# 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.

# Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

The following text is the transcript of an audio recording found on dytopolitik. In it, Giorgio Agamben interprets Michel Foucault's chapter in Discipline and Punish about the shift from an exclusive urban scheme based on the leprosis management to a disciplinary urban scheme based on the plague management. In fact, according to Foucault, the sovereignty on life itself has been replaced in the XVIIIth century by a biopolitical sovereignty that consider life in its anatomical and biological dimensions in order to both ensure its power and maintain them in a state of continuous work production.

Metropolis by Giorgio Agamben

Many years ago I was having a conversation with Guy (Debord) which I believed to be about political philosophy, until at some point Guy interrupted me and said: 'Look, I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist'. This statement struck me because I used to see him as a philosopher as I saw myself as one, but I think that what he meant to say was that every thought, however 'pure', general or abstract it tries to be, is always marked by historical and temporal signs and thus captured and somehow engaged in a strategy and urgency. I say this because my reflections will clearly be general and I won't enter into the specific theme of conflicts but I hope that they will bear the marks of a strategy.

I would like to start from a banal consideration on the etymology of the word metropolis. As you know, in Greek, metropolis means Mother City and refers to the relationship between cities and colonies. The citizens of a polis who left to found a colony were curiously called en apoikia: distancing/drifting away from home and from the city, which then took on, in relation to the colony, the character of Mother City, Metropolis(1). As you know this meaning of the word is still current and is today used to express the relationship of the metropolitan territory of the home to the colonies. The first instructive observation suggested by the etymology is that the word metropolis has a strong connotation of maximum dislocation and spatial and political dishomogeneity, as that which defines the relationship between the state, or the city, and colonies. And this raises a series of doubts about the current idea of the metropolis as an urban, continuous and relatively homogeneous tissue (2). This is the first consideraton: the isonomy that defines the Greek polis as a model of political city is excluded from the relation between metropolis and colony, and therefore the term metropolis, when transposed to describe an urban fabric, carries this fundamental dishomogeneity with it. So I propose that we keep the term metropolis for something substantially other from the city, in the traditional conception of the polis, i.e. something politically and spatially isonomic. I suggest to use this term, metropolis, to designate the new urban fabric that emerges in parallel with the processes of transformation that Michel Foucault defined as the shift from the territorial power of the ancient regime, of sovereignty, to modern biopower, that is in its essence governmental.

This means that to understand what a metropolis is one needs to understand the process whereby power progressively takes on the character of government of things and the living, or if you like of an economy. Economy means nothing but government, in the 18th century, the government of the living and things. The city of the feudal system of the ancient regime was always in a situation of exception in relation to the large territorial powers, it was the citta franca, relatively autonomous from the great territorial powers (3). So I would say that the metropolis is the dispositif or group of dispositifs that replaces the city when power becomes the government of the living and of things.

We cannot go into the complexity of the transformation of power into government. Government is not dominion and violence, it is a more complex configuration that traverses the very nature of the governed thus implying their freedom, it is a power that is not transcendental but immanent, its essential character is that it is always, in its specific manifestation, a collateral effect, something that originates in a general economy and falls onto the particular (4). When the US strategists speak of collateral damage they have to be taken literally: government always has this schema of a general economy, with collateral effects on the particulars, on subjects.

Going back to the metropolis, my idea is that we are not facing a process of development and growth of the old city, but the institution of a new paradigm whose character needs to be analysed. Undoubtedly one of its main traits is that there is a shift form the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly invested in a process of de-politicization, which results in a strange zone where it is impossible to decide what is private and what is public.

