Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:44:30 +1300 (NZDT)
From: "Tim Adams" <t.adams-AT-auckland.ac.nz>
Subject: Cartographies schizoanalytiques/part 2


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p. 296
a) ÒhorizontalÓ complimentary relations, positioning each constructed 
segment on the group of urban structures interconnected today within world 
capitalism(11); 
b) ÒverticalÓ relations of integration ranging from the micro-equipment 
(lighting, ventilation, communication, etc.) up to the infrastructural 
macro-equipment. As writes Paul Virilio: ÒToday ... the essence of what we 
insist on calling urbanism is composed/decomposed by these transfer, 
transit and transmission systems, these transport and transmigration 
networks whose immaterial configuration reiterates the cadastral 
organization and the building of monuments. If there are any monuments 
today, they are certainly not of the visible order, despite the twists and 
turns of architectural excess. No longer part of the order of perceptible 
appearances nor of the aesthetic of the apparition of volumes assembled 
under the sun, this monumental disproportion now resides within the obscure 
luminescence of terminals, consoles and other electronic night-stands.Ó(12)

Consequently, the collective enunciators here are:
-- the social stratifications according to resources, age group, regional 
characteristics, ethnic divisions, etc. 
-- the social bodies sectored according to their activities being 
specialized by economic, cultural order, or by a state of assistance 
(internment, incarceration, etc.);
-- the programmers, the experts, the technicians of all sorts in position 
of setting out the constraints and norms for architectural writing.

5. _A technical enunciation_, implies a Òcapture of wordsÓ for the 
machinery and more generally the materials of construction in the fixing, 
for example, Òof the slope of a
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p. 297
roof according to the relative permeability of the material employed, the 
thickness of a wall according to its load, the dimensions of a material 
according to its ability to be manipulated, its transportability, or its 
usefulness.Ó(13) 

The circuit of interlocutors are here no longer only the building 
engineers, but the chemists as well who every month invent new materials, 
the electrical and communication engineers and eventually, the ensemble of 
technical and scientific disciplines.

6. _A signifying enunciation_, whose aim, independent of functional 
semantemes, is to allocate to a built form a significant content divided by 
a human community more or less extensive, but always delineated by the 
ensemble of other communities not dividing the same type of content. One 
will rediscover here several of Philippe BoudonÕs scales. One that leads to 
embody a symbolic form in a building independent of its size (example: the 
cross plan of Christian churches). One that transfers the layout of a 
construction from an ideologically explicit model (the ideal city of 
Vitruvius; the ÒruralÓ, ÒindustrialÓ or ÒcommercialÓ cities of Le 
Corbusier...). One which, on the contrary inserts a more or less 
unconscious socio-cultural scheme (such as the central courtyard that Arab 
builders probably inherited from Roman antiquity), or one, even more vague, 
that confers a global style onto an urban settlement (like the conditions 
under which small towns of Tuscany are re-attached to the opposite extreme 
of the spectrum, to a transfinite spatium of North American towns clinging, 
which is their nature, to a freeway system).

7. _An enunciation of existential territorialisation_, of the order with an 
ethnological perspective as well, onto which I will fasten the three types 
of space that Vittorio Ugo has distinguished for us(14):
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p. 298
1) Euclidean spaces, under the aegis of Apollo, positioning in a unique way 
an object identity in the  framework of an axiomatico-deductive logic and 
within which inscribes a Òprimary and elementary architecture in all the 
clarity of its crystalline perfection, always identical to itself and 
devoid of all ambiguity or internal contradictionÓ; 
2) projective spaces, under the aegis of Morpheus, positioning of forms 
from the modulated identity, from metamorphic perspectives, affirming the 
principle of Òthe imaginary above the real, vision above speech, extension 
above usefulness, the plan above perceptionÓ;
3) labyrinthine topological spaces functioning under the title of 
existential space(15), under the aegis of Dionysus and according to a 
geometry of the wrapping of tactile bodies that we have already referred to 
under the register of affects.

Architectural space is a concrete operator, among others, of the metabolism 
between objects from the outside and intensities from the inside. But if, 
from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier and passing through Leonardo da Vinci, the 
play of analogies between the human body and its habitat did not stop being 
explored, perhaps its a question less, henceforth, of considering these 
from a formal angle than from a point of view that one could describe as 
organic. As Massimo Cacciari writes: ÒAll authentic organisms are 
labyrinthine.Ó(16) And we will mention further the multiple fractal 
dimension of this labyrinthine (or rhizomatic) character of the existential 
territorialization.

