archilannka

Paul Kidder on Gadamer

Hermeneutics – the root of this word  is an ancient one referring to activity of interpretation. Gadamer claims that quality of traditional hermeneutics – its combination of intellectual grasp and practical application 0 is at work in the interpretation of any text, and indeed in every instance of trying to understand the thoughts and beliefs of another person or culture. Hermeneutics, in both the study of texts and in relation to architecture, holds the promise of fundamentally altering the way one thinks about interpretations, understanding, and the communication of culture.

On play. To engage in play, in Kantian sense, is to follow connections, relations, and associations among sensations, images, and ideas in a free-flowing manner, yet a manner that has a direction, that seems to be taking somewhere.

Process of Socratic inquiry, identified by term 'dialectic', has been called a kind of 'serious play'. In it there is always a tension between creativity and discovery. Creativity, as every artist knows, is playful. It requires this playfulness in order to be open to possibilities. Truth is serious, often gravely so; but discovery of truth requires, like artistry, an openness to unsuspected possibilities, so that philosophical inquiry comes to engage playfully with serious matters, yet to take even that playfulness seriously. Recognition of the constant presence of this ironic tension between playfulness and seriousness is essential, in Gadamer's view, to understanding anything about the Platonic corpus.

Genuine play in art, for Gadamer, bears this same mark of being capable of seriousness in its very playfulness. In part this is so because freedom is one of the most profound of human potentialities.

A truly successful work of art is stunning in its identity and definition; it hits one like a blow, with a distinctive kind of force. [..]Part of what thinkers do not grasp is something that Plato, long before them, understood completely: that art occupies a realm that is neither exactly truth nor exactly fiction, a realm that is neither purely known nor purely  unknown, that combines the subjective and objective in an undifferentiated way. Plato realized that this realm, which art inhabits, between the known and unknown, is the same uncanny realm occupied by every form of genuine truth-seeking. To claim with Socrates, that in spite of all one may know, on lacks wisdom and lives in ignorance, is to acknowledge that human consciousness inevitably spends most of its time in this state of the in between. [..] The work of art is never simply a record of something as it is; it is always constitutes an “increase in being”. Art imitates life, then, or nature, or the world, but in a manner designed to help its viewers or hearers recognize something about life, nature or the world that they might not have grasped before.

One would be very much mistaken to see such an emphasis on the sensual qualities of particular materials in Herzog and de Meuron, or in Holl, or Pallasmaa, or Zumthor as a movement away from comprehension and intelligible significance. Such architects should rather be seen as embracing the same enigma that Gadamer finds in every work of art: mysterious interwining of endless itelligibility with endless particularity.

In an analogous way the work of art is symbolic in that it point beyond itself, but not in self-effacing way. It is a fragment of the total meaning, it is an essential but incomplete part. The grasp of symbolic meaning constitutes a realization as if suddenly coming upon something familiar. The archaic torso is a fragment of an entire ancient world, but when it speaks to one, when it makes its insisted demand, its meaning becomes not only familiar, but immediately and intimately so.

“It emerges as an artwork only when, in the middle of its use, something wonderful shines forth, as with everything that is beautiful. The experience causes us to pause in the midst of our purposeful doing, for example in a room of a church, or in a stairwell, when suddenly we stand there and remain entranced.”

Gadamer's highly integral view of architecture caused him to lament the cultural tendency to appreciate architecture primaly in terms of its immediate visual impact. He associated this tendency with the rise of architectural photography. The excellence of photographs in making it easy to share an auditory, and kinetic imagery. The culture that was promoting a visual sense of architecture was also creating droves of tourists who simply wanted to 'see' buildings, as if the whole world were a picture book and traveling was a matter of turning the pages. The sense that the meaning of the buildings is discovered in its use becomes lost in this process. [..] One would have to spend time with a building, he thought, to discover everything that it was attempting to accomplish. But when the integral artistry of architecture steps to the fore, then everything that happens within it may seem to resonate with its power. Great structures bring their artistry to the whole of a life.

When architects say “it is not serious” they do not mean to denigrate play as such, but to resist the return of an aestheticism that does not appreciate the great thing to which play can be dedicated.

Recognition of historical connections emerges as a dimension adding to the depth of the work. This depth dimension unfolds progressively as the details of the building become familiar. In such moments of unfolding recognition one has the experience of discovering countless marks of the past upon the present. It forms an analogy, or an allegory, of an emerging consciousness on the effects of history.

[..] As architectural interpretation and education came to be captivated by the purely geometrical qualities of structures; as a breakthroughs in engineering brought with them their own ideals of simplicity and efficiency; and as space, time, volume, perspective, and optics came to be viewed in uniformly quantitative terms, the symbolic and poetic dimensions of design acquired a superficial status- both in the sense of being pushed to exterior surfaces of structures and in the sense of being non-essential. In his view, what has been lost, as positivistic scientism has come to dominate the culture of architectural practice, is what was most central to architectural interpretation in the age of Vitruvius: a humanistic and poetic significance – with roots deep in traditions of myth and cultural narrative- that guides the design process and suits the building to its purpose and place. For Gadamer, the older mythologies and rituals must be called back to memory- not in their own context, to be sure, as if one could turn back the clock and forget modernity- but as a poetic elements in our tradition that can ring new brilliance in the contemporary cultural landscape.

