# The biblical battle of Jericho / When the trumpets destroy the walls

The biblical episode of the battle of Jericho has always fascinated me. The story from the book of Joshua (6:1-27) introduces the first battle the Israelites had to win in order to conquest the land promised by God after the Egyptian slavery period and the forty years spent in the desert. God gave Joshua instructions in order to take the city of Jericho: the Israelites had to march around the city's walls once every day during six days. Then on the seventh day, they had to do the same but in addition to blow in their horns which would make the walls collapse and the city easily defeated.

It always pleases me to imagine a poetico-scientific explanation to this episode by thinking that the horns actually reached the resonance frequency of the walls; this same phenomena that explains why military manuals prevent troops to march on bridges not to risk to make them collapse. I find very compelling the potentiality of destroying whole buildings with only human means (or in that case, music instruments). This could in fact be considered as a metaphor of revolutions which make institutions collapsing...

Here is the text in the Bible.

# Once upon a Place. Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities

picture: La Fievre d'Urbicande by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters

From October 12th to October 14th, will be held in Lisbon a very interesting symposium entitled Once upon a Place. Haunted Houses & Imaginary Cities.

Guest speakers include:
- Alberto Manguel (Author: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, A History of Reading, among others)
- Colin Fournier (Bartlett School of Architecture, London)
- François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters (graphic novels authors)
- Kazys Varnelis (Columbia Univ., NY)
- Ângela Ferreira (artist)
- Gonçalo M. Tavares (author/writer)

The program is attractive with three full days of literary stimulation !
Thanks Pedro for reminding me about it.

# The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges

One story by Jorge Luis Borges is interesting to read as it reveals his vision of his own work. This short story, entitled The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths in fact compares two types of labyrinths; the first one, complex, full of tricks and devices and the second whose labyrinthine aspect comes from its extreme simplicity and "desertness". It has been written that those the first labyrinth was assimilated to Borges' vision of James Joyce's litterature, which lost the reader thanks to the complexity of its form, whereas the second labyrinth was Borges' interpretation of his own work which lost the reader thanks to the vertigo of its essence.

The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths

It is said by men worthy of belief (though Allah's knowledge is greater) that in the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture to enter it, and those who did would lose their way. Most unseemly was the edifice that resulted, for it is the prerogative of God, not man, to strike confusion and inspire wonder. In time there came to the court a king of Arabs, and the king of Babylonia (to muck the simplicity of his guest) bade him enter the labyrinth, where the king of Arabs wandered, humiliated and confused, until the coming of the evening, when he implored God's aid and found the door. His lips offered no complaint, though he said to the king of Babylonia that in his land he had another labyrinth, and Allah willing, he would see that someday the king of Babylonia made its acquaintance. Then he returned to Arabia with his captains and his wardens and he wreaked such havoc upon kingdoms of Babylonia, and with such great blessing by fortune, that he brought low his castles, crushed his people, and took the king of Babylonia himself captive. He tied him atop a swift-footed camel and led him into the desert. Three days they rode, and then he said to him, "O king of time and substance and cipher of the century! In Babylonia didst thou attempt to make me lose my way in a labyrinth of brass with many stairways, doors, and walls; now the Powerful One has seen fit to allow me to show thee mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor walls to impede thy passage."

Then he untied the bonds of the king of Babylonia and abandoned him in the middle of the desert, where he died of hunger and thirst. Glory to him who does not die.

From Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 263-264.

# Tower of Babel. Bruegel and his successors

Pieter Bruegel's paintings of the Tower of Babel are impressive by their sense of details; one can probably spend one whole day exploring the multitude of scenes populating the canvas...
But Bruegel's paintings also acquired the status of paradigm in the Tower's representations. After him, painters from the XVIth and XVIIth centuries -and even later- continued to paint the biblical edifice with similar compositions.
Something peculiar in Bruegel and later, van Valckenborch's paintings is that the Tower seems to be based on a mountain as some pieces of rock emerge from it. The Tower seen that way would have not been an addition of material but rather a monumental sculpture of a mountain...

For this article I chose five of them but several dozens of them can be seen by following this link.

I also already wrote about the Tower of Babel and Kafka's poetical hypothesis that the Great Wall of China had been designed to be its foundation: read the article

Read the Chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis in the Bible narrating the Tower of Babel's story.

