http://mail.architexturez.net/+/Deleuze-Guattari-L/archive/msg15508.shtml + From: "Tim Adams" <t.

adams@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> + Date: Tue, 6 Oct 1998 19:44:25 +1300 (NZDT) Responding To: Paul Bains <P.Bains@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Original Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 18:15:42 +0800 > Has anyone ever managed to read essays 2-8 in Cartographies > Schizoanalytiques? > > If you have, what do you think of them? (any short response appreciated,altho long is ok). > > Do you think they are translatable? > > The article 'the pm dead end' in flash art is a short extract from essay > no.1 'Les cartographies analytiques'. Guattari never wrote an article > with > such a title (although he could easily have)....

Paul, Yes, having just translated "L'enonciation architecturale" from _Cartogrphies schizoanalytiques_, I think they are translatable (although you may not agree with me after reading my translation below). Can anyone tell me which number this essay is in the book, and perhaps post a list of all the essays? Tristan Palmer informs me that Athlone are having the whole book translated right now. But for those who can't wait the existing translations are ... 1. Regimes, Pathways, Subjects, The Guattari Reader, pp95-108, and, Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, (N.Y., Urzone, 1992),pp.16-37. 2.Ritornellos and Existential Affects, The Guattari Reader, pp158-171. 3.Genet Regained, The Guattari Reader, pp218-230. I think that being a collection of essays, many previously published, the quality varies greatly. The following essay seems to me a work in progress, notes for further elaboration -- the multiple lists

becoming rather tiresome after a while. Nevertheless Guattari's message to architects is powerful and clear: deterritorialize or perish ... become indisciplined.

Felix Guattari, "Architectural Enunciation", Cartographies schizoanalytiques, (Paris, Galilee, 1989), pp. 291- 301.

Unpublished translation by Tim Adams page numbers at the TOP of each page and footnotes to follow] p. 301 Over thousands of years, perhaps in imitation of crustaceans or termites,human beings have acquired the habit of encasing themselves in all kinds of shells: buildings, clothes, cars, images and messages, that they never stop secreting like a skin, adhering to the flesh of their existence just as much as do the bones of their skeletons. There exists nonetheless one notable difference between man, crustaceans and termites, it is that at present no census has been taken among these last two species of architectural corporations, of the tailors and the pros of their media. Be that as it may, one notices that there is much in ecolithical expressions such as: the building of ziggurats, the demolition of Bastille,or the capture of the Winter Palace, that owing to very long historic periods gives us the outline of social assemblages. In recent times,besides stone being relegated behind steel, concrete and glass, these are what in terms of the speed of communication and the control of information can make light of the cleavages of power. Under these conditions architects dont even know which Saint to worship! What good would it do today, for example in a city like Mexico that tears madly towards 40 million inhabitants, to call upon someone like Le Corbusier! Even Baron Haussmann could do nothing there! From now on the politicians, the technocrats and the engineers manage this sort of thing with the least possible contribution from the men of that art Hegel once placed on the first rank among all the other arts. Certainly architects do hang onto a minimal control in the area of sumptuous ______________________ p.292 buildings. But places in this domain are dear and other than taking the role of a politico-financier schemers like some post-modern dandy, that then infects everything they do, they generally devote

