Limits of fluxion
2012
fluxions of sense
“The Arcadia of dangerous hunts and lost shadows will become the name of an artificial landscape lived like the policed counterpart of the city and like the appeased memory of a shivering and otherwise dangerous excess (démesure)…”1
Following Foucault’s classification of prisons, asylums, the panopticon, schools, confessionals, factories, disciplines, juridical measures and architecture, Giorgio Agamben counts language (together with writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers and mobile phones) as perhaps the most ancient of dispositifs (apparatuses or devices):
“I call dispositif everything that has, in one way or another, the capacity to capture, to orient, to determine, to intercept, to model, to control and to assure the gestures, conducts, opinions and speech of living beings.”2
The apparatus is not merely a tool available to a subject, but a means of producing subjects, subjectivations and subjugations by creating a scission between living being, self and milieu. This scission, which Heidegger names the receptor-disinhibitor cycle, leads to profound boredom (Langeweile, the `lengthening of the while’) and to the Open, or to being `open in captivation’3 – “that is, the possibility of knowing the being as being, to construct a world, and with this possibility, the possibility of apparatuses which populate the Open with instruments, objects, gadgets, things and technologies of all kinds.” The apparatus, and with it the entire technological enterprise, functions by making available to common usage - or in Agamben’s terms by profaning - the things, places, animals or people that had once been consecrated into a separate, sacred sphere.4
For Heidegger, Technology is a mode of revealing, a manner of poietic production that discloses (aletheia/truth) in a double gesture poised on a turning. This turning is an ambiguous condition that reveals even as it preserves for the revealed a measure of withdrawal and concealment. The revealed both advances and retreat, and in that encounters the danger that haunts every advent (Ereignis), every production and every bringing into presence. The danger manifests in the flash of a shimmering limit, or in the halo that rings every look and every appearance (Eraügnis, Auge, eye).5 But Aletheia also has the sense of `un-sheltering,’ from which the sense of `errant divinity,’ ale-theia, was signalled by Plato in the Cratylus.6 The danger then becomes the risk that apparatuses of technology will profane what they reveal by a radical and total exposure to the absence of sheltering-concealment - so much so that on the one hand they will have nowhere to hide and on the other they will become destined to oblivion.
In Heraclitus’ fragment on the Delphic oracle - “the master to whom belongs the oracle of Delphi neither reveals (legei) nor conceals (krupthei) but signals (semainei).”7 Jean Christophe Bailly identifies the revealed or said – that is, language – with the possibility of the human, and concealment with that of nature (phusis), which is its permanent manifestation. ‘Phusis krupthestai philei’ – nature loves to hide itself:8
“The opposition is therefore that of speech and silence, of a proposition and a negation (derobade): it is the normal game of speculation which opens here. But the third mode, which belongs to the god, is different, and it is as if he transcended speculation to inscribe himself in a proposition tainted with obscurity and silence: it is still a case of speech, but blurry (floue), and this blurriness – constitutive of the oracle – is not an added value, it is the very mode of the constitution of truth: we can raise the veil, but in veiling again…» – that is, it is not an artifice, but «of the order of provenance, which comes with the oracle, and is not a resolution, but an opening to the open of the enigma.”9
This is the apparatus of language, to which we are all destined. An apparatus which flexes to exfoliate sense and the interminable reflux of semantic mobility. If Hermogenes believed in the rectitude or truth value of names and Cratylus in the theory of the perpetual flux of sense,10 for Deleuze, language is a system, an apparatus in perpetual disequilibrium. Its normative mode is stammering and babbling (bégayer, balbutier), according to which language struggles with its own limit even as it enunciates.11 The struggle is a shuttling rhythm, folding and unfolding to produce sense as weaving and hemming (ourlant) – where the hem is a fold that prevents the borders of sense from fraying and the weave from unravelling.12 With this rhythm, sense ravels and unravels, arrives and departs in the same gesture. Words don’t concretise or crystallise meaning – rather, they are traces of the waves of its interminable disappearance. They do not capture sense but captivate it into a withdrawal that is the presentiment of an un-evadable evanescence.
exfoliation
“Now to unfold signifies that I develop, that I undo the infinitely small folds that never cease to agitate the depths, but in order to trace a large fold on the face of which forms appear … ”13
Both space and flow are liminal words. They preserve the sense of an expansion to the brink, to a moment just before the breach, to a condition of excess where the limit threatens to burst. Space is from the etymon *SPA- = to expand, span, draw out, have room, prosper, accomplish, reach satiation. Flow is from *PLEU-, in the sense of an excessive pluvial outpouring, and *BHLEU = to swell up, in the sense of a pullulating thriving, blooming and flowering. The etymon *PLE gives ply, peel, flay, unfold. Flux inheres because of the fold, because of being the folding-unfolding reflux of becoming. The fold is involved and involving, it harbours a flux of implications. In it, something implicit and implied is hidden in replete profusion – an implicit exfoliation and application, a tactic or strategy of emplotment - a ploy or play, a scheming plot.
