# ARCHITECTURES OF JOY. A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture

Site of Reversible Destiny - Yoro Park by Arakawa & Madeline Gins

ARCHITECTURES OF JOY.
A spinozist reading of Parent/Virilio and Arakawa/Gins’ architecture
By Léopold Lambert (December 2010)

In the middle of the XVIIth century, Baruch Spinoza revolutionized theology by proposing a tremendous change in the definition of God. From the classic transcendental vision of a God creator, he introduced an immanent vision of God creature. Some architects might stop their reading of Spinoza’s Ethics here and consider the whole theory as an external element from their practice. However, this immanent theology envisions the world in such a way that architecture can creates itself based on this vision and celebrates it in composing what we will call, an architecture of joy. The first part of this short essay will attempt to concisely envision Spinoza’s Ethics, the second will present the difference between joyful affects and sad affects, and the third and last one will try to elaborate relationships between this philosophy and the architectural projects designed by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio in the 1960’s on the one hand, and those built by Arakawa and Madeline Gins in the last ten years on the other hand.

Spinoza envisions God as the infinite substance composing the universe. This substance is an infinite amount of infinitely small parts which develop external relations with each other and thus compose bodies. The ability of those bodies to maintain the effort of persisting in their own beings is called conatus and composes the essence of things. Those bodies have then the ability to encounter and affect each other and thus increasing or decreasing their power of action. That being stated, we can observe that Spinoza is not only a rebel against religion but also against the paradigmatic philosophy of his century; the Cartesian philosophy. In fact, in the second book of his Ethics, he demonstrates the following proposition: The Human mind does not perceive any external body as existing, except through the ideas of the modifications of its own body. In other words, a mind knows itself only via the encounter with other things which is in complete contradiction with Descartes’ I think, therefore I am , in which a mind knows itself by thinking. Spinoza, on the contrary could have states something like “I encounter, therefore I am.”

From there, Spinoza distinguishes four modes of perception in his Treatise on the Improvement of the Understanding . In order to focus on the proposed topic here, we won’t even evoke the first one, “arising from hearsay” that is negligible. In fact, in his class for the University of Vincennes about Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze – who appears between the lines in this essay- does not even talk about this first mode of perception that he personally calls kinds of knowledge. Those three remaining modes of perception are establishes as following:

- The first one is empirical. It implies only the experience of shock between the extensive parts of respective bodies and thus provides what Spinoza calls inadequate ideas. Deleuze, in order to illustrate this mode, uses the example of the wave. In the first mode of perception/knowledge, one can only experience the shock of the wave against his body. In other words, it provokes a knowledge of effects without a knowledge of causes.
- The second one is both empirical and rational. It involves the composition of relations between the bodies. In the illustration of the wave, one can position his body in such a way that the relations of the wave compose in a harmonious way with the relation of one’s body.
- The third one is strictly rational. It implies a perception of the essence of a thing or, following what we wrote earlier about the essence, the understanding of the mechanisms of perpetuation of a body in its being. It is indeed an understanding of causes and this way can be defined as adequate ideas.

From there, the purpose of this essay becomes probably clearer and one can distinguish the role that the second mode of perception can play in architecture. However, it is still too early in this text to evoke this question as the Ethics itself has not been yet deployed.

The first part has in fact established Spinoza’s theology/cosmology and the different modes of perception of it; nevertheless, the second part needs to develop veritably what makes Spinoza calls his book Ethics. In fact, one more reason for his Cherem from the Jewish Community is that he establishes a fundamental distinction between a religious moral and an individual ethics. The good versus evil both determined transcendentally are replaced by the good versus the bad which are, on the other hand, determined by the accordance or the discordance of relations between parts composing bodies.

As Deleuze explains in his class, when I have an encounter such that the relation of the body which modifies me, which acts on me is combined with my own relation, […] my power of acting is increased . This encounter that increases the power of acting is defined by Spinoza as being good and he calls it Joy. As a corollary, any encounter that tends to destroy the relations of one’s body is considered as bad for this same body and thus is called sadness. In the same way Spinoza decided to keep the same terminology (God) than religion in order to show the revolutionary content of his philosophy, he uses the creationist religious example of the Original Sin in his demonstration, in order to deactivate what used to be the paradigm of the religious moral. He affirms that Adam did not do an evil act when he ate the apple, but rather he did a bad act as the relations of the apple were not composing well with his own relations. What is described in the Bible as a divine interdiction to eat the apple is nothing else than Adam’s instinct that the apple may be poisonous for his body.

Since joy results from the harmony of relations between two bodies, joy can be said to be the motor of the persistence of the parts in their being. We have already seen that this persistence is called essence by Spinoza but it also matches with the notion of desire also called appetite. This notion is central here, as it implies the action that is required for the concerned architecture to be activated and to be legitimately considered as Architectures of Joy.

Those principles of Spinoza’s Ethics being expressed, we can now begin to evoke the two architectures we proposed to investigate in this essay.
The first one is the work of the association between the two French architects, Claude Parent and Paul Virilio between 1963 and 1969 under the name of Architecture Principe. In 1964, they established an architectural manifesto that can be summarized by an action of tilting the ground that replaces the paradigmatic assemblage of horizontal plans with vertical ones. They call it, The Oblique Function.

Explanatory diagram by Claude Parent in Architecture principe : 1966 und 1996 . [Besançon] : Les Ed. de l'Imprimeur, 2000.

The previous diagram illustrates the effect of the tilted surface on the body. If we apply a Spinozist reading on it, we can observe that the first mode of perception is necessarily occurring as gravity forces the bodies’ parts to interact with the architectural surface’s parts. However, in the difference of architectures which proceed only with flat floors, in the Oblique Function, gravity imposes an additional effect on the bodies, a directionality. In fact, any movement of the body in any direction will exercise on it, a degree of acceleration. This acceleration will be negative if the body attempts to climb up the surface and it will be positive if the same body attempts to go down the slope.

If we accept to consider as negligible -for the sake of this argument- the effects of a flat surface on the body, we can obviously not do the same for the Oblique Function’s effects. In fact, a negative acceleration imposed on the body creates a fatigue on the body whereas a positive one triggers an exhilaration. One could thus hastily argue that only half of the potential movements on this surface provide a Spinozist joy when the other half provokes sadness. However, this affirmation would be inaccurate as the body in action while conquering –we use the word conquest here in the same way that Deleuze talks about the conquest of colors by Gauguin and Van Gogh - the slope is expressing its power of existence. This last argument is the one that lead us to think that comfort and joy are not synonyms if not veritably antonyms.

