FƒLIX GUATTARI: SPACE AND CORPOREITY

Source: Columbia Documents of Architecture: D, Vol:2, (1993), pp.139­148[A paper delivered at the ÒCaged BodyÓ symposium, the Columbia UniversitySchool of Architecture, April 7, 1990.]

[start page 139]When considered by disciplines such as architecture and medicine, space andthe body are understood according to distinct and autonomous categories. Iwish to relate them from a completely different point of view: that oftheir patternings/orderings of utterance/enunciation .

The phenomenological approach to space and the lived body reveals the twoto be inseparable. For example, in sleep and dreams the fantasized bodycoincides with the different modalities of spatial semiotization broughtinto play. The bodyÕs folding in upon itself is accompanied by an unfoldingof imaginary spaces. When I ride in a car, my projection forwardcorresponds to a bracketing of my corporeal schema, setting aside my sightand body, positioned in cybernetic subservience to the

[Page 140 starts here]automobile­machine and to the signal systems emitted by the surroundings.At the movies the body is radically absorbed by the filmic space in aquasi­hypnotic relationship. While reading a written text one receives thetrace of the phonematic/phonetic articulation intermittently freeing itsmeaningful sequences of monematic/morphemic articulation. Here stillanother patterning/ordering of utterance/enunciation entails othermodalities of spatialization and corporeity. The space of writing iswithout doubt one of the most mysterious offered to us, and the bodyÕsposture, respiratory and cardiac rhythms, and humoral discharges interferegreatly. There are then as many spaces as there are modes of semiotizationand subjectivation .

But we must not content ourselves with this first aspect of diachronicdiversification. There also exists, at every instant of the plotting, asynchronic ÒfoliationÓ of heterogeneous spaces. In the above examples I canat the same time find myself swept forward/aspirated by the vanishing pointof the road traffic and unfold a space of dreams or let myself be submergedby a musical space. In other circumstances a landscape or a painting cansimultaneously take on a structural consistency of aesthetic character andquestion me, look me right in the eyes from an ethical and effective pointof view that submerges all spatial discursiveness.

Consider a personal example. One day as I was walking with a group offriends on a main road of S‹o Paulo, I felt myself summoned, while crossingat a certain point, by an unplaceable speaker. One characteristic of thiscity, which seems strange to me in many respects, is that its highwayinterchanges occur on levels separated at very great heights. As I was

looking down on heavy traffic moving straight toward an infinite grayness,an intense impression, fleeting and undefinable, brusquely seized me. Iasked my friends to go on without me. Just as when Proust became fixed onhis Òpregnant momentsÓ (the taste of the madeleine, the dance of the churchsteeples at Martinville, VinteuilÕs short musical phrase, the loosecobblestone in

[page 141 starts here] the courtyard of the GuermantesÕ hotel), I froze trying to clarify whathad just happened to me. After some time the answer came to me as ifsomething from my early childhood was speaking to me from the heart of thisdesolate landscape, something of a principally perceptive order. There was,in fact, a homolographic relation between a very old perceptionÑperhaps ofthe Cardinet Bridge spanning the numerous railroad lines swallowed up bythe Saint­Lazarre train stationÑand the present one. The same feeling ofoverhang reproduced itself. In reality the Cardinet Bridge is of normalheight. It is only in my childhood perception that I confronted thisdisproportionate height, which reconstituted itself on the bridge at S‹oPaulo. Where this exaggerated height was not reiterated, the complexchildhood affect associated with it could not be triggered.

This example shows that actual perceptions of space can be ÒdoubledÓ byprevious perceptions, without having to speak of repression or conflictbetween preestablished representations, since the semiotization of thechildhood memory was accompanied by the creation ex nihilo of a poeticimpression.

American psychoanalyst and ethologist Daniel Stern in his book TheInterpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis andDevelopmental Psychology (Basic Books, 1985) elaborates an innovativeconception of the self that can shed light on the polyphonic character ofsubjectivity. He describes, in the infant up to two years, fourstratifications of the self:

¥ from birth to two months: the sense of an emergent self;¥ from two to three months to seven to nine months: the sense of a coreself;¥ from seven to nine months to fifteen months: the sense of a subjectiveself;¥ after fifteen months: the sense of a verbal self.