The ethic of modernism creates profound barriers to any attempt to simply return to historical styles. Every such attempt must face charges, not merely of aesthetical nostalgia, but of a socially irresponsible backwardness. Yet at the same time the modernistic ethic,a s it has unfolded in practice, has failed to realize the harmony that it sought.

[..] The emergence of architectural modernism was driven by technological innovations in materials and engineering techniques, to the point where mainstream views began to see the task of design as one of accommodating the aesthetics to the technology rather than the other way around. But this movement raised a host of persistent questions. For example, does the emphasis on the functional, mechanical nature of architecture, with its pervasive symbolization of the technological revolution per se, break architecture's ties to the humanities , and perhaps to the human dimension in architecture's historical identity? Architecture has been recruited on a grand scale in the reshaping of human communities, and architects have produced grand visions of the rationally organized city, But has architecture thereby served its proper calling, or has it been swept up in the romance of an obsessively technological age?

The idea of horizon. Gadamer has a conception of the cultural and historical horizons withing every individual and community lives. On the one hand, every such horizon functions as a limit. It delineates a set of beliefs, stories, ideas, customs, shared experiences, and dispositions that make a people who they are. Beyond the horizon are the things that they do now know  and cannot imagine, including things that they cannot even ask about because they do not know how to ask, or why one would ever want to ask. The world of this horizon will never cease to be one's origin, one's home. Within its compass are feelings, habits, sensibilities, and associations that one may never be able to entirely alter. They mark one with the stamp of a culture's history.

Yet the horizon is also the means of being open, for the culture that one assimilates, from one's youth is what makes the world familiar and life livable. Like the physical horizon, the cultural horizon functions both as limitation and as an opening to everything that transcends it.

Architects and designers know just how deep a horizon goes in the human psyche. They see it embed in language, but equally in gestures and bodily habits – the way people move withing public spaces and congregate together, the way they orchestrate their lives amid public and private spaces. The horizon is manifest in all of the feelings and images that go along with these dimensions of experience and activity. It determines which places feel comfortable and home-like and which ones require a difficult accommodation. If architecture relates to culture as the book relates to literacy, hen the architect must be aware of cultural horizons and be able to mediate them.

A person who has made a life in the world or architecture is someone in whose imagination such experience loom large. He or she has been moved- perhaps early in life- by the power of design to bring order, or peace, or fascination to life. In design the world that ordinarily seems so random and scattered, so fleeting and derelict, is brought into an exact unity that heightens the vibrancy of its sensuous presence. Such epiphanies have inspired this person to take the steps necessary to be one who produces thing with that kind of power, steps that mean entering communities – first of fellow students, then of collegues0 formed around similar experiences and inspirations.

[..] in Gadamer's view it is Enlightenment thinkers who are displaying their naivete. To think that one can magically step out of one's horizon by the mere application of a method is to fall far short of grasping the reality of horizons. Living in the resulting imaginary state that is supposedly free of prejudice, one is far more likely to be oblivious to the ways in which prejudices are actually controlling one's interpretations of experience. The very idea of a methodical freedom from prejudice functions, in other words, as a supremely distorting kind of prejudice. Key toe the process is becoming aware that one inevitably inquires from within a horizon, and that the nature of this horizon and the possibility of altering it can be fully realized only in the course of engaging with another horizon.

In the ideal case there occurs what Gadamer calls a Horizonverschmelzung, which is normally translated as the 'fusion of horizons', it is something similar to the experience that one undergoes when one can finally drop the whole apparatus by which one translated a new language into one's native tongue and one simply thinks and speaks in the new language. When this happens with regard to a whole horizon – i.e. that one can simply make one's life within it- that is when one has truly achieved an 'understanding'. Understanding, at this level, is not simply cognitive or verbal; it is existential. It alters the very foundations of one's approach to life.

Again, such a transformation cannot happen in the abstract or by simply cultivating feeling of openness and sympathy. The change comes about in the process of developing relationships and interacting in the places where different horizons hold sway. The word 'fusion' captures some of the sense of what occurs in the transformation, but the English word is limited if it suggests that the two horizons are simply bonded together. What in fact happens, to the extend that there is success, is that a third reality emerges, something that is born of the two horizons but is equally the product of the new experience and relationships that have formed. The fusion is never complete, for there is no end to the discoveries that one ca make about another individual or another culture, no end to the experience of hermeneutical recognition that one could have. But the process is limited, de facto, by the limits on our time and abilities, by the finite scope and span of our lifetimes.

Every attempt to work together, to make decisions together, to live together requires complex, often difficult efforts of understanding. To grow in one's realization of the need for understanding, to learn patience with the effort and to develop a sense of its own intrinsic rewards, to have tested principles in wide ranges of circumstances, to have called them into question and to have revised them where needed, to have built trust and to have formed friendships even within the context of contentious deliberations – all of these are signs of development in practical wisdom, a development which is more determinative of one's character and identity than skill or set of convictions could be. Ay decision that is made in collaboration with other people can benefit from the kind of understanding that involves hermeneutic awareness.