Pieter Bruegel 1563

Pieter Bruegel 1563 (detail)

Pieter Bruegel 1563 (detail)

Hendrick Van Cleve 1580

Lucas van Valckenborch 1594

Lucas van Valckenborch 1594 (detail)

Dutch school (XVIIth century)

Marten van Valckenborch around 1600

Tobias Verhaecht around 1600

Tobias Verhaecht around 1600 (detail)

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

see previous Deleuze's article about Carroll

thanks Nikolas !

# Against Architecture. The writing of Georges Bataille by Denis Hollier

In 1974, Denis Hollier (the current chairman of NYU's French Department), published a n absolutely brilliant book entitled La Prise de la Concorde that will be later (1990) be translated in English with the title Against Architecture. The writings of Georges Bataille.
This book takes as premises the very limited amount of writings that Georges Bataille published about architecture and makes out of them a beautiful treatise on architecture and society.

I meant to write an article about this book a long time ago and I never made the time for it, so now I would rather publish an anthology of excerpts of this book than nothing at all.

Two quotes about death and architecture stroke me when I read them as I was very interested by the association of two notions at the time I read the book:

“For Bataille the world of the Aztecs will remain the model of a society that does not repress the sacrifice that forms it. Ephemeral, at the height of glory and at the peak of its powers, this society neglected to put in place the institutional structures that would have secured its future, but. When the time came, offered itself as heedlessly as it sacrificed its victims to extinction and death when Cortez’s army landed in Mexico. It presents the only image of a society based upon death and faithful to this basis to such an extent that is somehow defenseless and died out. The pyramids is left behind were not used to cover up death of the sacrificial victim. “Their knowledge of architecture,” writes Bataille in the chapter of La Part maudite (The Accursed Share) devoted to them, “served them in the construction of pyramids on top of which they immolated human beings.” Architecture is returned to the destructive interaction that its initial function was to interrupt.”

“Imperialism, philosophy, mathematics, architecture, etc., compose the system of petrification that waves of humanity, the crowd unleashed, will end up carrying off in its revolutionary uprising. “Upholding death’s work,” said Hegel, “requires the greatest strength of all.” But the relation between conceptualization and death is not the same for Hegel as it is for Bataille. In the work of the mind, which introduces divisions into the concrete, separating and abstracting, Hegel sees the mechanics of death at work. Discursive knowledge is thus the bearer of this “absolute power” of destruction that cancels the sensuous concrete. It is not until later that science’s abstract concepts, which initially liquefied the “sensuous being-there,” become in turn a unified a whole of thought, “fixed and solidied,” and are set rigidly into a system of abstract determinations. For Bataille, on the contrary, this petrification is the very essence of conceptualization (and here it is not yet necessary to make a distinction among the various sciences, mathematics, and others on the one hand, nor between science and philosophy): it is initially formalist. Conceptualization is being preserved in it, as Hegel put it, conceptualization eludes death by keeping ahead of it, propelled by whatever in its terror over presentiments of the unknown takes refuge in the forms of sameness. Death fluidifies, it liquefies; mathematics paralyze. Architecture has not even a hint of motion. Its main purpose, as the article “Informe” said, is to provide what exists with a “formal coat, a mathematical overcoat”: a form that veils the incompletion that death, in its nakedness, introduces into life. Concerning this point a paradoxical anthropomorphism of mathematics is outlined. In “Le Cheval Academique” Bataille connects the harmonious proportions of human form (form being that which covers up nakedness) with “fright at formless and undefined things.”

“Classical, academic painting, under the control of architecture, is limited to masking a skeleton. Painting conceals it, but the skeleton is its truth. In many primitive societies the skeleton marks the moment of the second death – a death that is completed, clean, and properly immutable: that which survives putrefaction and decomposition. The skeleton, as architectural, is the perfect example of an articulated whole.”

Later in the book, within a chapter entitled The Labyrinth and the Pyramid, Hollier basing his vision of architecture on Bataille's writings establishes that:

“The labyrinth, therefore, is not an object, not a referent. It does not have a transcendence that would permit one to explore it. Wanting to explore the labyrinth only confirms this further: there is no getting around it. But neither the category of subjectivity nor the category of objectivity can exist in this space, which, having made them unsound, nevertheless has no replacement to offer. Distance like proximity, separation like adhesion remain undecidable there. In this sense one is never either inside or outside the labyrinth – a space (perhaps that is already too much to say) that would be constituted by none other than this very anxiety, which is however, incurably undecidable: am I inside or outside?”

