Looking into the Folds

DSD Publications \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Looking into the Folds Arie Graafland © DSD - Arie Graafland. 2009 www.delftschoolofdesign.eu 23 March | 2009 DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 1 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 Looking into the Folds Arie Graafland The flat screen of my computer has a name of its own. It’s called digital life. Is there life inside my computer? Well, sometimes it looks like it. It does things on its own, it seems to have its own mind. It shows me lively pictures, it communicates for me all over the planet with its equals. It can drive me mad, but mostly I am quite happy with what it does for me. At least it has changed my working life considerably. And isn’t that what most life forms do? Change behavior. But where does that leave me as a person? Am I lost as an ‘interface’? Quite a few architects and artists will tell me, you are not lost, you just have to talk back. Communicate! Communicate with our digital architecture and art forms. But I keep thinking about notions of ‘humanism’, ‘post-humanism’, the ‘loss of subjectivity’, and most of all the disappearance of ‘the subject’ from the battlefields of theories. How do we address these questions? The concept of humanism is highly complex. I will not strictly follow the problem of what is called ‘the posthumanist subject’ as it is presented in current cultural discourse or theory (although I will introduce it as such); I will address it from the problem of ‘grounding’ and the necessity of a spatio-temporal ‘framing’ architectural thought in terms of the organic and inorganic in order to get at ways in which we may rethink the possibility of action and agency in our contemporary times. Michael Hays in his book on Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer refers to an ‘anti-humanism’ in theory.1 The subject, Hays writes, is no longer viewed as an originating agent of meaning, but as a variable and dispersed entity whose very identity and place are constituted in social practice. Objects and social processes are seen as having a material existence in--dependent of, and at times threatening to, the unity of the individual self. What Hays argues is that an analogous perceptual shift, which he calls posthumanism, can be detected within modern archi-tecture – in particular the architecture of Meyer and Hilberseimer. It is a shift away from the humanist concept of subjectivity to the so-called ‘death’ of the subject that refers to the trans-formation of the romantic ideal of individuality into ‘structurality’ in, for example, Althusser or Foucault. It is the notion that humans stand as triumphant subjects among inert objects, a concept long gone. With Deleuze we can go one step further. It means that the distinction between organic and inorganic life has to be reformulated. If organic life cannot be easily demarcated from inorganic matter as he claims, it behooves subjects to look at all matter from a different angle. Our experience of a shrinking globe, writes Conley, inflects the vision of the monad – the name that Leibniz ascribes to the soul – since compressions of time and space modify the difference of inside and outside, and of public and private. Leibniz’s monad is a cell, a room with neither doors nor windows, a crypt where all activity takes place on the inside. The monad is about the autonomy of the inside, a phenomenon that is as good as lost in our present-day world. Monadology in Leibniz turns into nomadology in Deleuze, a way of emigrant thinking, deterritorializing accepted notions of space and other received ideas. Theory has to be grasped in the place and time out of which it emerges. These situations are constantly changing. In that sense Scott Lash’s use of ‘allegory’ is an interesting thought that I would like to pursue for a moment. He distinguishes two types of modernism in social theory. On the one hand positivism and on the other ‘Lebensphilosophie’. Positivism he understands as structured along the lines of ‘system’, and Lebensphilosophie along the principle of ‘symbol’. The forerunner of positivism, whose paradigmatic system-building figures run from Rousseau/Condorcet, through Comte, the late Marx, Le Corbusier and Habermas’s later work, is French humanist classicism. Lash refers to the not unproblematic opposition of ‘Zivilisation’ and ‘Kultur’ in Norbert Elias’s work.2 Lash’s main reference here is Simmel, who worked more in the idiom of symbol than system. Simmel also began to work in a different register, the register of allegory. Lash describes it as a deepening of Goethe’s notion of symbol in contrast to French classical allegory DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 2 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 which was superficial and ornamental, as it was associated with the salons and the manners of court society. Lash shifts the notion of symbol from the classical to the baroque allegory, from French court