Spinoza’s Two Existences
Prima facie, proposition 2P7 in Spinoza’s Ethics presents the counter-intuitive claim that there can be no ideas without extended objects accompanying them. That is, ideas cannot exist without correlative bodies. However, Spinoza offers 2P8 to address the possibility of singular things that do not exist, while preserving his mind-body parallelism. 2P8 states: The ideas of [...]
The Black Box in the White Cube: Lyotard’s Les Immatériaux as Machinic Theater
The 1960s and 1970s mark the first time contemporary art opposed modernist art. Formalist strategies that privileged the art object were displaced by discursive, administrative and conceptual approaches that emphasized relationships, and connoisseurship gave way to the demands of the growing research-industrial complex. The concept of creativity partially shifted from a traditional craft function to [...]
Borromini’s Bricks: Matters of Immanence in the Roman Oratory
And if you think of Brick, for instance, and you say to Brick, “What do you want Brick?” And Brick says to you, “I like an Arch.” – Louis Kahn [1] A concept is a brick. It can be used to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. [...]
Tearing Real Images from Clichés: Edward Burtynsky’s Industrial Landscapes
Such a voyage does not necessarily imply great movements in extension; it becomes immobile, in a room and on a body without organs—an intensive voyage that undoes all the lands for the benefit of the one it is creating. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 319) Edward Burtynsky’s manufactured landscapes – large-format, photographic compositions of industrially-transformed [...]
James Stirling and the Post-War Crisis of Movement: An Architectural Model of the Smooth and the Striated
Gilles Deleuze transitions between the two volumes of his cinema project by identifying a crisis of movement in post-War cultural and aesthetic practices. As film liberates itself from causal logic and linear displacements, introducing a differential subjectivity to replace static identity, space and time are (re)conceptualized to accommodate incompossible worlds. In establishing these late modern [...]
Spaces in Becoming: Jacques Rancière and Pedro Costa
In The Emancipated Spectator, Jacques Rancière challenges traditional theatrical and conceptual binaries separating spectator and actor, active and passive, seeing and knowing, experience and thought, action and reaction, acting and thinking, teaching and learning. Where Brecht and Artaud, despite their differences, assume a pre-constituted subject to be molded, challenged and incorporated within discourses, Rancière assumes [...]
In the Metal and in the Flesh: The Materiality and Individuation of Information through Architecture
The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.[1] – Baruch Spinoza Thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.[2] – William James (1912) In the decades immediately following the Second World War, architectural practice and spatial theory experienced a crisis of legitimacy [...]
Spaces in Becoming: Heterotopias, the Smooth and the Striated)
In Plateau 14 of A Thousand Plateaus, dated 1440 and titled “The Smooth and the Striated,” Deleuze and Guattari posit two types of space – the smooth and the striated – which act as processes that resist a strict binary or dialectic and “exist only in mixture” (474), each one continually being translated and transversed [...]
Spaces in Becoming: Rhizome
In “Rhizome,” their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari supplants arborescent and fascicular modes of thought with rhizomatic ones. The hierarchy within trees and fascicles always has recourse to a root, which as a metaphor operates to elucidate the transcendence and totality of representational thought. Any creative endeavor that follows this model can [...]
McLuhan (and Mailer) on Nature
Rough Type, Next Nature and Hilobrow have all linked to a great video of Marshall McLuhan (and Norman Mailer) discussing the physical and ontological status of nature. (See videos below.) Next Nature writes: The two heroes of the ’60s are absolute opposites. Leaning forward in his chair, Mailer is assertive, animated, hot, engaged. McLuhan, abstracted [...]
A Deleuzian Birthday Meal
Today would have been Gilles Deleuze’s 86th birthday. Hilobrow celebrated his memory by reminding us of the dramatic act of defenestration with which he ended his life (as well as his immense contribution to philosophy). But it seems hard to envision celebrating his birthday anyway other than by eschewing the molar habit of serving the [...]
The Smooth, the Striated, the Snark and the Sea
Deconcrete has posted an entry entitled Scaled Infinite on Lewis Carrol’s The Hunting of the Snark – An Agony in 8 Fits. The accompanying image of the map of the sea used by the sailors seems the perfect combination of the striated and smooth, concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Plateau 14 “1440: The [...]
Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand
How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: Simulacrum in the Tableaux Vivants of Thomas Demand Friedrich Nietzsche introduces a chapter of Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Ultimately Became a Fable: A History of an Error” with six concise points that purport to overturn Western philosophy by replacing representation with simulacra.[1] [...]
Actor-Network Rochambeau
Having recently finished Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature, I was reminded of his liberal use of “Latour Litanies,” the lists (for which he continually demonstrates an adeptness) he creates to remind his audience of the implications of a flat ontology in which ALL entities – animate and inanimate, human and nonhuman – receive equal treatment [...]
Matthew Barney’s “Hoist” and the Desiring-Production of Space
There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. -Gilles Deleuze Destricted has finally been released on DVD in the U.S. While I have not watched this version, I have previously seen the one produced for the UK market. The only two films in that series worth recommending are [...]
The Wilderness Downtown and The Poetics of Space
I just discovered “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video for Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait,” from their new album Suburbs. The project was created and directed by Chris Milk, who is responsible for a number of interesting videos and commercials, including one my favorites.
Latour on Compositionism
Critique has become passé, but a perennial issue has become with what (if anything) to replace it. I just discovered a draft of an essay called “An Attempt at Writing a Compositionist Manifesto,” which can be downloaded from Bruno Latour’s website, in which Latour suggests composition or compositionism as a meaningful replacement. I’m not sure [...]
Speculations
The first issue of Speculations, a new journal of “speculative realism,” is available here. The journal joins a growing list of online, open-access, peer-reviewed, refereed journals to appear in the past few years (though it is also available as a pdf to download and in an on-demand print version), which is an encouraging development. Even [...]
On the Death and Life of Cities
Only by enlisting the movements of a building and accounting carefully for its “tribulations” would one be able to state its existence: it would be equal to the building’s extensive list of controversies and performances over time, i.e. it would be equal to what it does, to the way it resists attempts at transformation, allows [...]
Stupid, but not that Stupid: Unknown Unknowns and the Outside of Thought
Errol Morris has written an essay, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is,” which The New York Times published in five installments last week. Morris opens with an epigraph taken from The Surrealist Manifesto in which Andre Breton writes, “Existence is elsewhere.” This quote, as well as the first installment [...]
R&Sie(n) on Stuttering
On its “New Territories” blog, R&Sie(n) just published, “Stuttering,” the transcript of a recent dialogue between Natanel Elfassy and François Roche. The essay reads more like a manifesto duet rather than an interview between the two. There are no questions posed, though as the dialogue progresses, the comments do become more closely linked and sequential. [...]
R&Sie(n) on Unknow
At the “New Territories” blog, R&Sie(n) posted “Unknow,” a video featuring the firm’s andgrogynous spokesperson. The video, along with theBuildingWhichNeverDies, another one of their projects, will be exhibited as part of “People Meet in Architecture“, during the 2010 Venice Biennale. The title of the piece, “Unknow,” suggests a particularly useful and relevant word. It probably [...]
Bioreboot: The Architecture of R&Sie(n)
Earlier this month, Princeton Architectural Press published Bioreboot :The Architecture of R&Sie(n) by Giovanni Corbellini, Alessandro Rocca and François Roche. The book is the most comprehensive overview so far of R&Sie(n)’s work to appear in print, representing 19 projects accompanied by imagery, photos and insightful essays that will appeal as much (if not more) to [...]
