Julgamento, produção subjetiva e construção histórica

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a canonical text of modern English literature, has received two very different readings by Edward Said and Gilles Deleuze. While Said reads Seven Pillars i...

Several concepts derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have provided powerful exploratory tools for a number of planning theorists who have begun to advance a range of political visions, strategies and governance agendas that are in contrast to the traditional objective/goal setting of instrumental planning. This chapter will explore the concept of becoming and the potential it may offer for new theorisation in spatial planning. The chapter sets the scene through a brief literature review which argues that uncertainties are inherent in planning practices. Plans and legislation which present fixed rules or policies project inflexibility and universality and do not allow for commitment to less precise goals, provisional advice and adaptive futures. Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming resonates with a world marked by uncertainty. Deleuze makes the world into a 'creative, complexifying and problematizing cauldron of becoming' (DeLanda, 1998). I discuss the concept as an encounter between elements which affects a transition of those elements from one state to another. Being is thus the effect of becoming. Becoming is concerned with how something comes into being and with what it can do, rather than what it is. Following discussion of becoming in general, I consider becomings of specific types; what Deleuze and Guattari term becomings-minor. The authors' first specific becoming is that of becoming-woman, followed by becoming-animal, both of which are relevant for planning theory and practice. I then explore potentialities for development of DeleuzoGuattarian-inspired pragmatics with regard to emergent forms of law and strategic spatial planning before engaging in critical discussion of the potential for 'revolutionary-becoming'. I non-conclude that becomings undermine the stable identities and fixed terms of majority planning cultures. In so doing, they offer us ways to think and act differently in dynamic worlds.

Introduction As researchers and practitioners in the field of co-design, we are interested in design activism as a particular mode of engagement that denotes collaboration rather than persuasion. Co-design already has strong connotations to an activist ethos through its historical affinity with the more explicit emancipatory tradition of Scandinavian Participatory Design from the 1970s onward. In this paper we argue that some types of contemporary co-design practices embody a different form of activist agency—one that is experimentally and immanently generated only as the design project unfolds. First, the cases that we describe are delimited in a specific context—namely, the Danish public sector—and they use the co-design methods of the co-design research center at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Second, the type of political engagement that this paper examines is one that is intrinsic to the design process itself, rather than being directed by a priori political teloi. To begin a closer examination of such activist positions in co-design, we propose the notion of a minor design activism, inspired by the concept of minoritarian in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.1 We describe a minor design activism as a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation. Through this ongoing quest for displacement and change, a minor design activism challenges attempts to stabilize the initial design program around already unified agendas. A minor design activism is not restricted to certain marginal or non-commercial domains.2 In fact, both cases discussed in this paper are firmly situated within public policy-driven initiatives. As such, a minor design activism distinguishes itself from more general assertions of activism in contemporary design,3 insofar as this kind of activism works from within hegemonic public institutions and agendas. From this structurally embedded position and through open-ended experiments, minor design activism seeks to challenge prescriptive agendas and to reconfigure group relations. 1 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 2 Although providing an in-depth overview of activism in contemporary design is beyond the scope of this paper, the following definition of design activism proposed in the call for contributions to the 2011 Design History Society Annual Conference, titled “Design Activism and Social Change,” suggests that design activism should indeed “...distance itself from commercial or mainstream public policy-driven approaches. Instead, it embraces marginal, non-profit, or politically engaged ...articulations and actions.” “Design Activism and Social Change,” http://www.historiadeldisseny.org/congres/ (accessed November 21, 2013). 3 Alastair Fuad-Luke, Design Activism Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (London: Earthscan, 2009); Thomas Markussen, “The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design Between Art and Politics,” Design Issues 29, no.1 (Winter 2013): 38–50; Guy Julier, “From Design Culture to Design Activism,” Design and Culture 5, no.2 (2013): 215–36.

