-moderne.”La quinzaine littéraire (February 1–15, 1986): 21. —. Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Galilée, 1989. .“Restoration of the Urban Landscape.” in Proposal from Nagoya, edited by —Riichi Miyake, 85-95. Nagoya: Urban Design Seminar Executive Council/The Japan Institute of Architects, 1989. —. The Three Ecologies. Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone Press, 2000. Originally published as Les trois ecologies. Paris: Galilée, 1989. —. Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu.” Chimères 21 (1994): 127–41. —. Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews, 1972–1977. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David Semiotext(e), 1995. L. Sweet, Jarred Becke and Taylor Adkins. New York: —. The Guattari Reader. Edited by Gary Genosko. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. —. Soft Subversions. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by David L. Sweet and Chet Wiener. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. A more recent edition also cited is Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977–1985. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, translated by Chet Wiener and Emily Wittman, with an introduction by Charles J. Stivale. New York: Semiotext(e), 2009.
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Guattari, Félix and Antonio Negri. Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. Translated by Michael Ryan. New York: Semiotext(e)/ Autonomedia, 1990. Guattari, Félix and Shin Takamatsu. “Singularization and Style: Shin Takamatsu in Conversation with Félix Guattari.” Parallax 7, no. 4 (2001): 131–7. Guillot, Xavier. Shin Takamatsu: Projets d’architectures/Architectural Works, 1981/1989. Paris: Electa Moniteur, 1989. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Hartley, Leslie Poles. The Go-Between. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953. Hays, K. Michael. “Architecture Theory, Media, and the Question of Audience.” Assemblage: Tulane Papers: The Politics of Contemporary Architectural Discourse, no. 27 (1995): 41–6. —. Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: Architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. —. Architecture Theory Since 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. “What is Metaphysics?” Translated by Walter Kaufmann. in Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 242–64. Hinshelwood, Robert D.A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. London: Free Association Books, 1989. Iversen, Margaret. Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: New American Library, 1975. Klein, Melanie. Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth, 1950. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Koolhaas, Rem, Jens Hommer and Michael Kubo, eds. Rem Koolhaas: Projects for Prada, Part I. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2001. Kovel, James. White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Pantheon, 1970. Kuma, Kengo. “L’architecture decapitée/The Decapitated Architecture.” in Guillot, Shin Takamatsu, 18–23. Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. Kwinter, Sanford, JonathanCrary and Michel Feher, eds.Zone 1/2: The Contemporary City. New York: Urzone, Inc., 1986. Lacan, Jacques. Norton, 1977.Écrits: A Selection . Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: —. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe and Jean-Luc Nancy.The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Translated by Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988.
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Lahyani, Gabriel E. Shin Takamatsu + Gabriel E. Lahyani Architects Associates. Edited by Noriko Ueshina. Zürich: Artemis, 1993. Laplanche, J. and J.B. Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1974. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. “The Pedagogy of Philosophy.” Radical Philosophy 75 (1996): 44–6. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings. Translated by Robert Latta. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898. Lotringer, Sylvère. “Better Than Life—My ’80s.” Art Forum (2003): 194–7. —. ed. Semiotext(e): Nietzsche’s Return, vol. 3, no. 1 (1978). —. ed. Semiotext(e): Oasis, vol. 4, no. 3 (1984). Lotringer, Sylvère and Sande Cohen, eds. French Theory in America. New York: Routledge, 2000. Lotringer, Sylvère, John Rajchman, et al., eds. Semiotext(e): Anti-Oedipus from Pyschoanalysis to Schizopolitics, vol. 2, no. 3 (1977). —. eds. Semiotext(e): Schizo-Culture, vol. 3, no. 2 (1978). Lotringer, Sylvère and Christian Marazzi, eds. Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. New York: Semiotext(e), Foreign Agents series, 2007. Originally published as Semiotext(e): Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, vol. 3, no. 3 (1980). Lynn, Greg. Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. —. AD: Folding in Architecture, Architectural Design Profle 102. London: Academy Editions, 1993. Marks, Zita M. and Sara Murphy Huguette Glowinski, eds. A Compendium of Lacanian Terms. London: Free Association Books, 2001. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. . A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari . London: —Routledge, 2002. Matsuba, Kazukiyo. “Two Mirrors of Contemporary Japanese Architects: War and Postmodernism.” GA Houses: Japan III, vol. 20 (1986): 9–239. Matsunaga, Yasumitsu and Kazuo Shinohara. Kazuo Shinohara:Essays by Yasumitsu Matsunaga and Kazuo Shinohara . New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies/Rizzoli International Publications, 1982. Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1991. Originally published as L’anomalia selvaggia: Saggio su potere ePress, potenza in Baruch Spinoza . Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981. Published in French as L’anomalie sauvage: Puissance et pouvoir chez Spinoza, translated by François Matheron. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982.