In that sense, the Oblique Function, in its experience, requires the exercise of the second mode of perception. On this tilted surface, a body can only persist in its being if it manages to compose harmoniously its relations with the relations of this surface. That is how we can affirm that Claude Parent and Paul Virilio manage to create an Architecture of Joy in the Spinozist meaning of joy. The Oblique Function, being only a manifesto, it is interesting to observe the work –mostly by Parent- that has been built based on those principles:

- The Villa Drusch in Versailles (1963)_
- Sainte Bernadette Church in Nevers (1966)
- The French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970)
- Claude Parent’s apartment in Neuilly sur Seine (1973)

French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1970) designed by Claude Parent

The second architecture on which we propose to apply a Spinozist reading is the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. In fact, despite the fact that their work has been comfortably categorized by critics as having more to do with art than with architecture in the same way than many radical architects, their production is probably the best achievement of a Spinozist architecture.

In order to illustrate this point, we have to start by evoking the notion of the Architectural Body developed by Arakawa and Gins. In fact, in their research of an interaction between the human body and the architectural environment, they establish this notion as a symbiosis of those two entities. The Architectural Body is thus an entity in which the second mode of perception is continuous. Placed in a state of disequilibrium as in Arakawa and Gins’ architecture, the human body keeps re-harmonizing its parts in relation with the architectural parts and thus develops a conscience of its direct environment. Via this process of harmonization, the body learns and becomes both stronger and more skillful.

Reversible Destiny Lofts – Mitaka by Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Photograph by Masatako Nakano.

That leads us to the main purpose of such an architecture for Arakawa and Madeline Gins which consists in a adamant refusal to death. In accordance with the XVIIIth century French physiologist Xavier Bichat who stated that life is the ensemble of functions that resist death , they undertake to architecturally train the body against the continuous degradation of human tissues.

One could not be more wrong to associate this enterprise with the Modernist belief for potential healing characteristics own by architecture. Indeed, what Arakawa and Gins calls Reversible Destiny is an absolute refusal towards the modernist comfort that triggers a process of weakening for the body and decreases its power. On the contrary their architecture challenges the body, put it in danger and leaves it without any other alternative than to react to this delicate situation. In this regard, this architecture is profoundly anti-paternalist and own some clear emancipative characteristics. It releases the exact same Spinozist freedom, when he writes A thing is called free which exists from the necessity of its nature alone, and is determined to act by itself alone .

Spinoza describes death as the change of belonging of a body’s parts to another body. The parts do not persist in their being anymore and they start to populate one or several other bodies. The goal of Arakawa and Gins is therefore to maintain this persistence as long as possible via a continuous conquest of joy as we have been defining it earlier in this essay. Describing the condition offers by the Bioscleave House (Life Span Extending Villa), Madeline Gins has this evocative sentence: Everyday, you are practicing how not to die.

Bioscleave House by Arakawa and Madeline Gins

In the Proposition II of the Book III in his Ethics, Spinoza writes no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has as yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as extension . This way, he asks a fundamental question which can be formulated this way: What can a body do? The question that the Oblique Function and the Reversible Destiny ask is not different in any way. Acknowledging their common ignorance with Spinoza, those radical architects attempt to create an environment dedicated to the Spinozist Joy, only condition for the beginning of an answer to this question.

# Vision Haptique by Salem Mostefaoui (OzCollective)

"Voyez, la vue optique, ce serait la vue éloignée, relativement éloignée, au contraire l’exercice haptique ou la vue haptique, c’est la vue proche qui saisit la forme et le fond sur le même plan également proche."

Extrait du cours de Gilles Deleuze à l'Université Paris 8 du 19.05.81

"See the optic vision, it would be a far vision, relatively far away, on the contrary the haptic vision, it is a close vision that grasp form and content on the same plan close as well."

Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze's seminar at Université Paris 8 (19/05/1981)

Vision Haptique is a series of twenty two photographs created by Salem Mostefaoui who is part of our friends' collective Oz. As the Deleuze's quote indicates, Salem tries to approach this antinomic haptic vision (haptic being what belong to the sense of touch) and to extract from each of those photographed buildings "a built truth that attempts to gather the architectural concept and its physical reality." In his approach of this method, he understands his work as being infinite.

When I contacted him to write this short article Salem referred to some photographers whose work has similarities in the approach of architecture:
- Perry Roberts
- Christobal Palma
- Nicolas Moulin
- Kim Høltermand

The complete series of visible on OzCollective's website

# Sometimes, I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast...

see previous Deleuze's article about Carroll

thanks Nikolas !

# CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with Anonymous Materials by Reza Negarestani

Cyclonopedia is one of those books that drives you ecstatic for being so different from anything you have ever read so far. In this book, Iranian Philosopher Reza Negarestani elaborates a beautiful narrative of the Middle East seen as a sentient and alive entity. Following the tracks of Deleuze & Guatarri's Thousand Plateaus, Negarestani go far beyond them by granting an alive autonomy to every entities composing the Middle East (sand, dust, oil, plague, rust, war, bullets, rats, corpes, Zoroastrian divinities etc.) except maybe human being themselves.
The text is very obscure and sometimes even esoteric, but the feeling of being lost in it provides even more jubilation when a paragraph becomes vivid for the reader.

Here are some beautiful excerpts (and there are so much more in the book):

“Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented. When the despotic necrocratic regime of periphery-core, for which everything should be concluded and grounded by the gravity of the core, is deteriorated.” P50

“Rats are exhuming machines. Not only full fledged vectors of epidemic, but also ferociously dynamic lives of ungrounding. […]
A surface-consuming plague is a pack of rats whose tails are the most dangerous seismic equipment; tails are spatial synthesizers (fiber-machines), exposing the terrain which they traverse to sudden and violent folding and unfolding, while seizing patches of ground and composing them as a non human music. Tails are musical instruments, playing metal -tails, lasher tanks in motion. Although tails have a significant locomotive role, they also act as boosters of agility or anchors of infection.” P52

“A self-degenerating entity, a volunteer for its own damnation, dust opens new modes of dispersion and of becoming-contagious, inventing escape routes as yet unrecorded. In his interview, Parsani suggests that the Middle East has simulated the mechanisms of dusting to mesh together an economy which operates through positive degenerating processes, an economy whose carriers must be extremely nomadic, yet must also bear an ambivalent tendency towards the established system or the ground. An economy whose vehicle and systems never cease to degenerate themselves. For in this way, they ensure their permanent molecular dynamism, their contagious distribution and diffusion over their entire economy.” P91

“If, in middle-eastern tradition, gods deliberately allow themselves to be killed left and right by enemies, humans, or themselves without any prudence as to their future and eventual extinction, it is because they find more significance and benefit in their own corpes –as a concrete object of communication and tangibility among humans- than in the abstractness of their divinity. At last, as corpes, they can copulate and contaminate.” P205

Negarestani Reza. CYCLONOPEDIA. Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re-Press 2008

# Lewis Carroll by Gilles Deleuze

picture: Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney 1951

The following short essay is excerpted from a collection of texts by Gilles Deleuze entitled Critical and Clinical. Deleuze described the mathematical shift from the depth to the surface achieved by Lewis Caroll through his work. It is also interesting as he write about the smile without the cat, that will serve Slavoj Zizek several years later in order to illustrate his counter-Deleuzian concept of Organs Without Bodies (in opposition to Deleuze and Guattari's Bodies Without Organs).

