6 October 1998
See Tim Adam's translation of The Architectural Machines of Shin Takamatsu, Guattari, May 4, 1998
This is from the Deleuze-Guattari list. Tim Adams is an
architecture student, that is, an architect, that is, an
architecture.
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:44:25 +1300 (NZDT)
From: "Tim Adams" <t.adams@auckland.ac.nz>
To: deleuze-guattari@lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Cartographies schizoanalytiques
Felix Guattari, "Architectural Enunciation", Cartographies
schizoanalytiques, (Paris, Galilee, 1989), pp. 291- 301.
Unpublished translation by Tim Adams
page numbers at the TOP of each page and footnotes to follow]
p. 301
Over thousands of years, perhaps in imitation of crustaceans or termites,
human beings have acquired the habit of encasing themselves in all kinds of
shells: buildings, clothes, cars, images and messages, that they never stop
secreting like a skin, adhering to the flesh of their existence just as
much as do the bones of their skeletons. There exists nonetheless one
notable difference between man, crustaceans and termites, it is that at
present no census has been taken among these last two species of
architectural corporations, of the tailors and the "pros" of their media.
Be that as it may, one notices that there is much in ecolithical
expressions such as: the building of ziggurats, the demolition of Bastille,
or the capture of the Winter Palace, that owing to very long historic
periods gives us the outline of social assemblages. In recent times,
besides stone being relegated behind steel, concrete and glass, these are
what in terms of the speed of communication and the control of information
can make light of the cleavages of power. Under these conditions architects
donÕt even know which Saint to worship! What good would it do today, for
example in a city like Mexico that tears madly towards 40 million
inhabitants, to call upon someone like Le Corbusier! Even Baron Haussmann
could do nothing there! From now on the politicians, the technocrats and
the engineers manage this sort of thing with the least possible
contribution from the men of that art Hegel once placed on the first rank
among all the other arts.
Certainly architects do hang onto a minimal control in the area of
sumptuous
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p.292
buildings. But places in this domain are dear and other than taking the
role of a politico-financier schemers like some post-modern dandy, that
then infects everything they do, they generally devote their precious
influence to a deceitful degradation of their creative talents. What
remains are the lines of pure theory(1), utopia(2), and the nostalgic
return to the past(3). Or continue the critical questioning of the
establishment, although the times hardly seem to lend themselves to it.
The architectural object flies to pieces. It is useless to cling to what
has been or might be! Situated at the intersection of political stakes of
the utmost importance, of demographic and ethnic tensions, of economic,
social and regional antagonisms, which are by no means nearing resolution,
spurred on by constant technological and industrial mutations, the
architectural object is irreversibly condemned to being tugged at and torn
in all directions. Not to suggest however that we take an eclectic course
of action in such a state of affairs that perhaps demand, on the contrary,
an exacerbation of ethico-political choices that have always been
underlying the exercise of this profession. From now on it will be
impossible, in good faith, to take refuge behind art for art's sake or pure
science!(4) To reinvent architecture should no longer be considered to mean
the reviving of a style, a school, or a theory with hegemonic tendencies,
but to recompose under today's conditions the _architectural enunciation_
and, and in a sense the performance of the architect.
When architects no longer simply aim at being modellers of built form, but
also offer their services as revealers of virtual desires of space, places,
journeys and territory, they will need to manage the analysis of relations
between individual and collective corporeities in constantly singularising
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p.293
their approach and they will have to become in addition, intercessors
between those desires revealed to themselves and the interests that they
oppose, or in other words, an artist and a craftsman of sensible and
relational real life [_vecu_]. Understand clearly that I donÕt have any
particular intention for them to attempt a decenterring of their role or to
lie down on the couch of psychoanalysis! On the contrary, I believe that
they will discover for themselves that they are now in the position of
having to analyze certain specific functions of subjectivation.(5) On
account of this and numerous other social and cultural operators, it will
be possible to constitute an essential relay within the assemblages of
enunciation on a multiple front [_tete multiple_], capable of analytically
and pragmatically carrying out the contemporary productions of
subjectivity. Consequently this a long way from the simple position of a
critical observer!