How does one situate the thought of Gilles Deleuze (his own thought, as well as his collaborative writings with Felix Guattari)? On the one hand, the reader of his works is struck by the breadth of the topics they survey (philosophy, literature, political theory, cultural critique, psychoanalysis, film) as well as by wide variations in tone (sober, declarative unpacking of difficult philosophical concepts, but elsewhere inventive flights of fancy which have been much admired and hotly contested). On the other hand, if, as Michel Foucault suggested, our century is ＂Deleuzian,＂ this is possibly the case because of the multifaceted usefulness and rhetorical persuasiveness of terms such as ＂assemblage (agencement),＂ ＂deterritorialization,＂ ＂line of flight,＂ ＂plane of immanence,＂ ＂rhizome,＂ etc.—terms which have served multiple ideological purposes and which have migrated far from their Parisian or European points of origin. In my article, I attempt to situate the relationship between literature and philosophy in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. My thesis is that the writers' own explicit attempts to separate the domains into separate territories (developed with the greatest explicitness and rigor in What Is Philosophy?) mask the fact that, for Deleuze the acute reader of literary texts by Proust and Kafka, these two supposedly distinct fields stand in a relation of mutual resonance. Rather than being separate but equal, literature and philosophy are strangely analogous. Philosophy, the domain in which concepts are created, resembles uncannily, in the mode of Freudian Unheimlichkeit, the spider's web of literature.

The idea of the whole is a consistent theme in Virginia Woolf’s works, which is presented through her descriptions of life, order, and pattern. Woolf’s idea of the whole emerges from an atmosphere teeming with stability, coherence, peace, and eternity as resistance against “the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral.” Nonetheless, Woolf’s idea of the whole is also simultaneously characteristic of the “varying,” the “unknown,” and the “uncircumscribed,” which features disruption and fluidity. These two aspects of the whole are closely interlinked with the material aspect in contexts. Involvement of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s exploration of the variability and infinity of chaos, along with Deleuze’s conceptual analyses of trajectory, becoming, and diagram, in observing Woolf’s writings may facilitate an understanding of how Woolf’s idea of the whole achieves its intensity via the material aspect. Woolf’s idea of the whole points to a process of composition, rather than an integration of given constituents or a transcendence of sublimity and completeness. Disruption and fluidity that characterize this sense of the whole are not to be deemed equivalents of overwhelming destruction, opposition, or precariousness. Instead, disruption and fluidity are laid out via laying down the imposed confinement of given identities and values. The material aspect of this sense of the whole points to a process of contraction resonating with disruption and fluidity, in which individuals, feelings and emotions, and things, after laying down their affiliated, recognized values, become elements susceptible to diverse potentialities and compositions. The material aspect in this sense is an orientation toward an impersonal level of “matter of fact.” In Deleuze’s analysis of the concept of the event, actualization, as a level composed of states of affairs, may have two directions of development. On one hand, actualization may refer to actualized, defined states of affairs; on the other hand, actualization may point to reworked compositions put into effect in states of affairs. Counter-actualization involves both aspects of actualization: it disrupts the rigidity of actualized states so as to launch reworked compositions in actualization. In terms of Deleuze’s view of the event, willing the event is not necessarily delimited to passive acceptance of actualized states of affairs, but instead may be regarded as an expression of counter-actualization. On the one hand, resistance against actualized values and initiation of reworked actualization shape “an active mode of ethics,” which reinforces the significance of counter-actualization and its positive effects in reworked actualization. On the other hand, with a further step, counter-actualization does not circumscribe its operation within an actualized framework of activity and passivity. With an attempt to open access to alternative and diverse trajectories of willing the event, counter-actualization focuses on the indispensability of unfolding a potential, virtual plane in processes of slackening the rigidity of actualization. This potential, virtual plane lays out in disjunctions and resonances between divergent series. If the confronted divergences, disjunctions, and resonances in processes of counter-actualization are taken into account, the operation of the will that wills the event is no longer confined to the activity or passivity of personal will. Distinguished from a pursuit of the autonomy of personal will, the intensity of the will that wills the event relies on the extent of exertion of susceptibility, potentiality, and plasticity, which display the susceptibility to the immanence of divergent series, lay out the potentiality of divergent series, and compose the plasticity of divergent series. This sense of willing the event in terms of the extent of susceptibility, potentiality, and plasticity enables the immanence of an individual to impersonally emerge from the “univocity of Being.” The univocity of Being is the quintessence of the Deleuzian “transcendental empiricist ethics,” which is also the immanence of Woolf’s conception of the whole.