[page 142 starts here]I would like to stress that each of these components of the self, once itappears, exists parallel with the others and is susceptible to rising tothe surface, to the foreground of subjectivity, according to thecircumstances. Stern thus rejects diachronic psychogenesis of thepsychoanalytic­stage type (oral stage, anal stage, genital stage, latencyperiod) in which returns to an earlier perception are synonymous with

archaic fixation and regression. Here is a true polyphony of subjectiveformations.

Stern does not pursue his investigations beyond the age of two years, butone could certainly envision the later appearance of:

¥ a scriptural self (correlative with the childÕs entering school);¥ a pubertal self, etc.

My Òpregnant momentÓ on the S‹o Paulo bridge seems to correspond to areenactment of the emergent self, with its moving feeling of initialdiscovery of the world and, moreover, with a topical reorganization of theother modalities of the self. The core self relating to the stage when thebody takes on consistency is as if petrified, at the limit of psychoticcatatonia, whereas the third domain of the interpersonal intersubjectivelink mobilizes what Stern calls an Òevoked companionÓ who does notfunction, as Stern stresses, as a means to recall a real past event but asan active copy/duplicate of the events relating to the period considered.In fact, this evoked companion refers to generalized representations ofinteraction not directly understandable by dint of their abstract nature.This idea of an abstract effect seems capital. It is not because the effectgives itself wholly that it is composed of a raw instinctual material. Itis also through this type of effect that extremely complex universes appearat the sound of a phrase of Debussy or at the sight of a futurist poster.On a bridge in S‹o Paulo a whole world of childhood comes to life. Theevoked companion here is the mother who withdraws, explaining that she is

[page 143 starts here]leaving me alone for a moment, that she is going to come back, an effectiveintensity relayed by my walking companions, who also abandon me to theforeign city. As for the verbal self, it consists in phrasing a childhoodevent experienced at an essentially sublinguistic level.

This experience of subjectivation of space is exceptional only insofar asit reveals a psychic rift, providing a glimpse, in a quasi­pedagogical way,of the stratifications of the self. But any other lived space can alsoengage such synchronic agglomerates of the psyche that alone a poeticoperation, delirious experience or passionate explosion can bring to light.In this manner certain psychotics hear voices calling them from all pointsin space, often to insult them.

Does architecture have something to do with this diachrony and polyphonyof space? Must the developed/constructed domain always be univocal, with aone way meaning? Evidently any construction is always overdetermined ifonly by a style, even if this style shines by its absence. As Wittgensteinsays, ÒEverything is found, so to speak, in a space of possible things.ÓLet us take, for example, the texture of materials and the spatial devicesof what is conventionally called Òthe Middle Ages.Ó The period always bears

an aura of mystery, as if its very ground irrigated it with a secret power.A hidden witch or an alchemist has worked there since time immemorial. Onthe contrary, the extraordinary constructions of a Shin Takamatsu send usto a world of science fiction despite their machinic nature, which isÒoutdatedÓ because rooted in futurist clichŽs from the beginning of thecentury. Whether we are aware of it or not, constructed/developed spacecalls us from different points of viewÑstylistic, historic, functional,effective. Edifices of all kinds are enunciating/uttering machines. Theyproduce a partial subjectivation that agglomerates other structurings ofsubjectivation. A shantytown or favela maintains another discourse andmanipulates in us other cognitive and effective energies. From this roughobservation architects such as Henri Gaudin advocate a pure and simplereturn to the dyssymmetries of yesteryear. Such nostalgia seems at theleast risky, since history never gives back the same formulas/recipes andany authentic apprehension of the past always implies a radical recreationor reinvention. In this respect Tadao AndoÕs ruptures seem much moreinteresting insofar as they proceed from properly modernist orthogonalforms, which leads Ando to reinvent quite new intensities of mystery.

The span of developed/constructed spaces extends quite beyond their visibleand functional structures. They are essentially machines, machines ofmeaning, of sensation, abstract machines functioning like the previouslyevoked

[page 141 starts here]Òcompanion,Ó machines that carry incorporeal universes that are notuniversals but that can standardize individual and collective subjectivity.I believe that after the structuralist havoc and postmodern collapse it isurgent that we return to an animistic conception of the world. Themodernist outcome thwarts unidimensionality and the spirit of generalityand formalism into which it seemed to bound to crash. Every history of thisend of the century shows an extraordinary proliferation of subjectivecomponents, for better or worse a collective subjectivity of the rise ofnationalistic and religious archaisms; a machinic subjectivity of the samemedia that one hopes will recover the paths of singularity by initiating apost­media era. These components of social, machinic and aestheticsubjectivity literally besiege us from all sides, slicing into our formerspaces of reference. More or less happily, and at a greater and greaterrate of deterritorialization, our sensory organs, organic functions,fantasies and ethological reflexes are machinically plugged into a wildlygrowing techno­scientific world. The world no longer changes every tenyears but every year. In this context architectural and urban programmingappear to move at a dinosaurÕs pace. Henceforth, will a scrupulousarchitect be condemned to remain idle before the complexity of the stakesthat assail him?