The ontology of time. A definitive claim of Heidegger's ontology is that Dasein's way of being is time, or temporality. When we thing about time, our temptation is always to imagine ourselves a stable entity moving through time, or riding along the stream of time like a floating vessel. Heidegger's Being and Time seek to shift this mentality, to say that we are not something that moves through time but something that exists, rather, as the movement itself. This means that the experience of presence (both in the sense of the temporal present and the sense of being present to the world) emerges only out of the constant movement of an anticipated future into a receding past. Presence is not a static state but is always coming-to-pass. We are never simply present to the world; our experience of presence results from the working of that which is not yet and that which no longer is- two unimaginably vast forms of absence. [..] The 'decorum' of architecture, to put it another way, is not simply an aesthetic or experiential quality, but has its roots in the temporality of being.

To conclude - the very desire to have an effect, the very structure of one's purposes, is itself something originating in the larger world of meaning in which one's consciousness is not only a participant, but a consequence, an effect. To be hermeneutically minded is, above all, to be sensitized to the working of this pattern throughout one's life and work. It is to look for the pattern, to find situations where an appreciation of the pattern might help make difference between understanding and misunderstanding.

So what is it, finally, that distinguishes a hermeneutically minded architect? It is, one might say, a kind of sensitivity – to where play might be appropriate, to where clues to solving problems may be lurking in language and historical sources, to the moments where listening might be more appropriate than speaking, the moments where on must question one's own assumptions before questioning those of others. It involves knowledge, though one could not call an architect hermeneutically minded simply on the basis of a body of knowledge. Neither is it exactly a matter of experience or skill, though again, these have their role to play. It is a manner of attending, of exploring of recognizing, anticipating, inquiring, playing with possibilities.

Helena Webster on Bourdieu

Students spend a long period of learning to 'become' architects trough a gradual process of imbibing of the tactic knowledge, beliefs and values of the discipline and, for most, this proves to be a thoroughly fascinating, enjoyable and all-consuming experience. However, one of the results of this process of socialization and acculturation is that architects come to see the world refracted, or interpreted, through an architectural lens and as a consequence they often become frustrated and intolerant of outsiders (the general public, builders, quantity surveyors, politicians etc.) who see the world differently. Bourdieu's ideas can help architects to understand this complex phenomenon. He proposes that social groups (what he terms 'fields') within society construct their own particular beliefs and values as a means of reinforcing group cohesion and that these groups compete for the power in society to dictate what is legitimate. Thus, Bourdieu offers architects a way of thinking about of the social construction of their own discipline and its relationship to the social world outside architecture.

Bourdieu described the city apartments as 'a system of demands inscribed in objective space and asking to be fulfilled, a universe strewn with expectations and thereby generating need and dispositions'. That is, having been made for the 'modern man', the apartment demands the behavior of a 'modern man', and not for those used to agrarian ways of life.

Claude Levi-Strauss argues that cultures subconsciously constructed a shared but 'arbitrary' understanding of their particular world as a means to make them intelligible. These constructions were akin to systems that were characterized by hidden semantic structures that connected each discrete part to the whole through a hierarchy of binary oppositions. Levi-Strauss suggested that these subconscious structures were to be found manifest in the symbolic aspects of culture including language, artifacts, sacred and profane architecture, decoration, art, myths, songs, rituals and although not readily apparent to participants, could be discerned by the trained eye of the anthropologist. For Bourdieu  buildings, objects, and actions were part of the same symbolic system.

Bourdieu's 'theory of practice' suggested that all actions, even those understood as disinterested or of no purpose, were to be conceived economically as actions aimed at the maximization of material or symbolic gain. This hypothesis was radical in that it challenged the, then dominant, structuralist notion that the symbolic realm was the product of the logic of the human mind and replaced it with utilitarian model that put symbolic practices on the same level as economic practices, that is, as strategies in the competition for prestige or standing in the social hierarchy.

[..] The result of the research suggested that students from privileged families arrived ad university with a range of dispositions, including dress sense, deportment and knowledge of art, music and literature, which correlated closely with those of the cultural elite. Further Bourdieu's findings suggested that the university system, its structure, pedagogy and rituals implicitly favored this group of students and disadvantaged students from families with low social status. At this point in his career Bourdieu's 'solution' to the inequity he found in the educational system was the instigation of  'rational pedagogy', a method of learning and teaching that recognized the individuality of each student, as opposed to one that 'favored the favored'. Bourdieu believed that 'rational pedagogy' would allow previously excluded classes access to education and thereby to high culture.

[..] More contentiously, Bourdieu's findings dispelled the commonly held notion that museums were 'open' to all, by presenting evidence that suggested that the very institutional nature of museums, their structures, rituals and forms, were so alien to the least educated groups in society that they effectively excluded themselves. Bourdieu went on to use these findings to support his general thesis that institutions played an important role in both legitimizing high culture (i.e. those forms of culture valued by the culture elite) and in reproducing high culture in the children of cultural elite.

