Guattari, Félix (1989): Architectural Enunciation

 Guattari, Félix (1989): Architectural Enunciation[1]

 (...)

The architectural object flies to pieces. It is useless to cling to what it has been or should be. Situated at the intersection of political stakes of the utmost importance, of demographic and ethnic tensions, of economic, social and regional antagonisms that are by no means nearing resolution, spurred on by constant technological and industrial mutations, the architectural object is irreversibly condemned to being tugged and torn in all directions. Nothing infers, however, that we should take an eclectic course of action in such a state of affairs, which on the contrary demands an exacerbation of the ethico-political choices that have always underlain the practice of this profession. From now on it will be impossible to take refuge behind art for art’s sake or pure science with a clear conscience. To reinvent architecture can no longer be taken to mean the revival of a style, a school, or a theory with hegemonic tendencies, but rather to recompose the architectural enunciation, and in a sense, the métier of the architect under today’s conditions.

When architects stop trying simply to be plasticians of built form and begin to offer their services as revealers of the virtual desires of space, place, journeys and territory, then they will have to analyse the relations between individual and collective corporeities by constantly singularising their approach. And furthermore they will have to become intercessors between those desires revealed to themselves and those interests they oppose; in other words, they will have to be artists and craftsmen of perceptual and relational lived-experience [vécu] (...) I believe they are in the position of having to analyse for themselves certain specific functions of subjectivation.5 For this reason they will be able to constitute, along with many other social and cultural operators, an essential relay within the multi-headed assemblages of enunciation that can deal with the contemporary productions of subjectivity, both pragmatically and analytically. Consequently, this is far from placing the architect in the role of simply being a critical observer.

The emphasis having thus shifted from object to project, an architectural work, whatever the characteristics of its semiotic expression and its semantic content may be, will now require a specific elaboration of its enunciative “material”: how should one practice architecture today? What part of themselves do architects need to mobilize? What kind of commitment should they be making and which operators should they use? (...)

It’s a matter of a highly elaborate transferential economy, and one that I will now examine from the point of view of the two forms of consistency of the enunciation of an architectural concept:

—The first one polyphonic, of the perceptual order, inherent to the deployment of the components concurrent with its discursive coming into existence; and

—The second one ethico-aesthetic, of the affective order, inherent to its non-discursive “coming into being”.

The Polyphonic Components

Under the category of scale, Philippe Boudon has listed twenty ways of conceptualising the architectural object, all essentially based on the category of space. He then proposes to regroup these into four categories:

—Scales that refer real space to itself (geographical, optical visibility, proximity and apportionmental scales);

—Scales that refer architectural space to an exterior referent (formal, symbolic, technical, functional, extensional, dimensionally symbolic, socio-cultural, modelling and economic scales);

—Scales that refer architectural space to its representation (geometric, cartographical, and representational scales); and

—Lastly, scales of architectural thought processes that involve a constant to-ing and fro-ing between different spaces (to “put into scale”, “give scale” etc.)

(...) As Henri von Lier writes, “a significant work of architecture always has the ability to be other than what it is. A dwelling is not dwelling per se, but refers to dwelling: it is one of its possibilities appearing

as such.” Nevertheless, I have selected eight kinds of assemblages from this continuous spectrum of virtual enunciations to reflect those “voices” that seem to me to be active in contemporary architecture.

1. A geopolitical enunciation taking into account not only the orientation of cardinal points but also the contours of the land and the climatic and demographic givens, which evolve over long periods like Fernand Braudel’s secular trends causing the centre of gravity within “an archipelago of towns” to drift according to the fluctuations of the world-economy.

2. An urbanistic enunciation relative to the laws, regulations, habits and customs, concerning the size of parcels of land, the arrangement and volumes of buildings, as well as the mechanisms for contamination between various models and images (referring to what Philippe Boudon calls the scale of proximity). The interlocutors here can take the hard form of local authorities and state bodies or the “fuzzy” form of a collective state of mind, opinions more or less controlled by the media.

3. An economic enunciation, the capitalistic expression of relations of force between the different systems of individual and collective valorisation: the use of a relative evaluation of costs and demand in terms of projected profits, prestige, political impact and social usefulness to fix the exchange value

of real-estate property and to “drive” the choices and scales of investment in the domain of construction.

4. A functional enunciation or function of equipment that considers built spaces according to their specific uses. Collective equipment as well as equipment for private use becomes integrated into a double network of:

a) “horizontal” complementary relations positioning each constructed segment in the set of urban structures now interconnected within world capitalism, and

b) “vertical” relations of integration ranging from the micro-equipment (lighting, ventilation, communication, etc.) up to the infrastructural macro-equipment.

(...)

Consequently, the collective enunciators here will be:

—The social stratifications according to resources, age group, regional characteristics, ethnic divisions, etc.

—The social bodies sectored according to their specialised activities of an economic, cultural nature or by a state of assistance (internment, incarceration, etc.).

—The programmers, experts, and technicians of all sorts, having the position of stating the constraints and norms of architectural writing.

5. A technical enunciation implying that the equipment and, more generally, the construction materials “speak” in terms of fixed standards, stating, for example, “the slope of a 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 ease of handling, transportability or implementation.”

(...)

