rap off!

"I like DeLanda’s basic argument: which is to insist on the exteriority of relations. Traditionally, positivist, atomistic thought has pretty much denied the importance of relations between entities: the entities themselves are the absolutes, and all relations between them are merely accidental. Thus neoclassical economics adopts a “methodological individualism” according to which “all that matters are rational decisions made by individual persons in isolation from one another” . On the other hand, what DeLanda calls the “organismic metaphor” asserts that entities are entirely defined by the totality to which they belong, entirely constituted by their relations: “the basic concept in this theory is what we may call relations of interiority: the component parts are constituted by the very relations they have to other parts in the whole”. Hegelian thought is the most powerful example of this tendency, thought Saussurean linguistics and the “structuralism” influenced by it could also be mentioned."

extracted from Shaviro's Post on: DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society

I would like to focus on two rather interesting points of this short quote:

the relations of exteriority and methodological individualism

The concept of relations of exteriority is what gives to an assemblage its machinic character. Those relations are coming to repose Autopoiesis as a machinic autopoiesis that is open both organizational and informational.

At the same time this short quote raises another issue that has to do with "methodological individualism" and Hayek's opposition on collectivism. Delanda's attempt to move obliquely from Hayek's individualism and Keynes' collectivism with a very insightful way will be extended to a project that he will call A New Philosophy of Society. it is not annoying for my understanding the use of the world new, since the last 50 years we tend to believe that nothing new and novel can be produced.

hypertrophic state

why those two approaches are so politically different?

creativity and experimentation are to be discussed...

but what does it mean to overlay one system on top of another without any intrinsic communication between the two and what does it mean to exploit a system? The failure of the system is its success. They did manage to push the system in a hypertrophic state... to maximize its virtual states, to push it beyond of what is meant to be. It is this possibility to think the impossible that marks the second example as political resistive.

I would like to close this post with what E. Dijkstra said in 1972:

“I have the feeling that one of the most important aspects of any computing tool is its influence on the thinking habits of those that try to use it.”

now replace computing tools with any technological machine and you would have them opened into a machinic field. Experimentation becomes the mode to generate and acquire knowledge.

algorithmic text as beyond text

"today to write theory means to write code"

Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit

theorization and its mode of experimentation. I will come back on this shortly, it is a field that we would like to exploit by putting forward an interdisciplinary web platform. The goal is not to destroy IT but to push IT into a hypertrophic state, further than IT is meant to go... this is resistance through an active experimentation

Architecture of Consequence

"Architecture of Consequence proves that any notion that architecture should be an "expression of its time," or should do no more than express the vanity of its commissioners, pales into insignificance when compared to its tremendous potential for resolving urgent societal problems".

architect 3.0

citizen architect or if you prefer architect 3.0

I will have to stick with my old man... at some point Peter says... "I do not believe that architecture is about makin' a better world! architecture is about challenges, changes is about suggesting a truly open future"

cause if we believe that is about making a better world then we have to define what is "better", to reveal our moralistic principles but at the same time we need to avoid not to be trapped in an anthropocentric approach... a "better" world maybe is not exactly what this trailer would like to promote... this is a homeostatic view of world that through entropy will die soon or latter...

thus we need to free our ethics from moralistic principles and to embrace the ethics of emergence... to be able to mutate and change by dynamically forming networks or better heterogeneous assemblages that would proliferate world in a truly open and unpredictable future where afresh will be ready to affect and be affected, to challenge and be challenged... this is what architect 3.0 needs to take under consideration. he or she needs to become an ant not a God, a system designer and not a MegaEgo, an architect that constructs distributed, ill defined, open, participatory systems.

from the other hand, I might be completely wrong... well, that is part of the risk I have decided to take...

Spatial Thinking

Spatial Thinking:: Architecture and Neuroscience [do not] communicate

Olafur Eliasson: Space is Process

Space

[leave a space]

do we mean the same thing...?

Space is one of these notions that you can find in thousand different contexts.

space alone, space as opposed to time or space in spatiotemporal continuum...?

there is no clear definitions of space... everytime that someone tries to articulate one it slips, moves, mutates. It doesn't stay still, it is in a continuous construction, it is always in becoming.

So, I will turn back to an artist and not an architect to help me formulate an understanding of space. Olafur Eliasson(2008) will agree that “it is crucial to recognize [space's] temporal aspect. Space does not simply exist in time; it is of time.” It is this continuous becoming of the space that affects and is been affected by users' actions that architects were trying to express in today's twofold workshop in Bartlett at UCL.

confront the unexpected

"Many people refuse to be absorbed by something they don’t know. Žižek talks about Kinder eggs. Kinder eggs were forbidden in California in the mid-1960s because it was a total disruption of American life where everything needed to be predictable, and here you didn’t know what was inside. You could buy cocaine but not Kinder eggs because they thought it could corrupt the young. Kinder eggs were made by the Germans after the war to reconnect to the unknown and to force the kids away from the lazy period where everything was free. It’s a beautiful articulation of knowledge."

Francois Roche in a conversation with graphic novelist Warren Ellis, moderated by blogger Geoff Manaugh, at the Architectural Association, London, 29 May 2009.