Michel Foucault tried to define some of the essential characters of this urban space in relation to 'governmentality.' According to him, there is a convergence of two paradigms that were hitherto distinct: leprosy and the plague. The paradigm of leprosy was clearly based on exclusion, it required that the lepers were 'placed outside' the city. In this model, the pure city keeps the stranger outside, the "Great Confinement": enclose and exclude (5). The model of the plague is completely different and gives rise to another paradigm. When the city is plagued it is impossible to move the plague victims outside. On the contrary, it is a case of creating a model of surveillance, control, and articulation of urban spaces. These are divided into sections, within each section each road is made autonomous and placed under the surveillance of an intendant; nobody can go out of the house but every day the houses are checked, each inhabitant controlled, how many are there, are they dead etc. It is the imposition of a grid upon urban territory surveilled by intendants, doctors and soldiers. So whilst the leper was rejected by an apparatus of exclusion, the plague victim is encased, surveilled, controlled and cured through a complex web of dispositifs that divide and individualize, and in so doing also articulate the efficiency of control and of power.

Thus whereas leprosy is a paradigm of social exclusion, the plague is a paradigm of disciplinary techniques, technologies that will take society through the transition from the ancient regime to the disciplinary paradigm. According to Foucault, the political space of modernity is the result of these two paradigms: at some point the leper starts being treated like a plague victim, and vice versa. In other words, there emerges a projection onto the framework of exclusion and separation of leprosy, of the arrangement of surveillance, control, individualization and the articulation of disciplinary power, so that it becomes a case of individualizing, subjectivating and correcting the leper by treating him like a plague victim. So there is a double capture: on the one hand the simple binary opposition of diseased/healthy, mad/normal etc. and on the other hand there is a whole complicated series of differentiating dispositions of technologies and dispositifs that subjectify, individuate and control subjects. This is a first useful framework for a general definition of metropolitan space today and it also explains the very interesting things you were talking about here: the impossibility of univocally defining borders, walls, spatialization, because they are the result of the action of this different paradigm: no longer a simple binary division but the projection on this division of a complex series of articulating and individuating processes and technologies.

I remember Genoa 2001: I thought it was an experiment to treat the historical center of an old city, still characterized by an ancient architectural structure, to see how in this center one could suddenly create walls, gates that not only had the function of excluding and separating but were also there to articulate different spaces and individualize spaces and subjects. This analysis that Foucault summarily sketches out can be further developed and deepened. But now I want to end on a different note and concentrate on a different point.

I said that the city is a dispositif, or a group of dispositifs. The theory that you referred to earlier was the summary idea that one could divide reality into, on the one hand, humans and living beings, and, on the other, the dispositifs that continuously capture and take hold of them. However, the third fundamental element that defines a dispositif, for Foucault too I think, is the series of processes of subjectivation that result from the relation, the corpo a corpo, between individuals and dispositifs (6). There is no dispositif without a process of subjectivation; to speak of dispositif one has to see a process of subjectivation. Subject means two things: what leads an individual to assume and become attached to an individuality and singularity, but also subjugation to an external power (7). There is no process of subjectivation without both these aspects.

What is often lacking, also in the movements, is the consciousness of this relation, the awareness that every time one takes on an identity one is also subjugated. Obviously this is also complicated by the fact that modern dispositifs not only entail the creation of a subjectivity but also and equally processes of de-subjectivation. This might have always been the case, think about confession, which shaped Western subjectivity (the formal confession of sins), or juridical confession, which we still experience today. Confession always entailed in the creation of a subject also the negation of a subject, for instance, in the figure of the sinner and confessor, it is clear that the assumption of a subjectivity goes together with a process of de-subjectivation. So the point today is that dispositifs are increasingly de-subjectifying so it is difficult to identify the processes of subjectivation that they create. But the metropolis is also a space where a huge process of creation of subjectivity is taking place. About this we don't know enough. When I say that we need to know these processes, I am not just referring to the sociological or economic and social analysis; I am referring to the ontological level or Spinozian level that puts under question the subjects' ability/power to act; i.e. what, in the processes whereby a subject somehow becomes attached to a subjective identity, leads to a change, an increase or decrease of his/her power to act (8). We lack this knowledge and this perhaps makes the metropolitan conflicts we witness today rather opaque.