society to Spanish absolutism and thus to baroque allegory. For Lash it consists of a completely different register from the original juxtaposition of symbol and allegory, it has to do neither with Zivilisation nor Kultur. Classical allegory proffers a point for point homology between two narratives; his baroque version posits a significant absence, a ‘hole’ in the underlying narrative. If the original, ‘true’ story somehow is not quite right, then the point-to-point homology between the second narrative and the first is no longer possible. Baroque allegorists such as Nietzsche, Simmel, Benjamin, Adorno and Karl Krauss write in the form of an essay, Lash writes. The essay might well look ‘wissentschaftlich’, but emerges in an aesthetic mode: serious and at the same time superficial, light, ornamental. Baroque allegory is opposite to Marxist explanation. The work of the French Marxist Louis Althusser might be an example here with the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer and Adorno at the other end of the line. The allegorist is, however, while looking ornamental, simul-taneously deadly serious. In Lash’s sense, the allegorist is the father of the illegi-timate child of modernity’s other. The one author he does not mention but who is to my mind very apt for this kind of writing is Peter Sloterdijk. His work is very much on the side of ‘baroque allegory’. The same goes for the position I will try to argue from, a position not so much circumscribed by post-structuralism or psychoanalysis but by social theories; discourses that seek not only to make social life intelligible but also to make it better. My argument will be that with contemporary architectural ‘foldings’ and ‘blobs’ we are finally loosing all ground. With Scott Lash I claim that we need more ‘ground’ instead of ‘folds’. I think I can agree with Lash’s critique on ‘indifference’. Speed supersedes space as indifference supersedes difference. The locations of most of our folded architecture is nowhere; they might be anywhere. The complexity of movement in international airports, themselves interchangeable, is indifferent. Just like zeros and ones are indifferent.3 I will deal with the concept of ‘anti-humanism’, but in a more concrete form of practical humanism quite like a baroque allegory. In Scott Lash’s Another Modernity humanism thrives where there are no sharp dualisms. The dualism of people and machines excludes humanism in a meaningful sense. Alberti and Vitruvius were humanists. Descartes and Hobbes were not, already dealing in the logic of abstraction, he writes. Organic images for the human society were developed by the Greeks. They conceived the citizen, the city, and the cosmos to be built according to the same principles. To see the structure of human groups as a mirror of natural forms has remained imaginatively and intellectually powerful.4 We are all familiar with the manner in which Renaissance architects drew on these organic images. But major changes in science and technology have occurred. In his Introduction to Kas Oosterhuis’s book Programmable Architecture, Ole Bouman writes that today we experience the next step of dissolution of social bodies.5 Families, firms, communities are either vanishing or changing their structure. After the melting into air of ideologies and big moral institutions, it is now the turn of patterns of dependency and interaction between people to be liquefied. They have become malleable, Bouman writes. Oosterhuis’s architecture to him is the art of no longer occupying space by its enclosure, but the creation of situations that become movable and thus reflecting these social tendencies. It is difficult to represent values when there are no longer any shared values, Bouman suggests. Architecture is at risk of losing its cultural relevance. Unless, that is, it is able to redefine itself in the Hyperarchitecture of moving surfaces such as those manifested in Oosterhuis’s Trans-ports Version (with a rubber exterior) or in interactive surfaces which may overcome the supposed passivity of the viewer. Of course no form of humanism is present in this information culture, in which the machinic and the digital become predominant and human beings become increasingly attached to their information DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 3 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 machines and display screens. Although it leaves many questions to be resolved, Ole Bouman’s critique still operates on a notion of relative autonomy, a relation with society is present. But the way this kind of architecture is mimicking society without any form of resistance, might be typical of the way this architecture understands itself. We will have to look again at what is permanent in our society to fully understand what seems to be in a constant flux. I agree with David Harvey who writes, ‘we need not only to understand but also to create permanences – organization, institutions, doctrines, programs, formalized structures, and the like – in order to change anything in any kind of meaningful or directed way’.6 One of the main questions to be solved is not the traditional philosophical question of how it is that something new can be said to come into being; but, perhaps more importantly today, the question arises of the nature of the relationship itself as that which generates a different condition or thing. In other words, are we dealing with ‘another’ or ‘new’ architecture, or is it mainly repetition on another plane of what is already present? If we frame this question in the way Slavoj Žižek writes about Deleuze: ‘How is a free act possible within the causal network of material interdependencies; … because something really New can emerge only if the determinative power of the linear causal chain is not complete’.7 In architecture we still have to define the relations to historical and contemporary practices. Lynn’s and Oosterhuis’s practices can easily slide into the Leibnizian conceit of an isolated monad, with no context being necessary. In discussing Greg Lynn’s ‘Fold’, Michael Speaks refers to Deleuze’s philosophical distinction between the ‘realization of the possible’ and the ‘actualization of the virtual’.8 Deleuze, following Bergson, makes this distinction in order to differentiate between two kinds of multiplicity: one that is redundant and one that is creative. Realization of the possible operates by the principles of limitation and resemblance. In the circuit of the realization of the possible there exists a kind of preformism in which everything is already given in the possible so that nothing new is created in its realization. Speaks considers deconstructivist architecture and ‘certain folded architectures’ to be forms of realization of the possible. ‘When a theoretical concept (the fold) or reading/writing protocol (deconstruction) is used as a blueprint to generate an architectural form, architecture becomes applied philosophy, and necessarily gives up all claims to singularity and creativity’, Speaks writes.9 Actualization of the virtual on the other hand, does not operate by resemblance or representation, but by differentiation, divergence, and creation.10 In that sense one could ask, with Speaks, whether ‘the fold’ contributes to the production of new forms of architecture or simply repeats what already exists. The question is relevant since it is entirely possible that Lynn steps into the same trap as Eisenman’s deconstructivism did in the nineties. Lynn wants to operate outside Eisenman’s and Derrida’s hemisphere of deconstructivist architecture. No longer the conflicting orders, but a fluid logic of unrelated elements within a continuous flow. But first let’s look at Deleuze’s process ontology and its physical origins. In explaining Deleuze’s ontological analysis of ‘state space’, Manuel DeLanda explains how state spaces are constructed. He distinguishes the different operators involved in this construction. ‘Given the relation between the changes in two (or more) degrees of freedom expressed as a rate of change, one operator, differentiation, gives us the instantaneous velocity (also known as a velocity vector)’, he writes.11 The other operator, integration, performs the opposite but complementary task: from the instantaneous values it reconstructs a full trajectory or series of states. These two operators are used in a particular order to generate the structure of state space. The modeling process begins with the choice of manifold to use as a state space. Then from experimental observations of a system’s changes in time, that is, from actual series of states as observed in the laboratory, we create some trajectories to begin populating the manifold. These trajectories, in turn, serve as the raw material for the next step: we repeatedly apply the differentiation operator to the trajectories, each application generating one velocity vector and in this way we generate a velocity vector field. Finally, using the integration operator, we generate from the vector field further DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 4 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 trajectories which can function as predictions about future observations of the system’s states. The state space filled with trajectories is called the ‘phase portrait’ of the state space.12 Trajectories in this space always approach an attractor asymptotically, they come close but never reach it. In other words, attractors are never actualized. ‘Despite their lack of actuality, attractors are nevertheless real and have definite effects on actual entities’, DeLanda writes. The stability of trajectories is measured by their resistance to small shocks. Distributions of attractors are structurally stable, on the other hand if the perturbation is large enough a distribution of attractors may cease to be stable and change or bifurcate into a different one. Referring to the work of Abraham and Shaw, DeLanda further provides that ‘[s]uch a bifurcation event is defined as a continuous