[..]He argued that the capacity to appreciate art was not a 'gift' but rather a competence, or 'good taste', acquired through education and socialization that was merely presented as 'natural' by those who possessed it as a means for them to claim superiority over those who lacked competence, that is, those with 'poor' taste,

Bourdieu cited the following research findings in support of his thesis. First, his research found that the most-educated museum visitors spent the longest time in front of individual paintings and artifacts (i.e. they possessed the codes necessary to appreciate the work). Second, he found that the most-educated visitors possessed prior knowledge of artists, periods and styles, whilst those with little education did not (i.e. they could not locate the work in relation to other works). Third, the most-educated viewers described the art and artifacts they viewed in terms of their formal properties, their style, technique and meaning in relation to other artifacts, while those with little educations described  the art and artifacts in functional or literal terms. Bourdieu concluded that only the acultured had the capacity to decode cultural works and thereby the potential to achieve educational benefit from their museum visits.

“The history of the instruments for the perception of the work is the essential complement of the history of the instruments for the production of the work, to the extend that every work is, so to speak, made twice, by the originator and bu the beholder, or rather, by the society to which the beholder belongs”

-this statement refuted the commonly held tactic belief that the meaning of a work of art was somehow latent in the artifact and it was merely waiting to be 'found' by any viewer equipped with the correct degree of aesthetic competence. Bourdieu proceeded, in a radical politicization of Pafonsky's work to argue that the form of artistic competence demonstrated by 'educated beholders' (i.e. the ability to decode a broad spectrum of cultural works in accordance with the aesthetic codes of the day) was gained through a combination of a cultivated family upbringing, including a repeated exposure to culture, and schooling, and as a consequence was neither a natural nor a universally distributed capability. He also argued that artistic competence, as a form of cultural capital, and like other forms of capital, tended to follow unequal patterns of accumulation. Therefore, those who possessed artistic competence, had it in their own interests to both define what constituted artistic competence and to restrict who could have access to it. Bourdieu further suggested that, by maintaining the scarcity of artistic competence, those who possessed it could guarantee its cultural value.

For Bourdieu it now appeared that the French educational system, as an instrument of those with the greater capital accumulation (that equated to power), was organized to legitimize specific forms of culture as natural or superior (and by default making other forms of culture illegitimate and inferior) and to ensure that only those from families well endowed with capital would be effectively acculturated. Bourdieu claimed that the education system tacitly discriminated against those who did not have the initial cultural competence to participate and let to those discriminated against automatically excluding themselves from education, thereby ensuring the reproduction of the cultural elite and the maintenance of the scarcity and value of cultural competence ('cultural capital'). Education was inevitably an instrument controlled by those in power and therefore would never operate in a manner that might threaten to erode that power. As a consequence Bourdieu subsequently revised his own political aims from contributing to the reform of education to helping the powerless to understand the 'hidden' mechanisms or their oppression.

Bourdieu also developed a hypothesis suggesting that legitimized culture circulated as a form of capital in society and that cultural capital, like economic capital, was the object of social struggle and status.

Bourdieu's conceptual tool 'Fields' – first, there was the small 'field of restricted production' (FRP), an autonomous field in which well-educated consumers shared the codes or aesthetic appreciation with well-educated producers. Second, there was the much larger 'filed or large-scale production' (FLP), a field in which less well educated producers responded to the demands of the 'popular', and largely uneducated market. Bourdieu also argued that, given the causal relationship between scarcity and value, both consumers and producers, within both fractions of the field adopted strategies which would , they calculated, lead to 'distinction'; i.e. an increase in their cultural capital and their standing in the field.

In addition to providing evidence to support the hypothesis that aesthetic codes were socially constructed, Bourdieu also asserted that he wanted to prove that “art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences”

Buying houses – 'the taste of fantasy'.  [..] people used a combination of social (cohesion and family), cultural (symbolic) and economic (monetary value) criteria to select housing, and that the criteria differed in weight and manifestation for different social groups, thus conforming his previous findings on the social construction of taste. In a significant development from his previous findings Bourdieu identified the new role that credit and advertising played in tempting the working classes to move beyond the 'taste of necessity' and to indulge in the 'taste of fantasy', in this case the fantasy of semi-detached suburban living. The study went on to demonstrate that the consequences of home ownership for working-class were often negative as, very quickly after the purchase, they came to realize that their seduction had resulted in, amongst other things, an unmanageable burden of debt.

Bourdieu's work on taste challenges architects in many ways. Most importantly, it asks architects to consider how they might reconcile the potential schisms between their own taste culture and the taste culture of those who inhabit architecture.

Another hypothesis of Bourdieu's – people in society formed groups sharing the same world view and the same 'arbitrary' ethos (a term more procedural than the earlier 'ethic' but less dispositional than in the later habitus) reflecting their pre-existing position in social space.