There are five senses implied in the word fold, a fivefold rhythm of articulation and exfoliation: weave, play, flat, flow and full.14
Weave: French: plier; Latin: plico/plicare = fold; applicare = join, attach; turn or direct towards; Middle English: aplien = apply; Greek: plekein/ploke, Latin: plectere = to plait, weave ; German: flechten = braid, plait, twist, entwine; English: pliable = flexible, able to be continually worked - from *PLEK/FLEH = to plait, weave, fold together; Anglosaxon: fleax = flax; Latin: flectere = bend.
Play: Anglosaxon: plega = play, stroke, blow, battle; German: pflege = care, plight; work at steadily; urge, toil; cf. Greek: polemos, pelomai = warfare; Anglosaxon: pliht = risk, danger; Latin: periculum (cf. peri- = limit); Anglosaxon: pleon, pleoh = risk, peril, danger; Old High German: pflegan = answer for; plegan = promise or engage to do; Middle Englsih: plyte = state, condition, situation; pledge = security, surety; plegge = hostage; Old Saxon: plegan = attend to, promise, pledge; English: plot = conspiracy, stratagem - abbreviated from plotform/platform = plan, map or sketch of a place.
Flat: *PLAT = spread out; Greek: platus = broad, flattened-out; platos = breadth; plate = blade of an oar, plate; plax = molding board, flat surface; plateia = place, open square, street; Latin: planta = sole of the foot, spreading shoot, plant; Sanskrit: prath = spread out; prthu = broad; prthivi = earth; Anglosaxon: plaec/plek = a place; cf. English: floor; Middle English/Angosaxon: flor, German: flur, Indogermanic: pla- = spread out; Latin: planus = plain; cf. *PLAQ/*FLOK = strike (down, flat); Greek: plakos = flat surface; plakinos = made of boards; Latin: placenta = flat cake; planca = plank; German: flach = flat.
Flow: *PLEU/*FLEU = swim, float, flow; Sanskrit: plu = swim, fly; plauaya = innundate; Greek: pleein = sail, float; ploion = vessel; plunein = wash; Latin: pluuia = rain; flere = weep; Anglosaxon: flowan = flow; flod = flood; fleot = that which floats, ship, fleet.
Full: *PLE = fill; Sanskrit: purna, Greek: pleros, pleroma; Latin: plere = full; Greek: polus = much; pleres = replete, complete; pleroo = furnish, finish, accomplish, perfect; Latin; plenus = full; plenarius = entire; plenitudo = fullness/abundance; plebes = throng; plus = more; populus = people, multitude; French: plein = full; cf. English: felt = to full or thicken cloth by beating and pounding.
The lexicon that flows from this fairly pullulates at the limit of sense:
ply, apply, imply, reply, comply, explicit, explicate, implicit, implicate; play, plight, peril, pledge, plot, plan, place, plate, plank, plant, floor, plain; deploy, display, employ; plethora, plenary, plebeian, plural, popular, polis, politics, polygon, implement, complete; simple, complex; plait, pleat, fold, field, plight, replete, complete, full, fill, felt; simple, complex, double, duplex, duplicity, dupe, triple, triplicate, multiple; explicate, supplicate, supple, pleach; splay, supple, supplicate; oblique, obligation, obliging, oblation; bend, bow, turn, bind, join; flag, flake, flog, flail, flaw, flex, flax, flexion, circumflex, deflect, inflect, reflect, plastic; pluvial, flow, float, fly, flood, pluvial, flue, fluid, flux, fleet, flotilla, flux, fly.