their precious influence to a deceitful degradation of their creative talents. What remains are the lines of pure theory(1), utopia(2), and the nostalgic return to the past(3). Or continue the critical questioning of the establishment, although the times hardly seem to lend themselves to it. The architectural object flies to pieces. It is useless to cling to what has been or might be! Situated at the intersection of political stakes of the utmost importance, of demographic and ethnic tensions, of economic, social and regional antagonisms, which are by no means nearing resolution, spurred on by constant technological and industrial mutations, the architectural object is irreversibly condemned to being tugged at and torn in all directions. Not to suggest however that we take an eclectic course of action in such a state of affairs that perhaps demand, on the contrary,an exacerbation of ethico-political choices that have always been underlying the exercise of this profession. From now on it will be impossible, in good faith, to take refuge behind art for arts sake or pure science!(4) To reinvent architecture should no longer be considered to mean the reviving of a style, a school, or a theory with hegemonic tendencies, but to recompose under todays conditions the _architectural enunciation_ and, and in a sense the performance of the architect. When architects no longer simply aim at being modellers of built form, but also offer their services as revealers of virtual desires of space, places,journeys and territory, they will need to manage the analysis of relations between individual and collective corporeities in constantly singularising _____________________ p.293 their approach and they will have to become in addition, intercessors between those desires revealed to themselves and the interests that they oppose, or in other words, an artist and a craftsman of sensible and relational real life [_vecu_]. Understand clearly that I dont have any particular intention for them to attempt a decenterring of their role or to lie down on the couch of psychoanalysis! On the contrary, I believe that they will discover for themselves that they are now in the position of having to analyze certain specific functions of subjectivation.(5) On account of this and numerous other social and cultural operators, it will be possible to constitute an essential relay within the assemblages of enunciation on a multiple front [_t?te multiple_], capable of analytically and pragmatically carrying out the contemporary productions of subjectivity. Consequently this a long way from the simple position of a critical observer! The emphasis is therefore shifted from the object towards the project,whatever the characteristics of its semiotic expression and its semantic contents may be, from now on an architectural work will require a specific elaboration of its enunciative material: how to be an architect today? What part of themselves should they mobilize? What should they engage with and with which operators? What relative importance should they give to their clients, the engineers, the urbanists, and the actual and potential users? Up to what point will they be justified in making compromises with the various parties involved? Here it goes to a highly elaborate transferential economy, that I now propose to examine from the angle of two modalities of consistency of the enunciation of an architectural

"concept": -- One, the polyphonic, of the order of the percept, inherent in the deployment of the components concurrent with its coming into discursive existence. -- The other,ethico-aesthetic, of the order of the affect, inherent in its non-discursive capture of being. __________________________ p. 294 The Polyphonic Components Under the category of scale, Philippe Boudon has listed eight angles of approach for the architectural object which turn out to be centered essentially on the category of space. He has proposed a regrouping into four categories: 1) those that refer real space to itself (scales of geographical optics of visibility, of proximity and of plotting); 2) those that refer architectural space to an exterior referent (symbolic, formal, technical, functional, extensional, dimensionally symbolic, socio-cultural, modeling and economic scales); 3) those that refer architectural space to its representation (geometric, cartographical, and representational scales); 4) lastly, those from architectural thought processes during which a constant toing and froing is made between different spaces(putting into scale, giving a scale, etc.) (6) No doubt one could continue this list with other components of this type. But from the standpoint of enunciation and no longer from a simple taxinomic enumeration of modes of spatialization, it is evident that their potential number becomes literally infinite. All the virtual enunciations are found drifting in the vicinity of the architectural object. As Henri Lier writes, a significant work of architecture is always able to be other than what it is. A dwelling is not dwelling itself but refers to dwelling: it is one of its possible appearances as such.(7) Nevertheless, concerning this continuous spectre of virtual enunciations, I have retained eight types of assemblages corresponding to the voices that appear to me to be effectively active in contemporary architecture. ______________________ p. 295 1. _A geopolitical enunciation_, takes into account as well as the orientation of cardinal points, the contours of the land, the climatic and demographic givens that evolve over long periods of time as the secular trend dear to Fernand Braudel(8), affect the drift of the centre of gravity of urban archipelagos(9) according to the fluctuations of the world economy.(10) 2. _An urbanistic enunciation_, relative to the laws, regulations, habits and customs concerning the size of plots, the arrangement and volumes of buildings, as well as the mechanisms of contamination