He suggested that artists, writers and intellectuals produced work for a perceived audience but that they only had a weak control over the actual audience response to their world that is, whether their work would be well received or not. In addition, Bourdieu identified the potential for a misalignment between artist's self-perception and that held by society when he wrote: “The artist may accept or reject the image of himself which society reflects back at him, he cannot ignore it... society intervenes at the very center of the creative project thrusting upon the artist its demands and refusals, its expectations and its indifference”

Bourdieu went on to suggest that the aim of all artists was to produce work that, by means of its recognized value, would increase their cultural capital and thereby improve their position in the field. He also pointed to the ways that ;cultural intermediaries' such as critics, publishers and gallery owners, hat the power to be 'taste makers'  by mediating between artists and audiences within the fields.

Artists existed in relation to each other in the social space of the filed and their relative positions reflected the quantity and configuration of their capital (social, economic and cultural). Those with the most cultural capital, which was recognized internally as the pre-eminent capital in the field, had the power to define what constituted legitimate culture (form and content) and those with less cultural capital fought to gain legitimacy for their beliefs and thereby overturn those in power. Bourdieu then described the way that a newcomer would enter the field of cultural production for the first time and the way that their pre-existing capital (social, cultural and economic) configuration would place them in a field position that reflected the value that the new field placed on each form of capital.

Following Panofsky, Bourdieu argued that schooling produced: “ individuals endowed with this system of subconscious (or deeply buried) schemes that constitute their culture, or, better yet, their habitus; in short, of transforming the collective heritage into an individual and collective subconscious”, and that the habitus provided the portal through which:” the creator partakes of his community and time, and that guides and directs, unbeknownst to him, his apparently most unique creative acts”.

Bourdieu's notion of habitus allowed him to account for the context-bound nature of individual cultural practice and for the existence of homologies between architecture and scholastic thought.

Bourdieu elaborated the concept of the autonomous field of cultural production by suggesting that the field was split into two parts: the field of restricted production (FRP) and the field of large-scale production (FLP), which served two different markets, each ascribing a different relative value, or capital, to the commercial and symbolic content of cultural foods. Thus, Bourdieu suggested, within the field of restricted production the economic value of a cultural product was secondary to its symbolic value and to the long-term accumulation and gestation of symbolic capital by producers and consumers alike. He also suggested that the field of restricted production was the most autonomous part of the filed because it was not dependent on an external market for its existence and as a consequence it had the ability to set its own beliefs and values, although there were always the subject of internal struggles. However, in contradistinction Bourdieu explained that in the field of large-scale production economic profit had primacy over symbolic value and as a result the field was oriented towards making short-term profit. Therefore, the production of goods focused on serving immediate and large-scale market external to the field ('the public at large') and had to respond to and defer to its values.

Bourdieu clearly stated that cultural producers working in both sub-fields were highly skilled; although he also pointed out that their skills differed because they were aligned to the particularity of their respective markets. He also suggested that the field of restricted production, which included high art, or 'art for art's sake', and architecture, tended to hide its beliefs and value systems under a veil of 'idealism' and 'mystique', as a means of protectionism, whereas the field of large-scale production, which included fashion and commercial art, was altogether more open and pragmatic.

He began re-asserting that cultural goods, did not have intrinsic properties that made them valuable, but rather, that value was ascribed to them by those with authority (i.e. those with the most cultural capital) and, further, that those in authority were in a constant struggle to maintain their authority in the face of challenges from those who sought to take their place.

On - fashion designers - Bourdieu suggested that they operated in a manner that was homologous to fashion houses. Their position in the field allowed them to bestow symbolic value on material goods and give the, seemingly alchemical power (like Midas's ability to turn object into gold) to turn clothes of low economic worth into clothes with high economic worth without changing their material nature. Bourdieu termed this process 'symbolic exchange': the ability to convert one kind of capital into another. Further, Bourdieu suggested that haute couture fashion designers cultivated the notion that they possessed magical powers of creation as a strategy to maintain their dominant positions. Bourdieu also pointed to the tension that existed within haute couture fashion houses between allowing junior designers the freedom of individual expression and maintaining the character of the label (a tension ever present in architectural practices).

Andrew Ballantyne on D&G

They presented new ways of conceptualizing things.[..] They are deliberately experimental, and the point of them is always to see what might be turned up that could bring about new possibilities in living. In this stance we see that there is a link with certain sort of architect – the sort who wants to design buildings that promote life and that are experiments in living. For the architect who wants to be  stimulated into extending the range of what life has to offer, D&G attitudes will immediately be congenial – even if it may take a little longer to make sense of their concepts.

Identity is political, in that it is generated through our relations with others. It is not altogether interior, but has an external aspect. Our various temporary identities are all the identities we have, and depending on the point we are addressing, the pertinent identity is the one – or maybe more than one – that has bearing on the case.

Lines of flights – Works of art produce lines of flight. Aesthetic experience, the thrill of being moved by a work of art – whether it be literary, architectural or whatever – is difficult to reproduce in a commentary. Perhaps it works most powerfully and effectively when one is taken by surprise and the rush of the sublime overtakes one unannounced. This 'transport', this 'lift', is, to use D&G term produced by 'line of flight'

A warm bath is a pleasant experience, but I normally experience it as a comfort, rather than as a work of art. Many paintings, films and novel work in this sort of way – like a warm bath, producing a sense of good-natured well-being, rather than the rush of air, the enthusiasm, of a line of flight. Always to choose the comfortable over the sublime would be a formula for mediocrity, but conversely the asceticism of the determined artist can turn out to have been formula for mania, alcoholism or anorexia.