I think that a confrontation with metropolitan dispositifs will only be possible when we penetrate the processes of subjectivation that the metropolis entails in a more articulated way, deeper. Because I think that the outcome of conflicts depends on this: on the power to act and intervene on processes of subjectivation, in order to reach that stage that I would call a point of ungovernability. The ungovernable where power can shipwreck in its figure of government, the ungovernable that I think is always the beginning and the line of flight of all politics.

Transcribed and translated by Arianna Bove from audio files.

Translator's notes:
(1) allontanarsi is the verb used in the original;
(2) tessuto: material, cloth, woven fabric;
(3) citta franca is so called because it is exempt from feudal tax (franca = free, nice idiom: farla franca, 'getting away with it');
(4) ricade sul particolare: falls onto but also hangs and incumbs on;
(5) These reflections can be found in Michel Foucault's Lectures on Les Anormaux, given at the College de France in 1975, specifically this issue is treated on 15th January, Lecture II. The 1975 lectures are published in English by Verso as The Abnormals (London: 2003), in French by Gallimard (Paris: 1999) and in Italian by Feltrinelli (Milan: 2000). Excellent stuff;
(6) Funny how in English there is head to head and face to face, but no body to body. The Leviathan;
(7) assoggettamento;
(8) the usual conundrum: capacitá in Italian.

# Radio documentary programs about Hannah Arendt on France Culture

French speakers (listeners) would be happy to know that the radiophonic program Les Nouveaux Chemins de la Connaissance (on France Culture) just released five hours of discussions about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt mostly about Totalitarianism and the "banalization of evil".
Eichman cannot be excused by his role in the Nazi bureaucracy nor can he be expelled from the man kind (which would be too easy for humans) but rather has to be put in front of his responsibilities, as a human who committed true horror.

# Sympathy with the obstacle / Parkour in Gaza

“Thus, hostile urbanists or militias always conduct the battle towards the inside, or the domain of obstacles, the urban canyon. When it comes to urbanized war, every combatant must think like an obstacle –‘See everything from the perspective of an obstacle’. West then uses Parkour as the exemplary discipline in which the practitioner becomes as one with the obstacle during movement. Every soldier should be a traceur, a swerving projectile which has a deep sympathy with its physical obstacle.”

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

We already wrote a bit about Parkour on boiteaoutils (link 1 and 2) and our fascination for this practice of architecture which attempts to consider every surfaces as a potential ground for the body.
In his great Cyclonopedia (already evoked in a previous article), the Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani evokes urban combat as the new paradigm of war in the Middle East. He establishes a materialist interpretation of the city as a set of obstacles and the militarized choreography of bodies as a set of trajectories that develop a "sympathy" for these same obstacles.
I recently discovered this following video showing three young men practicing Parkour in the Gaza Strip. My romanticism did not need so much to see a poetical resistance by the bodies to the various obstacles the Israeli Army impose to the Palestinian population...

# UTOPIA TODAY : INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 22 - 23 - 24 OCTOBER 2010

Following is the programme of an upcoming event I really invite you to join !
I'll be around for an installation, and I'll try to do a report for the unlucky ones that won't be able to come. See you there!

Utopia today?

Saline Royale Arc-et-senans, 22-24.10.2010

friday 22.10.2010

14:00 – 14:30 Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson (ESA Paris)

introduction

14:30 – 14:50 Michel Pierre, Director Saline Royale

welcome

14:50 – 15:00 Martial Marquet, Paris

Rise above

15:00 – 15:30 break

15:30 – 16:00 Ole W. Fischer (Harvard)

After Modernity – architecture between utopia, nostalgia and dirty reality?