Lewis Carroll

In Lewis Carroll, everything begins with a horrible combat, the combat of depths: things explode or make us explode, boxes are too small for their contents, foods are toxic and poisonous, entrails are stretched, monsters grab at us. A little brother uses his little brother as bait. Bodies intermingle with one another, everything is mixed up in a kind of cannibalism that joins together food and excrement. Even words are eaten. This is the domain of the action and passion of bodies: things welded together into nondecomposable blocks. Everything in depth is horrible, everything is nonsense. Alice in Wonderland was originally to have been entitled Alice’s Adventures Underground.
But why didn’t Carroll keep this title? Because Alice progressively conquers surfaces. She rises or returns to the surface. She creates surfaces. Movements of penetration and burying give way to light lateral movements of sliding; the animals of the depths become figure on cards without thickness. All the more reason for Through the Looking-Glass to invest the surface of a mirror, to institute a game of chess. Pure events escape from states of affairs. We no longer penetrate in depth but through an act of sliding pass through the looking-glass, turning everything the other way round like a left-hander. The stock market of Fortunatus described by Carroll is a Mobius strip on which a single line traverses the two sides. Mathematics is good because it brings new surfaces into existence, and brings peace to a world whose mixtures in depth would be terrible: Carroll the mathematician, or Carroll the photographer. But the world of depths still rumbles under the surface, and threatens to break through it. Even unfolded and laid out flat, the monsters still haunt us.
Carroll’s third great novel, Sylvie and Bruno, brings about yet a further advance. The previous depth itself seems to be flattened out, and becomes a surface alongside the other surface. The two surfaces thus coexist, and two contiguous stories are written on them, the one major and the other minor: the one in a major key, the other in a minor key. Not one story within another, but one next to the other. Sylvie and Bruno is no doubt the first book that tells two stories at the same time, not one inside the other, but two contiguous stories, with passages that constantly shift from one to the other, sometimes owing to a fragment of a sentence that is common to both stories, sometimes by means of the couplets of an admirable song that distributes the events proper to each story, just as much as the couplets are determined by the vents: the Mad Gardener’s song. Carroll asks, Is it the song that determines the events, or the events, the song? With Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll makes a scroll book in the manner of Japanese scroll paintings. (Eisenstein thought of scroll painting as the true precursor of cinematographic montage and described it in this way: “The scroll’s ribbon rolls up by forming a rectangle! It is no longer the medium that rolls up on itself; it is what is represented on it that rolls up at its surface.”) The two simultaneous stories of Sylvie and Bruno form the final term of Carroll’s trilogy, a masterpiece equal to the others.
It is not that surface has less nonsense than does depth. But it is not the same nonsense. Surface nonsense is like the “Radiance” of pure events, entities that never finish either happening or withdrawing. Pure events without mixture shine above the mixed bodies, above their embroiled actions and passions. They let an incorporeal rise to the surface like a mist over the earth, a pure “expressed” from the depths: not the sword, but the flash of the sword, a flash without a sword like the smile without a cat. Carroll’s uniqueness is to have allowed nothing to pass through sense, but to have played out everything in nonsense, since the diversity of nonsenses is enough to give an account of the entire universe, its terrors as well as its glories: the depth, the surface, and the volume or rolled surface.

Gilles Deleuze. Lewis Carroll in Critical and Clinical (translated by Daniel Smith and Michael Greco). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1997

# Processes of smoothing and striation of space in urban warfare

I very recently wrote a short essay about the three notions of space conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their Treatise of Nomadology (in A Thousand Plateaus): the Striated, the Smooth and the Holey. The following text is only a part of this essay. It tries to articulate three historical examples already approached on boiteaoutils: Blanqui and his manual of urban modifications for the XIXth century French revolutions, the Casbah's guerrilla for the Algerian Independence in the 50's and the capture of the War Machine by the Israeli State.


The act of striating space is fundamentally inherent to the birth of agriculture and therefore to property. Indeed, agriculture is the first act that brings value to the land and by this very fact is asking for a parcelization of it. Agriculture is also what brings a population to become sedentary and therefore to aggregate knowledge in the research of new tools. This process of innovation is called progress and is the base of the construction of a civilization. Architecture embodies the striation and thus defines the limits of the land. Property is thus claimed and history of war can begin. This narrative is perfectly expressed by the myth of the creation of Rome. Romulus established the limits of the city by digging a trench (or building a wall depending on the version) and when his brother Remus leaped across it, Romulus killed him.

Architecture thus creates an inside extracted from an outside and whose property is being claimed by people or institutions. Lines of property are being virtually traced and architecture materializes them into violent devices actively controlling the bodies. The wall is quintessential and paradigmatic in this regard and is operating at every scale, from the domestic wall of an apartment to the United States’ border with Mexico via various scales of gated communities. The original city limit from Romulus however disappeared during the XIXth century to let the city diffuse and spread into a quasi total ambient milieu.

