Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemImpersonal effects : architecture, Deleuze, subjectivity( 2007)This thesis imagines and articulates an image of architectural subjectivity in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Subjectivity for Deleuze does not refer to a person but is rather a power to act and to produce effects in the world. Deleuze in fact tends not to use the word subjectivity, speaking instead of what he calls prepersonal singularities, meaning those irreducible qualities or powers that can be seen to act in the world, independently of any particular person with fixed traits. To walk, to see, to love-these are general or anonymous capacities that function in a very real sense prior to the personological subject. Singular, here, does not mean specific or rare, but the reverse: the function "to sleep" or "to laugh" is singular for Deleuze because "a sleep" always retains a certain abstractness and `impersonality,' no matter who sleeps. For Deleuze, the world is composed of so many singularities, which together resonate silently towards a mystery of something yet to come; this primary field of a pure encounter transcends formed identities and things. The `subject' is understood therefore not primarily as identity but as a convergence of singularities immanent to the encounter. While to speak of the `subject' in these terms-to rid oneself of identity-is a difficult thing, we might say architecture is already such a singular encounter and deindividualisation of self. There is, as soon as I step into a room, a street, or a town, a palpable mystery of the singularity "to walk inside," "to see an unfamiliar street"; each echoing and anticipating in that moment every other instance, past and future, of this primitive encounter. It is an anonymous sense of a primary production that lies beyond the individual, spatio-temporal experience I call "mine." To encounter, then, does not mean an in-between, a space between persons and concrete forms; rather, it is an event that comes before the crystallisation of these things, it is the abstract surface of all singularities. I will call architectural singularities the impersonal effects, to think the inchoate, not-yet determined fragments of architectural encounter (these I oppose to the `personal' effects of identity, such as a watch, a wallet, a cigarette case). I use "effect" in Deleuze's sense of production, in which the effect is not ephemeral, an effect of something more primary, but is in itself a primary production, an effect that works, and creates. The project here is to express, by architectural means, the image of effects. Image, here, does not mean a representation, such as a photograph or a media image, but refers to a live "arrangement" of effects. What individuates an image is precisely the mode in which it causes the effects to proliferate. I begin the project with an account of Deleuze's reception in the American architectural academy, so as to reveal the historical conditions that make Deleuze's theory of subjectivity important now. Chapter Two introduces the concept of the effect and the architectural formulation that functions in the dissertation; Chapter Three extends this work in the effects-image; Chapter Four turns to Guattari's reception in Japan, and what I observe to be a pursuit after the effects-image in Guattari's encounter with architecture; finally in Chapter Five I explore the psychoanalytic lining of Guattari's project, further engaging the working of the effects-image.