—. Pour une défnition ontologique de la multitude,” translated by François
Matheron. Multitudes 9 (May–June 2002): 36–48. —. “Modern and Postmodern: The Caesura.” in The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, translated by Noura Wedell. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008.
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Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1980. Panofsky, Erwin. “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures.” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings , edited by Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Originally published in Bulletin of the Department of Art and Archaeology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1934). Papadakis, Andreas, ed.,Truth, Radicalityand Beyond in Contemporary Architecture. New Architecture 5. London: Andreas Papadakis Publisher, 2000. Paraldi, François, ed. Semiotext(e): Polysexuality, vol. 4, no. 1 (1980). Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. 8 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58. Rajchman, John. The Deleuze Connections. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Ripellino, Angelo Maria. Praga Magica. Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City . Translated by Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982. Originally published as L’architettura della città. Padua: Marsilio, 1966. Rowe, Colin. Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Rowe, Colin and Robert Slutzsky. “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal.” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45–54. Ruyer, Raymond. Paradoxes de conscience et limites des automatismes . Paris: Albin Michel, 1966. Sartre, Jean-Paul.Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen, 1957. —. The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. Translated by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960. Originally published as “La transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique.” Recherches Philosophiques 6 (1936–37): 85–123. Schaarschmidt-Richter, Irmtraud, ed.Kazuo Shinohara. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1994. Scheffauer, Herman G. “The Vivifying of Space.” in Introduction to the Art of the Movies, edited by Lewis Jacobs. New York: Noonday Press, 1960. Originally published in Freeman 24 (November 24–December 1920): 248–50, 275–6. Schlegel, Friedrich von.Friedrich Schlegel’ s Lucinde and1,the Fragme nts. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Sherer, Daniel. “Le Corbusier’s Discovery of Palladio in 1922 and the Modernist Transformation of the Classical Code.” Perspecta 35 (2004): 20–39. Shinohara, Kazuo. “When Naked Space is Traversed.” Japan Architect 51, no. 2 (February 1976): 64–9. —. “House with Triangular Windows.” Japan Architect 52, no. 2 (1977): 66–7.