The emphasis is therefore shifted from the object towards the project,
whatever the characteristics of its semiotic expression and its semantic
contents may be, from now on an architectural work will require a specific
elaboration of it's enunciative "material": how to be an architect today?
What part of themselves should they mobilize? What should they engage with
and with which operators? What relative importance should they give to
their clients, the engineers, the urbanists, and the actual and potential
users? Up to what point will they be justified in making compromises with
the various parties involved? Here it goes to a highly elaborate
transferential economy, that I now propose to examine from the angle of two
modalities of consistency of the enunciation of an architectural "concept":
-- One, the polyphonic, of the order of the percept, inherent in the
deployment of the components concurrent with its coming into discursive
existence.
-- The other, ethico-aesthetic, of the order of the "affect", inherent in
its non-discursive "capture of being".
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p. 294
The Polyphonic Components
Under the category of scale, Philippe Boudon has listed eight angles of
approach for the architectural object which turn out to be centered
essentially on the category of space. He has proposed a regrouping into
four categories:
1) those that refer real space to itself (scales of geographical optics of
visibility, of proximity and of plotting);
2) those that refer architectural space to an exterior referent (symbolic,
formal, technical, functional, extensional, dimensionally symbolic,
socio-cultural, modeling and economic scales);
3) those that refer architectural space to its representation (geometric,
cartographical, and representational scales);
4) lastly, those from architectural thought processes during which a
constant toing and froing is made between different spaces("putting into
scale", "giving a scale", etc.) (6)
No doubt one could continue this list with other components of this type.
But from the standpoint of enunciation and no longer from a simple
taxinomic enumeration of modes of spatialization, it is evident that their
potential number becomes literally infinite. All the virtual enunciations
are found drifting in the vicinity of the architectural object. As Henri
Lier writes, "a significant work of architecture is always able to be other
than what it is. A dwelling is not dwelling itself but refers to dwelling:
it is one of its possible appearances as such."(7) Nevertheless,
concerning this continuous spectre of virtual enunciations, I have retained
eight types of assemblages corresponding to the "voices" that appear to me
to be effectively active in contemporary architecture.
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p. 295
1. _A geopolitical enunciation_, takes into account as well as the
orientation of cardinal points, the contours of the land, the climatic and
demographic givens that evolve over long periods of time as the secular
trend dear to Fernand Braudel(8), affect the drift of the centre of gravity
of "urban archipelagos"(9) according to the fluctuations of the world
economy.(10)
2. _An urbanistic enunciation_, relative to the laws, regulations, habits
and customs concerning the size of plots, the arrangement and volumes of
buildings, as well as the mechanisms of contamination of model and image
(referring to what Philippe Boudon calls the scale of proximity). Here the
interlocutors are able to take on the "hard" form of local authorities, of
State bodies, or the blurred form of the state of collective spirit,
opinion, more or less taken over by the media.
3. _An economic enunciation_, capitalist expression of relations of force
between the different systems of individual and collective valorisation.
From a relative evaluation of costs and demands in terms of projected
profits, of prestige, of political impact and usefulness to society, it
leads to the fixing of exchange value onto the basic properties and to
"drive", the things and volumes of investment in the domain of
construction.