of model and image (referring to what Philippe Boudon calls the scale of proximity). Here the interlocutors are able to take on the hard form of local authorities, of State bodies, or the blurred form of the state of collective spirit, opinion, more or less taken over by the media. 3. _An economic enunciation_, capitalist expression of relations of force between the different systems of individual and collective valorisation. From a relative evaluation of costs and demands in terms of projected profits, of prestige, of political impact and usefulness to society, it leads to the fixing of exchange value onto the basic properties and to drive, the things and volumes of investment in the domain of construction. 4. _A functional enunciation_, or function of equipment that considers built spaces according to their specific use. The collective equipment, as well as the equipment for private use, becomes integrated within a double network of:p. 296 a) horizontal complimentary relations, positioning each constructed segment on the group of urban structures interconnected today within world capitalism(11); b) vertical relations of integration ranging from the micro-equipment (lighting, ventilation, communication, etc.) up to the infrastructural macro-equipment. As writes Paul Virilio: Today ... the essence of what we insist on calling urbanism is composed/decomposed by these transfer, transit and transmission systems, these transport and transmigration networks whose immaterial configuration reiterates the cadastral organization and the building of monuments. If there are any monuments today, they are certainly not of the visible order, despite the twists and turns of architectural excess. No longer part of the order of perceptible appearances nor of the aesthetic of the apparition of volumes assembled under the sun, this monumental disproportion now resides within the obscure luminescence of terminals, consoles and other electronic night-stands.(12) Consequently, the collective enunciators here are: -- the social stratifications according to resources, age group, regional characteristics, ethnic divisions, etc. -- the social bodies sectored according to their activities being specialized by economic, cultural order, or by a state of assistance (internment, incarceration, etc.); -- the programmers, the experts, the technicians of all sorts in position of setting out the constraints and norms for architectural writing.

5. _A technical enunciation_, implies a capture of words for the machinery and more generally the materials of construction in the fixing, for example, of the slope of a ____________________ p. 297 roof according to the relative permeability of the material employed, the thickness of a wall according to its load, the dimensions of a material according to its ability to be manipulated, its transportability, or its usefulness.(13) The circuit of interlocutors are here no longer only the building engineers, but the chemists as well who every month invent new materials, the electrical and communication engineers and eventually, the ensemble of technical and scientific disciplines. 6. _A signifying enunciation_, whose aim, independent of functional semantemes, is to allocate to a built form a significant content divided by a human community more or less extensive, but always delineated by the ensemble of other communities not dividing the same type of content. One will rediscover here several of Philippe Boudons scales. One that leads to embody a symbolic form in a building independent of its size (example: the cross plan of Christian churches). One that transfers the layout of a construction from an ideologically explicit model (the ideal city of Vitruvius; the rural, industrial or commercial cities of Le Corbusier...). One which, on the contrary inserts a more or less unconscious socio-cultural scheme (such as the central courtyard that Arab builders probably inherited from Roman antiquity), or one, even more vague, that confers a global style onto an urban settlement (like the conditions under which small towns of Tuscany are re-attached to the opposite extreme of the spectrum, to a transfinite spatium of North American towns clinging, which is their nature, to a freeway system). 7. _An enunciation of existential territorialisation_, of the order with an ethnological perspective as well, onto which I will fasten the three types of space that Vittorio Ugo has distinguished for us(14): ._______________________ p. 298 1) Euclidean spaces, under the aegis of Apollo, positioning in a unique way an object identity in the framework of an axiomatico-deductive logic and within which inscribes a primary and elementary architecture in all the

