Architecture for a Free Subjectivity

Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real

Simone Brott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351957342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Critique de l'architecture

Architecture for a Free Subjectivity reformulates the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's model of subjectivity for architecture, by surveying the prolific effects of architectural encounter, and the spaces that figure in them. For Deleuze and his Lacanian collaborator Félix Guattari, subjectivity does not refer to a person, but to the potential for and event of matter becoming subject, and the myriad ways for this to take place. By extension, this book theorizes architecture as a self-actuating or creative agency for the liberation of purely "impersonal effects." Imagine a chemical reaction, a riot in the banlieues, indeed a walk through a city. Simone Brott declares that the architectural object does not merely take part in the production of subjectivity, but that it constitutes its own. This book is to date the only attempt to develop Deleuze's philosophy of subjectivity in singularly architectural terms. Through a screening of modern and postmodern, American and European works, this provocative volume draws the reader into a close encounter with architectural interiors, film scenes, and other arrangements, while interrogating the discourses of subjectivity surrounding them, and the evacuation of the subject in the contemporary discussion. The impersonal effects of architecture radically changes the methodology, just as it reimagines architectural subjectivity for the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1
Deleuze and “The Intercessors”

Gilles Deleuze has enjoyed significant notoriety and acclaim in American academia over the last 20 years. The unique disciplinary focus of the contemporary discussion has derived from Deleuze the architectural possibilities of biotechnology, systems theory, and digital processualism. While the persistence of Deleuze's theory of science and the formalist readings of A Thousand Plateaus and Bergsonism¹ have dominated the reception since the 1990s, few are aware of a much earlier encounter between Deleuze and architects, beginning at Columbia University in the 1970s, which converged on the radical politics of Anti-Oedipus and its American reception in the journal Semiotext(e), through which architecture engaged a much broader discourse alongside artists, musicians, filmmakers, and intellectuals in the New York aesthetic underground, of which Deleuze and Guattari were themselves a part.

This early reception of Deleuze's work was widespread yet subterranean and imperceptible, as was typical of the 1970s anarchic-aesthetic bloc to which it first spread, and eventually attached itself to architecture. Through a series of individual discussions with John Rajchman and Sylvère Lotringer, the founding editors of Semiotext(e), and Sanford Kwinter. an editor of Zone, an oral history of the early Deleuze scene can be assembled²—tracing the multiple trajectories, publications, and individuals that not only brought architecture into contact with Deleuzian ideas, but, as these stories demonstrate, provided Deleuze with an important entry point into the American academy.³

This, of course, is not to say the early American reception of Deleuze was exclusively architectural, or that there is something inherently architectural in Deleuze and Guattari's ideas.⁴ The immediate question is: Why Deleuze and architecture—an institutional terrain par excellence, which is a principal target of Deleuze and Guattari's ethico-aesthetic polemic of the 1970s? Why did a discipline that valorizes its orthodoxy (its histories), its interiority (its putative autonomy), become simpatico with what is essentially an anarchic philosophy of subjectivization? What distinguishes the early architectural reception is precisely the disciplinary milieu; namely, the '70s art scene by way of which architecture adopted Deleuze and Guattari. By historicizing the travails of Deleuze in America, mirrored in architecture's disciplinary problematic, a retrospective of this order provides clues to the sympathies between architecture and Deleuze today.

Italian Autonomia

Mediators are fundamental. Creation's all about mediators ... Whether they're real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It's a series. If you're not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you're lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they'd never express themselves without me: you're always working in a group, even when you seem to be on your own. (Gilles Deleuze)⁵

Deleuze entered architecture via what in Pourparlers he called the "mediators," the cult-assemblage of various characters who pursued their own activities around Deleuze. The question of the relationship between Deleuze and architecture is misleading, because Deleuze had very little to do with architecture. He never appeared in architectural fora in the manner of his contemporary Jacques Derrida, whose personal involvement in architecture since the 1980s is well known: Derrida participated in two of the Anyone conferences in the early 1990s;⁶ he was also a close friend of Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman; and, of course, his theory of deconstruction had its architectural analogue. Not so with Deleuze.

John Rajcliman: The lecture Félix [Guattari] gave when he came to New York was on singularizing space. It was at Columbia, an event sponsored by the architecture school. Deleuze did not travel. First of all there was his health, which then turned into a principle. He said he didn't travel. Derrida came here; Deleuze, never.⁷

Deleuze wrote very little directly on architecture. There was The Fold, on Leibniz and Baroque architecture: his instruction of Bernard Cache, and citation of Cache's book Earth Moves; and the references to urbanism and space in A Thousand Plateaus—albeit as the uneasy objects of his and Guattari's critique.

Indeed, the longer affiliation between Deleuze and architecture arose neither by his direct interest in architecture nor by architecture's immediate affection for him. It evolved through, to use his own phrase, les intercesseurs, the "intercessors" or intercedes—those figures, events, and mobile connections that were accessories to his involvement in architectural discussion. He said they "can be people—for a philosopher, artists or scientists—but things too, even plants or animals."⁸ Deleuze's interceders were, first, Foucault, with whom Deleuze had a close discussion and affinity, as well as affiliated writers and artists, and their collaborations in the wider Foucauldian debate on cities—through which Deleuze's project of subjectivity found its most important philosophical lineage.