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Index a-signifying semiotics 8 Acker, Kathy 20 Adorno, Theodor W. 77 aesthetic machine 29–32, 40, 42, 44, 48, 59, 67, 75, 80–81, 83–5, 87–9, 91–5, 98, 112, 120 affection-image 57, 60, 71 Agamben, Giorgio 51 agency 4, 6, 37, 39, 41, 43–4, 46–51, 56,
Bachelard, Gaston 46–7, 53, 118 Bakhtin, Mikhail 80 Balázs, Béla 59 Barthes, Roland 23, 46–7, 53, 68, 73 Barton Fink 58 60, 71 Bataille, Georges 30, 34, 110 Baudrillard, Jean 8, 33, 69, 72–3 Bazin, André 1, 55, 70 becoming 1, 25, 28, 34, 37, 63, 70, 78,
60, 67–8, 81–2, 84, 86,120 90–91, 94, 100, 104, 107–8, 110, Aida, Takefumi 75 Allen, Stan 13, 35 American reception 15, 26, 30, 97 Ando, Tadao 75 Antonioni, Michelangelo 59–61, 72, 110 ANY, Architecture New York 1, 3–4, 7, 9, 17, 24–8, 30, 34–5, 38–44, 46, 48, 51, 56, 58–60, 62–4, 67, 69, 77–8, 83, 89–90, 99, 101, 104–5, 107,
81,Walter 86, 88, 50–51, 94, 11966, 68, 73 Benjamin, Benoist, Jean-Marie 23 Bergman, Ingmar 57–60, 71 Bergson, Henri 7–8, 38, 52, 64 Bergsonism (Bergsonisme, Le ) 8, 28, 30 38–9, 44, 52, 72 Berque, Augustin 82, 93 Bigelow, Kathryn 32–3 Blanchot, Maurice 31, 85–6 body 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, 31, 41, 46, 56, 58,
110–11, 118–20 any-space-whatever 60, 63, 110 Arab World Institute 64 architectural encounter 1, 4, 6, 13, 37, 42–6, 67, 104, 110, 118–19 architectural subjectivity 1, 6, 30, 43–4, 46–7, 56–8, 67, 75, 82, 88, 97, 104; creative subjectivity 25; joint subjectivity 25 Aristotle 10 Ark I 88 Art in America 22 Artaud, Antonin 20, 111 Assemblage 13, 16, 25, 70, 75, 94, 99, 119 Asymptote 28 Athenaeum 85–6 Atkinson, Ti-Grace 20 Autonomia 8, 13, 16–17, 21, 30, 32
76–7,91–2, 98, 100, Bognár,68, Botond 114102, 113 Borde, La 97, 111 Breuer, Lee 20 Burroughs, William 20 Cabinet des Doktor Caligari, Das (Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, The
70 Cacciari, Massimo 11, 17, 21, 31 Cache, Bernard 7, 12, 16 Cage, John 20, 32, 68 Cardiff Bay Opera House 27 Cartographies schizoanalytique 81 Case Vide, La 49, 54 Castells, Manuel 120 CERFI (Le Centre d’Études, de Recherches et de Formation Institutionnelles) 18, 31
)
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CINEL (Le Centre d’initiative pour de nouveaux espaces de liberté) 33 Cinema 1 60, 71–2 Cinema 2 71–2 cinematic image 55–6, 63, 81 classical subject 4, 10; constituted subject 44, 46, 49, 105; humanist subject 4–6, 118; personological subject 1, 28, 38; transcendental subject 10, 38 close-up effects 57 close-up image 57 Colomina, Beatriz 66–7, 73 consciousness 8, 10, 12, 24, 33, 38, 41, 45, 47, 49, 64, 66, 72 Corbusier, Le 44, 53, 56 corporeal 3, 39, 59, 82, 101 Crary,ofJonathan 21–2, crisis