incontinent nature
“The city conceives and constructs itself as an ordered and geometric clearing in the midst of a forest of branching and fleeing signs which continue to carry a dimension of dread. The end of dispersion and the open spaces that structure it constitute at best an enclave that loses its efficacy the further away from it one is. Greek religion can be understood in its ensemble and in its contrasts as the effort to render compatible these two distinct universes, that of the city entirely given to measure, and that of a world sensed as immense, dangerous and unmapped (inarpenté).”15
Jean-Christophe Bailly claims for Greek thought a propensity to fix and arrest flux, to counter chaos and hubris so as to answer a horror vacuui – this terror that emptiness might be subject to pure and unimpeded manifestation, to the flooding excess and interminable profusion of natural, aesthetic and semantic production. Flux is the wayward, unpredictable trajectories of dispersion – in other words everything that the city and that civic virtue establish as counterpoints and safeguards against the troubling and pullulating incontinence of nature:
“The choral dimension of the city is also a rhythmic space: it answers to the violence of flux by measure, and to the distracting character of the void by an accentuated disposition. Confronting savage nature where entanglement and the shapeless dominate, the city imposes on itself the law of a choreia, it is rhythm or rhythmic enclave within the dangerous arrhythmia of hills and woods, and it is so only in the open space that it allows itself.”16
This propensity to bring the threat of unregulated flow to a standstill is implemented by technologies of control through apparatuses or machines which function to organise and regulate the production of predictable order. All that the polis is – symbolically, politically, economically, culturally, environmentally, architectonically – conspires to keep unfettered abundance at bay, to safeguard the politeia from excess.17 The city, and with it architecture, is a dispositif for a techne of limitation, boundary setting, exclusion and control: agora, acropolis, temenos, theos, oikos, oikonomia, templum, sanctum, deus, intervallum, impluvium… In mathematics and geometry, the control aims to counter diagonal and incommensurable values by way of the orthogonal. In the natural sciences, by checking the surfeit of production through geanological organisation and classification. In music, by coordinating discord through modulated harmony. In philosophy, by erasing linguistic and semantic ambiguity through predetermined fixed meaning and accepted usage. In the built environment by `civilising’ nature through survey and mapping, colonisation, appropriation and the installation of regulating grids.
This standstill and stabilisation of flow has a negative and excluding function. The prevention, closure and shutting-down of potential, the stabilisation of flux and the exclusion of altereity are achieved by installing planned, predictable and calculable circumstances which exclude or suppress heterogeneity. Yet the stabilisation of flow is not necessarily a gesture applied from without. Flow always-already includes a condition of restraint, material drag or inertia integral to the system. It is always-already an alternating flexion, a double gesture of retreat and advance, withdrawal and presence that constrains and affords. The apparatus of this double gesture, which brings fluxion to the brink, is rhythm.
(re)flexion: rhythm
“Even with Heraclitus, who is entirely on the side of flux, rhythm appears as what holds contraries together, like a sort of outrigger of becoming, and with Plato, who as we know condemned the unfurling effects of mousike and dreaded the Heraclitean perspective of a perpetual flux, is opposed to the dangers of arrhythmia… choreia is what counters mania and rhythm is a power at once syntactical and political, a sort of regulator of assemblages (agencements), a figure of nomos. No doubt rhythm is ambivalent and comports a potential derive, a capacity for flight, just as melody does: in truth, none of the three axes of representation – rhythm, melody and language – is exempt from this possibility of overflowing…”18
The word rhythm (Greek: ruthmos) combines two etymons - *RH = flow (Greek: rheo = flow; river, rave) and *TH = stop, stand (step, station, install).19 This complex of roots yields word associations around the notion of measuring and organising – for example order, art, articulation, repartition, radiation, ritual, rite, right, correct, orthogonal. Rhythm is the standing and reiteration of flow. Not its elimination or closure, but its second wind - a momentary poise which brings flow back into itself, back into a knot that both gathers and propels it into the open. The pulse of rhythm is a kind of reflux, an interminable forwarding-return. This push-pull cuts and modulates, articulates and joins an apparently continuous trajectory. The standing of flow is poised or hinged on a point that represents the locus of a turning – not a change of direction, but a change of phase or flexion in the material texture that undergoes the rhythmic transport (a body, a space, a geometric form, a phrase, an idea, a mood…). Benveniste concluded as much in deriving the word rhythm from rhuthmos/rhusmos = changing configuration, fluidity.20 Here rhythm and form are not opposed or even complementary but phases of the same formalising gesture.