“A flight is a sort of delirium. To be delirious is exactly to go off the rails (as mi decontrol – to say absurd things, etc.) There is something demoniacal or demonic in line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jumps across interval, and from one interval to another”

Deleuze on Spinoza:” Spinoza awakens the sense of alternative possibilities, and destabilizes the common-sense order of things”

D&G writings are appealing to architects, who find themselves called upon to find a from for buildings. A precondition for finding form is to be without form, to suspend the condition of having form, so that a new possibility can emerge.. They can help us to keep common sense at bay, take us on a witches' ride, so that we can see the world as unformed elements acted upon anonymous forces, and by entering into this world of virtualities, it can push us in a position where we might actualize something that has not previously been.

Machines, swarm, deterritorialization, body without organs, immanence, nomadic thought (Anna will get back to these terms later in the blog)..

Matter, environment and emergent consciousness all connect across to something nearby, and ultimately to everything else, to give a political and ethical dimension to the thinking.

The body without organs is a state of creativity, where preconceptions are set aside. It is the state before a design takes shape, where all the possibilities are immanent, and one holds at bay the common-sense expectations of what the design should be.

“Chaos is defined not so much by its disorder as by the infinite speed with which every form taking shape in it vanishes. It is a void that is not a nothingness but a virtual, containing all possible particles and drawing out all possible forms, which spring up only to disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence. Chaos is an infinite speed of birth and disappearance”

“The unforgettable associated world of the Tick, defined by its gravitational energy of falling, its olfactory characteristic of perceiving sweat, and its active characteristics of latching on: the tick climbs a branch and drops on to a passing mammal it has recognized by smell, then latches on to its skin  (an associated world composed of three factors, and no more)”

So it makes no sense to think that an organism stands a chance of survival independently of the survival of its milieu; the milieu is a precondition for the organism's  development.

D&G thought tend to promote un-monumental aspects of life, preferring fluidity and creativity ('becoming') to establishing any sort of fixity. Their thought is a challenge for any architects who choose to engage with it, as its volatility is at odds with the profession’s traditional preoccupation with form. With D&G one leaves behind the well-defined forms of solid object, for a description of relation between unformed elements (longitude) and sets of affects (latitude), in order to construct a map of body – and a 'body' here can be any entity at all, clear or vague, from an idea to a whole world, including along such bodies as people, buildings and their environments. 'The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities'

The descriptions  proposed by D&G , then are descriptions of virtualities, which can be taken up and actualized, composed and recomposed. So rather than offering a set of instructions upon which one could immediately act, their programme involves unmaking everything that one knows, and then showing how, with just a little order, a world takes shape and dissolve.

Richard Coyne on Derrida

Derrida's philosophy is skeptical about foundations, absolutes and certainties to knowledge, be they laws of nature, moral principles, standards of beauty, ideals, transcendence or even common sense.

To understand Derrida it is necessary  to grasp what is meant by Structuralism.

Saussure departed from the orthodoxy of this day by proposing that the synchronic (time independent or parallel) dimension to language is more revealing than its diachronic dimension. The diachronic, or historical, study of language focuses in the way languages change in time and how languages are derived from each other. To study the synchronicity of language is to look at the structures within any particular language, the relationships within the language, at a point in its evolution and compare it with the structures of other languages. So different languages have structural similarities that seem to transcend the particularities of individual sound patterns and local grammatical differences. For Saussure, we learn more by examining the current state of all languages, a slice through the world's languages, or rather similarities and differences in the multiplicity of the world's languages at any moment (such as at the present moment), than by looking at the derivations of languages.

The relationship between the signifier and the signified is often referred to as the 'sign situation', which is already a departure from the common view that language consists of signs that refer to things. Needles to say, Derrida is heir to the Structuralist skepticism towards the concept the language operates by making reference to an independent reality outside of language, the correspondence theory of language.

Like the postal service, language is a king of circulation system that keeps things in play and leaves in its wake a multiplicity of connections and referents. Language can only function and always has, through the concept of trace. “there always remains, around the final meaning, a halo of virtualities where other possible meaning are floating”

For McLuhan , the invention of writing asserted priority to the eye and the capability of vision. Under the sway of written texts, humankind sees things written down, and at a distance, and so derives notions of objectivity and the methods of science. But before the cataclysmic invention of writing, human communities were permeated by speech and chatter and, of course, listening, the culture of the ear. Drawing loosely from anthropological studies. McLuhan's mythic construction of this epochal transition characterizes aural culture as altogether more engaged, absorbed and undifferentiated than the subsequent civilizing influence of visual culture.

“It will atrophy people's memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make things they have learned dissapear from their mind. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence . Because your students will be widely read, though without contact with teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant”  Plato

Ideas only form as we speak in conversation, speaking and listening connect directly with who we are, utterances are of the authentic moment, provisional, contextual, open to refinement and adjustment. Derrida disagrees precisely with this common perception.