the subject 51;32–3, 73 crisis of subjectivity 6–7; lost subject 6, 29, 69, 121; evacuation of subjectivity 29 Dal Co, Francesco 11 Debord, Guy 21, 33 De Landa, Manuel 7, 9, 12, 21–2, 28, 35 De Man, Paul 20 Derrida,19–20, Jacques 8, 11, 49–50, 13, 16, 54, 23,5–6, 26, 32–3, 77, 118 Descartes, René 10 Deserto Rosso, Il (Red Desert ) 72 desire 7, 10, 17, 24, 30, 33, 40, 64, 75, 77, 80–81, 87–8, 93, 100–101, 107, 113 desubjectivization 49, 63, 104 Diller, Elizabeth 12, 26 discipline 3, 15, 26, 28–9, 41, 57, 68–9, 78, 107 discourse 4, 7–9, 12–13, 15, 18, 26, 28, 34, 38, 48, 50, 52, 57, 63, 66, 77, 90–91, 104, 106–7, 118, 120 double articulation of language 81 12, 16 Éditions de Minuit 23 Earth Moves
effects-image 55, 57, 59–60, 63–9, 78, 86, 88, 91, 94, 97, 107, 110, 119–20 ego 1, 10–12, 27–8, 30, 37–8, 40, 44, 48, 52, 68, 103 Eisenman, Peter 16, 22, 25–6 Eisenstein, Sergei 55–6, 70, 90 empirical subject 39 Empiricism and Subjectivity (Empirisme et subjectivité ) 8, 13, 37–40, 52, 72 Evans, Robin 112–13 existential territories 77, 80, 87, 99 faceication 58
fantasy 59, 72, 92, 103–4, 107 Feher, Michel 21–2, 32–3, 73 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence 10, 33, 44, 53, 86 Cartier 64, 66 Fondation Foreman, Richard 20 formalism 2, 4–6, 9, 11, 15, 27–9, 41, 44, 48–9, 51, 54–7, 61–4, 67, 70, 86, 88–91, 94, 99, 106–8, 110, 118–19 Foster, Hal 21, 93, 111 Foucauldian subject 7 Foucault, Michel 5, 8, 12–13, 16–20, 25, 30–33, 65, 72, 91 Frampton, Kenneth 5, 22 Freud, Sigmund 5, 11, 18, 77, 97–8, 101, 104–5, 113–14 Fujii, Hiromi 75, 78, 93 Gandelsonas, Mario 19 Genosko, Gary 12, 33, 92–4, 114 Giedion, Sigfried 4 Giorno, John 20 Girard, Christian 78, 92, 95 Glass, Philip 20 Glucksmann, André 23 Go-Between, The 18, 31 Graves, Michael 89 Gravity’s Rainbow 22, 33 Grosz, Elizabeth 28 Guattari, Félix 1, 6–10, 12–26, 28–34, 38, 41, 51, 57, 66, 71, 75–95, 97–106, 108–15, 117–18, 121 Guattarian Real 106
Index
135
Hardt, Michael 13, 31, 53, 94, 119–20 Hays, K. Michael 4, 11, 13 Heidegger, Martin 50 Hejduk, John 11 Hocquenghem, Guy 20 Hollier, Denis 20 Hubert, Christian 23–4, 35 Hume, David 8, 10, 13, 37–9, 52–3, 65, 72 Husserl, Edmund 10, 37–8, 44, 50, 59
Klein, Melanie 87, 95, 98, 111 Koboko Lighting Showroom 89 Kochuu 105–6, 114 Kogawa, Tetsuo 76, 78, 89, 92–3 Koolhaas, Rem 9, 22, 61–2, 72 Kristeva, Julia 20 Kuma, Kengo 77, 92, 99 Kunstwollen (artistic will) 12 Kurokawa, Kisho 75 Kwinter, Sanford 12, 15, 19–24, 26, 28, 31–3, 35, 73
IAUS (Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies) 23, 32 identity 1–2, 4–5, 28, 34, 40, 43–4, 47, 50, 60, 77, 80–82, 107–8, 115, 119–20
L’anomalie sauvage 18, 31 L’anti-oedipe (Anti-Oedipus)