Comments on the uncertain state of an ancient profession…

16:00 – 16:30 Michel Pregardien (Université de Liège)

Il n’y a plus de place pour l’utopie

16:30 – 17:00 break

17:00 – 18:00 David Harvey (New York)

18:00 – 19:00 round table discussion, moderators Odile Decq, Andri Gerber, Brent Patterson

19:00 – 20:30 dinner

20:30 movie projection

saturday 23.10.2010

8:00 – 9:00 breakfast

9:30 – 9:50 resumé Andri Gerber

9:50 – 10:30 Philippe Morel (EZCT, Paris)

10:30 – 11:10 Matthias Pauwels (BAVO, Rotterdam)

From urban laboratories to utopian NGOism. Recent mutations in architectural utopianism

11:10 – 11:30 break

11:30 – 12:00 Karin Bradley (The Royal Institute of Technology – KTH, Stockholm)

Freegans, squatters and urban farmers – Radical political ecology in the making

12:00 – 12:30 Katia Frey, Eliana Perrotti (ETH Zürich)

Women’s utopia. Tradition and future opportunities of a gender oriented town planning

12:30 – 14:00 lunch

14:00 – 14:30 Julia Ramírez Blanco (Complutense University of Madrid)

The ideal city of AVL-Ville

14:30 – 15:00 Hendrik Tieben (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Gordon Wu - Hong Kong’s empirical utopist

15:00 – 15:30 break

15:30 – 16:00 Stefan Kurath (Urbanplus, Zürich)

Imagine grison, the meaning of working with architectural utopies and dystopies in the daily practice

16:00 – 16:40 Peter Eisenman, interview by Emmanuel Petit (Yale University)

16:40 – 17:30 Winy Maas (MVRDV, Rotterdam)

What’s next?

17:30 – 18:00 break

18:00 – 19:00 roundtable, moderators Andri Gerber, Johannes

Käferstein, Brent Patterson

19:00 – 20:30 dinner

20:30 movie projection

sunday 24.10.2010

8:00 – 9:30 breakfast

9:30 – 9:50 resumé (Brent Patterson)

9:50 – 10:20 Jae Emerling / Ronna Gardner (University of North Carolina)

Prosthetic Architecture as Heterotopia

10:20 – 10:50 Hanspeter Bürgi (HSLU, Luzern)

Gross National Happiness: The Bhutanese concept and a focus on space, energy and culture

10:50 – 11:10 break

11:10 – 12:00 Final discussion with all speakers

12:00 – 13:30 lunch

# 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.”

# The Importance of Imperfections by Manuel de Landa

Following is an interesting article of Manuel de Landa excerpted from a series of "columns" he wrote for Domus Magazine a couple of years ago.

It is entitled The Importance of Imperfections and investigates the minor science of metallurgy (to use Deleuzian terminology) as a celebration of material transformation by its main characters: the blacksmiths.

The Importance of Imperfections

In the ancient craft of metallurgy the distinction between being hard and being tough has long been understood. A blacksmith manufacturing a sword in classical times, for example, knew that the edge and body of the weapon had to have distinct properties. The edge, if it is to stay sharp, must be able to preserve its pointy, triangular shape for as long as possible, that is, it must be hard. But the sword’s body, the part that must perform a load-bearing role, must be tough: rather than trying to hold on to a particular form it must be able to change shape, that is, it must yield without breaking under the blows of another sword. If instead of tough the swords’s body was hard it would be brittle and hence incapable of bearing the loads placed on it during hand to hand combat. A similar point applies to metallic armor: it must yield without breaking under the impact of an arrow or other projectile, and the more it yields, the more it allows the arrow to dent it, the more it robs the arrow of its kinetic energy as the latter exhausts itself trying to penetrate it. Hardness and toughness are distinct but complementary properties in metallurgy.

Ancient blacksmiths also knew the kinds of operations or transformations that human beings can apply to metals in order to get these properties. They knew that cold working a piece of metal, by repeatedly hammering it, for example, would yield a hard edge. They also knew that the brittleness that inevitably accompanies hardness could be eliminated by annealing the metal piece, that is, heating it to a high temperature below its melting point, then allowing it to cool down slowly. Annealing restores the ductility, hence the toughness, of a cold worked piece of metal. Yet, despite this ability to successfully match physical operations to desired metallic properties, the actual microscopic mechanisms unleashed by the operations and responsible for the properties remained a mystery. Today we know the main characters in this hidden drama and they turn out to be imperfections.