But if it is true that interactions between the body anddeveloped/constructed space unfold through a field of virtuality whose

complexity borders on chaosÑ cities like Mexico City are heading at topspeed toward seemingly insurmountable ecological and demographicasphyxiationÑperhaps it behooves architects and urban planners to envisagecomplexity and chaos along new lines. Here the equivalent of ÒstrangeattractorsÓ from the thermodynamics of states far from equilibrium (fromthe field of nonlinear dynamics) could be sought in the potentialpatternings of enunciation/utterance that secretly inhabit urban andarchitectural chaos.

[page 145 starts here]But we must move quickly from such a scientific paradigm to an aestheticone. The architectÕs drawing (dessin), which in French is a homophone ofplan, project (dessein), goal, axiological finality, sets out in search ofa partial enunciator that will give consistency to the group of componentsput in question. As a creator of new forms, the architect is not forciblydispossessed and lost within the labyrinth of the possible. Something inhim can announce that he is getting closer, that he is ÒboilingÓ as we sayin the childÕs game when, with eyes closed, we set off to find the objectguided only by the playersÕ cries. It happens sometimes, as if by miracle,that all of the components, all of the instruments are not in harmony butcombine in a play of harmonics and ladders of symmetries that bestow on theedifice its auto­reference, its systemic completion, simply, its properlife.

The great late historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford recently qualifiedcities as mega­machines. In fact, if one broadens the concept of machinebeyond its technical aspects and takes into account its economic,ecological and abstract dimensions and even the Òdesiring machinesÓ thatpeople our unconscious drives, one must treat the mass/aggregate of urbanand architectural machinery as machinic components, all the way down totheir smallest subgroupings. But if it is true that above all machiniccomponents produce subjectivity, it is because they are more than astructure or even a system in the ordinary sense. One can describe them asautopoetic systems, as does Francisco Varella, who furthermore assimilatesthis type of system to machines. One cannot overemphasize that theconsistency of an edifice is not only material, for it engages mechanicaldimensions and incorporeal universes that confer its subjectiveself­consistency. It may seem paradoxical to displace subjectivity ontomaterial aggregates. Thus we shall speak of partial subjectivity: the city,the street, the building, the door, the hallÑeach itself and in compositiona center of subjectivation. The agoraphobic, for

[page 146 starts here]example, experiences the loss of consistency of a complex spatial machinein which the following cooperate: the square he crosses, the traffic hefeels as a threat, the looks of passersby, his own existential apprehensionof a space expanded to the extreme and his own distressed fantasies.

But what means does the architect have at his disposal to grasp/seize andplot the productions of subjectivity inherent to his object and activity?We can speak of an architectural transfer that would not manifest itselfthrough an objective knowledge of a scientific nature but through the angleof complex aesthetic affects. We can characterize this knowledge asÒpathic,Ó following Vikto Von Weizsaker. This knowledge does not proceedfrom a discursivity bearing on well­delimited wholes but rather from anaggregation of existential territories that allows us to postulate theexistence of the same partial enunciator behind entities as different andheterogeneous as the formations of the ego, parts of the real and imaginarybody, lived domestic space, the connection to the evoked companion, traitsinherent to the ethnic group, to the neighborhood and of course toarchitectural space. The simplest example of pathic knowledge is theunderstanding of an ambience, that of a meeting or fte grasped totally andimmediately and not by the accumulation of distinct information. Thiscomprehension resembles that of the architectural object. Both offerthemselves without mediation. For example, as soon as one enters certainprimary schools, one feels anguish oozing from the walls, a factor ofpartial subjectivation that integrates itself into the surroundings(paysage) experienced by every schoolchild and teacher.