Polygons for example (Greek: poly = many + gonu = knee, joint – from *GEN = generation, production), are not x-sided, but x-jointed, and the joint is not a point of formal fixity but primarily a site of rhythmic articulation and production, a generative moment in the fluid co-modulation of space. Contour and envelopment, or the delineating lineaments that mark shape and form, do not have a distantiating function. The parts they articulate or dispose21 are not separated elements but “repartitioned intensities” and differentiations, oscillating phases or rhythmic pulsations, which liberate space rather than confine it:
“This line of contour which turns on itself, which as a consequence ceases to be a purely separative line in order to in some way vanish around the figure it traces, one must not make of it a contrary to the held line, it is rather its relief. At the extremity of the tenuitas, there is the quasi-erasure, the line of contour is no more than an almost, which enunciates the subtlety of the limit. Enveloped by the line, the figure announces itself by this limit even as something that is neither simply cut-out nor on the contrary embedded, but which floats into the depth and, one could say, into space.”22
The line vanishes as it builds contour and relief. It relieves and is relieved of its work. This `turning contour’23 and tenuous dilation leavens or interleaves a foliate, exfoliated and exfoliating space that is less perspectival or constructivist than the space of sfumato. In it line and contour are dissolved as elements of closure. Its focus is atmosphere not arrangement or shape. It is a space of pure formal evanescence, characterised by undecidability between figure and ground, agent and support, form (schema) and rhythm (rheo).24 These antinomies interminably play and defer to weave the tenuous texture and fluxion of the field of appearance.
For Plato and Aristotle, rythmos is a central condition of the archetype. It is the actualising or manifesting phase of the formal idea (eidos)25 - not as immutable paradigm in a state of stasis, but as dynameis. Rhythm is the manner in which eidos is deployed as formal and configurational pattern (taxis) in a moving (kinesis) and dynamic fluid substance.26 Forms (schema) are configurative, recognisable shapes – but they are above all flexure maps, traces of confluent rhythmic organisation, trajectory and gesture, tendency and destiny.27 They are in some way akin to de Certeau’s intersections of mobile elements that characterise a space of vectors, velocities and time variables28 and to Deleuze’s cinematic notion of the mobile section of duration, developed out of Bergson’s idea of the indivisibility of existential movement and concrete duration.29
The immobility of architecture is terminal, but architecture can also be receptive to the flux of the movement it harbours – without itself adopting mobile contours. It can be responsive to the movement of ideas in its intellectual constitution, and to the literal flow of processes, systems, bodies and substances that traverse it. In that sense the immobility is only part of a story that needs to be animated by embodied and continuous, indivisible spatial experience.
There are musical parallels. Every tone has a distinctive frequency, but the sound we hear is an approximation. A tone is in fact the sound of difference, of altereity, of the interval that separates two notes - for example the sound of the space between two stops on a monochord. This difference is animated by rhythm, which is the vibrational character of tonality. Likewise tones and the modes in which they are set are not fixed formal configurations, but rhythmic existents with particular dynamics, tendencies, impulsions and combinational potential. In Deleuzian terms, music is an agencement, an assemblage of relational dynamics, constituting an apparatus that can achieve specific effects - for example of consonance or closure (the octave), compulsion (the third), restlessness or dissonance (the tritone or diabolus in musica).
In Greek music, rhythm is kineseo stasis,30 the standing of movement. It orders the flow (reo) of sound by bringing dynamic flux (kinesis) to rest (stasis).31 It does this as an alternation "first opposed, then accorded"32 between the Same (homoios) and the Different (heteros),33 about points of rest or pause called chronoi kenoi - literally `empty times.' Rhythm is the mobilising and mobilised vitality of difference, articulated around such empty times. It differentiates relational fields in traces drawn from altereity in alternation. It expresses the incommensurable discrepancies between limit-extremes whose spaces and tensions it traverses, convokes and weaves.
standstill
“Now we can see that the present, which we found was the only one of the three divisions of time that could possibly be said to be long, has been whittled down to the space of scarcely one day. But here again we must look into the matter more closely, because not even the whole of one day is present. It is made up of hours of darkness and hours of daylight, twenty-four of them. In relation to the first hour the others are future; in relation to the last the others are past; and any intermediate hour comes between the hours which precede it and those which follow it. Even that one hour consists of minutes which are continually passing. The minutes which have gone by are past, and any part of the hour which remains is future. In fact the only time that can be called present is an instant, if we can conceive of such, that cannot be divided into even the most minute fractions, and a point of time as small as this passes so rapidly from the future to the past that its duration is without length. For if its duration were prolonged, it could be divided into past and future. When it is present it has no duration.”34
Along these lines, St Augustine agonises over the threefold nature of time. None of the three – future, past or present seem to exist, and yet we have a palpable sense of them. The future is not yet, the past is no longer, and the present is not yet past (passed). Neither not-yet nor no-longer, temporally unlocatable because always passing, the present is this fugitive existent that cannot-not be lived. As such, the present is the centre of time, belonging to neither past nor future, yet conditioning both as the hinge on which they turn and return into and out of each other.