Assemblage Theory, Ecology and the Legacy of the Early Garden City

From momentary metaphorical allusions to “unraveling,” or “stitching,” to more elaborately built philosophical models that directly employ the likenesses of folded and/or patchworked cloth, the regular repetition of fabric(ated) references—punctuated by the physical refrain of turning, cloth-like pages—in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari cleverly makes the relationships between “our bodies,” which are largely understood through clothed pleats, and the matter-content-expression of “their books” exceedingly palpable.This article aims to unpack this aspect of Deleuze and Guattari's projects and to explore the implications it has not only for our immediate experiences of “the book” and/or “the textile,” but also for the traditional plays between man, beast, and technology that have been historically related through the technology of cloth and which have served to, in part, justify the human's neatly ordered dominance in the world.As a means of embarking on this project, the article considers Deleuze and Guattari's works alongside a cast of other figures preoccupied with various fabrics, namely the matador, various (textile) artists including Eran Schaerf, and even one's own self and wardrobe, and recasts all of these figures' texts and textiles as “text(ile)s.”

The paper opens with a small vignette regarding the production of calligraphy at speed on the Tokyo train network. This will serve as a focal point in considerations pertaining to the notion of Zerrissenheit or ＂tearing＂ and its intimate relationship with the complicated notion of the ＂abstract machine.＂ As both Gilles Deleuze and Martin Heidegger have used the idea of ＂tearing＂ in various ways, we shall think transversally across these two approaches in terms of disclosing the dangers and possibilities of technological relationships as in Heidegger, and, as in Deleuze (and his collaborator Felix Guattari), in the sense of how tearing impacts on writing and the articulation of calligraphy or what Deleuze designates the ＂Oriental line＂ in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. It will become clear that while technology tears the hand away from an essential relation to man and earth through disruption and disorientation, it also engineers ＂universes of reference＂ in unheard-of ways, as means to think, produce and live afresh. Man is essentially torn between these two poles. In entwining the aforementioned remarks with the art of Paul Klee (active, spontaneous lines), the notion of sobriety and Asian culture in general, the conclusion, which teases out the ramifications from the mainstay thesis that technology effectively disrupts the purity of style or the simplicity of becoming, suggests that in several ways Deleuze and Guattari's sole and joint writings are an extension, radicalisation and complement of Heidegger's thought.

«Dramas and tragedies are written about [the revolt of the son against the father], yet in reality it is material for comedy»: Deleuze and Guattari claim that the best way to reverse the Oedipus is to make it comic, instead of dramatic. The “Adventures of Doinel”, realized by Francois Truffaut, could be then the Oedipus comedy wished for by Deleuze and Guattari, accomplishing an anti-Oedipal revolution of the conception of desire, reversed by the productive nature of desire itself, affirmed through the mise en scene of the artistic production. KEYWORDS: Desiderio; Truffaut; Anti-edipo; Deleuze;