4. _A functional enunciation_, or function of equipment that considers
built spaces according to their specific use. The collective equipment, as
well as the equipment for private use, becomes integrated within a double
network of:
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p. 296
a) "horizontal" complimentary relations, positioning each constructed
segment on the group of urban structures interconnected today within world
capitalism(11);
b) "vertical" relations of integration ranging from the micro-equipment
(lighting, ventilation, communication, etc.) up to the infrastructural
macro-equipment. As writes Paul Virilio: "Today ... the essence of what we
insist on calling urbanism is composed/decomposed by these transfer,
transit and transmission systems, these transport and transmigration
networks whose immaterial configuration reiterates the cadastral
organization and the building of monuments. If there are any monuments
today, they are certainly not of the visible order, despite the twists and
turns of architectural excess. No longer part of the order of perceptible
appearances nor of the aesthetic of the apparition of volumes assembled
under the sun, this monumental disproportion now resides within the obscure
luminescence of terminals, consoles and other electronic night-stands."(12)
Consequently, the collective enunciators here are:
-- the social stratifications according to resources, age group, regional
characteristics, ethnic divisions, etc.
-- the social bodies sectored according to their activities being
specialized by economic, cultural order, or by a state of assistance
(internment, incarceration, etc.);
-- the programmers, the experts, the technicians of all sorts in position
of setting out the constraints and norms for architectural writing.
5. _A technical enunciation_, implies a "capture of words" for the
machinery and more generally the materials of construction in the fixing,
for example, "of the slope of a
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p. 297
roof according to the relative permeability of the material employed, the
thickness of a wall according to its load, the dimensions of a material
according to its ability to be manipulated, its transportability, or its
usefulness."(13)
The circuit of interlocutors are here no longer only the building
engineers, but the chemists as well who every month invent new materials,
the electrical and communication engineers and eventually, the ensemble of
technical and scientific disciplines.
6. _A signifying enunciation_, whose aim, independent of functional
semantemes, is to allocate to a built form a significant content divided by
a human community more or less extensive, but always delineated by the
ensemble of other communities not dividing the same type of content. One
will rediscover here several of Philippe Boudon's scales. One that leads to
embody a symbolic form in a building independent of its size (example: the
cross plan of Christian churches). One that transfers the layout of a
construction from an ideologically explicit model (the ideal city of
Vitruvius; the "rural", "industrial" or "commercial" cities of Le
Corbusier...). One which, on the contrary inserts a more or less
unconscious socio-cultural scheme (such as the central courtyard that Arab
builders probably inherited from Roman antiquity), or one, even more vague,
that confers a global style onto an urban settlement (like the conditions
under which small towns of Tuscany are re-attached to the opposite extreme
of the spectrum, to a transfinite spatium of North American towns clinging,
which is their nature, to a freeway system).
7. _An enunciation of existential territorialisation_, of the order with an
ethnological perspective as well, onto which I will fasten the three types
of space that Vittorio Ugo has distinguished for us(14):
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p. 298
1) Euclidean spaces, under the aegis of Apollo, positioning in a unique way
an object identity in the framework of an axiomatico-deductive logic and
within which inscribes a "primary and elementary architecture in all the
clarity of its crystalline perfection, always identical to itself and
devoid of all ambiguity or internal contradiction";
2) projective spaces, under the aegis of Morpheus, positioning of forms
from the modulated identity, from metamorphic perspectives, affirming the
principle of "the imaginary above the real, vision above speech, extension
above usefulness, the plan above perception";
3) labyrinthine topological spaces functioning under the title of
existential space(15), under the aegis of Dionysus and according to a
geometry of the wrapping of tactile bodies that we have already referred to
under the register of affects.
Architectural space is a concrete operator, among others, of the metabolism
between objects from the outside and intensities from the inside. But if,
from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier and passing through Leonardo da Vinci, the
play of analogies between the human body and its habitat did not stop being
explored, perhaps its a question less, henceforth, of considering these
from a formal angle than from a point of view that one could describe as
organic. As Massimo Cacciari writes: "All authentic organisms are
labyrinthine."(16) And we will mention further the multiple fractal
dimension of this labyrinthine (or rhizomatic) character of the existential
territorialization.
8. _A scriptive enunciation_, that articulates the ensemble of the other
enunciative components. Because of the diagrammatic distance that it
introduces between the expression and the content and through the
coefficients of creativity that it generates, the architectural projection
promotes new potentialities, new constellations of universes of reference,
starting with the ones that preside over the deployment of ethico-aesthetic
aspects of the built object.