The following paragraph will try to elaborate about how the urban Warfield became a territory submitted to processes of striation and smoothing since the XIXth century. The first one implies Paris’ situation between the first and the end of the second Empire. In fact, this fifty six years period of time of French history would have seen three revolutions occurring starting from the Parisian urban fabric. As both theoretician and practician of urban insurrection, Auguste Blanqui makes the link between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848, the Paris’ Commune in 1871 and urban modification in a conflict situation. In fact, he was fully part of the two revolutions and without being actually present during the Paris Commune –he was imprisoned- he was then considered as an icon of the resistance against the governmental forces. In 1866, he writes a small manual entitled: Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris which establishes an extremely precise protocol of modification of the Warfield in order to optimize it for the weak –yet victorious- camp of asymmetrical urban conflict:

”This labor done, one put the two lateral barricades in communication by piercing the thick walls that separate houses situated on the defense’s front. The same operation is being executed simultaneously, in the houses on the two sides of the barricaded street until its extremity, then backwards, on the right and on the left, along the parallel street, on the defense’s front and on the back. Openings have to be practiced on the first [ndt: first floor in Europe is second floor in US] and last floor in order to obtain two ways; work is being achieved in the same way in the four directions. All the houses’ blocks belonging to the barricaded streets should be pierced in their perimeter, in a way that fighters are able to enter or exit by the backward parallel street, out of sight and out of reach from the enemy.”
”The interior of the blocks generally consists in courtyards and gardens. One could open communications between those spaces, usually separated by weak walls. It should be even compulsory on the bridges whose importance and specific situations expose them to the most serious attacks.
It would be therefore useful to organize companies of non-fighters workers, masons, carpenters, etc. in order to jointly achieve work with the infantry.
When, on the defense’s front, a house is more particularly being threatened, one demolished the ground floor’s staircase and one achieves opening in the various rooms’ floor of the first [second] floor in order to shoot the potential soldiers who would invade the ground floor to apply some bombs. Boiling water can also play an important role in this circumstance. If the attack embraces an important extent of the front, one cuts the staircases and pierces the floors in all the exposed houses. As a general rule, when the time and the other defense works more urgent allow it, one should destroy the ground floor’ staircase in every block’s houses except in the one the less exposed. ”

Those urban modifications that Blanqui advocates for are precisely applying processes of striating and smoothing the space . In fact, the construction of barricades with the paving stones of the street –Blanqui establishes very precise calculations about the necessary amount of them- adds another layer of striation of the city which encounters the normal function of it. On the other hand, the piercing of holes through the walls associated with the destruction of staircases tends to deny the physicality of architecture and thus smooth the urban space. With those processes, the city is assimilated to a giant assemblage of mono-matter mass that can be acted on and reconfigured according to the needs of the insurrection army. On the contrary it is interesting to observe that the additional layer of striation the State’s police applies on the city is not at all part of this scheme since its own barricades are pre-fabricated and owns no vernacular dimension whatsoever. The ability of the insurgents to act on this matter evoked above, and therefore to manipulate the Warfield in favor of their strategies probably has a lot to do with their victories in 1830 and 1848. On the other hand, the Paris Commune’s ultimate defeat against the Versaillais, was very likely influenced by the State’s modifications of this same Warfield for the last two decades by Napoleon III and his Baron Engineer Haussmann. In fact, the “renovation” of Paris between 1852 and 1870 into an urban apparatus both hygienic and militarized, helped Thiers’ cavalry and artillery to move very efficiently within Paris when the ultimate suppression of the Communards was effected.

A second example still concerns French history and the French State strategies of counter-insurrection. It occurs between 1954 and 1960 in Algier’s Casbah from where the first operations of the FLN were being organized. In this regard, Gille Pontecorvo’s 1966 film entitled The Battle of Algiers depicts in a pseudo-documentary way the guerrilla opposing the French paratroopers with the Algerian anti-colonialists within the labyrinthine Casbah. The chronology is important here. The typology of the Warfield is in a first period perfectly used by the Algerians who applies Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of speed as the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms) occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing up at any point . Whoever accomplishes a mission for the FLN, strikes intensively then immediately disappear in the maze of the Casbah. However, some years later, by following the officer in charge of the counter insurrection Lieutenant-Colonel Mathieu’s strategies, the French paratroopers manages little by little to capture the War Machine’s principle by acting directly on the Casbah’s materiality and infiltrating the organization of the FLN. The final result is the absolute suppression of resistive forces in Algiers in 1960. Nevertheless, the resistance would have had last long enough to provoke a national mobilization that leads eventually to the Algerian independence in 1962.

A final example of urban striation and smoothing in a conflict situation would be the one studied by Israeli architect Eyal Weizman who daily attempts to establish a forensic analysis of the hyper militarized use of architecture by the Israeli State to oppress and control the Palestinian lives. In 2006, in an article entitled Lethal Theory , Weizman analyzes the Israeli General Aviv Kokhavi’s strategy during the siege of Nablus in 2002 in the West Bank. In fact, Kokhavi developed a theory of inverted geometry that consists for his division in avoiding to operate in Nablus’ refugee camp’s streets but rather to move through the wall of the dense urban fabric in order to surprise the Palestinian fighters. “Rather than submit to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries and logic, movement became constitutive of space. The three-dimensional progression through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban balk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax .” From Auguste Blanqui to Aviv Kokhavi via Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a capture of the War Machine has been operating by the State. It is not innocent that the State that succeeded this capture is a state who established war as its main contingency and its population as entirely composed of soldiers. The elaboration of the oppression towards the Palestinian led the Israeli Army to associate a striation of the space both by its walls, colonies and roads and to adopt a nomadic behavior, springing up from its border, infesting Palestinian land and folding itself back in its own territory. This coexistence of State and War Machine is probably achieved by to the status of the Jewish People who was involved in what Deleuze calls a common becoming due to a long persecution through ages and who eventually become a State. Thus was established a normatizing benchmark that internalizes some of its subjects and oppress the others.


notes:
- Blanqui, Auguste. Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris. in MAINTENANT IL FAUT DES ARMES. Paris: La Fabrique, 2006. (unofficial English translation by Leopold Lambert)
- FLN: Front de Libération Nationale. Algerian organization leading the fight for independence
- Weizman, Eyal. HOLLOW LAND: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. New York: Verso, 2007.

# Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's Holey Space

Holey Space [espace troue]: the 'third space' of the machinic phylum (of matter-flow), inhabited by itinerant mettalurgists, and by extension the 'underground' space that can connect with smooth space and be conjugated by striated space. Holey space is the subsoil space of 'swiss cheese' that bypasses both the ground [sol] of nomadic smooth space and the land [terre] of sedentary striated space. In this bypassing, holey space is suspect; for Gilles Deleuze, the mark of Cain is not the biblical mark of the soild, but a mark of the subsoil [sous-sol], since holey space is conceived of by surface dwellers as created by theft and betrayal.
Holey space has different relations to nomadic smooth and State striated space. Cave-dwelling, earth-boring tunnellers are only imperfecty controlled by the State, and often have allied with nomads and with peasants in revolts against centralized authority. Thus the machinic phylum explored in holey space connects with smooth space to form rhizomes, while it is conjugated (blocked) by State striation. The previously positive relation of holey and smooth space has turned around, however, now that States are able to create a smooth space of surveillance and global military interevention. Holey spaces have flourished for the only way to escape the spying eyes of State intelligence is to go underground: 'Do not new smooth spaces, or holey spaces, arise as parries even in relation to the smooth space of a worldwide organization? Virilio invokes the beginnings of subterranean habitation in the "mineral layer", which can take on very diverse values. Such a turnaround has not gone unnoticed; led by the Bush Administration, global States now trumpet the danger of 'rogue regimes' that have taken their weapons-making capabilities underground where they cannot be detected by satellites and spy planes. North Korea in 2003 remains the prime example, but much of the premise upon which the Bush Administration built its case for the 2003 'pre-emptive' assault on Iraq was the supposedly concealed nature of weapons laboratories and storage facilities. The post 9/11 Afghanistan war was also launched against the holey space of the so-called 'Al Qaeda' network, supposedly in possession of innumerable underground hideouts, indeed even elaborate bunkers (though these were discovered to be not nearly as luxurious as their reputations). The bunkers and tunnels of the American establishment are, of course, exempt from any suspicion.
Cyberspace and forest space may also be seen as holey spaces rather than as smooth spaces in that they provide protective cover for 'underground' operations. Guerrilla armies such as the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) use forests to great advantage, and indeed a long line of guerrilla forces in Latin American has used rain forests in this way. The armies of the State cannort array on it as on a battlefield, and the trees must be defoliated before air war can be successful. Cyberspace is filled with gaps and voids, black matter from which hackers (these may of course be in the service of States) launch coordinated attacks on sites and servers. A study of the paranoid tunneling in Cold War suburban backyards to create 'fallout shelters' would yield yet another aspect of the interrelations of smooth, striate, and holey space, as would the innumerable urban legends concerning sewers, subway tunnels, and the like.

Deleuze and geophilosophy: a guide and glossary by. Mark Bonta and John Protevi. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004

# The necessity of Utopia

It strikes me to observe how much pejorative the word utopia has turned out to be. This shift seems to be a trick of the system in order to operate an easier normalization of architectural projects. The Metabolists and Western Utopian projects from the 60's were definitely not perfect and they owned some bureaucratic totalitarian characteristics that recalls Kafka despite the fact that Izosaki seems to be familiar with this literature. However, the very important quality of these project is that they increased in a tremendous way the field of potentiality of what architecture could be. Those projects were Utopian in their participation to what the great French Philosopher and Poet Edouard Glissant calls Imaginary. Imaginary and Imagination are two different things in this regard. Imagination is the ability of an individual to produce virtual images based on memory. Imaginary on the other hand is a collective construction based on a common horizon to work towards to. Utopia is the territory of the Imaginary. What defines a totalitarian society is the absence of Imaginary -Deleuze would call it "devenir" (becoming)- and it needs a tremendous subterranean work in order to re-build a beginning of Imaginary within those societies.

The case of Western capitalism is interesting. In fact, instead of preventing Imaginaries to exist like a totalitarian system would, it has the ability to intrude and corrupt Imaginaries from the inside. This is true both in general and in architecture more specifically. The current case of sustainability seems appropriate in this regard since capitalism seems to have cannibalized what used to be a resisting Imaginary against it. That is how some new processes of normalization have been invented in order for capitalism to survive. As architects, we have the possibility to adopts those processes more or less voluntarily or to resist to them by still considering utopia as a tool rather than a waste of time.

# Deleuze's wave about Spinoza

The following short excerpt is extracted from one of Gilles Deleuze's classes about Spinoza in Vincennes (the Parisian autonomous University during the 70's) and, in my opinion, illustrates very vividly the philosophy of the great Portuguese/Dutch Philosopher.
The entire class transcript can be read either in French or in Spanish but unfortunately it has not been translated in English...I therefore tried to do the translation of this excerpt myself...once again I apologize for the low quality of my written English.

DELEUZE / SPINOZA
Cours Vincennes - 17/03/1981

Personne ne peut nier que savoir nager, c'est une conquête d'existence, c'est fondamental, vous comprenez: moi je conquiers un élément ; ça ne va pas de soi de conquérir un élément. Je sais nager, je sais voler. Formidable. Qu'est ce que ça veut dire? C'est tout simple: ne pas savoir nager c'est être à la merci de la rencontre avec la vague. Alors, vous avez l'ensemble infini des molécules d'eau qui composent la vague ; ça compose une vague et je dis: c'est une vague parce que, ces corps les plus simples que j'appelle "molécules", en fait ce n'est pas les plus simples, il faudra aller encore plus loin que les molécules d'eau. Les molécules d'eau appartiennent déjà à un corps, le corps aquatique, le corps de l'océan, etc... ou le corps de l'étang, le corps de tel étang. C'est quoi la connaissance du premier genre ? C'est: aller, je me lance, j'y vais, je suis dans le premier genre de connaissance: je me lance, je barbote comme on dit. Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, barboter ? Barboter, c'est tout simple. Barboter, le mot indique bien, on voit bien que c'est des rapports extrinsèques: tantôt la vague me gifle et tantôt elle m'emporte ; ça c'est des effets de choc. C'est des effets de choc, à savoir: je ne connais rien au rapport qui se compose ou qui se décompose, je reçois les effets de parties extrinsèques. Les parties qui m'appartiennent à moi sont secouées, elles reçoivent un effet de choc, des parties qui appartiennent à la vague. Alors tantôt je rigole et tantôt je pleurniche, suivant que la vague me fait rire ou m'assomme, je suis dans les affects passion: ha maman, la vague m'a battu ! Bon. "Ha maman, la vague m'a battu", cri que nous ne cesseront pas d'avoir tant que nous serons dans le premier genre de connaissance puisqu'on ne cessera pas de dire: ha la table m'a fait du mal ; ça revient exactement au même que de dire: l'autre m'a fait du mal ; pas du tout parce que la table est inanimée, Spinoza est tellement plus malin que tout ce qu'on a pu dire après, pas du tout parce que la table est inanimée qu'on doit dire: la table m'a fait du mal, c'est aussi bête de dire: Pierre m'a fait du mal que de dire: La pierre m'a fait du mal, ou la vague m'a fait du mal. C'est du même niveau, c'est le premier genre. Bien. Vous me suivez ? Au contraire: je sais nager; ça ne veut pas dire forcément que j'ai une connaissance mathématique ou physique, scientifique, du mouvement de la vague, ça veut dire que j'ai un savoir faire, un savoir faire étonnant, c’est-à-dire que j'ai une espèce de sens du rythme, la rythmicité. Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, le rythme ça veut dire que: mes rapports caractéristiques je sais les composer directement avec les rapports de la vague. ça ne se passe plus entre la vague et moi, c’est-à-dire que ça ne se passe plus entre les parties extensives, les parties mouillées de la vague et les parties de mon corps ; ça se passe entre les rapports. Les rapports qui composent la vague, les rapports qui composent mon corps, et mon habileté lorsque je sais nager, à présenter mon corps sous des rapports qui se composent directement avec le rapport de la vague. Je plonge au bon moment, je ressors au bon moment. J'évite la vague qu approche, ou, au contraire je m'en sers, etc... Tout cet art de la composition des rapports.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Nobody can deny that to be able to swim is a conquest of existence, it is fundamental you understand: I conquer an element; it is not so obvious to conquer an element. I can swim, I can fly. Wonderful. What does that mean ? It is very simple: not be able to swim consists in being vulnerable to the confrontation with the wave. Then, you have the infinite ensemble of water molecules that compose the wave; it compose a wave and I say: it is a wave because its most simple bodies that I call “molecules”, actually they are not the most simple, one should go even further that water molecules. Water molecules already belong to a body, the aquatic body, the ocean body, etc…What is the first type of knowledge ? It is, come on I dare, I go, I am in the first type of knowledge: I dare, I wade like one says. What does that mean to wade ? To wade, that is very simple. To wade, the word indicates pretty well, one clearly see that it is some extrinsic relationships: sometimes the wave slaps me and sometimes it takes me away; that is some shock effects. They are shock effects, meaning, I don’t know anything of the relationships that compose themselves or decompose themselves, I receive the extrinsic parts’ effects. The parts that belong to me are being shaken, they receive a shock effect coming from parts that belong to the wave. Therefore sometimes I laugh, sometimes I weep, depending if the wave makes me laugh or knock me out, I am within the passion affects: ha Mummy, the wave beat me up! Ok “Ha Mummy the wave beat me up”, cry that we shall not cease to do until we don’t come out of the first type of knowledge since we shall not cease to say: ha the table hurted me; it is the same to say: the other person hurted me; not at all since the table is inanimate, Spinoza is so much smarter than everything that one could have said afterwards, not at all because the table is inanimate that one should say: the table hurted me, it as stupid as saying: Peter hurted me than to say: The stone hurted me or the wave hurted me. It is the same level , it is the first type. On the contrary, I can swim; it does not necessarily means that I have a mathematic, physic, or scientific knowledge of the wave’s movement, it means that I have a skill, a surprising skill, I have a sort of rhythm sense. What does that mean, the rhythm, it means that my characteristic relationships, I know how to compose them directly with the wave’s relationships, it does not happen anymore between the wave and myself, meaning it does not happen anymore between the extensive parts, the wave’s wet parts and my body’s parts; it happens between the relationships. Relationships that compose the wave, relationships that compose my body, and my skill when I can swim, to present my body under some relationships that compose themselves directly with the wave’s relationships. I dive at the right time, I come out from under the water at the right time. I avoid the coming wave, or on the contrary I use it, etc… All this art of the relationships’ composition.