Here, the summer solstice has just passed – the moment at midday on June 21 when the sun appears to stand still at the limit of its ascending course, before descending once again towards its winter station. At that moment without duration, its poise is neither pause nor rest, but contraflexure, inflexion and limit of inversion. Likewise the gloaming of twilight, in which day and night become indistinguishable; the slack sea at high tide, when waters appear to swell and become heavy; the moment before a torrential storm; sweat in sweltering heat; flushed cheeks; laughter; the instant tears well up. Each one of these is a limit condition which threatens to breach a boundary. But each is also an opportunity, a threshold between worlds, an opportune time (kairos) rather than a moment in time (chronos), or else wu wei - action without action.35 In these moments, time and space are taken to a limit of potentiality and undecidability. The dimensions of space compress. Past and future withdraw into their common presence and hinge in the instant of time, leaving only ubiquitous presence.
If rhythm articulates time – by diurnal, seasonal and annual cycles; the precession of the equinoxes; physiological phases; geo-morphological eras; climatic shifts – it does not do it by cutting and subdividing a pre-existent time-matter of homogenous extent. Rather, it articulates temporal densifications and rarefactions creating conditions of variable texture, speed, pace and pulse – such as times tied to potentialities of life events like the compressed times of work, the dilated times of rest and the circuitous times of play:
“Time appears most generally under its `fluvial’ form, but it also belongs to it to be able to spread itself and to appear, from that moment, as an extended present. Of this immobilisation of what physicists, all children of Heraclitus, call the `arrow of time,’ the shadow is one of the vectors, and according to this perspective the image always comes to inscribe itself as a shadow, that is to say as a caesura in the course of time. Every image (except of course in cinema) is arrest on image, arrest of time. It is as arrested that the image transits time, and every glance upon it triggers again the caesura that it opened.”36
This caesura or incommensurable discrepancy at the heart of time is the instant, the hinge of time around which its rhythms and revolutions turn. Like the empty felly of a wheel or the eye of a storm, this instant has no substance and suffers no change – yet it constitutes the strength of the wheel and the pivot of movement. In the mythic dance of Siva Nataraja, the god is imaged poised as a mobile section through the whirl and the whorl of a cosmic dance, which simultaneously produces, preserves and destroys the world. Siva’s stance is a manifestation of shakti - his consort and the potential that is not actualised but preserved in his gesture and in his body’s flexion as an articulated topography. Siva appears at a standstill. But what is stilled in this ever-present readiness to act is the full force of production maintained in the instant of an absent presence. The arrest of flow, its suspended fluxion, is a collected intensification which wells up to a limit of potential and mass. In its evident groundedness, the figure is heavy and grave – and yet it gathers the telluric into an aerial promise. Siva is shown not at the moment of action, but just before it – like an offbeat that holds his rhythmic transport on just this side of a calamitous or felicitous rift.
in the space of flows
“The labyrinth, in all of its possible states, is in any case the place where one is led astray, the very place in which and by which space is scrambled and where all possibility of orientation is destroyed. Elsewhere it is also… the dwelling of a monster, intended and conceived for it. Now the city, all that it will become, all that it is in its earliest phase, is entirely directed by the effort of separating itself from the monstrous, and that is why we can say that poléogenèse (genesis of the city) is essentially anti-labyrinthine; because it dispenses with the monstrous and what originally has to do with the monstrous, but also because it dispenses with space without measure or landmarks, seeking rather to establish by way of spacings and voids the clarity of a visible and legible harmony: the city that Greece seeks to give consistency to is drawn within a confused and toustled universe as the space where one does not get lost, where one cannot feel lost. It is as such opposed to the labyrinth, which, as we know, often serves as reflexive image of today’s metropolis or of the great city in general.”3
In this context, the space of flows would constitute a place and condition of potential rupture which is just about to, but has not yet taken place. This `not yet' is not a moment that has yet to arrive. Rather, it is a condition of contraflexure between two coexistent and interpenetrate phases or states, each of which is defined by the advancing-withdrawal of the other. In that sense, the space of flows is a space of forgetfulness, of oblivion and erasure, of avoidance and evasion. Yet, in a strange contradiction, in the midst of our passionate engagement with irremediable fluxion (“everything is moving, intensifying, dispersing; growing, decaying, proliferating…”), there is the palpable sense of a still and grave presence, threatening one excess with a wholly and indiscernible other. Any architecture that seeks a place in the space of flows must encounter this difficult and expropriating condition that is its proper limit and opportunity.
