HOW TO THINK ALONG DOTTED LINE
February 2010
Natanel Elfassy | R&Sie(n) Architects
On Neurobiology, Computation, Robotic, Philosophy… and incidentally architecture
Presented at École nationale supérieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais. Paris, France.
LES MALENTENDUS...HOW TO THINK ALONG DOTTED LINES ?
EXTRACT:
“Perhaps in every field but most of all in language, use is a polar gesture: on the one hand, appropriation and habit; on the other, expropriation and nonidentity. And ‘usage’ (in its whole semantic field, as both ‘to use’ and ‘to be used to’) is the perpetual oscillation between a homeland and an exile -- dwelling.” [1]
I’ve heard about something that builds up….
When we think of a residential building, what comes to mind is a ramshackle set of unruly inhabitants each having their own positions – strengths and weakness, desires and psychotic disorders … humeurs. All of whom are united, however undisciplined and chaotic their life are, by their belonging to that building, By their belonging to a particular situation.
Now, let us consider stripping a residential building of all its attributes, to the extent that even its identity and unity are removed; That is leaving all of a situation’s properties aside and considering only the basic relations which holds throughout its multiplicity.
That way, we can schematize a situation as a set, and reformulate the classical language of architecture in mathematical terms; more specifically, in the relational operators of set theory[2]. This allows any situation to be written as a kind of set defining the relationship between the parts and the whole, while considering that the whole cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts or even to the ensemble of relations between these parts. Thus one can describe all the properties of a situation in terms of relationships, both the relationship between elements (residence areas) and the relationship between these elements and the set to which they belong.
An assemblage of multiple multiplicities, inconsistent, like you and me; within it each individual generates his own form through his behavior, his way of coming across, and the way he addresses others;, negotiations and tendencies[3]that come about in the borderline area, at the frontiers, where the individual struggles with the other. Thus, this architecture is merely a relational property, where subjectivities are in perpetual transactions.
Operations such as belonging, union, inclusion, intersection and disjunction describe morphologies that negotiate the distances between each other and indicate the protocols of exclusion, attraction, touching, repulsion, dependence, sharing, indifference and so on. Before the morphology of a residence unit is reduced to a functional typology, it is worked out in this way as an area of exchanges, that can generate a relational structure on which a residence space is based. But one have always to bare in mind that Ultimately, every situation is based on a void, on silence… which is simply what is not there, in the situation, but what is necessary for anything to be there; still life formed by relationships with the other.language to the limits of meaning by breaking up the traditional linear struc¬ture of the sentence through fragmentation, repetition, and reversal, rewriting the program in a different form. Stuttering the language, stuttering in language: it becomes—an eternal reassessment.
How can we architecture record this silence?
This silence, this gap, is the space between things, between individuals…the white blank space before and after the word... an elusive smooth space of intensities… it is a force in motion, a potential that links an “already” and a “not yet”…
Inconsistencies, contradictions and conflicts that compose what we read as Les malentendus:
“Les malentendus “ between the expression of our avowed desires, directly influenced by the pathologies of collective living and our indiscrete biochemical secretions: [as we witness before in the physiological test]
“I’d love to do that, but at the same time / and maybe / not / and the contrary.”
Broken symmetries that bring new relations to light…. As a symmetry that renders the disparate fluid in order to intensify an individuation. “Les malentendus “ provide reserves for the act of architecture, by taking conflicts into account as an operational mode; allowing architecture to become their transactional vector; no longer restricting architecture to a verbal statement paraphrasing operativity; and allowing it to venture into a concrete and precise approach of the preformal and the intuitive, and to grasp virtuality according to a mode other than an influence of a cultural and sociological context.
In contrast to the configuration of the residence units based on standard models, Une Architecture des Humeurs offers the potential of negotiating with the ambiguities of one’s own “humeurs” and desires, thus making it possible to conjugate contradictory impulses, belongings and ” malentendus”
Therefore, suggests other trading possibilities, towards the horizon of human interactions and social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space. It make the threshold, the “Zone of indiscernibility”[4]of body and language, emerge from beneath and take us to the “states of encounter” proposed by the Multitude…on which we will elaborate later today in the philosophical session…
Une Architecture des Humeurs pushes the language of architecture to the limits of meaning by breaking up the traditional linear structure. Learning to inhabit the world, instead of trying to construct It, to quote Nicolas Bourriaud, no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actualize ways of living and models of action within the existing real, Understanding that while traditional language, even in it’s more poetic usages, does not fulfill its promise to express the emotional intensity of human existence.
We propose to follow stuttering protocols[5],rearticulating intuition and operation; Not in order to represent a theory of architecture [this would imply the statement of an origin and a destination], but a theory of form – Mode of life - A coherent unit, independent entity made of inner dependencies. As a linking element, Form is a principle of dynamic agglutination of possibilities;
These possibilities are “Block of affects and percepts” [to borrow Deleuzian terminology] that keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences, gestures and potentials….That arouse intuition, amplify and condense it.
If each situation is a dot on a line, Une Architecture des Humeurs can be seen as the drama of the production of possibles …as thinking along dotted lines…[6].
NOTES:
[1]Giorgio Agamben, “Expropriated Manner”, The End of the Poem (1996/1999)
[2]Any mathematical proposition can be rewritten in the language of set theory.
[3]Is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.
[4]On the “Zone of indiscernibility” see Deleuze - Francis Bacon, Logic of Sensation
[5]Stuttering architecture is searched for consciously, in different forms, and in each period of time using the ways and means [technology] typical of it … coming from the margins, sneaking in from the periphery, immigrating from the minor to the major. Today, these attempts of stuttering architecture represent a different kind of thinking and creating architecture, in which complex relations between architectural theory and practice re-perform the relation between the unknown and the known. Therefore, stuttering architecture cannot be understood to be a fleeting artistic fad, but a momentous contemporary stage in the history of design and thought, which characterizes the present moment in the history of creativity and urges us to rethink what has been taken for granted in architecture.
[6]expression I take from Gilles Chatlet