deformation of one vector field into another topologically inequivalent one through a structural instability’. Using the technical terms, he comes to the following definition: ‘[a] multiplicity is a nested set of vector fields related to each other by symmetry-breaking bifurcations, together with the distributions of attractors which define each of its embedded levels’.13 Deleuze speaks not of ‘realization’ but of actualization, and introduces a novel ontological category to refer to the status of multiplicities themselves: virtuality. This is where Speaks picks up on Deleuze’s argument. In discussing architectural practices we also have to mediate philosophical thought to more concrete forms of human practice and experience; sociologists and architects deal with a different kind of thinking, a less distantiated way of dealing with reality. Theory is never a matter of pure abstraction, as Harvey writes. ‘Theoretical practice must be constructed as a continuous dialectic between the militant particularism of lived lives and the struggle to achieve sufficient critical distance and detachment to formulate global ambitions’.14 We should not pose this question in terms of possible and real, as Deleuze argues, because then we are forced to conceive of existence as a brute eruption, a pure act or leap which always occurs behind our backs and is subject to a law of all or nothing. In an effort to visualize this more concrete sociological relation of the possible (as realizable) and the virtual (as actualizable), in my book The Socius of Architecture, we have drawn up a homeless shelter plan for Manhattan, New York.15 The typology of the shelter is that of Melnikov’s SONnaia SONata, a design for a sleeping laboratory where Marxian notions on the liberating forces of labor are refueled in a collective sleeping facility. In that sense our Manhattan Transfer Shelter design is certainly an explicit effort of the realization of the possible. But in its day-to-day use it may evoke on occasion an emotion or affect that I have described as sublime, and this affect may yet transform the building into ‘architecture’, I then wrote.16 The design procedures in the book stay away from all too realistic representation. What matters in architecture is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual. It is not about imitating reality or reproducing experience in an artificial medium.17 The question to be answered was, whether a condition of absence is achievable in architecture. Through a theoretical discourse on Kant’s and especially Lyotard’s notion of the sublime and his discussion on Newman’s paintings, I tried to relate a philosophical concept (the sublime) with an architectural form (a homeless shelter). This ‘relation’ however is a shift of ‘planes’, a stab in the dark, an aesthetic affect. The affect is the effect of limitlessness, limitlessness represented by an image of expansiveness, but – and this is crucial – as seen from street level. No bird’s eye is involved, no mastering representational architectonic form is present. What I had in mind at that point were the few articles and a letter Althusser wrote on art and ideology. In a letter he wrote in April 1966 to André Daspre, Althusser explained what he called ‘aesthetic effect’ in an attempt to come to knowledge about the processes causing this ‘effect’ (French effet). Effect here is different to Deleuze’s notions of affect which have a physical source in thermodynamic systems. ‘An individual may be characterized by a fixed number of definite properties…’ DeLanda writes. And yet, he may ‘possess an indefinite number of capacities to affect and be affected by other individuals’.18 The possible interactions will DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 5 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 vary from individual to individual; DeLanda mentions the realm of chemistry, different chemical elements which ‘have different capacities to form novel combinations with other elements, the capacities of carbon, for instance, vastly outperforming those of inert gases’. This openness is also related to the virtual, in fact ‘Deleuze gives a two-fold definition of the virtual (and the intensive), using both singularities (unactualized tendencies) and what he calls affects (unactualized capacities to affect and be affected’.19 To be able to find answers to this Althusserian relation between knowledge as art, we need to develop a knowledge of art. Art does not give us the knowledge of our world, it gives us the reality of the ideology of our world, it makes us ‘see’, and ‘feel’. We also have to separate it from political notions; aesthetic affect and political action are not related, although the Russian avant-garde thought otherwise. It only led to hopelessly stranded debates and conflicts as I showed in my book.20 Ideology in Althusser is different to what it is in Marx. Ideology is present in every possible human action, science included. Ideology was very much the object of his science