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p. 299
The Ethico-Aesthetic Ordinates
The architectural enunciation is not committed to the diachronic discursive
components, it implicates equally a capture of a consistency of synchronic
existential dimensions, or ordinates on a level plane. Following Bakhtin, I
will distinguish three types(17):
1) the cognitive ordinates, to know the energetico-spatio-temporal
coordinates that take over the logic of the discursive ensemble. It is in
this register that the scriptive enunciation of architecture is
incorporated by linking together the first five types of assemblages of
enunciation previously listed;
2) the axiological ordinates including the ensemble of systems of
anthropocentric valorization, as well as of the aesthetic, economic and
political orders;
3) the aesthetic ordinates determining the thresholds of completing an
entity, object or structural ensemble, for these to be able to transmit
meaning and form on their own account. It is the duty of these
ethico-aesthetic ordinates to intertwine the components of signifying
enunciations and the existential deterritorialization of the other
components. In this way the frame, real life [_vevu_] and the incorporeal
find themselves rearticulating each other, although the capitalist
corporations do not stop eliminating from their architecture and their
urbanism all trace of subjective singularization, for the benefit of a
functional, informative and communicational, rigorous transparency.
To make myself clear: the singularisation that is at issue here is not a
simple matter of a "supplement of soul", a "personalization" or
"after-sales service", it raises procedures that operate at the heart of
the architectural object
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p. 300
and that confer its most intrinsic consistency. Under its exterior
discursive aspect, this object institutes itself at the intersection of a
thousand tensions that pull it in all directions, but under its
ethico-aesthetic enunciative aspects, it reattaches itself on a
non-discursive mode, of which the phenomenological approach is given to us
through the particular experience of spatialized affects. On this side of
the threshold of cognitive consistency, the architectural object collapses
into the imaginary, the dream and delirium, while on this side of a
threshold of axiological consistency, its dimensions bearing alterity and
desire crumble -- like those movie images that the aborigines of Australia
always turn away from through lack of finding any interest -- and on this
side of the threshold of aesthetic consistency, it ceases to catch the
formÕs existence and the intensities demanded to inhabit it.
Consequently, what would define in the final analysis, the art of the
architect, would be his capacity to apprehend these affects of spatialized
enunciation. Only it is necessary a matter of paradoxical objects that are
not able to be delineated by the co-ordinates of ordinary rationality and
that one can only approach indirectly, by meta-modelization, by aesthetic
detour, by mythic or ideological narrative. Like the partial objects of
Melanie Klein(18) or Winnicott(19), this type of affect institutes itself
transversally in the most heterogeneous levels. Not for homogenizing but on
the contrary, for engaging further forward in the fractal process of
heterogenesis. The architectural form is not called to function as a
gestalt closed in on itself, but as a catalytic operator releasing chain
reactions among the modes of semiotization that we make come out of
ourselves and we open up new fields of possibility. The feeling of intimacy
and existential singularity adjoining to the aura given off by a familiar
framework, an old residence or a landscape inhabited by our memories,
places itself in the rupture of the redundancies emptied of their
substances and it can be the generator of a proliferation and lines of
flight in all the registers of lifeÕs desire, of refusal to abandon itself
to the dominant inertia. For example, this is the same
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p. 301
movement of existential territorialization and of capture of synchronic
consistency that will "work" together things as different as a shoe box and
a treasure chest under the bed of a child hospitalized in a psychiatric
home, the refrain-password that divides, perhaps with a few friends, the
space within the particular constellation as he occupies the refectory, or
a totem pole standing out against the sky in the play ground, but only
well-known to him. The architect, other than composing a harmony out of all
these fragmented components of subjectivation, must at least not mutilate
them by advancing the essential from the virtual!
