Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real

151 Pages·2011·1.047 MB·English

by  Simone Brott

Architecture for A free Subjectivity
For David
Architecture for a free
Subjectivity
Deleuze and Guattari at the horizon of the real
Simone brott
Queensland University of Technology, Australia
© Simone brott 2011
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
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recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Simone brott has asserted her right under the copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
brott, Simone.
Architecture for a free subjectivity : Deleuze and Guattari
at the horizon of the real.
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Guattari, félix,
1930-1992. 3. Architecture--Philosophy. 4. Architecture--
Psychological aspects. 5. Architecture--Aesthetics.
6. Subjectivity.
i. title
720.1'9-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
brott, Simone.
Architecture for a free subjectivity : Deleuze and Guattari at the horizon of the real / by
Simone brott.
p. cm.
includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-1995-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-1994-5 (ebook)
1. Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. 2. Guattari, félix, 1930-1992. 3. Architecture--
Philosophy. 4. Subjectivity. i. title.
b2430.D454b76 2011
194--dc22
2011009461
ISBN 9781409419952 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409419945 (ebk)
V
Printed and bound in Great britain by
tj international Ltd, Padstow, cornwall.
Contents
Foreword vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Subjectivization 1
1 Deleuze and “The Intercessors” 15
2 Impersonal Effects 37
3 Impersonal Effects 2 55
4 Guattari and the Japanese New Wave 75
5 Shinohara and Takamatsu: Objets Verité 97
6 Architecture Without Qualities 117
Bibliography 123
Index 133
This page has been left blank intentionally
Foreword
The Return of the Subject
The multiple worlds envisioned by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—by way
of their immanentist theory of subjectivity given to material forces, including
architecture—are ineluctably compossible, just as they are heedlessly ‘futural.’
In reading Simone Brott’s analytical tour de force the question that returns,
incessantly, to haunt this examination of architecture is how the intrusion of
such a conceptual paradigm into the discipline can be actualized and imagined—
because, in most instances, as soon as these ‘other possible worlds’ arrive they are
converted into something else. What always remains, after the careful delineations
of a prescient architectural subjectivity specific to architectural surfaces and forms,
is the impression that we are, once again, caught at the precipice of architectural
representation, with the choice of leaping into the unknown or turning back. The
impersonal effects of architecture persist, paradoxically, under these conditions;
at the same time, it is also true that representation in architecture has survived
Mille Plateaux, regardless of any intentions of Deleuze and Guattari to erase
signification in favor of pure affect.
In this productive examination of what is real within architectural form-
making—and how such forces are brought into play in architectural composition,
or how they are simply discerned in the architectural discourse’s often negative
‘critique of forms’—the cumulative effect of discussing impersonal effects is that
they are almost always hijacked or recoded as operative formal agency toward
some other means of expression: either the instrumental orders of authorized forms
of reality or the inborn auspices of architectural theory (its famous claim to purely
autonomous agency as an imaginative art). What is very obvious, however, over
the course of reading Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at
the Horizon of the Real, is that architecture, in repeatedly surrendering to ideology,
suffers from this inability to liberate free forms of architectural subjectivization
from the embedded representational orders that are an unnecessary component
of its historical and social condition. In certain instances, and in excess of all
ideological programs (such as those of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library), these
effects simply find an address within traditional representation, turning worlds
inside out and upside down in the process. Yet it is absolutely necessary to
remember that this supposed liberation of purely immanent agency in architectural
terms is, for Deleuze and Guattari, also always aimed toward desubjectivization,
or the ridding of individual or personal agency; that is, it aims to give architecture
over to the impersonality of austere material agency. The project is utterly
