Tuesday 2 December 2014

Fabulation in the Anthropocene

"We have lost what it means to be an architect; we have lost this notion. It does not mean constructing a building. Many people construct buildings, but are they necessarily architects? No! So why are we architects? To define a political-aesthetic condition of construction where we produce something in order to destabilise that habits of a situation. I don't think there is anything else for us, because if we take the job of an architect, it is not for the beauty of the building alone, or for the arrogance of the discourse, or to become that master of ceremonies which so many young egos want to become today, but to question the condition of production and the context of practice." 

Roche, F.(2014) Matters of Fabulation: On the Construction of Realities in the Anthropocene. In Architecture in the Anthropocene ed. Ettien Turpin. p. 197 

Guattari's Ecosophical Logic

"Unlike Hegelian and Marxist Dialectics, eco-logic no longer imposes a 'resolution' of opposites. In the domain of social ecology there will be times of struggle in which everyone will feel impelled to decide on common objectives and to act 'like little soldiers', by which I mean good activists. But there will simultaneously be periods in which individual and collective subjectivities will pull out without a thought for collective aims, and in which creative expression as such will take precedence. This new ecosophical logic -- and I want to emphasise this point -- resembles the manner in which an artist may be led to alter his work after the intrusion of some accidental detail, an event-incident that suddenly makes his initial project bifurcate. making a drift [deriver] far from its previous path, however certain it had once appeared to. There is a proverb 'the exception proves the rule/, but the exception can just as easily deflect the rule, or even recreate it."

Guattari, F (2000) Three Ecologies. Coninuum: London. p. 34 

Friday 14 November 2014

Deductive, Inductive, Transductive

"Gilbert Simondon: There is a third way of progress that I try to think through; the notion of transductivity (transductivité). It is the passage of an assembly consisting in a set. In this sense, something is transductive which is transmitted to the next, which eventually propagates with amplification. It is the passage of the triode (electron tube) to the transistor, that is to say, from one system to another where voltages and currents are not the same. Another example would be an aircraft engine from, without doubt, the motorcycle engine; lightweight, reliable and not requiring water cooling. In all cases we use an analogy where the real differences are taken into account and not a simple approximate reasoning." Interview here

Sunday 17 August 2014

Human-Machine vs Human/s-Machine/s

"The issue is no longer to adapt, even after violence, but to localise. Where is your place?" Deleuze on Humans-Machines ATP p.570

Wednesday 20 November 2013

the autism of autopoietic architecture.

The fascination of the interiority of the discipline of architecture and the constant attempt either to demarcate its boundaries or to penetrate them and to push them further, might seem not adequate as a response to the challenges of today. We have had invested spontaneity and self-organisation with enough faith to excuse our blind experimentations and vague attempts to redefine architecture, architects and the bodies that inhabit it. Above the state of affairs there are Events that supervene them. A dark precursor will momentarily 'decide' at the same paradoxical time that the effects of that decision will wash 'him' out. Deleuze and Whitehead speculated about this stange entity with the incorporeal capacity to decide. Both approached philosophy from the process side. The first via the transcendent empiricism and immanent materialism while the second one through a formal axiomatic ontology. Both though were aimed to construct a complementary to each other ontology for the subject of the new science.

Thursday 14 November 2013

Biology and Sex

‘Sex in the biological sense has nothing to do with copulation; neither is it intrinsically related to reproduction or gender. Sex is a genetic mixing in organisms that operates at a variety of levels; it occurs in some organisms at more than one level simultaneously’. (Slanted Truths, p.285).

Marguilis, L., Sagan, D.(1997) Slanted Truths: Essay on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution. Springer

Friday 8 November 2013

The Martyr of General Speculativeness



"The sixteenth century of our era saw the disruption of Western Christianity and the rise of modern science. ... Copernicus and Vesalius may be chosen as representative figures.... Giordano Bruno was the martyr... the cause for which he suffered was not that of science, but that of free imaginative speculation. In his execution there was an unconscious symbolism: for the subsequent tone of scientific thought has contained distrust of his type of general speculativeness." 

Whitehead, A.N(1985) Science and the Modern World. Free Association Books, London. p1-2
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