in the sense of knowledge about the individual and his/her experience of the world. Art and science deal with the same reality, but in a specific form art delivers the affect in the form of ‘seeing’ and ‘feeling’, and science in the form of knowledge in the sense of concepts. Art and knowledge do not exist in an opposition, but there is a difference. In a comparison of Robert Altman’s films Short Cuts and Nashville, Žižek discusses what Altman himself refers to as ‘subliminal reality’, as ‘meaningless mechanic shocks, encounters, and impersonal intensities that precede the level of social meaning’.21 In Nashville Altman directly mobilizes what Brian Massumi calls the ‘autonomy of affect’. We totally misread Nashville, he writes, ‘if we locate the songs within the global horizon of the ironico-critical depiction of the vacuity and ritualized commercial alienation of the universe of American country music… [w]e are allowed to,’ he continues, ‘even seduced to fully enjoy the music on its own in its affective intensity, independent of Altman’s obvious critico-ideological project’. The same might be true of the shelter project, Melnikov’s Marxian notions are bypassed as a political ideological project to open up the actualization of the virtual. Lynn’s techniques are operating on a notion of limitlessness also, but here expansiveness is on the level of the computer programs and the media involved. I called the design of the shelter a ‘critical thirding’, addressing the critical questions raised in the respective analyses in Parts One and Two of The Socius. It does not result from any limitation of preexisting possibilities or realities. Theoretical positions are not there to be translated or retroactively fabricated in the image of what resembles it; I use the proposals as frameworks of visibility.22 ‘Framework’ means an effort to make visible the by definition formless and unframable, it raises the question of what forms and frames this formless in architectural practices that are by definition involved in form, or formation. Or, in the words of Žižek, ‘the proper site of production is not the virtual space as such, but, rather, the very passage from it to constituted reality, the collapse of the multitude and its oscillations into reality – production is fundamentally a limitation of the open space of virtualities, the determination and negation of the virtual multitude’.23 I discussed this condition of production and absence as an aesthetic affect of the aesthetic/ideological ‘instance’, produced by a realization of the possible, resulting in a possible ‘actualization of the virtual’, the possible affect of the sublime to my mind dormant in formal architecture. Perhaps it is possible to paraphrase Deleuze in his ideas on the virtual and the real in this context. This terminology has to be revised, he writes in Difference & Repetition. ‘The virtual is opposed not to real but to actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual’.24 The virtual must be defined as part of the real object, as though the object – the shelter in this case – had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension. Could it be that a sublime experience of the shelter is its ‘virtual’ or ‘embryonic’ element? ‘When it is claimed that works of art are immersed in a virtuality’, Deleuze writes, DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 6 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 ‘what is being invoked is not some confused determination but the completely determined structure formed by its genetic differential elements, its “virtual” or “embryonic” elements’.25 Could it be that the sublime coexists in the object, in its virtual part of the object? The proposed ‘critical thirding’ is never a project of translation, in architecture ‘realization of the possible’ and ‘actualization of the virtual’ are always related; the semi-autonomy of the different spheres of the economic and political order at that time in Manhattan might be able to generate some insight into the aesthetic affects of the proposed building. A project which is very much in line with Scott Lash’s notions on ‘ground’. It meant a certain differentiation in thought. ‘Philosophers and artists operate transcendentally, in a sphere of more or less distanciated reflection from the objects of their thought, in a way that sociologists and architects cannot. This is because sociologists, architects and planners deal less with objects than with technologies that are not outside of us so much as all around us…..they are closer to the field of power’, as Lash has argued.26 The shelter, the Tokyo housing project and the Amsterdam urban plan try to provisionally cover both. The projects are not there to seduce the eye, they are in fact not very attractive. This at the same time brings in the three different cities presented in The Socius. The cities are a product of different social systems, disparate flows, events etc. The city and the bodies within constitute the living part of it, but