Architecture for a Free Subjectivity reformulates the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze's model of subjectivity for architecture,
by surveying the prolific effects of architectural encounter,
and the spaces that figure in them. For Deleuze and his Lacanian
collaborator Félix Guattari, subjectivity does not refer
to a person, but to the potential for and event of matter becoming
subject, and the myriad ways for this to take place.
By extension, this book theorizes architecture as a self-actuating
or creative agency for the liberation of purely "impersonal effects."
Imagine a chemical reaction, a riot in the banlieues, indeed a walk
through a city. Simone Brott declares that the architectural object
does not merely take part in the
production of subjectivity, but that it constitutes its own.
This book is to date the only attempt to develop Deleuze's
philosophy of subjectivity in singularly architectural terms.
Through a screening of modern and postmodern, American and European
works, this provocative volume draws the reader into a close
encounter with architectural interiors, film scenes,
and other arrangements, while interrogating the discourses of
subjectivity surrounding them, and the
evacuation of the subject in the contemporary discussion.
The impersonal effects of architecture radically
changes the methodology, just as it reimagines architectural
subjectivity for the twenty-first century.
Introduction
This book imagines and articulates an architectural subjectivity
privileged as
impersonal effects, to be explored in the philosophy
of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, by retracing steps taken
earlier, in the 1970s and 1980s, by cultural
and architectural
protagonists in the united States and japan. the following
discussions pursue a more abstract and, therefore, timely
investigation of the form
and function of
impersonal effects in the architectural encounter.
Subjectivity is, for Deleuze, not a person, but a power given to
immanent
forces to act and to produce effects in the world.
In short, it is the field of what
i call subjectivization, meaning
the potential for and event of matter becoming
subject, and the
multiple ways for this to take place.
Deleuze, in fact, tends not to
use the word subjectivity, speaking
instead of “affects”—the capacity to affect and
be affected—and
“pre-personal singularities,” meaning those irreducible qualities
or powers that act independently of any particular person.
To walk, to see, to
love—these are general or anonymous capacities
that function in a very real sense
prior to the personological
subject.
Singular, here, does not mean specific or rare,
but the reverse:
the functions to sleep or to laugh are singular because sleeping
and
laughing always retain a certain abstract quality or
impersonality, no matter who
sleeps or laughs.
For Deleuze, the world is composed of so many singularities,
which together
resonate silently toward a mystery of something
always already yet to come.
the subject is understood, therefore,
not as identity but as a convergence of
singularities immanent to
an encounter.
Deleuze is critical of both phenomenology
and psychoanalysis, as still engaging a classical (Cartesian)
notion of subject as
individual or free agent, a form of subjectivity
premised on the separation of
the subject and the object of that
subject’s attention.
In Deleuze’s worldview,
the ordinary identity, the “i” of the
representational ego, is a ‘surface effect’ of impersonal processes
of differentiation and the repetition of pre-personal
singularities.
What i call the impersonal effects are the inchoate,
not-yet-determined
fragments of architectural encounter,
as opposed to the personal effects of identity,
individuality or
the constituted collective.
Effect is not, in Deleuze’s sense,
ephemeral—an effect of something
more primary; but rather, like a “magnetic
effect,”
it is a productive force, an effect that works and creates.
By extension,
the project here is to find and express, by
architectural means, the image of
effects.
(Image, here, does not mean a photograph or
a media image; but, rather,
a live “arrangement”
of effects at large in the world, like the realist cinema and
its image advocated by André Bazin.)
What qualifies such a pure (unmediated and unmediatic) image is
simply the mode in which it causes multiple effects to
proliferate.
Unlike personal effects (a watch, a ring, a condominium) that cling
to the
personal body, the impersonal effects of architecture—such as
those of a street,
a store, or the bathroom at a party—belong to
everyone and to no one; they
envelop the body from a distance, even
when they are up close. however, the impersonal effects can always
become repersonalized in their derivative mode
where architecture
becomes objectified, the object of a proprietary relationship
(such as ‘my house’) where subject/object relations are restored.
Personal effects in architecture generally produce a formalist
typology of
effects, invoking a suite of terms such as plan and
gestalt—in other words, the
entire discursive apparatus of ‘design.’
But this is not to criticize such formalistic
measures per se.
Only the most rigid and stultifying formalisms (for example,
those that prescribe architecture in advance and re-inscribe the
proprietary status
of building, author, resident) must be avoided
when discussing or isolating
impersonal effects. Architecture is not merely
what is made or planned, what is
drawn or built. It also creates,
alters, and conditions interlocking subjectivized
fields.
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