Other excerpts:

“Architecture exists only to control and shape the entire social arena. It is constituted by this impulse propelling it to erect itself as the center and to organize all activities around itself.”

“The revolutionary movement liberates the future from the prisons of known. Bataille speaks rarely of political action, but frequently of revolutionary agitation. The revolution destroys the authorities and imaginary dictatorships that work only because they tap the support of some faith. Including the authority of science.
“Man is seen as a bureaucratic-looking prison.” Architecture functions as the fantasy that man identifies with to escape his desire (to escape it is to control it). Man is confined: conformed within himself. Nothing of him escapes the group’s encoding synthesis, whole enclosure he himself guarantees. Because he, in fact, believes in his prison.”

# Beyond no.3 Trends and Fads

The third issue of Beyond (see previous post 1 & 2) has been released. This journal edited by Pedro Gadanho (read his manifesto for boiteaoutils) is smartly investigating current issues by means of essays and short stories, coherently gathered around a specific theme. This third opus is entitled Trends and Fads and attempt to question the factors of influence of the current architectural scene.

The contributors to those essays and short stories are:
Ole Bouman, Martha Cooley, Mockitecture, MOOV & DASS, Oren Safdie, Georg Simmel, Giovanna Borasi, Valéry Didelon, Krunoslav Ivanišin, Kieran Long, Marcosandmarjan, Ines Weizman, Jimenez Lai, Vanessa Liaw.

# Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space at the Royal Academy of Arts

On May 2010 was held an important symposium about James Graham Ballard's literary architecture at the London Royal Academy of Arts. This conference, entitled Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space, is composed by ten lectures by architects, authors, philosophers, sociologists etc. and two discussions that you can visualize here.
The emphasis is made on the ambiguous architectures depicted by Ballard in his novels, both fascinating and terrifying, monumental concrete behemoths that were born with a technocratic modernism.

Nic Clear (him again !), quotes Jean Baudrillard in his own lecture. In fact, Baudrillard wrote a small text about JGB's Crash that can be read by following this link on DePauw University's website.

Ballardian Architecture 1 - John Gray from static tv on Vimeo.

Gray's lecture discussses the latent and manifest content of spaces and buildings, comparing Guy Debord's notion of the spectacle and Ballard's investigation of celebrity culture.

John Gray is a philosopher and author. He has held a variety of academic posts and was most recently Professor of European Thought at the LSE. Gray contributes to The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Times Literary Supplement. Recent books include Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009), Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), and Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions (2004).

Ballardian Architecture 2 - Nic Clear from static tv on Vimeo.

Nic Clear presents a paper entitled, 'J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession'.

Nic Clear is an architect and teacher at the Bartlett School of Architecture. His teaching focuses on the use of video, animation and motion graphics in the development and representation of spatial and architectural ideas and practices. He is editor of Architectures of the Near Future a special edition of Architectural Design questioning received notions of the future, drawing on such fields as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, and neurology.

Ballardian Architecture 3 - David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

Cunningham discusses the literary aspects of Ballard's writing in relation to architecture and provides comparisons between Ballard's work and that of W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair.

Cunningham is deputy director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster and founder member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy. He is co-editor of the books Adorno and Literature (2006) and Photography and Literature in the Twentieth Century (2005), and has published widely on modernism, aesthetics, urban theory and the avant-garde.

Ballardian Architecture 4 - Session 1 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

The discussion elaborates on Ballardian registers of time, the idea of the future, the uncanny, sentimentality and the impact of technology and social networking.

Ballardian Architecture 5 - Nigel Coates from static tv on Vimeo.

In this lecture, Coates explores points of contact between Ballard's work and his own architectural practice.

Coates is an architect, designer and teacher. His buildings in Japan include the Wall, Noah’s Ark and the Art Silo, and in Britain, the National Centre for Popular Music, Powerhouse::uk and the Geffrye Museum. He is also a prolific designer of lighting and furniture, with links to Alessi, AVMazzega, Ceramica Bardelli, Frag, Fratelli Boffi, Poltronova, Slamp and Varaschin. He is currently Professor and Head of Department of the School of Architecture & Design at the Royal College of Art.

Ballardian Architecture 6 - Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Using the example of the short story Chronopolis Taunton investigates Ballard's engagement with modernist urbanism, Taylorism and Fordism.