clarity of its crystalline perfection, always identical to itself and devoid of all ambiguity or internal contradiction; 2) projective spaces, under the aegis of Morpheus, positioning of forms from the modulated identity, from metamorphic perspectives, affirming the principle of the imaginary above the real, vision above speech, extension above usefulness, the plan above perception; 3) labyrinthine topological spaces functioning under the title of existential space(15), under the aegis of Dionysus and according to a geometry of the wrapping of tactile bodies that we have already referred to under the register of affects. Architectural space is a concrete operator, among others, of the metabolism between objects from the outside and intensities from the inside. But if, from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier and passing through Leonardo da Vinci, the play of analogies between the human body and its habitat did not stop being explored, perhaps its a question less, henceforth, of considering these from a formal angle than from a point of view that one could describe as organic. As Massimo Cacciari writes: All authentic organisms are labyrinthine.(16) And we will mention further the multiple fractal dimension of this labyrinthine (or rhizomatic) character of the existential territorialization. 8. _A scriptive enunciation_, that articulates the ensemble of the other enunciative components. Because of the diagrammatic distance that it introduces between the expression and the content and through the coefficients of creativity that it generates, the architectural projection promotes new potentialities, new constellations of universes of reference, starting with the ones that preside over the deployment of ethico-aesthetic aspects of the built object. ________________________ p. 299 The Ethico-Aesthetic Ordinates The architectural enunciation is not committed to the diachronic discursive components, it implicates equally a capture of a consistency of synchronic existential dimensions, or ordinates on a level plane. Following Bakhtin, I will distinguish three types(17): 1) the cognitive ordinates, to know the energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates that take over the logic of the discursive ensemble. It is in this register that the scriptive enunciation of architecture is

incorporated by linking together the first five types of assemblages of enunciation previously listed; 2) the axiological ordinates including the ensemble of systems of anthropocentric valorization, as well as of the aesthetic, economic and political orders; 3) the aesthetic ordinates determining the thresholds of completing an entity, object or structural ensemble, for these to be able to transmit meaning and form on their own account. It is the duty of these ethico-aesthetic ordinates to intertwine the components of signifying enunciations and the existential deterritorialization of the other components. In this way the frame, real life [_vevu_] and the incorporeal find themselves rearticulating each other, although the capitalist corporations do not stop eliminating from their architecture and their urbanism all trace of subjective singularization, for the benefit of a functional, informative and communicational, rigorous transparency. To make myself clear: the singularisation that is at issue here is not a simple matter of a supplement of soul, a personalization or after-sales service, it raises procedures that operate at the heart of the architectural object ________________________ p. 300 and that confer its most intrinsic consistency. Under its exterior discursive aspect, this object institutes itself at the intersection of a thousand tensions that pull it in all directions, but under its ethico-aesthetic enunciative aspects, it reattaches itself on a non-discursive mode, of which the phenomenological approach is given to us through the particular experience of spatialized affects. On this side of the threshold of cognitive consistency, the architectural object collapses into the imaginary, the dream and delirium, while on this side of a threshold of axiological consistency, its dimensions bearing alterity and desire crumble -- like those movie images that the aborigines of Australia always turn away from through lack of finding any interest -- and on this side of the threshold of aesthetic consistency, it ceases to catch the forms existence and the intensities demanded to inhabit it. Consequently, what would define in the final analysis, the art of the architect, would be his capacity to apprehend these affects of spatialized enunciation. Only it is necessary a matter of paradoxical objects that are not able to be delineated by the co-ordinates of ordinary rationality and

that one can only approach indirectly, by meta-modelization, by aesthetic detour, by mythic or ideological narrative. Like the partial objects of Melanie Klein(18) or Winnicott(19), this type of affect institutes itself transversally in the most heterogeneous levels. Not for homogenizing but on the contrary, for engaging further forward in the fractal process of heterogenesis. The architectural form is not called to function as a gestalt closed in on itself, but as a catalytic operator releasing chain reactions among the modes of semiotization that we make come out of ourselves and we open up new fields of possibility. The feeling of intimacy and existential singularity adjoining to the aura given off by a familiar framework, an old residence or a landscape inhabited by our memories, places itself in the rupture of the redundancies emptied of their substances and it can be the generator of a proliferation and lines of flight in all the registers of lifes desire, of refusal to abandon itself to the dominant inertia. For example, this is the same _____________________ p. 301 movement of existential territorialization and of capture of synchronic consistency that will work together things as different as a shoe box and a treasure chest under the bed of a child hospitalized in a psychiatric home, the refrain-password that divides, perhaps with a few friends, the space within the particular constellation as he occupies the refectory, or a totem pole standing out against the sky in the play ground, but only well-known to him. The architect, other than composing a harmony out of all these fragmented components of subjectivation, must at least not mutilate them by advancing the essential from the virtual! So to undertake the recomposition of existential territories in the context of our societies devastated by the capitalistic flows, the architect will therefore have to be able to detect and exploit processually the ensemble of points of catalytic singularities capable of embodiment in the perceptible dimensions of architectural machinery as well as in the formal compositions and the most complex institutional problematics. In order to achieve this, all the cartographic methods will be justified from the moment their engagement (lets not turn away from this old Sartrian concept any longer, it has been tabu for too long) finds its own regime of ethico-aesthetic autonomisation; then the only criteria of truth imposed will be an effect of existential completeness and an overabundance of being that will never lack encounters from which they will have the happiness of being carried away in a process of becoming an event, that is to say, of

