Deleuz's narrative series

In The Logic of Sense (section 33) Gilles Deleuze defines novelists/artists as "clinicians of civilisation". Great authors are more like doctors than their patients - in that, like great clinicians, they create a set of disorders out of disorder, a table or grouping of symptoms out of disparate symptoms, so that "it is not the [Freudian Oedipus] complex which provides us with information about Oedipus and Hamlet, but rather Oedipus and Hamlet who provide us with information about the complex". For Deleuze, this creation of disorders takes on a particular character. In truth, for him, these structurings are not created from "disorder", since that would be to define the "choasmos" of differences - "disorder" in common parlance - by means of the notion of order; that is, it would be to define differences in terms of sameness - something he had spent the whole of his preceding book, Difference and Repetition, battling against. Thus the creation of disorders can only occur within a field where originary difference has been proclaimed and acknowledged, and where every notion of the same or the one is derived from, or "said of" (as he puts it) that which always and from the start differs. The exemplary novelist - Deleuze cites Joyce's Ulysses, Proust and Robbe-Grillet - disposes within this original difference two heterogeneous series of signifier and signified (section 6). These two series resonate through a single homogenous series of names where each term can be seen to relate to the preceding one and the next one, thus: n1 - n2 - n3 - n4... The first name, or signifier, relates to the second name/signifier, relates to the third etc in the familiar continuous chain of signifiers. But it is the novelist's task to consider this homogenous chain instead from the point of view of "that which alternates in this succession" - ie the alternation of signified and signifier through the terms - and to allow these to resonate. In the case of Joyce, for instance, there is a series surrounding "Bloom" which is given as the signifying set; and a corresponding signified series "Ulysses"; between which the author establishes a resonance and relation by various means. In the case of Robbe-Grillet, the two series operate on the smaller scale of descriptions of tiny "states of affairs" against "rigorous designations". In all cases, it is for Deleuze the differences between the series and their terms which "become [through the auspices of the author] primary", not the resemblances. This paper will attempt a preliminary transposition of these Deleuzian strategies onto a creative spatial field. Can a place be disposed according to this strategy of primary difference, homogenous chain of signifiers and the creative diagnosis of two resonating, heterogeneous series? In this case, what would constitute the two aspects of sense? How does this relate to the stoic disjunctive logic of the state of affairs of bodies and the entirely other order of "events", which hover over states of affair as "the battle hovers over its own field" (section 15)? It will be shown that the creation of a place must, like literature, stay true to Deleuze's words in Difference and Repetition: ... [it] opens on to the difference of Being by taking its own difference as object - in other works, by posing the question of its own difference (p195

The construction of architecture

This paper will proceed, via a brief discussion of Hans-Georg Gadamer�s anti-aesthetics of architecture, to outline why the architectural metaphor in philosophy is never simply a metaphor, using as a guide the critique of origins and sources contained in Jacques Derrida�s essay Qual Quelle. The question will be raised as to whether the tools and structures of philosophy, such as the difference between materiality and non-materiality, abstract thought and practice, are entirely adequate to architectural debate; and whether, in questioning these structures, it is possible to address Bataille�s critique of architecture (as interpreted in Denis Hollier�s Against Architecture) as the expression of pre-existing social order and power

Under what grace

There is an apparently paradoxical nature to resistance. Resistance is resistance against something, towards which it appears inimical. This resisted thing, however, requires such resistance in order to define itself and keep itself safe. Should it fail to do so, that which succeeds it will require resistance in turn. This paradox � a prevailing order requires that which is opposed to it, and that which overcomes is resisted in turn � occurs within time thought as a successive order of past, present and future moments. Two temporal displacements (those of simultaneity and reversal) are evoked, not in order to resolve the paradox but to displace it and hint at an other strategy of resistance

Architecture is always in the middle...

<p>This essay proposes an ontology of architecture that takes its lead from the bread and butter of architecture: a flat ontology opposed to Cartesianism in the sense that no differentiation between realms (body/mind, high/low) is accepted. The work of Spinoza and Deleuze is referred to in order to flesh out such an ontology, whose aim is to destroy the very desire for architecture and architectural theory to <em>even pose the question</em> about the difference between bread-and-butter architecture and high architecture. Architecture is shown to be of the nature of an assemblage, of a machine or a haecceity (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase), and the implications of this in relation to the question of composition and reception are outlined.</p

Unity and inevitability: Classic/Baroque and the universal

In conclusion Woelfflin outlines four formal characteristics of Classic Art: • repose, spaciousness, mass and size • simplification and lucidity • complexity • unity and inevitability The final of these (which completes the book) is decisive: if classic art has a certain coldness, then this is surely to do with its respect of the predestined One, as Woelfflin's own comparison of Ghirlandaio's masterpiece with Leonardo's chilly Last Supper illustrates. For Woelfflin, the Classic is unified, and can be ascertained formally by an analysis of the form of the work, although he is careful to state that the work is much more than just form – a warning which is all too often not taken account of. In his various works on the 17th century thinkers Spinoza and Leibnitz, whose work he links with a specifically Baroque conception of the world, Gilles Deleuze contrasts their philosophies with “classic” philosophy, which runs as a specific stream from Aristotle through to Descartes (and beyond, to Kant). Classic philosophy is essentialist, whereby a thing is defined as that which fulfils its essence to a greater or lesser extent; and it is substantialist whereby a thing is defined as substance and therefore as form. As Deleuze says, substance is, at bottom, form. There is therefore a non-coincidental coherence between Woelfflin's formal method of ascertaining what classic art is, and the nature – in general – of the classic as defined philosophically. The classic is defined in classic fashion – by means of a unified essence and the form of a substance. What then of the Baroque? If there is a coherence between the abstract thought of classicism and the way in which classic art and architecture is defined, then can a similar link be made between the anti-classic philosophers of the Baroque age and Baroque architecture? Spinoza's question is not about essence, but about power: he famously asks in the Ethics: what can a body do? The thing (architecture included) is no longer a substance with a form, but is a collection of relations, a series of nested individualities to infinity (Spinoza), a series of folds to infinity (Leibnitz). The relational character of reality extends, for the baroque, to the mathematics of integration and differentiation – dx/dy as the subsistence of the relation in the absence of its terms. This paper will explore these Baroque relationships with reference to the strands of classicism running through 17th century architecture (eg Bernini) and its rivalry with the “true” baroque (eg Borromini)

Systems and relations all the way down, all the way across

This article proposes a hyper-relational theory of the world, conjoining cybernetics, information theory, general systems theory, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari and quantum physics in order to show that systems and relations go all the way down, all the way across.  I give an exposition of Shannon’s information theory, and draw connections with quantum mechanics. The work of Bertalanffy is discussed and its relationship to philosophy and quantum mechanics outlined.  I then critique the naïve, realist account of reality; what is proposed in its place is a hyper-relational ontology whereby entities (being) are epiphenomena of relations (becoming). The implications of this ontology in relation to architecture are discussed by contrasting it with, on the one hand, a hylomorphic approach to the essence of architecture (which foregrounds entities) and, on the other, a hermeneutic approach (which foregrounds meaning).  Buildings are epiphenomena of broader political, interpersonal, ecological and essentially relational matters, assemblages, systems and interplays, and this hyper-relationality is the ontology of architecture