# The battle of Algiers by Gille Pontecorvo / Urban guerilla's theory by Auguste Blanqui

The battle of Algiers dramatizes the urban battle (1954-1960) that happened between the FLN (National Front for the Liberation) and the French paratroopers force aiming towards the decolonization of Algeria in 1962.
This movie, directed by Gille Pontecorvo, was released in 1966 and was banned for five years in France. Just like in Pepe le Moko (1937), the main character here is Algiers' Casbah, the old labyrinthine city from where the FLN succeeded to get organized and that the French army has transformed in a ghetto highly controlling its different gates.
This battle lost for six years and was eventually won by the French army but annihilating a network of organized resistance does not necessarily mean to destroy the fight this network was leading, therefore two years later, after very important demonstrations in Algeria' cities, France eventually accept the independence of the country.

French army has a pretty long history of urban suppression. The revolutions of 1789, 1830 and 1848 even inspired Napoleon III and his Baron Haussmann to transformed Paris in a secured controllable territory by the creation of a very important amount of large avenues that could be used in a very efficient way by the cavalry and the artillery in case of riots. Nobody can doubt that such an urbanism had something to do with the massacre of the Communards by the Versaille army in 1871.
However, a whole theory of urban guerilla has been invented by XIXth century French revolutionaries lead by the most charismatic of all, Auguste Blanqui. In fact Blanqui developed a whole agenda in order to "smooth the striated space" as Deleuze and Guattari would point out in their treaty of Nomadology (A thousand plateaus).
I want to quote here some excerpts from "Maintenant il faut des armes", collection of Blanqui's writing, but I don't have any translation so I will do it myself...I hope you will apologize my clumsiness in it.

« L’attaque repoussée, il [l’officier] reprend et presse sans relâche la construction de la barricade en dépit des interruptions. Au besoin, des renforts arrivent.

Cette besogne terminée, on se met en communication avec les deux barricades latérales, en perçant les gros murs qui séparent les maisons situées sur le front de défense. La même opération s’exécute simultanément, dans les maisons des deux cotés de la rue barricadée jusqu'à son extrémité, puis en retour, a droite et a gauche, le long de la rue parallèle au front de défense, en arrière.
Les ouvertures sont pratiquées au premier et au dernier étage, afin d’avoir deux routes ; le travail se poursuit à la fois dans quatre directions.
Tous les ilots ou patés de maisons appartenant aux rues barricadées doivent être perces dans leur pourtour, de manière que les combattants puissent entrer et sortir par la rue parallèle de derrière, hors de la vue et de la portée de l’ennemi. »

« L’intérieur des ilots consiste généralement en cours et jardins. On pourrait ouvrir des communications à travers ces espaces, séparés d’ordinaire par de faibles murs. La chose sera même indispensable sur les ponts que leur importance ou leur situation spéciale exposent aux attaques les plus sérieuses.
Il sera donc utile d’organiser des compagnies d’ouvriers non-combattants, maçons, charpentiers, etc., pour exécuter les travaux conjointement avec l’infanterie.
Lorsque, sur le front de défense, une maison est plus particulièrement menacée, on démolit l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée, et l’on pratique des ouvertures dans les planchers des diverses chambres du premier étage afin de tirer sur les soldats qui envahiraient le rez-de-chaussée pour y attacher des pétards. L’eau bouillante jouerait aussi un rôle utile dans cette circonstance.
Si l’attaque embrasse une grande étendue de front, on coupe les escaliers et on perce les planchers dans toutes les maisons exposées. En règle générale, lorsque le temps et les autres travaux de défense plus urgents le permettent, il faut détruire l’escalier du rez-de-chaussée dans toutes les maisons de l’ilot sauf une, à l’endroit de la rue le moins exposé. »