In this paper I will analyse the theoretical background of a single video installation – co-created by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato – in order to unpack Deleuze and Guattari’s important but somewhat elusive concepts of ‘machinic animism’ and ‘asignifying semiotics.’ Assemblages (2010) is a three channel audio-visual documentary about the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. I will argue that, in order to fully understand this work, we must interrogate the incredibly dense theoretical context it inhabits. In particular, I will explore the juncture between Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic ideas concerning a potential ‘ecosophy’ – or theory of the different relations between humans and nature that depends upon a new semiotics – and Lazzarato’s conception of ‘videophilosophy,’ which is grounded upon a politicised Bergsonian onto-aesthetics. I will conclude by criticizing Nicolas Bourriaud’s misappropriation of Guattari in his book Relational Aesthetics and propose that Assemblages demands quite a different and more radical gesture of relationality: one that follows an ecosophical logic that envelopes and imbricates the different levels of nature, the individual, and the social in a way that we might qualify with the term ‘unnatural participation.’

This research goes beyond the debate over the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the 2011 Arab Spring, seeking instead to develop a critical framing of one particular episode of those mobilisations, namely of the Tunisian revolution, by taking into account the often-overlooked instances of local struggles, migration and Islamic militancy in the region, in order to reveal the specificity of contemporary political action. The Tunisian revolution raises important questions regarding the articulation of resistance and political subjectivity in the context of global governmentality. By drawing from political theory, philosophy, ethnography and readings of local street art, I attempt to restore the radical significance of the event as an instance of possible collective action by engaging with the concept of ‘political event’ (here drawing critically from Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Alain Badiou) as both rupture and creation of the new. I reflect on different technologies of containment of dissent, aimed at reducing the virtual dimension of collective action. This containment can regard the discursive level and be enacted through hegemonic narratives or it can regard the non-discursive level of affects and be enacted by intensifying and/or speculating on accumulated affects (such as discontent). Yet, alongside these technologies, I theorize the existence of circuits of mediation concerned with the movement of tactical counter-knowledges and practices of resistance across wide (spaces such as the Mediterranean Sea after 2011, for example). I integrate theories around contagion and virality of protest with the concept of resonance (Clover, 2016) based on the commonality of dispossession and the ‘structural similarities’ (Manji and Sokari, 2012) of mobile categories of people produced as surplus population (Clover, 2016). Furthermore, I mobilise Edouard Glissant’s notion of Relation (Glissant, 1997), to engage with the Tunisian example of cross-class alliances, while showing their centrality for the revolutionary transformation.

We intend to discuss, in this article, the capitalist and environmental crises of today´s world. Our reading goes betweenphilosophy and psychoanalyses, searching to present some ideas that allow us to foresee, in the current conjuncture, the contours of a possible ethical and political approach to a world shattered by the environmental and capitalist crises. For this proposal, we have selected the following thinkers: Karl Marx, Fredrik Jameson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Antonio Negriand Michael Hardt. In the confluence of their ideas we search to construct new senses of an ethics for today´s world. Keywords: capitalism; environmental crisis; unconscious; subjectivity.

In order to enter the fray that is the bullfight, I will appropriate a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by way of which each of the four thrusts I advance, or fights I present, can be read as <i>asignifying ruptures</i>. With this concept we are encouraged to question the integrity of signification.

Two themes from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s study, Kafka Toward aMinor Literature, serve as an inspiration for this rumination on Carlos Bulosan’s1955 letter to Florentino B. Valeros about writing and the responsibilities of thewriter. Because Bulosan was an inherently political writer, his correspondenceis part-and-parcel of his writing machine, inclusive of his poetry, short stories,novels, and expository essays. In this, Bulosan’s case is parallel to that of Kafka. Incontradistinction to Kafka, however, Bulosan’s letters are not easily categorized interms of thematics such as those Deleuze and Guattari identify in the cases of Kafkaand Proust. Because both his life and his cultural production were forged in the heatof struggles for workers’ rights, against racism, and against various manifestationsof anti-immigrant, anti-Filipino, and anti-progressive sentiments during his lifetime,Bulosan’s correspondence demarks a line of flight that is distinctive from theconventions expressed by other authors in their letters.