Matthew Taunton completed his PhD at the London Consortium in 2008. His first book Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris was published by Palgrave in 2009. His research interests are in English and French Literature from 1850 to the present, urban studies, theory and politics, and he has published widely on these themes. He teaches at Goldsmiths, Central St. Martins and the Open University, and also writes for the New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement.

Ballardian Architecture 7 - Chris Hall from static tv on Vimeo.

Hall takes a passage from Ballard's book Terminal Beach and uses it to delve into ideas concerning the realities of internal and external worlds. His lecture also includes a consideration of Herzog and de Meuron's recent project Lincoln Rd. Car Park.

Chris Hall is a freelance journalist and writer who interviewed JG Ballard for Time Out and icon magazine, among others. His essay "Extreme Metaphor: A Crash Course in the Fiction of JG Ballard" (1997) was one of the first online articles about the author. He also runs Will Self's official website, will-self.com.

Ballardian Architecture 8 - Joanne Murray from static tv on Vimeo.

In this lecture Murray explores the links between Ballard and New Brutalism.

Joanne Murray is currently in the final stages of her PhD at Birkbeck College. Her thesis explores notions of ‘equivalence’ and the articulation of aftermath in New Brutalism and the fiction of JG Ballard. Joanne teaches Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University.

Ballardian Architecture 9 - Dan Holdsworth from static tv on Vimeo.

Dan Holdsworth talks about his photographs in relation to JG Ballard’s writings

Dan Holdsworth creates landscape photographs in which the subtle merging of nature, architecture and technology combine with dramatic effects of light and space to produce powerful visions of our contemporary world. Holdsworth's photographs have a global range, from the apparently mundane car parks and motorway intersections – to the sublime glacial topography of Iceland.

Ballardian Architecture 10 - Tim Abrahams from static tv on Vimeo.

Tim Abrahams talks about Shanghai at the time of the setting of Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and compares it to the city in the present day.

Tim Abrahams is a journalist and Associate Editor of Blueprint and a regular contributor to Building magazine. As well as writing for a host of other publications including Wired, New Statesman and GQ Style, he is also editing a book on collaboration between architects and other professionals, published by Birkhauser.

Ballardian Architecture 11 - Session 2 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Ballardian Architecture 12 - Claire Walsh from static tv on Vimeo.

Claire Walsh, JG Ballard’s partner, shared his passionate interest in architecture and the built environment. In their 40 years together they explored Europe, from Corbusier’s cabin and the Alhambra to the Heathrow Hilton and Westway. Claire is an editor and researcher.

# 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

# The Concentration City by James Graham Ballard

[...]
"The surgeon hesitated before opening the door. "Look," he began to explain sympathetically, "you can't get out of time, can you? Subjectively it's a plastic dimension, but whatever you do to yourself you'll never be able to stop that clock"- he pointed to the one on the desk-"or make it run backward. In exactly the same way you can't get out of the City."
"The analogy doesn't hold," M. said. He gestured at the walls around them and the lights in the streets outside. "All this was built by us. The question nobody can answer is: what was here before we built it?"
"It's always been here," the surgeon said. "Not these particular bricks and girders, but others before them. You accept that time has no beginning and no end. The City is as old as time and continuous with it."
"The first bricks were laid by someone," M. insisted. "There was the Foundation."
"A myth. Only the scientists believe in that, and even they don't try to make too much of it. Most of them privately admit that the Foundation Stone is nothing more than a superstition. We pay it lip service out of convenience, and because it gives us a sense of tradition. Obviously there can't have been a first brick. If there was, how can you explain who laid it, and even more difficult, where they came from?"
"There must be free space somewhere," M. said doggedly. "The City must have bounds."
"Why?" the surgeon asked. "It can't be floating in the middle of nowhere. Or is that what you're trying to believe?"
M. sank back limply. "No"
The surgeon watched M silently for a few minutes and paced back to the desk. "This peculiar fixation of yours puzzles me. You're caught between what the psychiatrists call paradoxical faces. I suppose you haven't misinterpreted something you've heard about the Wall?"
M. looked up. "Which wall?"
The surgeon nodded to himself. "Some advanced opinion maintains that there's a wall around the City, through which it's impossible to penetrate. I don't pretend to understand the theory myself. It's far too abstract and sophisticated. Anyway I suspect they've confused this Wall with the bricked-up black areas you passed through on the Sleeper. I prefer the accepted view that the City stretches out in all direction without limits.""
[...]