Auguste Blanqui. Esquisse de la marche a suivre dans une prise d’armes a Paris. Maintenant il faut des armes. La fabrique 2006

”When the attack has been pushed back, he [the leader] comes back and pushes relentlessly the barricade construction despite interruptions. If needed reinforcement arrives.
This labor done, one put the two lateral barricades in communication by piercing the thick walls that separate houses situated on the defense’s front. The same operation is being executed simultaneously, in the houses on the two sides of the barricaded street until its extremity, then backwards, on the right and on the left, along the parallel street, on the defense’s front and on the back.
Openings have to be practiced on the first [ndt: first floor in Europe is second floor in US] and last floor in order to obtain two ways; work is being achieved in the same way in the four directions.
All the houses’ blocks belonging to the barricaded streets should be pierced in their perimeter, in a way that fighters are able to enter or exit by the backward parallel street, out of sight and out of reach from the enemy.”
”The interior of the blocks generally consists in courtyards and gardens. One could open communications between those spaces, usually separated by weak walls. It should be even compulsory on the bridges whose importance and specific situations expose them to the most serious attacks.
It would be therefore useful to organize companies of non-fighters workers, masons, carpenters, etc. in order to jointly achieve work with the infantry.
When, on the defense’s front, a house is more particularly being threatened, one demolished the ground floor’s staircase and one achieves opening in the various rooms’ floor of the first [second] floor in order to shoot the potential soldiers who would invade the ground floor to apply some bombs. Boiling water can also play an important role in this circumstance.
If the attack embraces an important extent of the front, one cuts the staircases and pierces the floors in all the exposed houses. As a general rule, when the time and the other defense works more urgent allow it, one should destroy the ground floor’ staircase in all the block’s houses except in the one the less exposed. ”

An important amount of readers will draw the parallel with Eyal Weizman's study of Tsahal General Aviv Kokhavi's strategy of making his troop progress in Palestinian towns through the walls. You can read this article in French on this previous post, and in English by following this link. The parallel of this Israeli general and the Commandant Matthieu - they both commands paratroopers - in The battle of Algiers seem also relevant in their very high sense of tactical philosophy and refusal of any ideology - they consider themselves as soldiers and that is all.

Cities are the new - since walled cities disapeared - scene of war -especially asymmetric wars and domestic riots/revolutions. Architecture, in its physicality, owns some ways to weaponize itself in favor of one side or another. What is certain in that matter is that not choosing is already a choice which risks to bring some more flesh to the institutional body.

# Our Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter

Our Daily Bread illustrates human's anthropocentrism by following Descartes who was wishing to see human becoming "master and owner of the nature". In fact, what this movie introduces is a global elaborate machine providing food for the Western World. It is then interesting as architects to wonder who are the designers as such a system and to notice that those ones are completely disconnected to the daily operation of their devices.
The comparison of this machine to a wider extent of a political system seems appropriate looking at the mechanization of the apparatuses, the subjectivation of the bodies and the exclusion and suppression of elements that are not adapted to such a system (here weak chickens, oversized apples, weirdly shaped eggs etc.).
However, the film, by its aesthetization of the machinery and the absence of comments, leaves the documentary genre to series of very ambiguous paintings often tending towards Rembrandt and Bacon as far slaughterhouses are concerned.

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon’s pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, “Pity the beasts,” but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a “fact”, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher’s shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim. Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher’s shops.

Gilles Deleuze. The logic of sensation. Continuum 2003

PS: The film also shows what I think are incredible underground salt quarries. If anybody have some information or pictures or those, I'd be very interested to read about them.

# 7 Reece Mews: Francis Bacon's Studio by Perry Ogden

7 Reece Mews is a book of photographs by Perry Odgen taking place in Francis Bacon's workshop in London just after he died in 1992. Odgen spent three days alone in the studio in order to understand (or desunderstand) how his photographs should exists. The result is a description of a space by a juxtaposition of pieces assembled in the reader's imagination in order to compose a whole.
This chaotic subterranean - the studio is on first floor but the side window is clogged, only the ceiling window is furnishing natural light - fits perfectly with Deleuze description of Bacon's attitude in The Logic Of Sensation (see former post for an excerpt) about a new painting starting not with a white canvas but with a fulfill canvas that the painter has to free from superfluous elements.
The photographs transcribe well the influences and references used by Francis Bacon in his work. In this sea of documents, you find book on Velasquez or Seurat, pictures of wrestlers, of himself, of nude models, of his former paintings, chronophotographs etc. just like this mess was nothing else than Bacon's mind itself materialized on the floor and on the walls, and the painting just being a selected frame of this monad.

# Francis Bacon The logic of sensation by Gilles Deleuze

After a post on Victoria Reynolds' photographs directly related in my opinion to Gilles Deleuze's Logic of sensation (1981) about Francis Bacon's work (see previous post), here is another quote. (original French version follows the English text).

It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he – or she – could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model. But such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, or in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface, but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it. He does not paint in order to reproduce on the canvas an object functioning as model; he paints on images that are already there, in order to produce a canvas whose functioning will reverse the relations between model and copy. In short, what we have to define are all these “givens” [données] that are on the canvas before the painter’s work begins, and determine, among these givens, which are an obstacle, which are a help, or even the effects of a preparatory work.

Gilles Deleuze. Francis Bacon The logic of sensation. Continuum 2003 (translated by Daniel W. Smith)

C’est une erreur de croire que le peintre est devant une surface blanche. La croyance figurative découle de cette erreur : en effet si le peintre est devant une surface blanche, il pourrait y reproduire un objet extérieur fonctionnant comme modèle. Mais il n'en est pas ainsi. Le peintre a beaucoup de choses dans la tête, ou autour de lui, ou dans l'atelier. Or, tout ce qu’il a dans la tête, ou autour de lui est déjà dans la toile, plus ou moins virtuellement, plus ou moins actuellement avant qu’il ne commence son travail. Tout cela est présent sur la toile, a titre d’images, actuelles ou virtuelles. Si bien que le peintre n'a pas à remplir une surface blanche, il aurait plutôt à vider, désencombrer, nettoyer. Il ne peint donc pas pour reproduire sur la toile, un objet fonctionnant comme un modèle, il peint sur des images déjà là, pour produire une toile dont le fonctionnement va renverser les rapports du modèle et de la copie. Bref ce qu’il faut définir, ce sont toutes ces « données » qui sont sur la toile avant que le travail du peintre commence. Et parmi ces données, lesquelles sont un obstacle, lesquelles une aide, ou même les effets d’un travail préparatoire.

