Reclaiming What Architecture Does: Toward an Ethology and Transformative Ethics of Material Arrangements

Abstract

Accounting for historical formation as intensive formations of a material milieu amounts to nothing less than an ethical project. This paper proposes an ethological approach to architectural arrangements to overcome an impasse in the understanding of the built environment. In its central parts, it respectively revisits two favourite clichés of architectural theory: the Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus) and the Deleuzo-Guattarian agencement (assemblage). By reclaiming their different ontological conceptions of material arrangements, the paper challenges reductive readings of architectural apparatus and advance a more “machinic” reading of architecture. Therein, it proposes a tactical alliance with the flat, monist, and matter-oriented methodologies of such new-materialist theorists as Barad and Braidotti, that help reconsider its arrangements more ecosystemically as “embodied and embedded, relational and affective” figurations. Suggesting a clear theoretical challenge waiting to be taken up, the paper considers how architectural theory could advance such a radically productive conception of the built environment.