The Concentration City (1957). James Graham Ballard. The Complete Short Stories

# COMPUTATIONAL LABYRINTH or Towards a Borgesian Architecture

picture: Etching by Eric Desmazieres for The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Boston : David R. Godine, 2000

As I wrote a week ago, I was lucky enough to write for the last issue of Pratt's grad students' journal TARP which was proposing to investigate new ways of considering Computational Architecture. Here is the article:

COMPUTATIONAL LABYRINTH or Towards a Borgesian Architecture

Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before its death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

Jorge Luis Borges

It has been several years now since computation has grown within a group of international architecture schools in the Western world. However, something that I regret too often, computational architecture stands as a self-contained discipline. Increasing the limits of the field of possibilities is definitely a laudable idea; however this achievement seems relatively meaningless if it is not achieved with serious consideration for the human dimension in architecture. Based on this statement, I will elaborate with a short study of how computation allows one to design what I would call a ‘Borgesian’ architecture. Jorge Luis Borges’ work indeed involves very evocative spatial dimensions and I will try to focus here on what may be his two most famous short stories: The Lottery in Babylon and The Library of Babel.

The Lottery in Babylon dramatizes a city whose integral human behaviors and functions are systematically subordinate to chance. It is very important to understand that the notion of lottery in this short story is not characterized by an arbitrary distribution of more or less valuable prizes, but rather by a random determination of every citizens’ acts and fates whether those are desirable or dreadful. The whole frenzy – not to say idolatry – of this lottery actually comes from this existence of danger and loss of control.
The notion of loss of control is primordial because it is that which brings us to the creation and origins of architecture and the ability we now have to design with computational methods. In the same way that the Borgesian Babylon ceases to depend on the causal judgment of a transcendental morality, architecture can now tend towards an emancipation from the omnipotence of the architect by partially delegating a power of decision to chance. Actually, the Babylonians and computational architecture still depends on a transcendence; however, the latter no longer arises from a direct subjectivity but rather from an illegible disorder triggered by this subjectivity. On the contrary I would suggest that randomness is able to bring an important dose of irrationality and illegibility which I am personally interested to study. If the hyper-rationalization of an architecture tends to make it more controllable by an institutional power, breaking with this process, could thus be considered as a form of resistance towards such a power. As a homage to Borges, I would propose to call labyrinth any “out of control” architecture inserting in its core a decent amount of resistance to rationality.

The other short story that seems appropriate to evoke in this short study is The Library of Babel. This story is a conscientious description of the library as “a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible,” that host the totality of books composed with all letter combinations possible. The Library is thus questioning the notion of the infinite and its paradoxical spatial application. I intentionally write “paradoxical” because the infinite seems to me as illustrating a conflict between mathematics and physics. The latter can only suggest the infinite without actually describing it whereas, mathematics is a language based on the idea of the infinite. Returning to our field of study, architecture originally belongs to the universe of physics; computation tends to insert mathematics into it and therefore the notion of the infinite.
The only limit to an architecture generated by mathematics is the finite characteristics of its generator: the computer. However, simply the idea of relating architecture to one or several equations is to allow itself to acquire an infinite dimension. Such an idea obviously tackles the issue of its physicality and therefore allows architecture to exist through other means than within the finite amount of the physical world’s particles.
In the same way Borges succeeded to create an infinite world thanks to words and to the reader’s imagination, computation allows the creation of an infinite architecture thanks to its relation to mathematics.

In 1949, Jorge Luis Borges published Ficcionnes, a collection of labyrinthine short stories including the two studied here, and thus proved once again that some of the richest architectures were not necessarily designed by traditional means. Sixty years later, computation, another untraditional means, allows such scenarii to be visualized. It seems appropriate here to evoke very briefly the creation of the hyperlink, which elaborates protocols for the infinite narrative arborescence of another short story from Ficcionnes, The Garden of Forking Paths.
Computation now allows architecture to reach a new dimension be it poetic, political, mathematical or even metaphysical, and thus seems to justify the use of these new tools. The architect now needs to adopt a perfect balance between, on one hand, the amount of control he gives up in order to improve his design, and on the other hand, the amount of control he actually needs to tame the tool so as to not fall into idolatry.