A piece of metal is typically crystalline. When molten metal undergoes the critical transition to the solid state, crystallization may begin at several points in the liquid simultaneously, with different crystals growing at different angles from each other. When two such growing crystals eventually meet a boundary forms, a layer that may be more or less deformed depending on how different the angles of growth were to begin with. These are two-dimensional defects, surfaces dividing the piece of metal into separate grains. Within these grains another type of imperfection exists, a one dimensional defect called a “dislocation”. Given that crystals are nothing but geometrically packed atoms, and that we can arrange many of these atoms into mathematically perfect arrays, it is tempting to picture a crystal’s internal structure as consisting of rows of atoms placed precisely on top of one another. But here and there we can fi nd extra rows of atoms that disrupt the perfection of the array, introducing a distortion in neighboring rows.

Moreover, these extra rows can, in a sense, move through the crystal. Because the chemical bonds that join metallic atoms together, when broken by the application of a force, can easily reconstitute themselves, the atoms in an extra row can, one at a time, break and become bonded to those in a neighboring row. These atoms will now become part of a non defective row but will leave behind another defect displaced relative to the first. Although strictly speaking this is a process in which one defect disappears as a new one is born next to it, for all practical purposes it all happens as if the original dislocation had actually moved in position. For this reason dislocations are considered mobile line defects, and they exist in more or less numerous populations in most crystalline materials.

The ductility of metals, their ability to yield without breaking, is mostly derived from the fact that the mobility of dislocations allows entire layers of atoms to slide over one another when subjected to a force. For this effect to happen without the assistance of mobile defects all the bonds in a given layer of atoms would have to break and reconstitute simultaneously, a relatively unlikely event. But with dislocations this process can take place by repeatedly breaking only a few bonds at a time. The existence of populations of mobile defects implies that this ability of atom layers to slide can be present throughout a piece of metal. On the other hand, too many dislocations may have the opposite effect: with less room to maneuver defects start getting into each others way, eventually becoming immobilized, caught in complex tangles. This, in turn, reduces the sliding capacity of the non-defective atom layers. In other words, the metal becomes hard.

Hammering (and other types of cold working) produces large numbers of dislocations with limited mobility, and it is thus the appropriate operation to produce the cutting edge of a weapon or tool. But if the load-bearing body is to remain tough it must be annealed, a process that erases many dislocations allowing the surviving ones to break away from their tangles and recover their mobility. Two-dimensional defects, that is, grain boundaries, may also participate in the generation of ductility. Although the movement of dislocations is constrained by these boundaries, impurities accumulating along surface defects may sometimes act as lubricants allowing grains to slide over one another. The key role played by both one and two dimensional defects in the emergence of large-scale metallic properties is the reason why the practice of metallurgists today is aimed in large part at the control of grain and dislocation structure and distribution. Evidently, the descendants of the ancient blacksmiths have become aware of the importance of imperfections.

# Poetics of Relation by Edouard Glissant

Edouard Glissant is a magnificent poet-philosopher who develops the most beautiful French writing I've ever read. He is one of those authors that makes your reading slowing down (which in my case is miraculous) and moves you in your humanity.
As talented as Betsy Wing, his English translator, is, the beauty of language do not (and probably cannot) transfer from French to English but the substance remains...

Here are three excerpts of Poetics of Relation, one of his main books:

Imaginaire

Penser la pensée revient le plus souvent à se retirer dans un lieu sans dimension où l’idée seule de la pensée s’obstine. Mais la pensée s’espace réellement au monde. Elle informe l’imaginaire des peuples, leurs poétiques diversifiées qu’à son tour elle transforme, c’est-à-dire, dans lesquels se réalise son risque.

La culture est la précaution de ceux qui prétendent à penser la pensée mais se tiennent a l’écart de son chaotique parcours. Les cultures en évolution infèrent la Relation, le dépassement qui fonde leur unité-diversité.

La pensée dessine l’imaginaire du passé : un savoir en devenir. On ne saurait l’arrêter pour l’estimer, ni l’isoler pour l’émettre. Elle est partage dont nul ne peut se départir ni, s’arrêtant, se prévaloir.