6. A signifying enunciation whose aim, independent of functional semantemes, is to allocate a significant content to a built form, which is shared by a more or less extensive human community, but which is always delineated by all the other communities not sharing the same type of content. We rediscover several of Philippe Boudon’s scales here. At one scale a building comes to embody a symbolic form independent of its size (for example, the cross plan of Christian churches). At another scale, the plan of an ideologically explicit model is transferred to a construction (the ideal city of Vitruvius; the rural, industrial and commercial cities of Le Corbusier). At yet another scale, a more or less unconscious socio-cultural scheme intervenes (such as the central courtyard that Arab builders probably inherited from Roman antiquity). Or at another even more vague scale, a global style is

conferred onto an urban settlement (such as the self-enclosed character of a small Tuscan town, being the opposite extreme of North American agglomerations that open onto a transfinite spatium and cling, as best they can, to the flow of motorway traffic).

7. An enunciation of existential territorialisation that is as much of an ethological order as of a perspective one, in which I will locate the three types of spaces distinguished by Vittorio Ugo.

—Euclidean spaces under the ægis of Apollo, univocally positioning an object identity within the framework of an axiomatico-deductive logic in which is inscribed a “primary and elementary architecture in all the clarity of its crystalline perfection, always identical to itself and devoid of any ambiguity or internal contradiction”.

— Projective spaces under the ægis of Morpheus, positioning forms of a modulated identity within metamorphic perspectives, affirming the primacy of “the imaginary above the real, vision above

speech, extension above usefulness, the plan above perception”.

— Labyrinthine topological spaces under the ægis of Dionysus, functioning as existential space according to a geometry of the envelopment of the tactile body that already refers us to the register

of affects.

Architectural space is one concrete operator among others in the metabolism between objects on the outside and intensities on the inside. But even if the interplay of correspondences between the human body and its habitat has been explored continuously, from Vitruvius to Leonardo da Vinci and Le Corbusier, perhaps it is henceforth less a question of considering these correspondences from a formal point of view than from one that could be described as organic. As Massimo Cacciari writes, “Any authentic organism is labyrinthine”. And let’s not forget that the labyrinthine (or rhizomatic) characteristics of existential territorialisation can have multiple fractal dimensions.

8. A scriptural enunciation that articulates all the other enunciative components. Because of the diagrammatic distance that it introduces between expression and content, and through the coefficients of creativity that it generates, architectural projection promotes new potentialities, new constellations of universes of reference, starting with those which preside over the deployment of ethico-aesthetic aspects of the built object. 

The Ethico-Aesthetic Ordinates

Architectural enunciation is not limited to these diachronic discursive components: it is just as much a matter of the capture of consistency within synchronic existential dimensions, or ordinates on a level. Following Bakhtin I will distinguish three types:

—Cognitive ordinates, namely the energetico-spatio-temporal coordinates that pertain to the logic of everything discursive. It is in this register that the scriptural enunciation of architecture concatenates

the first five types of assemblages of enunciation listed above.

—Axiological ordinates, including all the systems of anthropocentric valorisation of aesthetic, economic and political orders.

—Aesthetic ordinates determining the thresholds of completion of entities, objects or structural groups, inasmuch as they are able to transmit meaning and form on their own account. It is up to these ethico-aesthetic ordinates to intertwine the components of signifying enunciations and existential deterritorialization with the other components. Thus the built object, lived reality [le vécu] and the

incorporeal find themselves rearticulating each other, despite the fact that capitalist corporations are ceaselessly trying to eliminate any trace of subjective singularisation from their architecture and urbanism in an effort to achieve a rigorously functional, informational and communicational transparency.

(...)

Under its exterior discursive aspect this object establishes itself at the intersection of a thousand tensions that pull it in every direction, but under its ethicoaesthetic enunciative aspects it reassembles itself in a non-discursive mode, whose phenomenological approach is given to us through the particular

experience of spatialised affects. Below the threshold of cognitive consistency the architectural object collapses into the imaginary, the dream or delirium, while below a threshold of axiological consistency the dimensions of alterity and desire are exhausted—like those cinematic images that fail to interest the aborigines of Australia—and below the threshold of aesthetic consistency it ceases to capture the form’s existence and the intensities destined to inhabit it.

What therefore defines the art of the architect, in the final analysis, is the capacity to apprehend these affects of spatialised enunciation. But it must be admitted that it concerns paradoxical objects that cannot be delineated by the coordinates of ordinary rationality; they can only be approached indirectly by meta-modelisation, by an aesthetic detour, and by mythical or ideological narratives. Like the part-objects of Melanie Klein, or the transitional objects of Winnicott, this kind of affect establishes itself

transversally on the most heterogeneous levels; therefore we must not homogenise them but, on the contrary, engage them further in the fractal process of heterogenesis. Architectural form is not destined to function as a gestalt closed in on itself, but as a catalytic operator setting off chain reactions among the modes of semiotisation, which draw us out of ourselves and expose us to new fields of possibility. The feeling of intimacy and existential singularity contiguous with the aura given off by a familiar situation, an old dwelling or a landscape inhabited by our memories, establishes itself in the rupture of the redundancies emptied of their substance, and can be the generator of a proliferation and lines of flight in all the registers of the desire to live, of the refusal to give in to the dominant inertia. It is the

same movement of existential territorialisation and capture of synchronic consistency, for example, that will make things “work” together (...) 

All the cartographic methods that can help achieve this will be valid since their commitment—

let’s not shrink from this old Sartrean concept that has been taboo for too long—will find its own regime of ethico-aesthetic automisation. The only criterion of truth confronting the architect will then be the effect of an existential completeness and an overabundance of being, which will never be absent so long as he has the good fortune to be caught up in a process of becoming-an-event, that is to say, the historical enrichment and re-singularisation of desire and values.

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[1] L’énonciation architecturale” from Félix Guattari’s Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989: 291-301).