urban occupation : berlin

This will be our final reading group and we will conclude with Gilles Deleuze, and also with Deleuze and Félix Guattari. We will read the first chapter from Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, “The Pleats of Matter” (1993)  in order to go in search of a very special understanding of material and its intimate rapport with immaterial forces. I recommend that you bring to the reading group examples of how the fold has found its way into architecture through the work of Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, UN Studio (Bos and van Berkel), and others (see the issue of AD dedicated to Folding in Architecture). The fold is usually interpreted in a very literal way by architects, and we will discuss the benefits and limits of this approach.

We will also read what is sometimes referred to as the aesthetic chapter from Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy?, “Percept, Affect, Concept” (1994), here we will be in pursuit of an understanding of sensation, and we will assess the way in which Deleuze and Guattari offer an account of architecture “as the first of all the arts”.

Public Space: An Architectural Reading of the Human condition.  pdf Taken from OASE 77

Hannah Arendt was a German Jewish political theorist.

In one of her most influential works, The Human Condition, written in 1958, she describes the differences between work, labour and action, and discusses the effects of these distinctions.  The work is not specifically on architecture, however this essay provides a reading from an architectural perspective.

This week we will read an essay by Peter Sloterdijk, a contemporary German philosopher who is just beginning to cause a stir in the discipline of architecture. He is well known for his Spheres Trilogy [Sphären], which is composed of Spheres I: Bubble/Blow (1998); Spheres II: Globes (1999); Spheres III: Foam (2004). Only small excerpts from the Spheres trilogy have been translated into English. Bruno Latour, who we read a couple of weeks ago now has recently suggested that “Sloterdijk is the thinker of architecture”, perhaps setting a challenge to architects and others like us to read him and see what we think!

Sloterdijk’s essay, Rules for the Human Zoo, originally appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit, in 1999, and caused some controversy with respect to the biopolitical implications it seemed to suggest. After Plato, Sloterdijk compares the distinction between those who govern and those who are governed to the difference between the zoo-keeper and his menagerie! Politics, the composition of society, what it is to be human, and how the human creature and her sphere of existence is maintained are all issues that are addressed here, or at least alluded to. Sloterdijk’s essay is also, in part, a response to Martin Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism, which asks whether humanism obscures the task of thinking, and whether it is a concept that needs to be discarded (a complex argument we should also touch upon when we meet!).

We will also read an essay about Hannah Arendt…hopefully Caitlyn can give us a small introduction!

This week we discover how dangerous theory can be depending on who wields the weapons of theory. Weapons, Christian Girard explains, are concepts, combatants are those we habitually call theoreticians, and the battlegrounds in question are often located between conflicting theories, or theoretical frameworks. The problem today, it would seem, is that theory often degenerates into ‘instant theory’, composed of sound bytes and jargon. When theory is deployed this way it becomes more exclusive (if you don’t know what I mean when I utter my jargon, then you are excluded from the conversation), and at the same time more empty of potential (how can we use a concept, if we can’t in the first place pass it round, or communicate what we can do with it!).

Eyal Weizman shows us how theory is not only a weapon in a metaphorical sense, but how it can really be employed in the midst of urban warfare. Weizman examines, in detail, the use by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of concepts borrowed from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (and other ‘post-structuralist’ thinkers), as well as from the Situationist International. He demonstrates how concepts such as smooth vs striated space, dérive and détournement, are used to develop stealthy and very material means to infiltrate Palestinian settlements or camps, for instance, by quite literally ‘walking through walls’, and reinterpreting the space of the city.

This disturbing use of theory is no reason to place theory to the side, but instead displays that theory can have a very real material impact. Theory is not merely composed of the clever words we enunciate after the fact of the built form, or a passive mode of reflection…it is as powerful as the sledgehammer that can knock down a wall. Pay attention to how you wield your conceptual weaponry!

Another essay that is well worth reading with respect to this idea of theory being a weapon and/or a tool is:

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, trans. (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977).

 Eyal Weizman: Lethal Theory  / Christian Girard: Weaponry Theory

We are going to undertake a somewhat difficult project this week, we are going to read an essay from Michel Serres’s book, The Parasite. The chapter is called, “Theory of the Quasi Object”. This essay will offer us another way of thinking about objects, subjects and relations. Serres sets up a distinction of either/or between being and relation. This distinction between being and relation quickly turns out to be unstable, which results in these strange, swerving objects/subjects that Serres names quasi-objects and quasi-subjects. The conjunction of ‘quasi’ with object and subject suggests the perpetual mobility and transfer of these deceptively stable individuals along passages of relation toward the possibility of the formation of collectives of all kinds.

A brief explanation of the title of Serres’s book might help, a book that was originally published in French as Le Parasite. In French this terms has three meanings: 1. biological parasite; 2. social parasite; and 3. noise. Noise is a term from information and systems theory to describe the interference that occurs when a message is being transferred between a sender and a recipient along some channel. Serres argues that noise, which we can also call nonsense, disorder, chaos, is fundamental to the transfer of a message: this would seem contrary to what we would normally understand noise to be, that is, merely a nuisance. Serres draws out the positive quality of noise or interference to suggest that it is out of noise that new systems and patterns, and perhaps even new ways of thinking can emerge.

Serres’s essay will allow us to continue a discussion we began last week about Actor-Network Theory (ANT), where neither the actor (human and non-human), nor the network are given precedence, but both assume the possibility, and emerge concurrently with the building of relations. It is interesting for us to consider why Serres begins his essay with the question of what is a collective and how this can be distinguished from an individual, or else how the collective and the individual turn out to have an intimate, often unstable relationship: an individual merges into a collective and out of a collective an individual can emerge. It would be worthwhile thinking of the very material impact of this intertwining of collective and individual. What can we do with this relation, as designers and architects, with respect to the occupation and activation of public space?

Reading tips: approach this essay as though it were a performance of noise and meaning intertwining to produce new relations between ideas. Serres moves swiftly and collects a great many references: read this excerpt from The Parasite as a performative essay-poem!

Michel Serres, quasi-object

The sci-fi book I was talking about today is called the The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin.

This week we will read two essays with a focus on the work of Bruno Latour, French sociologist associated with ANT (Actor Network Theory). ANT is a methodology used by scholars and researchers predominantly involved in what is called ’science and technology studies’ to understand the relations between human and non-human actors, and how knowledge (especially technological and scientific knowledge) is both produced and how ideas discovered through these relations. In the essay included here, Latour continues the debate concerning the problems surrounding the critical project or ‘criticality’. Then, the article by Fallan gives a brief introduction to ANT as well as Latour’s work, and addresses why this material might be of relevance to architecture.

1. Bruno Latour, Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?, in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2004).
Bruno Latour, Why has critique run out of steam

2. Kjetil Fallan, Architecture in Action: Traveling with Actor-Network Theory in the Land of Architectural Research, in Architecture Theory Review, 13:1 (2008).
Kjetil Fallan, Architecture in Action

Here are the new readings for this week friday, as always password protected:

1. Michael Speaks, Which Way Avant-garde?  2. Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol, Notes Around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism 3. Reinhold Martin, Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism

The reading group will meet at 1.30pm to continue the discussion, everyone is welcome.  

Reinhold Martin, Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism / Sarah Whiting and Robert Somol, Notes Around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism / Michael Speaks, Which Way Avant-garde? 

AAAARG is a conversation platform - at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal. AAAARG was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them. Weblink

(both are password protected)
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bourriaud_the_aesthetic_paradigm_felix_guattari_and_art
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