8, 13, 15, 17, 20, 24–5, 30, 32, 75–6, 78, 86–7, 95, 97, 100, 105, 111–12 L’avventura (Adventure, The ) 60–61, 72
immanent eld 10, 41, 104
impersonal effects 1–2, 6–7, 37–9, 41–7, 49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63–5, 67, 69, 71, 73, 79, 81, 90, 105, 109–11, 118–20 impersonal subjectivity 7, 12, 27, 33, 37, 41, 47–8, 50, 56, 61, 78, 82–3, 85–6, 99, 105 individual 1–2, 4, 15, 40–41, 46, 48–9, 52–3, 56, 58, 60, 67, 76, 80–81, 83–4, 87, 97, 101–2, 104, 106,
Lacan, Jacques 5–7, 8, 66, 72, 77, 82, 87–8, 90,11, 91,23, 95,59, 97–106, 110–14, 115, 118 Lacanian Real 66, 100 Lacanian subject 7 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 85–6, 94 Lahyani, Gabriel 94 Laing, R.D. 20 Learning from Las Vegas 11, 68–9, 73 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 14 Lefebvre, Henri 17, 33
120; Individuality 3, 28, 40, 61, 80; Individuated1,subject 3, 6, 38–46, 52, 58, 104; Institut du Monde Arabe 64 Irigaray, Luce 77 Ishii, Kazuhiro 75
Leibniz,73Gottfried 11, 13, 16, 26–7, 35, Lévi-Strauss, Claude 101, 112 Levine, Sherrie 23 Lévy, Bernard-Henri 23 Libeskind, Daniel 22 L’impasse post-moderne 76, 79, 92 linguistics 24–5, 98 Literary Absolute, The 86, 94 Logique du sens (Logic of Sense, The) 10, 31, 33, 38–9, 52, 112 Loos, Adolf 67, 73 Lotringer, Sylvère 13, 15, 19–21, 23, 26, 30–32, 34, 73, 93, 114, 118 Lynn, Greg 7, 12, 26–8, 35 Lyotard, Jean-François 17, 20, 89–90
Jameson, Fredric 5 Japan 1, 7, 30, 41, 75–9, 75–83, 85, 87, 89, 91–3, 95, 97, 101, 103, 108, 112–14, 118 Johnston, John 13, 19, 21, 24, 32–3 Kant, Immanuel 2, 108 Keaton, Buster 72 Kido Clinic 88 Killing Moon 107–9, 114–15 King, Kenneth 32 Kinoshita House 107, 109 Kirin Plaza 82–3, 87
Maki, Fumihiko 75 54 Marazzi, Christian 30, 32 Manhattan Transcripts
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Marker, Chris 72, 90 Marx, Karl 18, 77; Marxism 8–11, 13, 17–18, 21, 23–24, 31–3, 77, 80, 91 Massumi, Brian 12–13, 19, 25, 28, 30–32, 35, 53, 71, 94, 112 matter becoming subject 28 Matsuba, Kazukiyo 93 Matsunaga, Yasumitsu 112–13 Metz, Christian 81 milieu 3, 15, 26, 67–8, 72, 75, 77 Mille plateaux (Thousand Plateaus, A)
8, 12–13, 15, 17–19, 22, 24–6, 30, 34. 71, 76, 112
97–109, 111, 113, 118–20; Objet 46, 59, 68, 87, 95, 97–8, 100, 102, 105–9, 113–14, 121 object becoming subject 37 objecthood 7, 11–12, 37, 102 objet partiel 87, 97; part-object 85–6, 98–9, 109, 111, 113; partial object 97, 99, 102, 109 objet petit a 46, 87, 95, 97–8, 100–102, 104, 106–10, 113 Oblowitz, Michael 21 October 19, 22, 31, 33–5, 71, 91, 93, 114 On the Line 9, 13, 32–4 Origin III 107
Miyake, Riichi 94, 115 Miyata House 107
Panofsky, Erwin 56, 70–71 Paraldi, François 32