Here I must diverge from Jacques Lacan in several ways. The collectivesubjectivity in question is not based solely, or even essentially, insignifying language chains. It is engendered by semiotic componentsirreducible to translation in terms of structural or systemic signifiers.The drive carrying the fantasy ceases to be adjacent to the

[page 146 starts here]body with the help of the partial object, even if rebaptized and broadenedby the concept of object a (Òlittle aÓ). Spatial forms and the rhythms andritornellos associated with them are themselves bearers of an a­signifyingmeaning, which I distinguish here from a function of signification in thatit is the existential support of a center of enunciation/utterance. One canno longer speak of the subject in general and of a perfectly individuatedenunciation/utterance but of the partial and heterogeneous components ofsubjectivity and of collective patternings/structurings, which imply humanmultiplicities but also animal, vegetal, machinic, incorporeal andinfrapersonal becomings/evolutions/changes/destinies . One will only beable to separate transversal dimensions between components of partialsubjectivation, for example, between a lived space and musicÑMadameVerdurinÕs salon and VinteuilÕs sonataÑin that one will underline,accentuate, make discernible (discernibiliser) the specific traits of theexpressive matter of each of these components. Thus the transversality ofÒtime regained,Ó the overwhelming resonance that allows passage from oneuniverse to another, will always be given like a gift from God.

Everything always leads back to this question of centers of partialenunciation/utterance, of the heterogenesis of the components and of the

process of resingularization. It is in this direction that architects todayshould turn. They are obliged to take a stand, to commit themselves (asthey used to say in Jean­Paul SartreÕs day) to the type of subjectivitythey help to create. Will they go the route of a production reinforced by asubjectivity of the Ògeneralized equivalency,Ó of a standardizedsubjectivity that derives its value from its price on the mass­mediamarket, or will they go against the tide by contributing to areappropriation of subjectivity by subject groups concerned withresingularization and heterogenesis? Will they go the way of theinfantilizing consensus or of the creating Òdissensus?Ó But can one imaginea pedagogy of singularity? IsnÕt this a contradiction in terms? This ishappening somewhat in Japan, where numerous young architects rival eachother with a wild originality. The aesthetic component brought forth by thearchitect as a creator can become a primordial element within thepatterning/ordering fraught with a thousand functional, social, economicand material constraints constituted by the architectural subject­object.Here the ethico­aesthetic paradigm is destined to come to the foreground.The singularity sought through its ÒprojectationÓ must not only be

[page 148 starts here]recognized but must affirm its authenticity. In no case must an architectÕsrole be reduced to that of a building engineer. The fact that the creatorÕsdesiring­machines are located in a sort of continuum with opinion machines,material­machines, in no way implies that they are submerged in it.

There is reason then to associate this return to an aesthetic assumptionwith a more general ethico­political responsibility that calls for aconsideration, in heart and soul, of multiple Òoptional materials.Ó ThearchitectÕs essential work resides in the choices he is led to make. Whylisten to the imperatives of one component more than another? A certainlatitude of movement is available; but he also encounters certainthresholds not to be crossed, for fear of losing the existentialconsistency of his work, its potential power of enunciation/utterance.There are compromises with promoters, with engineers, with functionality,even with the prevailing tastes. But there is also the necessity of an auto(self)­affirmation of his own choice when the aesthetic completion iscalled into question.

Many factors in the present evolution lead to the loss of architectureÕsaesthetic specificity. A much larger question traversing this problemarises: Is it legitimate that an autonomized aesthetic dimension affirmitself within the urban fabric? This same question of an ethico­politicalrefinalization is found at all levels of human activity. Lacking sufficientconsideration of the dimensions of environmental ecology, social ecologyand mental ecology (which I group under the general rubric ÒecosophyÓ) towhich its etymology quite naturally leads us: oikos, dwellingplace/domicileÑhumanity and even the entire biosphere will be threatened.The valorization of human activities can no longer be founded unequivocally

on the quantity of work enlisted in the production of material goods. Theproduction of human and machinic subjectivity is destined to supersede themarket economy founded on profit, exchange value, the price system andinterest conflicts and struggles.

The redefinition of relations between developed space and the existentialterritories of humanity (but also of animality, vegetable species andincorporeal values and machinic systems) will become one of the principalstakes of political repolarization, which will succeed the collapse of theleft­right axis between conservatives and progressives. It will no longerbe a question only of the quality of life but of the future of life in itsrelation to the biosphere.