APPENDIX

However unlikely it might seem, no one had tried out before then a general theory of chance. Babylonians are not very speculative. They revere the judgments of fate, they deliver to them their lives, their hopes, their panic, but it does not occur to them to investigate fate labyrinthine laws nor the gyratory spheres which reveal it. Nevertheless, the unofficial declaration that I have mentioned inspired many discussions of judicial-mathematical character. From some one of them the following conjecture was born: If the lottery is an intensification of chance, a periodical infusion of chaos in the cosmos, would it not be right for chance to intervene in all stages of the drawing and not in one alone?

The Lottery in Babylon. Jorge Luis Borges. Ficcionnes (1949). Rayo 2008

The universe (which other calls the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal book case. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.

The Library of Babel. Jorge Luis Borges. Ficcionnes (1949). Rayo 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

# La Qu... by Marc-Antoine Mathieu

Still following the adventures of Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisoner of the dreams (see previous article), here is another graphic novel by the extremely talented Marc-Antoine Mathieu. This one is entitled La Qu... and has unfortunately not been translated in English (apparently only Dead Memory has been). This novel is once again extremely Kafkaian, but also borrows a small part of its narration to one of the best (and not so known) short story by James Graham Ballard called Billennium, which depicts an overpopulated world in which each citizen has the right on 3.5 square meters. The first image above also illustrate the influence of Marc-Antoine Mathieu since Lars von Trier's Dogville has been released ten years after La Qu...'s publication in 1993.
An important precision here, I tried not to spoil the novel by including the best frames of it, so you can still be fascinated while reading it for the first time.

# The Lost Drone Army by Tim Maly (Quiet Babylon)

The Lost Drone Army is a short story told by Tim Maly on his blog Quiet Babylon that dramatizes the existence of a mutineer group of drones that threatens to strike back its former masters.

MERAUX, La. – A swarm of drones, known as the “Lost Army,” appear to have established themselves in the New Orleans area, the defence commissioner said. The autonomous force has been operating without human control for nearly a decade.

Three units were spotted by junkyard workers, about 10 miles from where the reconnaissance units were discovered in November, commissioner Baako Arceneaux said Wednesday.

Though the exact nature of the drones remains unconfirmed, goggle imagery provided by the workers matches the profile of constructor-type units.

This most recent sighting was close enough to last year’s location that the drones could have been part of the main swarm. But they might also have been blown ashore by hurricane Quinton or Stephanie, said Arceneaux in a news release.

“Although the full extent of the so-called Lost Army’s presence isn’t known, we have to assume that at least a portion is established in the area and people should be careful when travelling outside, hunting recreationally, or otherwise behaving in what could be perceived as an aggressive manner,” Arceneaux said.

Since the Michoacán incident, the Louisiana Department of Civil Defence has been upgrading surveillance stations along a north-south line through the state and at several key navigational choke-points to monitor for signs of the drones. Critics charge that the process has taken too long and that warnings are coming too late.

“This is just part of a larger failure on the part of the powers-that-be to properly fund national sanctity,” said Corporal J. F. Ruck, Minutemen spokesman, “They’re telling us to just sit back and let the drones fly on by, more of the extensive record of do-nothing politics by the government. We don’t even know where they are.”

More security news
Louisiana Ambassador calls for funding assistance to deal with drone menace
Chinese government denies reports of Afghan uprising
“Pitbull” defence breeds approved for public purchase in Chicago

Built and deployed to police the Columbian jungle during the height of anti-drug paranoia, contact with the nearly completely autonomous collective was lost 9 years ago. The incident and subsequent massacre of a small unit of Panamanian security forces led to the immediate banning of high-autonomy drone units. The ban has ironically made the errant drones nearly impossible to contain.

“The problem is that our guys just aren’t as fast as these things,” said General Hussein, speaking from the Pentagon, “They do one thing really well and that is high speed 720 degree combat. You can’t expect a human operator to match that capability.”

After two disastrous attempts to retrieve or destroy the drones in South America, a containment policy was declared. However, jurisdictional issues have plagued the joint task force and as much as 50% of the army carrying up to 70% of the remaining ordinance remains unaccounted for. Despite efforts, they have been steadily migrating northward.

According to Lockheed Martin analysts, the drones appear to be in a patrol mode. Since the massacre at the alleged cartel fields in Michoacán, few violent incidents have been reported.