Miyawaki, Mayumi 75 29, 33–4, 38, modernism 2–6, 8, 10–13, 42–4, 48, 53–7, 61, 64–9, 71, 75, 77–9, 90, 93, 99, 107, 110, 117; modernity 3–5, 64–5, 79, 117 Molecular Revolution 82, 93, 112 monadology 27, 35 movement-image 57, 71–2 Mozuna, Kito (Monta) 75 Mumford, Lewis 17, 87 Muschamp, Herbert 22
partial subject5967 part-subject Pascal, Blaise 60, 104 Peirce, Charles Sanders 34 perception 38–9, 43–4, 58–9, 89 personal effects 1–2, 10 phenomenology 1–2, 5, 38, 44–5, 47, 53, 66, 83, 118 Plato 10 Playtime 56, 65–6, 70, 73 pli, Le (Fold, The ) 8, 13 12–13, 16, 26–7,
MVRDV (Maas, Van Rijs, De Vries) 28 Mythologies 46, 53, 73
Poetics of Space, The
Müller house 67 Nancy, Jean-Luc 10, 35, 38, 52, 85–6, 94 Negri, Antonio 5, 11, 13, 17–18, 21, 31, 33–4, 119–20 New Wave 7, 75, 77–81, 83, 85, 87, 89–91, 93, 95, 97, 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 5, 10, 20, 32, 77, 108 non-personal individuation 40 Norberg-Schulz, Christian 45–6, 53 Notte, La (The Night ) 61, 72 Nouvel, Jean 47, 63–6, 72–3 object 1–2, 4–7, 9, 11, 13, 24, 27, 33, 37–9, 44, 49, 51, 57–9, 64, 66, 69–71, 73, 80, 82–3, 85–7, 90,
35, 66, 73, 102,47, 10853
Polanski, Roman 56, 70 postmodern 4–9, 11, 29, 48, 56, 76–7, 79–80, 89–92, 107 postmodernism 5, 7, 9, 18, 23–4, 26, 48, 54, 75, 77, 79, 89–91, 93, 99 postpolitical politics 9, 13, 21, 30, 32, 117 poststructuralism 6, 8–9, 23 poststructuralist 5–8, 17, 33, 45, 48, 50–51, 90, 99, 101, 118 Poulet, Georges 85–6, 94 Prada 61–2, 72 Privacy and Publicity 66, 73 production 2–4, 7, 9, 11–13, 23–5, 27, 30–31, 34, 38–9, 41, 45–6, 49–50, 55–6, 59–60, 62–3, 65–8, 77, 80–82, 84–5, 87–8, 90, 92, 94–5, 98–9, 103–9, 112–13, 118–20
Index
projection 46, 49, 56, 59 Proust, Marcel 40, 53, 83–6, 94 Proust and Signs 53, 94 Psychanalyse et transversalité 76, 111 psychoanalysis 1, 5–6, 8, 12, 20, 22–3, 32, 52, 77, 91, 94, 97–8, 100, 111–14 pure cinema 56, 63, 72 Pynchon, Thomas 22 Querrien, Anne 31 Rabinow, Paul 33 Rajchman, John 8, 12–13, 15–23, 25, 27–8, 30, 32–3, 35 Rashid, Hani 9, 26 real, the 1, 4–7, 9, 11, 16, 25, 29, 37,
137
self 2–4, 7–11, 17, 20, 27, 30, 35, 37–8, 40, 45, 50–51, 53–4, 56, 59, 61–2, 65, 67–8, 72, 82, 88, 98–9, 103–4, 108, 118, 120 Semiotext(e) 15, 19–22, 24–6, 31–4 semiotics 19–20, 45, 68, 75, 83 Serra, Richard 22 Serres, Michel 34 Shinohara, Kazuo 75, 78, 83–5, 89, 91, 94–5, 97, 99, 101, 103–7, 109, 111–15, 120 Shugakuin II 107 Simmel, Georg 4 Singular Objects of Architecture, The
72–3 singularities 1–2, 10, 31, 37, 39–41, 50, 53, 57, 68
39, 41–7, 51–2, 55–7, 62–3, 66–7, 69–70, 80,59–60, 89–91, 97, 100–103, 106–12, 115, 118 reception 8, 15, 17–18, 25–6, 28–30, 43, 76–8, 92, 97 Reiser, Jesse 26 representation 6, 29, 37, 55, 66–7, 80–81, 90, 102, 108, 113, 118 reproduction 65–6, 68, 70, 73 Repulsion 70 “Rhizome” 9, 13, 19, 21–6, 29, 32–4, 94