One of the main outcomes of Structuralism and Post structuralism for architecture is to reassert, or at least to wrestle with, architectures materiality over its ideologies, to treat architecture and to theorize architecture by considering its groundedness, its textures, plumbing, specificity and its everydayness in social and urban contexts: its potions, poisons, paints and parasites.

Chora L

Under Derrida's reading, chora constitutes a third space between (!) the realm of ideas, that distant but invisible solid realm in which reside the eternal and unchanging forms and ideals, and (ii) the sensible world that we occupy in the here and now: the imperfect world of human experience that contains only so much imperfect copies of the ideas. Chora, as a third, contradictory entity of containment, precedes the other two and is irreducible to them.

There is tendency here in the emergence of such literary and publication convictions to make explicit the reader's complicity in developing sense from the text, and in a way contributing to the role of the reader: the author and reader as bricoleur. In  the case of Chora L Works, the perforations interrupt the text and the reader has to infer what is missing by attending to the immediate context of the surrounding words, arguably a further exercise in making explicit the character of all reading.

According to Plato – there are two forms of reality: the intelligible and unchanging model, and the changing copy of it, able to be apprehended by senses (Plato). There are thus two spaces, places, models, realms: the Intelligible and the Sensible. This is the underlying opposition of Platonic thought. Later in Timaeus Plato deploys the Greek word chora (space) to designate it. Plato maintains that this 'third form' is complex and obscure. It is 'the nurse of all becoming and change'

Chora is all of these spatial constructs (the sublime, the uncanny, non-place, heteretopias, other places) by a different name. Derrida has provided a service to the authors of these otherwise marginal and ambiguous constructions of space by demonstrating the presence of such spaces at the heart of reasoned and relational spatiality.

The effort required to identify and justify chora is more rewarding than representing it.

Derrida expects from Deconstruction in architecture to tackle four assumed foundations of architecture. 1 – primary importance accorded in the architectural tradition to home, dwelling and hearth. 2 – nostalgia within modern architecture for an origin, a set of primary principles, an ordering, including deference to the sacred origins of architecture. 3 – notion that architecture is heading somewhere, to betterment, improvement and the service of humankind. 4 – an adherence to  concepts of the fine arts, i.e. The pursuit of beauty, harmony and completeness.

These foundations are not exclusive to architecture, but architecture gives them the most obvious and tangible expression, through its monumental materiality and the persistence of buildings, through which these cultural foundations are preserved, transferred and resist deconstruction.

In French, jouissance means enjoyment, in terms both of rights and property,[1] and of sexual orgasm — the latter has a meaning partially lacking in the English word "enjoyment".[2]

Peg Rawes on Irigaray

Western culture, especially the disciplines of philosophy, psychoanalysis (and architecture), organize material and social structures through homogenous (i.e.) unchanging and hierarchical systems. Under these traditions distinct individuals, actions, practices, spaces, materials and ideas are brought together under laws of homogenous universality, whereby particular differences are ignored in favor of similarity.

Architecture is a social and cultural proses through which more than one space or architecture is constructed at the same time.

She argues that the female sexed subject – woman – does not yet actually exist in Western Philosophy.

“ Man and woman do not belong to one and the same subjectivity, that subjectivity itself is neither neutral nor universal. [...] The encounter between them requires the existence of two different worlds in which they could enter into relation or into communication after recognizing that they are irreducible the one to another”

Sexual difference therefore registers the different ways in which men and woman physically and psychically experience the world and relate to others.

In Irigaray's early writings, biological sex is a significant material aspect of our bodily experience of sexed subjectivity, and she uses there distinctions to develop an arguments about the relationship between sex and space.

Post-structuralist approaches show that architectural design and its uses are composed of dynamic psychic and material processes which are embodied in the architect, collaborator and user; for example, requiring that the designer develop a flexible range of practical and theoretical aesthetic, social, technical and structural skills. Architectural design, history, theory and criticism therefore become understood as permeable processes through which architecture is built and interpreted.

Consequently, Irigaray`s studies of sexed processes of material and spatial communication can be linked to recent architectural histories, theories and practices of 'fluid architecture', and may enhance discussions about the production of dynamic spaces and social relationships in architectural design.

“In me everything is already flowing and you flow along too if you only stop minding such unaccustomed motion, and its song. [...] So remember the liquid ground. And taste the saliva in your mouth also - notice her familiar presence during your silence, how she is forgotten when you speak. Or again: how you stop speaking when you drink [..] These fluids softly mark the time [..] "

Concepts of desire are significant for Irigaray`s theories of space and for architecture, because they enable the negotiation of the threshold between physical and psychic states of existence; for example, in the divide between the intellectual realm of immaterial ideas and concepts, versus the sensory realm of embodied emotions, feelings and perceptions of the world.

This desire is positive, ethical and non-hierarchical and does not exclude intellectual thinking. It is an extremely important idea in her writing because it represents a key form of corporeal energy, agency or power in the sexed subject and its qualities are reflected in a number of other post-structuralist philosophical critiques by Deleuze & Gauttari, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Cixous and Kristeva. In contrast to psychoanalysis definition of feminine desire as a lack of satisfaction or coherence in the individual or system, or philosophy’s definition of sexed subjects as excessive and incomplete states of subjectivity, each of these post-structuralist examinations of desire defines it as a positive act of material transformation, not just a theoretical idea.