The revolutions in computer science, robotics,telecommunications/tŽlŽmatique and biological engineering are leading to agreater availability of human activity to the detriment of traditionalsalaried work, as the machine takes over the least satisfying, repetitivetasks. The question is not whether this new availability will result in agrowing mass of unemployed and socially dependent persons but whether itcan be converted into an active production of individual and collectivesubjectivity relating to the existential body, lived space, time,evolution/destiny (becoming), a production dependent on ethico­aestheticparadigms. And from this point of view, I repeat, the choices facingarchitecture and urban studies will present themselves with a particularacuteness, at a particularly sensitive crossroads.

[page 149 starts here]FŽlix Guattari, who participated in ÒThe Caged BodyÓ symposium at theSchool on April 7,1990, died of a heart attack in Paris on Saturday, August29,1992 He was 62 years old. Guattari, a renown psychoanalyst andphilosopher, collaborated with Gilles Deleuze on numerous books includingLÕAnti­Oedipe, Kafka: Pour une Llturature Mineure, Rhizome and What isPhilosophy?

Memorial Postscript by John RajchmanThe sudden death of FŽlix Guattari on the 29th of August 1992 gives specialmoment to this lecture delivered at ColumbiaÕs Graduate School ofArchitecture. Guattari was himself a prodigious practitioner of the artthat he describes in his lecture, the art of ÒresingularizingÓ the world orenvironment in which we move, releasing strange smooth forces from out ofthe intervals of its segmentations or striations. And the shock of hisdeath sets into relief the mark of the singular ÒethosÓ or Òsubjectivity,Ówhich he thereby introduced into the categories of our intellectual andphysical landscape. For in the densely creative climate of postwar Frenchthought that crystallized in the events of Ô68, Guattari was perhaps theone who most introduced the fresh air of new possibilities. He has a raregift of finding the innocence of unforseen movements where there seems toexist only complacency or despair, where there seemed no possible movement

or creation, as in the extreme case when desire assumes the deathlyrigidity of psychosis. But it was not simply in the desperation of theÒblack holesÓ of schizophrenia that he encountered in his long work at thealterative hospital at La Borde that he tried to release the ÒvirtualityÓof other spaces, other movements. He tried to diagnose them everywhere hecould and to establish among them ÒtransversalÓ alliances that would traceÒdiagonal linesÓ of possibility in the social and political fabric. Hetaught that life is always more than something that weighs upon us andthat we must bear, as in the doctrines of moralists and psychoanalystsincapable or fearful of creative intensities. To live is rather to releasethe play of singular

[page 150 starts here]new forces, still unseen, still ÒvirtualÓ in our ways of being. Guattariwas the great opponent and antidote to the politics and aesthetics ofdepression, to what Spinoza had already diagnosed as the tyranny of Òthesad passions.Ó

It was the force of this Òdesire,Ó which Michel Foucault celebrated in thegay style of The Anti­Oedipus, the first of GuattariÕs writings with GillesDeleuze, directed against the p.c. assurances of C. P. [Communist Party]ÒtheoreticiansÓ of Marx and Freud. But it is in the second and moreuntimely book by the two authors, A Thousand Plateaus, that we find theaesthetic­scientific problematic of the invention of new spaces and times,which Guattari pursues in this lecture at Columbia: the Òwar machineÓ of anew Ògeo­poeticsÓ prior to the geographies and geometries that havecontained and restricted our capacity for unexpected ÒnomadicÓ movement andÒbecomings.Ó

This lecture at Columbia belongs to a cluster of writings and interventionspublished under the title Chaosmosis, which formed part of GuattariÕsparticipation in the emergent ecological politics in France. Deleuze hadspoken of writing another collaborative volume devoted to Òa sort ofphilosophy of nature at a moment when every difference between nature andartifice is blurred.Ó And it is perhaps this philosophy that Guattari waspursuing in his book when he called for an Òecology of the virtual,Ó wherethe romantic dream of a pretechnical organic whole is replaced by thenotion of an ever diversifying disparate ÒenvironmentÓ at once natural andartificial, subjective and physical, electronic and biological, whosepolitics and whose unseen forces and potentials would belong to thephilosophy of the future, to the ÒethopoeticsÓ of our being and ourbeing­together.

In the very specific landscape of his own life FŽlix Guattari was aconstant source of creative turbulence and movement. In losing him, we canwonder where and how this innocence of thought and action will happen againtoday.

[end]