Gilles Deleuze. Francis Bacon Logique de la sensation. Seuil 2002

# Victoria Reynolds' paintings + Deleuze's logic of sensation

Here is Victoria Reynolds' work who paint some incredible canvas of meat composing some very evocative carne-landscapes. Her work is very likely to be linked with Francis Bacon's paintings (see former post) as Gilles Deleuze describes it in his Logic of sensation:

Pity the meat! Meat is undoubtedly the chief object of Bacon’s pity, his only object of pity, his Anglo-Irish pity. On this point he is like Soutine, with his immense pity for the Jew. Meat is not dead flesh; it retains all the sufferings and assumes all the colors of living flesh. It manifests such convulsive pain and vulnerability, but also such delightful invention, color, and acrobatics. Bacon does not say, “Pity the beasts,” but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. Meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility; it is a “fact”, a state where the painter identifies with the objects of his horror and his compassion. The painter is certainly a butcher, but he goes to the butcher’s shop as if it were a church, with the meat as the crucified victim. Bacon is a religious painter only in butcher’s shops.

Gilles Deleuze. The logic of sensation. Continuum 2003

Thanks once more to Eduardo !

# Gilles Deleuze and the Baker Transformation

I had to transcript then translate this video from the ABCD of Gilles Deleuze for my fellow studiomates so I thought it could be useful to publish it here as well...

N for neurology

Claire Parnet : N c’est neurologie et cerveau

Gilles Deleuze : Ca c’est très dur, neurologie. C’est vrai que la neurologie m’a toujours fascine. Mais pourquoi ? C’est qu’est ce qui se passe dans la tète de quelqu’un quand il a une idée. Je préfère quand il a une idée, parce que quand il n’a pas d’idée ca se passe un peu comme dans un billard électrique. Mais qu’est ce qui se passe ? Comment ca communique a l’intérieur de la tète ? Parce qu’avant de parler de communication etc. comment ca communique dans la tète. Ou bien dans la tète d’un idiot, je veux dire, c’est la même chose quelqu’un qui a une idée ou un idiot. De toutes façons il ne procède pas par chemin préforme, par associations toutes faites. Eh bien qu’est ce qui se passe…ah si on savait, moi j’ai l’impression qu’on comprendrait tout. Alors ca m’intéresse ; par exemple…et les solutions peuvent être extrêmement variées, je veux dire…Deux extrémités nerveuses dans le cerveau peuvent très bien se mettre en contact, c’est même ca qu’on appelle des processus électriques, les synapses…Et puis il y a d’autres cas, beaucoup plus complexes peut être, ou c’est discontinu et il y a une faille à sauter. Et moi j’ai l’impression que le cerveau est plein de fentes, et que ca saute dans un régime probabiliste, qu’il y a des rapports de probabilités entre deux enchainements, que c’est beaucoup plus incertain…très très incertain. Les communications a l’intérieur d’un même cerveau sont fondamentalement incertaines, soumises a des lois de probabilités. Qu’est ce qui me fait penser à quelque chose ?

Alors il faudrait presque se demander lorsque, par exemple, un concept est donne, ou un tableau, une œuvre d’art est contemplée, regardée, il faudrait presque essayer de faire la carte cérébrale qui y correspond. Quelles seraient les communications continues, les communications discontinues d’un point à un autre. Moi il y a quelque chose qui m’a beaucoup frappe, c’est une histoire dont les physiciens se servent beaucoup sous le nom de la transformation du boulanger. Tu prends comme un carre de pétrin, tu l’étires en rectangle, et puis tu rabats, tu fais un ré-étirage etc. Tu fais tes transformations. Et, a limite de x transformations, deux points tout a fait contigus, forcement seront amenés à être au contraire, très distants. Et, il n’y a pas de points distants qui, a l’issue de x transformations, ne se trouveront pas des points contigus. Je me dis, lorsque l’on cherche quelque chose dans sa tète, est ce qu’il n’y a pas des brassages de ce type ? Est qu’il n’y a pas des trucs ou deux points, a untel moment de mon idée, je ne vois pas comment les rapprocher, les faire communiquer ; et puis au bout d’un certain nombre de transformations, les voila qui se retrouvent l’un a cote de l’autre. Je dirais presque que entre un concept ou une œuvre d’art - c'est-à-dire entre un produit de l’esprit - et un mécanisme cérébral, il y a des ressemblances qui sont tellement émouvantes, et moi j’ai le sentiment que la question « Comment pense-t-on ? », « Qu’est ce que signifie penser ? », les question a la fois de penser et du cerveau sont absolument mêlées.

English version

Claire Parnet: N is for neurology and brain

Gilles Deleuze: That is a though one, neurology. What is true is that neurology always fascinated me. But why? I am interested about what is happening in somebody’s head when he has an idea. I prefer when he has idea, otherwise when he does not have an idea, it happens a bit what happens in a pinball machine. But what is happening ? How does that communicate within the head ? Or even, in a dummy’s head, I mean, that is the same thing somebody who has an idea or a dummy. Anyway, he does not proceed by preformed ways, by already done associations. Well, what is happening…ah if we would know, I feel we would understand everything. So I am interested, for example…and solutions could be extremely various, I mean…Two nervous extremities in the brain could very much be in contact, that is even what we call electrical processes, synapses…And then there are a lot of cases, more complex maybe, where it is discontinuous and there is a fault to jump. I personally think that the brain is full of slits and that it jumps into a probabilistic system, that there are probabilities relationships between two sequences, that it is much more uncertain…very very uncertain. Inside brain communications are fundamentally uncertain, subjected to laws of probabilities. What is making me think of something ?

So we could almost wonder when, for example, a concept is given, or a painting, a piece of art is contemplated, looked at, we could almost try to do the cerebral map which matches with it. What would be the continuous communications, uncontinuous communications from a node to another. There has always been something which really moves me, it is a story that physicians are using a lot under the name of the baker transformation. You take a square of dough, you stretch it as a rectangle, then you fold it, you do a re-stretching etc. You accomplish transformations. And, after x transformations, two absolutely contiguous points, would be necessarily brought away from each other on the contrary. And, there is no distant points which would not be contiguous after x transformations. So I say for myself, when we are looking for something in our head, isn’t there some intermingling of this kind ? Isn’t there some stuffs where two points at one moment of my idea, I cannot see how to move them closer from each other, to make them communicate; and, after a certain amount of transformations, here are they are, meeting each other. I would almost say that between a concept, or a piece of art – therefore a product of the mind – and a cerebral mechanism, there are some similarities which are for me, so affecting, and I do feel that the question “How do we think ?”, “What does that mean, to think ?”, questions of thinking and of the brain are absolutely intermingling.