The drones carry a mixture of bio-explosive and conventional ordinance. Experts recommend that anyone confronted with drones disarm and seek cover immediately. People with weapons, home-based laboratories or certain kinds of farms are advised to take special caution. More information is available on the DoCD website.

# Maharishi Tower by Carlos Teixeira

Maharishi Tower is a beautiful narrative project by Carlos Teixeira who drew an hindu skyscraper in Sao Paulo (!) after Murilo Rubiao's short story entitled O Edifício (1965). The story depicts the construction of the biggest and tallest city in the world. Foundations takes five years to achieve and then the building seem never to end and host little by little the entire city of Sao Paulo. I really recommend to click on the pictures below in order to read this fantastic text.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// 砂の女 (The woman in the dunes) by Hiroshi Teshigahara

Following the previous article about the desert, let's stay in the realm of sand with the masterpiece 砂の女 (The woman in the dunes) by Hiroshi Teshigahara directly interpreted from Kobo Abe's novel.
The plot dramatize the captivity of a man in a house which lays at the bottom of a sand "dwell" in which lives a woman who needs each day to extract a certain amount of sand for the nearby village and in order to maintain her house out from being swallowed by the sand. It represents a daily fight for the existence of her life environment in order to survive against the intractable process of the sand.
Whether one talks about the book or the film, the sand descriptions are absolutely splendid and even comports a kind of metaphysical aspect to some degrees.
Here is an excerpt of the novel:

Sand: an aggregate of rock fragments. Sometimes including loadstone, tinstone, or more rarely gold dust. Diameter: 2 to 1/16mm

A very clear definition indeed. In short, the sand came from fragmented rocks and was interemediate between clay and pebble. But simply calling it an intermediate substance did not provide a really satisfactory explanation. Why was it that isolated deserts and sandy terrain came into existence through the sifting out of only the sand from soil in which clay, sand, and stones were thoroughly mixed together? If a true intermediate substance were involved, the erosive action of wind and water would necessarily produce any number of intermingling intermediate forms in the range between rock and clay. However, there are in fact only three forms that can be clearly distinguished from one another: stones, sand, and clay. Furthermore, sand is sand wherever it is; strangely enough, there is almost no difference in the size of the grains whether they come from the Gobi Desert or from the beach at Enoshima. The size of the grains shows very little variation and follows a Gaussian distribution curve with a true mean of 1/8mm.
[…]
Because winds and water current flows over the land, the formation of sand is unavoidable. As long as the winds blew, the rivers flowed, and the seas stirred, sand would be born grain by grain from the earth, and like a living being it would creep everywhere. The sands never rested. Gently but surely they invaded and destroyed the surface of the earth.

Kobo Abe. 砂の女 Suna no onna (The woman in the dunes). Borzoi 1964

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Desert

Desert is something between an heterotopia and what I would call an atopia (a non-space). It defines itself as a territory whose limits seem to reach the infinite, which is not to say that it seems to have no limits. In fact, in the cinematographic desert, one always tries to reach the horizon as a tenacious impossible quest.

I think an appropriate author to quote here is Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio (see previous post) in his beautiful humanist novel Desert:

They appeared as if in a dream at the top of the dune, half-hidden in the cloud of sand rising from their steps. Slowly, they made their way down into the valley, following the almost invisible trail. At the head of the caravan were the men, wrapped in their woolen cloaks, their faces masked by the blue veil. Two or three dromedaries walked with them, followed by the goats and sheep that the young boys prodded onward. The women brought up the rear. They were bulky shapes, lumbering under heavy cloaks, and the skin of their arms and foreheads looked even darker in the indigo cloth.
They walked noiselessly in the sand, slowly, not watching where they were going. The wind blew relentlessly, the desert wind, hot in the daytime, cold at night. The sand swirled about them, between the legs of the camels, lashing the faces of the women, who pulled the blue veils down over their eyes. The young childre ran about, the babies cried, rolled up in the blue cloth on their mothers' backs. The camels growled, sneezed. No one knew where the caravan was going.
[...]
They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in a dream at the top of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudness sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. They bore with them hunger, the thrist of bleeding lips, the flintlike silence of the glinting sun, the cold nights, the glow of the Milky Way, the moon: accompanying them were their huge shadows at sunset, the waves of virgin sand over which their splayed feet trod, the inaccessible horizon. More than anything, they bore the light of their gaze shining so brightly in the whites of their eyes.