Rajchman: It turns out that Deleuze and I both wrote Foucault books published around the same time. We had a mutual philosophical friend who came to me and said "Deleuze likes your Foucault book; he wants to meet you and he wants to know what you're working on now." So I said, "Tell him that I'm thinking of writing on him." Deleuze said, "I don't like people who write about me, I don't like people who write sur. But in your case [I don't mind], as long as [in] writing about me you satisfy two criteria: one, that you are accurate; and two, that I will be unable to recognize myself in the result."

Deleuze's debt to Foucault manifests itself in the citation of the Society of Control in "Mediators," the theory of a "City-State"⁹ in A Thousand Plateaus, the book Foucault,¹⁰ and in numerous interviews with Foucault discussing urbanism, space, and power. But more than any of these, Deleuze's Foucauldianism is embodied in Anti-Oedipus, a text that contributed to the broader Foucauldian debate on urbanism and subjectivity. Therein Deleuze and Guattari gave voice to a suite of theorists, such as Henri Lefebvre, Jean-Francois Lvotard, and Lewis Mumford, all of whom were also attempting to reformulate the problems of subjectivity, space, and the social.

In his introduction to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault describes Deleuze and Guattari's project as the "connection of desire to reality"; he says it is the concrete expression of subjectivity in urban form that possesses revolutionary force. Whereas Foucault is mainly concerned with the institutional subject, Anti-Oedipus extends this to the creative generation of subjectivity in concrete social and cultural forms.

Deleuze's Foucauldianism, importantly, goes back to the Italian Autonomia (autonomy) movement surrounding Antonio Negri, the Marxist and Spinoza scholar. Autonomia was the underground theoretical and political movement of Italian Leftists in the 1970s. It attracted French poststructuralists, Marxist anarchists, and a miscellany of artists and writers, and could be said not only to have provided Deleuze and Guattari an entry point to America, via the affiliation with Foucault, but also to have produced its own singular Deleuzo-Guattarian autonomist following in Italy.

The Italian Marxists had adopted Foucault's critique of the repressive functions of the capitalist city and his analysis of architecture and power. They developed it further using Deleuze's model of the "body without organs," the decentralized political formation that replaces the city as state, where capital is essentially dematerialized. Foucauldian autonomia emphasized the self-organizing power of everyday life practices, such as architecture and urbanism, in nonhierarchical structures, and emphasized Deleuze and Guattari's thinking on the aesthetic, productive nature of desire.¹¹

This Italian reception of Deleuze, via Guattari and Negri in the 1970s, was in turn influenced by a group of Marxist architecture critics from the Venice School—Manfredo Tafuri,¹² Massimo Cacciari,¹³ and Georges Teyssot¹⁴—who, while not agreeing on the role of Deleuze and Guattari in architectural criticism, were responsible, at least by the 1980s, for bringing French poststructuralist thought to light in America via their own debates and translation activities.¹⁵

Rajchman: Negri was, in Italy, associated with Tafuri because the group around Tafuri, the Italians, had an important role in introducing French thought to architecture. Foucault and Georges Teyssot, who helped introduce Foucault, had a big impact intellectually and politically in Italy on a very specific source. All the work about micropolitics got translated ... I think in Foucault they found the model of politics that no one else was working on, and that got translated into an Italian politics ... Guattari founded Le CERFI (1975-1976). a research group focused on the topic of cities, and for one of their meetings they invited Foucault and Deleuze to speak on the subject of cities.¹⁶

Deleuze and Guattari are intercessors in this longer Foucauldian trajectory, whose locus turns out to be the architectural debates in Italy. In practice, this Italian movement of the 1970s was a fringe phenomenon, and the introduction of Deleuze into academic discourse was a troublesome, even traumatic process. Publication was difficult, as there was political resistance to Deleuzian thinking and conflicts of borders (personal, political, and geographic), which all contributed to what Foucault would later anticipate as the "Deleuzian century."¹⁷

The intercessor is not simply a conduit for information, a silent mediator like Leo in The Go-Between,¹⁸ but a political act or intervention, literally a "going between." The intercessor does not install herself between two fixed points, in order to bridge or conciliate, but plots her revenge against an already existing condition from which she flees. The intercessor's address is not one of mediation, but what Deleuze calls the ligne de fuite, or "line of flight"; she communicates only her own escape—fuite or "flight/leak" should be understood as a loophole that allows one to create.

Rajchman: Of course, Negri was arrested in Italy and then escaped to France, where he was supported by Deleuze, who wrote the preface to the French edition of Negri's book, L'anomalie sanvage.¹⁹ Written in prison, this is a really interesting book on Spinoza and the idea of [subjectivity] as multitude²⁰—which later plays a big role in Empire, where it is developed. Deleuze and the French Spinoza scholars wrote prefaces to the book, partly to help Negri in his political situation. They were, in effect, saying: We French Spinoza scholars think this is very serious work ... Negri later returned to Italy, which involved his being imprisoned [again] because he was i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Subjectivization
• 1 Deleuze and "The Intercessors"
• 2 Impersonal Effects
• 3 Impersonal Effects 2
• 4 Guattari and the Japanese New Wave
• 5 Shinohara and Takamatsu: Objets Verité
• 6 Architecture Without Qualities
• Bibliography
• Index