historical enrichment and the re-singularization of desire and value.

Footnotes] 1. Leon Krier for example considers that in the face of the holocaust that raged through our cities ... a responsible architect doesnt want to build anything today._Babylone no1_, (Paris, UGE, 1983), p. 132. 2. For example, the work of Daniel Libeskind or similarly the landscape compositions of Vittorio Gregotti, such as his project for collective housing in Cefalu that has little chance of seeing the light of day. 3. See in this regard the interesting propositions of Henri Gaudin, in _La cabane et le labyrinth_, (Brussels, editions Pierre Mardaga,1984), on regional architecture 4. I refer here to the passionate analysis of Christian Girard in _Architecture et concepts nomades. Traite dindiscipline,_ (Brussels, editions Pierre Mardaga, 1986) 5. On the sometimes decisive position of programmer and on the architects role in the modelisation of psychiatric institutions, see the special edition of the review _Recherches:_:Programmation, architecture et psychiatrie, (June, 1967). 6. Philippe Boudon, _La ville de Richelieu,_ (Paris, AREA, 1972), _Architecture et architecturologie_, (Paris, AREA, 1975), and _Sur lespace architectural. Essai depistemologie de l'architecture_, (Paris, Dunod, 1971). 7. Henri von Lier, _Encyclopaedia Universalis_, Vol. II, Section 1, p. 554, (Paris, 1985). 8. Fernand Braudel, Le temps du monde. Civilisation materielle, economie et capilalisme, XVe-XVIIe siecle, Vol. III, (Paris, Armand Colin, 1979), pp. 61-64. 9. Ibid. p. 20. 10. Fernand Braudel. Le temps du monde..., op. cit., ibid.. p. 12-14, p. 62-68. The world economy is the largest zone of consistency in any given period and in a global field, a sum of individualized economic and non-economic spaces that ordinarily transgresses the limits of other large groupings of history and business. Francois Fourquet, under the term _ecomonde_, has undertaken a more systematic theorization than the conceptions of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein in:La richesse et la puissance. Publication provisoire: Commissariat general du Plan, Convention d'etude 984, (Paris, 1987).[ Wealth and Power. Provisional Publication: General Commissionership of Planning]

11. Cf. my study, in collaboration with Eric Alliez, Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes, in Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, (London, Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 273-287. 12. Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg, (New York, Semiotext(e), 1991), pp. 21-22. 13. Philippe Boudon, La ville de Richelieu, op. cit., p. 17. 14. Vittorio Ugo, Une hutte, une clairiere, Critique: 476, 477; L'objet architecture, (Paris, Minuit, jan.-fev. I987) 15. In the sense that Heidegger has given this term in Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York, Harper and Row, 1975) 16. Massimo Cacciari, Critique, op. cit. 17. I refer here to the three categories of enunciation (cognitive, ethical, aesthetic) -- proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in _Esthetique et theorie du roman_, (Paris, Gallimard, 1978). 18. Melanie Klein, Contributions: Contributions to Psycho-analysis, (London, Hogarth Press, 1950). 19. D.W. Winnicott, La psychanalyse, (Paris, PUF, 1959). [The End]