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio. Desert (1980). Verba Mundi 2009

pictures:
- Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana 1968
- Gus Van Sant: Gerry 2002
- Chuan Lu: Kekexili (Mountain Patrol) 2006
- Peter Watkins: Punishment Park 1971 (see previous posts)
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Zabriskie Point 1970
- Michelangelo Antonioni: Professione: Reporter (The Passenger) 1975

# Franz Kafka's Tower of Babel and Great Wall of China

Franz Kafka, in his short story called The Great Wall of China, draws an interesting literate association between the most horizontal edifice with the mythic vertical one, the Tower of Babel, the first one being the foundation of the second. I am pretty intrigued by the obvious anachronism and its Cabalistic aspect...

"First, it has to be said that achievements were brought to fruition at that time which rank slightly behind the Tower of Babel, although in the pleasure they gave to God, at least by human reckoning, they made an impression exactly the opposite of that structure. I mention this because at the time construction was beginning a scholar wrote a book in which he drew this comparison very precisely. In it he tried to show that the Tower of Babel had failed to attain its goal not at all for the reasons commonly asserted, or at least that the most important causes were not among these well-known ones. He not only based his proofs on texts and reports, but also claimed to have carried out personal inspections of the location and thus to have found that the structure collapsed and had to collapse because of the weakness of its foundation. And it is true that in this respect our age was far superior to that one long ago. Almost every educated person in our age was a mason by profession and infallible when it came to the business of laying foundations. But it was not at all the scholar’s aim to prove this. Instead he claimed that the great wall alone would for the first time in the age of human beings create a secure foundation for a new Tower of Babel. So first the wall and then the tower. In those days the book was in everyone’s hands, but I confess that even today I do not understand exactly how he imagined this tower. How could the wall, which never once took the form of a circle but only a sort of quarter or half circle, provide the foundation for a tower? But it could be meant only in a spiritual sense. But then why the wall, which was something real, a product of the efforts and lives of hundreds of thousands of people? And why were there plans in the book—admittedly hazy plans—sketching the tower, as well as detailed proposals about how the energies of the people could be strictly channelled into the new work in the future."

Franz Kafka. The Great Wall of China. Penguin91

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Fahrenheit 451 by Francois Truffaut

The film Fahrenheit 451 is a 1966 cinematographic adaptation from Francois Truffaut of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel. More than a visualization of the book, Truffaut's movie is a real personal interpretation and brings something in addition of the original plot.
Fahrenheit 451 is the story of a system where firemen are burning every books they find since those records of knowledge are being prohibited.

The heterotopia here is this zone in the woods where rebels to the system are living and happen to have traded their name to a book they have read and remembered. Literature and knowledge are thus being transmit from generation to generation as both a hyper-personification of their content (since somebody actually embodies it) and a personification of this same content (since the author is not anymore the important thing here).
This heterotopia is then dramatizing a territory where culture is not contained by objects but by people and triggers thus a global solidarity and equality between them.

Here is a short excerpt from Bradbury's novel:

“Montag.” Granger took Montag’s shoulder firmly.
“Walk carefully. Guard your health. If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastics. See how important you’ve become in the last minute!”
“But I’ve forgotten”
“No, nothing’s ever lost. We have ways to shake down your clinkers for you.”
“But I’ve tried to remember!”
“Don’t try. It’ll come when we need it. All of us have photographic memories, but spend a lifetime learning how to block off the things that are really in there. Simmons here has worked on it for twenty years and now we’ve got the method down to where we can recall everything that’s been read once. Would you like, some day, Montag, to read Plato’s Republic?”
“Of course!”
“I am Plato’s Republic. Like to read Marcus Aurelius? Mr. Simmons is Marcus.”
“How do you do?” said Mr. Simmons
“Hello”, said Montag
“I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver’s Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confusius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
Everyone laughed quietly.
“It can’t be”, said Montag
“It is”, replied Granger, smiling. “We’re book burners, too. We read the books and burnt them, afraid they’d be found. Micro-filming didn’t pay off; we were always traveling, we didn’t want to bury the film, and come back later. Always the chance of discovery. Better to keep it in old heads, where no one can see it or suspect it. We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law, Byron, Tom Paine, Machiavelli or Christ, it’s here. And the hour is lat. And the war’s began. And we are out here, and the city is there, all wrapped up in its own coat of a thousand colors. What do you think Montag?”

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. Ballantine 1953