How might architecture engage with flux, with the space of flux? Might it be by a crystallisation or monumentalisation of the gestural, the dynamic, the fluxion of ideas, the flows of information, the vectors of deterritorialisation, the lineaments of the indeterminate and the general restlessness that conditions the present time? The allusions are familiar: science fiction, aliens, slugs, assemblages of holes,38 woven substances subject to torsional force, soft rigidity, soft architecture, blob, fold, mobius strip, arabesque, forms and structures of the blur and the out-of-focus:
“The humid grid of Frei Otto is a formation in which movement is structurally absorbed by the system: it is a combination of intensive and extensive movements, of flexibility and displacements… We should replace the passive flexibility of neutrality by the active flexibility of the blurry… of a soft constructivism… The blurry operates in differentiated fields of vectors, of tendencies, which articulate clearly defined habits or goals and actions as yet undetermined…”39
With its avant garde claims of valorising non-Euclidean geometries and contesting classical orthogonal and hierarchical formalism, this kind of architecture prolongs rather than challenges the other face of modernity - the non-rational tendencies that have never ceased to haunt it. The direct lineage of this work was made explicit in the 2003 Beaubourg exhibition Architectures Non-Standard. It is traceable to at least late 19th C experiments in diagramming corporeal movement and fluid dynamics, the development of harmonic imagery and chronophotography, the biomorphism of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, the advent of cinema and the technologies and practices of force and fluid diagramming as a basis for artistic and architectural expression. The parallel neo-spirualist and esotericist predilections of the times (Theosophy, Anthroposophy) constitute a critically related phenomenon. In Notes on Gesture, Giorgio Agamben achieves a lucid reading of Gilles de la Tourette and Eadweard Muybridge’s work of 1886 on the imaging of human gesture. Agamben concludes:
“By the end of the nineteenth century the gestures of the Western bourgeoisie were irretrievably lost… In the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures seeks to reappropriate what it has lost while simultaneously recording that loss.”40
The striking effect of Architectures Non-Standard was the decidedly rearguard character of such contemporary attempts to formalise the dynamic. Might it be that the current fascination and motive for formal representation of gestural and fluxional processes and systems, mobilised by the potential of digital technologies developed in parallel, represent a further phase of this reappropriational archiving and memorialisation of the lost art of gesture? In turn, how might a different, truly avant garde, contestational and necessary architecture of resistance be articulated.
Rather than giving direct and unfettered expression to the unstable, such architecture might be founded on the propensity of the stable and orthogonal to unsettle itself and pullulate from within – much like the incommensurable (diagonal) presence of the square roots of 2, 3 and 5 which threaten the logic of the square and the cube, while simultaneously ensuring their stability and standing. Here, the fluxions and mutations of space would not be formally imposed as pure image. Instead, they would emerge slowly, as apparently aligned systems and layers begin to unravel through sustained, embodied and contextualised experience. As examples, one could consider the way overlaid orthogonal patterns in the plans and sections of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, or the faint shifts in symmetry and axial alignment in Peter Markli’s La Congiunta (1992), have the propensity to begin shifting, rotating and fluctuating in relation to an apparently strict, stable and pervasive order. Such ambiguities serve a critical function of deconstructing and mobilising the stasis of an established rigor - but they do so by stealth and in spite of any overarching system of control, suggesting for architecture a contestational and militant role with multiple tectonic and political implications.
Rather than literally translating system diagrams, data streams or other fluxional patterns directly into built form, architecture might desist in favour of the implicit and the implied – that is, in favour of emergent rather than prescribed configurations and spaces. In doing so, it might gather and preserve the unrealised but indefinitely available potential of the limit to touch its own and overburdening excess. Its power might not rest in fantastical flexional form, but in a kind of erasure or withdrawal of form in favour of atmospheres and environments sensitive to the slow and measured, to the troubling and uncanny indiscernability of the gloaming. Its language might be that of a stuttering convocation of the unpronounceable and evanescent, of the unprogrammed and the unprogrammable, of the makeshift, and of the fugitive lineaments and boundaries that waver and flex like the uncertain outlines of a shimmering form whose legibility hovers in forgetfulness.