Boundaries by definition have always produced limited consideration, have reduced diversity of dialogues and have thrived upon exclusions. For political reasons, he is in favor of a world that has less fascination with 'aura' (understood in a general sense). Foucault believed that the captivation with concepts such as 'humanity', 'art' or ' architecture' served to obscure the relation between  the individual and knowledge by means of the apparatuses that administer modern society. The relevance  of this point has grown recently as modern societies (alarmingly including academia) have been administered with lesser concerns for the relationship between individuals and knowledge. Instead, in the societies of late capitalism, the emphasis has been on knowledge that is relevant for performativity (Lyotard 1979)

Gordana Fontana-Giusti about Focault

Archaeology

Focault has established that every historical period is characterized by a fundamental paradigm (understood as a particular standard) which delineates the cultural production of specific types of knowledge – the episteme.

Epistime is shared by all knowledge and is the implied precondition that determines and makes it possible for all related discourses or works to emerge.

Andrei Piotrovski – Architecture of Thought (opens up Focaults question – what does it mean not to be able to think a certain thought any longer?)

Focault is interested in a new kind of archive because the old type was a problem. It privileged and perpetuated certain objects and discourses by means of its organization, choice of documents, underpinning discourses, and so on. It was the obstacle and the reason why so many things, said by so many men, for so long, have not emerged in accordance with his own laws of thougts or set of circumstances. (..) Focaults archive is spatially set between the language that defines the system of constructions possible sentences and the physicality of the archive that passively collects the spoken words.

Madness

Focault aimed to evoke an understanding of madness as a simple difference in behavior or attitude, rather than a different category that from the start dismisses the mad from the realm of reason and/or knowledge.

Foucalt thinks that the reason for the figure of the 'ship of fools' becomings the subject of many texts and images lies in the fact that it symbolized a great disquiet dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages.

A split appeared first of all between two forms of madness: on the one hand, the madness as in the paintings of Bosch (in the last years of the fifteen century) and on the other; the madness as described in Erasmus;s In Praise of Folly (1509). The former sees madness as troubling, obsessive and threatening, 'seemingly revealing the deep secret into which the truth of our world of appearances vanishes; while the latter' was already madness set at a distance' and caught in the discourse, elaborated in books and preached about at universities. The gap between two grew from then onward.

Madness was often seen to be at the heart of things – an ironic sign, that marks he space between the real and the imaginary.

The hospital became a place of confinement, allowing the wealthy and the privileged to clean up  the increasingly growing and messy city. The poor, the idle, beggars, vagabonds, the debouched, libertines, those with veneral diseases, prostitutes and homosexuals joined the insane behind the walls of places such as Hopital General in Paris

Since the emergence of Foucault;s discussion on panopticism, it has become impossible to see architecture as neutral, simply aesthetic or merely functional.

Sexuality

Focaults highlights the strangeness of the claim that sexuality has been the subject of repression precisely at the time when it was coming into prominence and gaining affirmation. He finds this insincere and concludes that the statement about the oppression of sexuality the 'sermon; about it in facts paradoxically and crucially reinforce each other.

This led him to the findings that sexuality, ethics and knowledge in antiquity were inextricably linked within the structure of the aesthetic experience

We cannot equalize the content of 'I think' to the content of  'I am', because the content of the subjects reality is always more than the content of any merely thinking self. The fact is that individuals are living, working, desiring and speaking subjects: these conditions take any individual beyond the realm of mere thought.

Altough it is not always transparently clear, it was in part due to Foucault and his followers that architects shifted focus from concerns about the built form to the design of space itself. Crucially, Foucalt demonstrated that this space is not neutral or empty bu a space of social relations, He recognized the role of architecture in allocating people and in organizing various flows of movement within urban contexts – what we might call architecture as exoskeleton.

“It is true that form me, architecture, in the very vague analyzes...is only taken as an element of support, to ensure a certain allocation if people in space, a canalization of their circulation, as well as the coding of their reciprocal relations. So it is not only considered an element in space, but is especially thought of as a plunge into a field of social relations in which it brings about some specific effects”

Heteretopia.

“Heterotopias constitute a sort of counter-arrangement of effectively realized utopia, in which all the real arrangements... that can be found within society, are at one and the same time represented, challenged, and overturned: a sort of place that lies outside all places and yet is actually localisable.”

In some cases, surpassing all irony, the national capital and the zone have become the same entity, making the zone itself the seat of governance from which it is selectively exempt

On Greenham Common, frame from Robinson in Ruins, 2010, Patrick Keiller

“the ruin is always dynamic and in process [creating] ‘dialectical landscapes’ that hover between the deep geological past and a catastrophic future”

“There is no such thing as perception of space without a continuous background surface”.

1.Perspectives of Position :

texture perspective - size perspective - linear perspective

2. Perspectives of Parralax

binocular perspective - motion perspective 

3. Perspectives Independent of the Position or Motion of the Observer