Imaginary

Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing into a dimensionless place in which the idea of thought alone persists. But thought in reality spaces itself out into the world. It informs the imaginary of peoples, their varied poetics, which it then transforms, meaning, in them its risk becomes realized.

Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity-diversity.

Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming. One cannot stop it to assess it nor isolate it to transmit it. It is sharing one can never not retain, nor ever, in standing still, boast about.

Répétitions

Ce flux de convergences, qui se publie sous la forme du lieu commun. Celui-ci n’est plus généralité reçue, convenance ni fadeur – il n’est plus évidence trompeuse, abusant le sens-commun -, mais acharnement et ressassement de ces rencontres. Tout alentour, l’idée se relaie. Quand vous éveillez un constat, une certitude, un espoir, ils s’efforcent déjà quelque part, ailleurs, sous une autre espèce.

Aussi bien la répétition est elle, ici et là, un mode avoué de la connaissance. Reprendre sans répit ce que depuis toujours vous avez dit. Consentir a l’élan infinitésimal, à l’ajout, inaperçu peut-être, qui dans votre savoir s’obstinent.

Le difficile est que l’entassement de ces lieux communs n’échoue pas en un bougonnement sans nerf – l’art y pourvoie ! Le probable : que vous alliez à fond de toutes confluences, pour démarquer vos inspirations.

Repetitions

This flood of convergences, publishing itself in the guise of the commonplace. No longer is the latter an accepted generality, suitable and dull – no longer is it deceptively obvious exploiting common sense – it is, rather, all that is relentlessly and endlessly reiterated by these encounters. On every side the idea is being relayed. When you awaken an observation, a certainty, a hope, they are already struggling somewhere, elsewhere, in another form.

Repetition, moreover, in an acknowledged form of consciousness both here and elsewhere. Relentlessly resuming something you have already said. Consenting to an infinitesimal momentum, an addition perhaps unnoticed that stubbornly persists in your knowledge.

The difficulty: to keep this growing pile of common places from ending up as dispirited grumbling – may art provide! The probability: that you come to the bottom of all confluences to mark more strongly your inspirations.

Généralisations

Reconnaitre, imaginer, la Relation.
Entreprise encore, et combien déguisée, de généralisation universalisante ?
Fuite, en avant des problèmes ?
Nul imaginaire n’aide réellement à prévenir la misère, à s’opposer aux oppressions, à soutenir ceux qui « supportent » dans leur corps ou dans leur esprit. Mais l’imaginaire modifie les mentalités, si lentement qu’il en aille.

De quelque endroit ou l’on se trouve, et quelle que soit la force d’errance, on entend monter le désir de « donner avec », de surprendre l’ordre dans le chaos ou au moins d’en deviner l’improbable motivation : de développer cette théorie qui échapperait aux généralisations.

La poétique ? Précisément cette double portée, d’une théorie qui tache à conclure, d’une présence qui ne conclut (ne présume) de rien. Non point l’une sans l’autre. C’est par là que l’instant et la durée nous confortent.
Toute poétique est un palliatif d’éternité.

Edouard Glissant. Poétique de la Relation. Paris : Gallimard 1990

Generalization

Recognizing, imagining, Relation.
Yet another undertaking, thoroughly disguised, of universalizing generalization?
Escape, the problems at our heels?
No imagination helps avert destitution in reality, none can oppose oppressions or sustain those who “withstand” in body or spirit. But imagination changes mentalities, however slowly it may go about this.

No matter where one is, no matter how strong the force of errantry, one can hear the mounting desire to “give-on-and-with”, to discover order in chaos or at least to guess its unlikely motivation: to develop this theory that would escape generalizations.

Poetics? Precisely this double thrust, being a theory that tries to conclude, a presence that concludes (presumes) nothing. Never one without the other. That is how the instant and duration comfort us.
Every poetics is a palliative for eternity.

Edouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1997