During my early introduction to architecture I found that I was motivated not only by matters pertaining to what architecture is, but also, to what it can do. Thus, the questions motivating this work derive from my education in architecture which, at their most rudimentary level, entail a deep fascination with the nature of space, and thus the problem of time. And, subsequently, a practical desire to understand the conditions that constituted experience, and thus perception, sensation and mind. My interest also developed from a general disposition towards others and world founded in principles of human equality and rights with respect to both freedom and responsibility. During my years practicing architecture, these questions as they were brought through the perspective of design continued to inspire me. At the same time, my interest in investigating these questions through theoretical and philosophical research persisted until my aspiration to engage in critical thought outpaced my desire to practice. Hence, a turn in career to work as an academic in the discipline of architecture and the area of architecture theory. This research may be perceived by some as situated outside the realm of architecture. However, this is not the case. My approach to architecture theory is not one that begins with a study of the object, or, for some, one might say the subject of architecture. That is, if the object is understood as the manifestation in thought, process or form of the building or built environment (real or conceived) itself; and if the subject is understood as the thought or idea emanating from the mind of the architect (as author). While there is much architecture theory advanced from this perspective lining my own bookshelves and utilized in my work as an educator. The concerns that have always called me towards thinking about architecture as the imagined and constructed world in which we live are those that query the very nature of concepts, notions, ideologies and intellectual constructions and beliefs upon which culture and society – architecture as both a cultural product and a social actor – are formed. This goes, as well, to the considerations that motivate my concern for people, not users or inhabitants as such, but as ontologically situated beings in the world. Accordingly, my work primarily deals with the content, history and effects of architecture as it relates to theories of space, time, the body, and cognition. Employing and developing theories and methods from disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, political, social and economic theory, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences in the broadest sense. Admittedly, the nature of theoretical discourse has shown itself to be problematic over the past fifty-plus years; it has also proven to be transformative. Critical thinkers in the late 1960s developed a sustained critique of their philosophical predecessors – primarily in regard to Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other – with a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics resulting in a repositioning of social and cultural discourse. Of course, the debate unfolded against the philosophical and aesthetic background of not only Marx and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud on one hand, and Manet, Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy on the other. In architecture, the debate extended to Ruskin and Wölfflin, and to Wright and Corbusier, amongst others. This period, in itself, refers to an unprecedented artistic, scientific, economic, and technological mutation. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which has brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another rebuke can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing. This culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ (1977) argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between the enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as self-constituting; as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Reflecting on this history, that post-war moment of theory, one cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure; qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of thinking and making emerged. Ideas that modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time. Discourses, when combined with a reflexivity within certain architectures and certain texts, rendered them somehow indefinitely open. In the 1960s, literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’s de-sanctioning of the biography-centric author, or the removal of authority from the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality with ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1969). These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomena and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories informed and redirected thinking in architecture, for instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in the first issue of Oppositions, an architectural journal produced between 1973 and 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now takes place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Louis Althusser, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The importance of the radically original works that emerged in the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works, translated into English shortly after their original publication, were being read throughout many disciplines outside of philosophy including schools of architecture, and their influence can only be said to have increased. I share the above brief history so as to situate my work for those less familiar with the work of theory – whether architecture or otherwise – as this, too, is the intellectual trajectory and exploration along which my own work, as well as many of my contemporaries, travels. In my own work, the influence of the nineteenth/ twentieth-century French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson – the great thinker of time and, as Walter Benjamin suggested, a seminal source to consult in considering the problem of experience – has quite profoundly informed my thinking and shaped its outcomes. Both with respect to time and space as well as body and brain, his influence is reflected in the title of this volume. That said, this is not a collection of chapters on Bergson’s philosophy. It is a collection on critical concepts I believe to be of importance for contemporary critique, delivered through topics that are relevant – at times directly and at others indirectly – to our current moment. This is a work of great commitment and it has sustained itself over time. It is my hope the reader finds some value in this as well.