About A-S-W
Space is no longer a particular determined space, it has become any-space-whatever [espace quelconque...] Any-space-whatever is not an abstract universal, in all times, in all places. It is a perfectly singular space, which has merely lost its homogeneity, that is, the principle of its metric relations or the connection of its own parts, so that the linkages can be made in an infinite number of ways. It is a space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible. What in fact manifests the instability, the heterogeneity, the absence of link of such a space, is a richness in potentials or singularities which are, as it were, prior conditions of all actualization, all determination…
- Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
And just as the image must attain the indefinite, while remaining completely determined, so space must always be an any-space-whatever, disused, unmodified, even though it is entirely determined geometrically (a square with these sides and diagonals, a circle with these zones, a cylinder “fifty metres round and sixteen high”). The any-space-whatever is populated and well-trodden, it is even that which we ourselves populate and traverse, but it is opposed to all our pseudoqualified extensions, and is defined as “neither here nor there where all the footsteps ever fell can never fare nearer to anywhere nor from anywhere further away.” […] It is a matter of covering every possible direction, while nonetheless moving in a straight line. There is equality between the straight line and the plane, and between the plane and the volume: the consideration of space gives a new meaning and a new object to exhaustion—exhausting the potentialities of an any-space-whatever.
- Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” Essays Critical and Clinical