singularity 114 2, 39–40, 53, 57, 78, 82, 92, “smooth and striated, the” 26 Somol, Robert 9, 13, 26, 28, 35 Speaks, Michael 3, 7, 12–13, 54, 61, 77, 80, 86 Sphere and the Labyrinth, The 11, 30 Spinoza, Baruch 17–18, 23, 31, 59, 72, 76, 92, 119 State of the Spectacle, The 21 Stirling, James 11
Riegl, Alois 11–12, Robbe-Grillet, Alain34, 48 58, 71 Rokkaku, Kijo 75 Rossi, Aldo 11, 45, 47–8, 51, 54 Rowe, Colin 26, 34 Révolution moléculaire 76, 93, 97
structuralism 11, 45, 47,113 59, 80, 91, 97–8, 102, 110, subject-object 38, 107 subjectivization 1, 7–8, 10, 15, 24–5, 28–9, 39–40, 57, 59–60, 66, 68–9, 71, 77, 79–80, 84, 90–91, 97, 101, 103–4, 110–11, 115, 118–21 “Subversion of the Subject, The” 102, 113 surface 1–2, 27, 34–5, 41–2, 44, 46, 57–8, 61, 63, 65, 67–71, 78, 80, 100–103, 107–9, 112–13, 119 syntax building 89, 99
Said, Edward 19 Salle, David 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5, 12, 59, 72 Scarpa, Carlo 11 Scheffauer, Herman G. 56, 70 schizoanalysis 20 schizo-culture 20, 23, 30, 32 Schlegel, Friedrich 85–6, 94 Schnabel, Julian 23 Scodio, Ricardo 12, 26
Scolari, Massimo 11 Scott Brown, Denise 5, 11, 68, 73
Tafuri, Manfredo 10–11, 17, 30–31, 77 Tahara, Keiichi 78 Takamatsu, Shin 75, 77–9, 81–3, 87–95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 107–15 Takeyama, Minoru 75 Tange, Kenzo 75
138
Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
Tanigawa House 75, 101–102, 105–6, 120 Tati, Jacques 65–6, 70 Team Zoo 75 Teyssot, Georges 12, 18, 31 Three Ecologies, The 81, 85, 93–4, 104, 111, 114–15 Through a Glass Darkly 57, 71, 110 time-image 71–2 Tour Sans Fins 63 transversality (transversalité ) 76, 78, 83–4, 94, 97, 106, 111 Trois écologies, Les (Three Ecologies, The) Tschumi, Bernard 16, 45, 48–51, 54, 56, 90
Virtual House, The 28, 35 visagéité 58
Uehara House 105–6, 110, 120
Wachtmeister, Jesper 114 Weber, Max 4 Wenders, Wim 2, 10, 72 “When Naked Space is Traversed” 75, 83, 91, 94, 113 Whiting, Sarah 13 Wiene, Robert 70 will of indifference 111 Wilson, Robert 20 Winnicott, Donald 106, 114 withdrawn effects 59 withdrawn image 61, 63, 110 Within a Budding Grove 84 Wodiczko, Krysztof 22
unconscious 29, 41, 43–4, 53, 88, 98, 102–6,5,111, 113–15
Woods, Lebbeus 26 11, 34, 71 Worringer, Wilhelm
Van Berkel, Ben 28, 35 Venice School 13, 17, 45, 77 Venturi, Robert 5, 11, 68, 73, 89 Vertov, Dziga 56, 90 Vidler, Anthony 12, 54, 56, 70–71 Villa Savoye 41, 44, 58 Villette 48–51, 54 Virilio, Paul 8, 21–2, 28, 69, 117, 121
Yamagushi Photo Studio 88 Yamamoto Atelier 89 60–61, 63, 72, 110 Zeitlian, Hrazten 34 Zone Books 15, 21–3, 25, 30, 32–3, 39, 53, 73 Zabriskie Point