8. _A scriptive enunciation_, that articulates the ensemble of the other 
enunciative components. Because of the diagrammatic distance that it 
introduces between the expression and the content and through the 
coefficients of creativity that it generates, the architectural projection 
promotes new potentialities, new constellations of universes of reference, 
starting with the ones that preside over the deployment of ethico-aesthetic 
aspects of the built object.
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p. 299
The Ethico-Aesthetic Ordinates

The architectural enunciation is not committed to the diachronic discursive 
components, it implicates equally a capture of a consistency of synchronic 
existential dimensions, or ordinates on a level plane. Following Bakhtin, I 
will distinguish three types(17):
1) the cognitive ordinates, to know the energetico-spatio-temporal 
coordinates that take over the logic of the discursive ensemble. It is in 
this register that the scriptive enunciation of architecture is 
incorporated by linking together the first five types of assemblages of 
enunciation previously listed; 
2) the axiological ordinates including the ensemble of systems of 
anthropocentric valorization, as well as of the aesthetic, economic and 
political orders;
3) the aesthetic ordinates determining the thresholds of completing an 
entity, object or structural ensemble, for these to be able to transmit 
meaning and form on their own account. It is the duty of these 
ethico-aesthetic ordinates to intertwine the components of signifying 
enunciations and the existential deterritorialization of the other  
components. In this way the frame, real life [_vevu_] and the incorporeal 
find themselves rearticulating each other, although the capitalist 
corporations do not stop eliminating from their architecture and their 
urbanism all trace of subjective singularization, for the benefit of a 
functional, informative and communicational, rigorous transparency. 

To make myself clear: the singularisation that is at issue here is not a 
simple matter of a Òsupplement of soulÓ, a ÒpersonalizationÓ or 
Òafter-sales serviceÓ, it raises procedures that operate at the heart of 
the architectural object
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p. 300
and that confer its most intrinsic consistency. Under its exterior 
discursive aspect, this object institutes itself at the intersection of a 
thousand tensions that pull it in all directions, but under its 
ethico-aesthetic enunciative aspects, it reattaches itself on a 
non-discursive mode, of which the phenomenological approach is given to us 
through the particular experience of spatialized affects. On this side of 
the threshold of cognitive consistency, the architectural object collapses 
into the imaginary, the dream and delirium, while on this side of a 
threshold of axiological consistency, its dimensions bearing alterity and 
desire crumble -- like those movie images that the aborigines of Australia 
always turn away from through lack of finding any interest -- and on this 
side of the threshold of aesthetic consistency, it ceases to catch the 
formÕs existence and the intensities demanded to inhabit it. 

Consequently, what would define in the final analysis, the art of the 
architect, would be his capacity to apprehend these affects of spatialized 
enunciation. Only it is necessary a matter of paradoxical objects that are 
not able to be delineated by the co-ordinates of ordinary rationality and 
that one can only approach indirectly, by meta-modelization, by aesthetic 
detour, by mythic or ideological narrative. Like the partial objects of 
Melanie Klein(18) or Winnicott(19), this type of affect institutes itself 
transversally in the most heterogeneous levels. Not for homogenizing but on 
the contrary, for engaging further forward in the fractal process of 
heterogenesis. The architectural form is not called to function as a 
gestalt closed in on itself, but as a catalytic operator releasing chain 
reactions among the modes of semiotization that we make come out of 
ourselves and we open up new fields of possibility. The feeling of intimacy 
and existential singularity adjoining to the aura given off by a familiar 
framework, an old residence or a landscape inhabited by our memories, 
places itself in the rupture of the redundancies emptied of their 
substances and it can be the generator of a proliferation and lines of 
flight in all the registers of lifeÕs desire, of refusal to abandon itself 
to the dominant inertia. For example, this is the same
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p. 301
movement of existential territorialization and of capture of synchronic 
consistency that will ÒworkÓ together things as different as a shoe box and 
a treasure chest under the bed of a child hospitalized in a psychiatric 
home, the refrain-password that divides, perhaps with a few friends, the 
space within the particular constellation as he occupies the refectory, or 
a totem pole standing out against the sky in the play ground, but only 
well-known to him. The architect, other than composing a harmony out of all 
these fragmented components of subjectivation, must at least not mutilate 
them by advancing the essential from the virtual! 