So to undertake the recomposition of existential territories in the context
of our societies devastated by the capitalistic flows, the architect will
therefore have to be able to detect and exploit processually the ensemble
of points of catalytic singularities capable of embodiment in the
perceptible dimensions of architectural machinery as well as in the formal
compositions and the most complex institutional problematics. In order to
achieve this, all the cartographic methods will be justified from the
moment their engagement (lets not turn away from this old Sartrian concept
any longer, it has been tabu for too long) finds its own regime of
ethico-aesthetic autonomisation; then the only criteria of truth imposed
will be an effect of existential completeness and an overabundance of being
that will never lack encounters from which they will have the happiness of
being carried away in a process of becoming an event, that is to say, of
historical enrichment and the re-singularization of desire and value.
Footnotes]
1. Leon Krier for example considers that in the face of "the holocaust that
raged through our cities ... a responsible architect doesn't want to build
anything today"._Babylone no1_, (Paris, UGE, 1983), p. 132.
2. For example, the work of Daniel Libeskind or similarly the landscape
compositions of Vittorio Gregotti, such as his project for collective
housing in Cefalu that has little chance of seeing the light of day.
3. See in this regard the interesting propositions of Henri Gaudin, in _La
cabane et le labyrinth_, (Brussels, editions Pierre Mardaga,1984), on
regional architecture
4. I refer here to the passionate analysis of Christian Girard in
_Architecture et concepts nomades. Traite dÕindiscipline,_ (Brussels,
editions Pierre Mardaga, 1986)
5. On the sometimes decisive position of programmer and on the architectÕs
role in the modelisation of psychiatric institutions, see the special
edition of the review _Recherches:_:"Programmation, architecture et
psychiatrie", (June, 1967).
6. Philippe Boudon, _La ville de Richelieu,_ (Paris, AREA, 1972),
_Architecture et architecturologie_, (Paris, AREA, 1975), and _Sur lÕespace
architectural. Essai dÕepistemologie de l'architecture_, (Paris, Dunod,
1971).
7. Henri von Lier, _Encyclopaedia Universalis_, Vol. II, Section 1, p. 554,
(Paris, 1985).
8. Fernand Braudel, Le temps du monde. Civilisation materielle, economie et
capilalisme, XVe-XVIIe siecle, Vol. III, (Paris, Armand Colin, 1979), pp.
61-64.
9. Ibid. p. 20.
10. Fernand Braudel. Le temps du monde..., op. cit., ibid.. p. 12-14, p.
62-68. The world economy is the largest zone of consistency in any given
period and in a global field, a sum of individualized economic and
non-economic spaces that ordinarily transgresses the limits of other large
groupings of history and business. Francois Fourquet, under the term
_ecomonde_, has undertaken a more systematic theorization than the
conceptions of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein in:La richesse et
la puissance. Publication provisoire: Commissariat general du Plan,
Convention d'etude 984, (Paris, 1987).[ Wealth and Power. Provisional
Publication: General Commissionership of Planning]
11. Cf. my study, in collaboration with Eric Alliez, "Capitalistic Systems,
Structures and Processes", in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and
Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, (London, Penguin Books, 1984), pp.
273-287.
12. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg, (New York,
Semiotext(e), 1991), pp. 21-22.
13. Philippe Boudon, La ville de Richelieu, op. cit., p. 17.
14. Vittorio Ugo, "Une hutte, une clairiere", Critique: 476, 477; L'objet
architecture, (Paris, Minuit, jan.-fev. I987)
15. In the sense that Heidegger has given this term in "Building, Dwelling,
Thinking", Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York,
Harper and Row, 1975)
16. Massimo Cacciari, Critique, op. cit.
17. I refer here to the three categories of enunciation (cognitive,
ethical, aesthetic) -- proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in _Esthetique et
theorie du roman_, (Paris, Gallimard, 1978).
18. Melanie Klein, Contributions: Contributions to Psycho-analysis,
(London, Hogarth Press, 1950).
19. D.W. Winnicott, La psychanalyse, (Paris, PUF, 1959).
[The End]