viii Architecture for a Free Subjectivity
timely (or untimely) for this reason. In revisiting Columbia University in the
1970s, Japan in the 1980s, and Paris in the 1980s and 1990s, we see a trajectory
emerging that strangely looks consistent with a nascent historicizing project
for determining where postmodernism has taken us, while the fact that we are
witnessing its endgame does not permit us to clearly discern where it is that we
have arrived. What is more than evident is that the attendant discourse regarding
the ‘biopolitical’ regimes of neo-liberal capitalism have reinvented many of the
terms of engagement for architecture vis-à-vis ‘the political.’ Thus, Deleuze and
Guattari’s deeply Foucauldian, “anti-Oedipal” project is as important today as it
was in the midst of what Guattari termed the postmodern impasse.
The path of Architecture for a Free Subjectivity is, therefore, necessarily
tortured. A torturous line is traced from the introduction of Deleuze and Guattari
to the Anglo-American architectural discourse of the 1970s, as a type of anarchic
force countering then prevalent forms of historicizing postmodernism. Indeed, it
is this “postmodern caesura,” to quote Antonio Negri, that is the principal nemesis
of Deleuze and Guattari’s project, and Architecture for a Free Subjectivity battles
this problem head on—through both that troubled relationship to postmodernism
and Guattari’s subsequent voyage to Japan, as well as his encounter with 1980s
‘New Wave’ Japanese architecture. It is in this latter instance that the confrontation
with the last vestiges of postmodern figuration occurs and a possible way forward
is discerned. Yet the outcome is never clear, as renascent forms of late modernism
continued well into the new millennium under the cover of Deleuze-inspired forms
of a ‘new’ determinism, evident most especially in ‘parametricism,’ in which the
subject of parametric architectures is wholly unknown and the machinic élan of
the genre has served to erase what Deleuze and Guattari were, arguably, most
interested in—the desubjectivization of the alienated late-modern subject under
wholly new forms of heterogeneous and de-territorialized systems devoid of the
economic, social, and political taint of ‘spent systems.’ Always a double bind,
this ‘anima toward’ the outmoded (or apparent ‘lost causes,’ such as humanism),
while strangely suggesting an alliance with avant-garde movements of the early
twentieth century, is nonetheless a red herring for the very reason that almost all
avant-garde movements are expressly ideological. Tracing these impersonal effects
isolates and details a range of architectural effects that dovetail with Deleuze’s
thinking of a plane of pure immanence and, as a result, a purely immanent set
of principles by which architecture might once again attempt to engage the real.
This real is also somewhat ominously ‘abstract,’ since its appearance here—
in poststructuralist experiments with forcing architecture to speak a different
language (an ‘a-signifying semiotics’) or to admit its own complicity with regimes
of repression—commits the effectiveness of impersonal effects to a ‘non-place’
that closely resembles formal agency in and for itself. This productive, indeed
generative agency within material orders—and Deleuze is always, to quote
Sanford Kwinter, concerned with “matter becoming subject”—is something that
has no origin, because it has always existed as the proverbial ether of architecture.
It is only in name ‘primordial,’ while it is also ‘futural.’ The paradoxical operations
Foreword ix
of isolating it, therefore, require forays into disciplines parallel to architecture,
most especially cinema and, to a lesser degree, literature.
In the cinematic turn, as applied to architecture as part of the overall
poststructuralist experiment, we find signs of impersonal effects in the gestures
toward a wholly realist mode of making images speak ‘of the real,’ which Guattari
called “partial enunciation”; for, per André Bazin, cinema creates a heightened
reality—it both enlarges the reality of impersonal effects and goes beyond this to
create a new world or reality.
Lastly, then, what emerges in Architecture for a Free Subjectivity is a sense of
yet another turn ahead, after the poststructuralist turn, after the phenomenological
turn, and after the theological turn ... One senses that this next turn is actually
a ‘return.’ What one hopes in traversing this short history of impersonal effects
at the close of the twentieth century is that this next turn might be an emphatic
embrace of the actually existing ‘real,’ minus all of the usual turns into new forms
of spectral agency, deferment, displacement, etc.—a return to what is and what
might be as one thing.
Gavin Keeney,
New York