So to undertake the recomposition of existential territories in the context 
of our societies devastated by the capitalistic flows, the architect will 
therefore have to be able to detect and exploit processually the ensemble 
of points of catalytic singularities capable of embodiment in the 
perceptible dimensions of architectural machinery as well as in the formal 
compositions and the most complex institutional problematics. In order to 
achieve this, all the cartographic methods will be justified from the 
moment their engagement (lets not turn away from this old Sartrian concept 
any longer, it has been tabu for too long) finds its own regime of 
ethico-aesthetic autonomisation; then the only criteria of truth imposed 
will be an effect of existential completeness and an overabundance of being 
that will never lack encounters from which they will have the happiness of 
being carried away in a process of becoming an event, that is to say, of 
historical enrichment and the re-singularization of desire and value.


Footnotes]
1. Leon Krier for example considers that in the face of Òthe holocaust that 
raged through our cities ... a responsible architect doesnÕt want to build 
anything todayÓ._Babylone no1_, (Paris, UGE, 1983), p. 132.
2. For example, the work of Daniel Libeskind or similarly the landscape 
compositions of Vittorio Gregotti, such as his project for collective 
housing in Cefalu that has little chance of seeing the light of day.
3. See in this regard the interesting propositions of Henri Gaudin, in _La 
cabane et le labyrinth_, (Brussels, editions Pierre Mardaga,1984), on 
regional architecture
4. I refer here to the passionate analysis of Christian Girard  in 
_Architecture et concepts nomades. Traite dÕindiscipline,_ (Brussels, 
editions Pierre Mardaga, 1986)
5. On the sometimes decisive position of programmer and on the architectÕs 
role in the modelisation of psychiatric institutions, see the special 
edition of the review _Recherches:_:ÒProgrammation, architecture et 
psychiatrieÓ, (June, 1967).
6. Philippe Boudon, _La ville de Richelieu,_ (Paris, AREA, 1972), 
_Architecture et architecturologie_, (Paris, AREA, 1975), and _Sur lÕespace 
architectural. Essai dÕepistemologie de l'architecture_, (Paris, Dunod, 
1971).
7. Henri von Lier, _Encyclopaedia Universalis_, Vol. II, Section 1, p. 554, 
(Paris, 1985).
8. Fernand Braudel, Le temps du monde. Civilisation materielle, economie et 
capilalisme, XVe-XVIIe siecle, Vol. III, (Paris, Armand Colin, 1979), pp. 
61-64. 
9. Ibid. p. 20. 
10. Fernand Braudel. Le temps du monde..., op. cit., ibid.. p. 12-14, p. 
62-68. The world economy is the largest zone of consistency in any given 
period and in a global field, a sum of individualized economic and 
non-economic spaces that ordinarily transgresses the limits of other large 
groupings of history and business. Francois Fourquet, under the term 
_ecomonde_, has undertaken a more systematic theorization than the 
conceptions of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein in:La richesse et 
la puissance. Publication provisoire: Commissariat general du Plan, 
Convention d'etude 984, (Paris, 1987).[ Wealth and Power. Provisional 
Publication: General Commissionership of Planning]
11. Cf. my study, in collaboration with Eric Alliez, ÒCapitalistic Systems, 
Structures and ProcessesÓ, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and 
Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, (London,  Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 
273-287.
12. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg, (New York, 
Semiotext(e), 1991), pp. 21-22.
13. Philippe Boudon, La ville de Richelieu, op. cit., p. 17.
14. Vittorio Ugo, ÒUne hutte, une clairiereÓ, Critique: 476, 477; L'objet 
architecture, (Paris, Minuit, jan.-fev. I987)
15. In the sense that Heidegger has given this term in ÒBuilding, Dwelling, 
ThinkingÓ, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York, 
Harper and Row, 1975)   
16. Massimo Cacciari, Critique, op. cit.
17. I refer here to the three categories of enunciation (cognitive, 
ethical, aesthetic) -- proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in _Esthetique et 
theorie du roman_, (Paris, Gallimard, 1978).
18. Melanie Klein, Contributions: Contributions to Psycho-analysis, 
(London, Hogarth Press, 1950). 
19. D.W. Winnicott, La psychanalyse, (Paris, PUF, 1959).

[The End]