Notes
1 Jean-Christophe Bailly. Le Champ Mimétique. Paris : Editions du Seuil, 2005 : 268-269.
2 Giorgio Agamben. Qu’est-ce qu’un Dispositif. Translated by Martin Rueff. Paris: Rivages, 2007: 31.
3 Martin Heidegger. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995: 59-273.
4 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations. Translated by Jeff Fort. New York: Zone, 2007.
5 Maurice Blanchot. L’Ecriture du Désastre. Paris: Gallimard, 1980: 152.
6 421b. See Blanchot, L’Ecriture du Désastre: 146-152.
7 Fragment 93.
8 Fragment 123.
9 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 256.
10 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 260.
11 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet. l'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze. S pour Style.
12 Giles Deleuze. Le Plis. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988: 248.
13 Deleuze, Plis: 124, citing Cocteau’s La Difficulté d’Être.
14 Etymologies are drawn across the following texts: W. W. Skeat. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; Strong, The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, Riverside: Iowa Falls (undated); and Fabre D’Olivet, La Langue Hébraïque Restituée, Vevay: Delphica, L’Age D’Homme, 1985.
15 Bailly. Champ Mimétique: 228.
16 Bailly. Champ Mimétique: 225.
17 In Genesis 4, the first city builder Cain kills his nomadic brother Abel. This myth is read by René Guénon as a metaphor for the destruction of time (nomadism) by space (sedentarism). See The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2004: 144-151, and the chapter Time Changed into Space: 159-164.
18 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 176-7.
19 Greek: ruthmos = measured motion, flowing metre. Cf. Hebrew: *RT/*RTH = arrested, retarded, enchained movement and *RD = iterative movement returning to itself, replication, articulation.
20 Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de Linguistique Générale. Volume 1. Paris : Gallimard, 1966 : 327-335.
21 Articulation is from Latin: ars- = to connect, join. Its correlate is dispositio. In both cases, the terminology refers less to formal than to equipmental characteristics through which an arrangement can produce certain outcomes. Assemblage and disposition maintain this idea, essential to the notion of agencement, of an organization that has ergonomic propensities to trigger and mobilise.
22 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 101-2.
23 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 142, citing Pliny on the suppleness and ductility of contour attained by the sculptor Parrhasios.
24 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 108-110.
25 Plato, Laws, 728e; Aristotle, Metaphysics, 985b; Benveniste, Problèmes: 329s.
26 Ruthmos is decomposed by Benveniste as ru = flow and th)mos = "modality of accomplishment" (332). Hence rhythm is the configurational flexion of form as it manifests itself.
27 Bailly reads this as a conjunction of form (schema) and flux (rheo), inscription and headlong flight (fuite en avant), demeanour (tenue), holding (tenir) and flowing (écoulement). Champ Mimetique: 173.
28 Michel de Certeau. The Practices of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986: 117.
29 Gilles Deleuze. Cinema 1. The Movement Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001: 11.
30 Plato, Laws, 665.
31 Plato, Parmenides, 402a-b, 426e.
32 Plato, Banquet; 187b; Laws, 665a.
33 In Platonic cosmogony the demiurge "judged uniformity (the `same': auto = self-sameness) to be immeasurably better (= more beautiful) than its opposite": Timaeus, 33b, 35a, 37c; cf. Theatetus, 185c, 186a; Sophist, 254e; and Francis Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1966: 59-66.
34 Giorgio Agamben. Infancy and History. Essays on the Destruction of Experience. Translated by Liz Heron. New York: Verso, 1993: 135-140.
35 St Augustine, The Confessions. Translated by R. S. Pine Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979 - Book 11, Chapter 15: 266-7.
36 Michael Tawa. Limit and leimma. What remains for architecture, in Limits, Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand Melbourne 2004. Melbourne: SAHANZ/RMIT, 2004: 455-460.
37 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 61-2
38 Bailly, Champ Mimétique: 211-212.
39 Lars Spuybroek, `La structure du flou,’ in Frédéric Migayrou, Architectures Non Standard. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 2003: 127.
40 Spuybroek, `Structure du flou’: 126ff.