are not compatible entities. What I tried to show is that the homeless of New York, and the day laborers in Tokyo were not involved in building their city or in what could be called their environment. They are completely peripheral to the decision making, political strategies and power relations they are living in. Their human body is a battleground like in Barbara Kruger’s Untitled from 1989, used in the earlier Dutch version of my book.27 The design processes for the shelter and the apartment block in Tokyo have more to do with what Michael Hays wrote about critical forces that thicken and roughen rather than lubricate the situation. ‘This practice will make itself felt as a kind of resistance, producing an alternative perception (of the sublime), a delay or refraction beneath the easy transparency of thematization and branding’.28 With Oosterhuis’s Trans-ports Version, it is my impression that we are dealing with an architectural replicator, where all ground is lost. It seems like a perfect fit into the experience industries of our time. A similar critique we find with Michael Hays in his discussion of the work of Greg Lynn, Lars Spuybroek, and Kas Oosterhuis. ‘Recent design theories have tended to take an affirmative position with regard to their cultural sponsors and accept a certain determination by cultural forces outside architecture like information and entertainment technologies’, he writes.29 Hays describes their architecture as the smooth fusion of relations among digitally synthesized images of diverse origins. Typological objects are definitively in the past – Hays describes it as a breakaway from the autonomous models of Tendenza – it is the computer software itself which coordinates multiple entities in a smooth, frictionless flow. The architects themselves operate on a completely autonomous design level. For Lynn the prevalence of topological surfaces presents the first opportunity for architects to draw and sketch using calculus. The challenge for Lynn is to try to understand the appearance of these tools in a more sophisticated way than as simply a new set of shapes.30 The same is true for Peter Zellner’s compilation in Hybrid Space.31 Most of the offices in Zellner’s book are comparable with Greg Lynn’s work. Michael Sorkin’s Wiggle might be of a different character, no computers are involved.32 Together with his designer Andrei Vovk, Sorkin devises the most fantastic urban models. Like a kind of architectural ‘écriture auto-matique’, each and every random landscape becomes filled with the same type of visual syntax. The working method is however readily comparable as there is no single reference to the ‘outside’. Kevin Rhowbotham’s Form to Programme tries to take another stance. DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 7 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 The common factor in all these books is that they justifiably discard the idea that ‘form follows function’. This maxim has always been a legitimation for an aesthetically formed concept. The suggested causality between the two is one of the myths born of the education systems and of an unreflected practice. Form to Programme is critical of this, but the interesting point is that it goes further than the majority of the others; not confined to seduction, Rhowbotham’s book is to a significant extent conceptual and critical. In David Greene’s ‘Beneath the Pavement is the Beach’ (written as an Introduction to Form to Programme), Greene states that, ‘what the result of Kevin Rhowbotham’s tactics might infer, is that, particularly with the use of computing, high levels of seduction are increasingly simple to achieve.’ If this is so, then this must shift the emphasis of speculative production to another site. This new site, I would suggest, is conceptual. The essential conceptual content of the book does not lie inherently in the models, drawings etc., but in the author’s text. Rhow-botham’s analysis is one of ‘immanent criticism or immanent analysis’, as he calls it, ‘a sort of criticism from within, specifically a dissection of those mechanisms upon which the production of cultural values depends’.33 The majority of the aforementioned books prove to be entirely imaginary with respect to the intractable sphere of production. My impression is that we are not dealing with another form of contemporary formalism, nor with a new geometry in terms of style. With Zellner, Lynn, Spuy-broek and Oosterhuis it is an architecture dissolving itself in ‘design’, whether cars, industrial design, video games or architecture. There is no longer any ‘disciplinary partitioning’, as Hays writes. There is however a strong terminological link in the reasoning with post-war sociobiology. The American biologist Donna Haraway has argued that biology has ceased to exist and that the organism has been replaced by cybernetic systems, which have radically changed the connections of physical life, and the human sciences.34 Sociobiology, like all modern biologies, studies not the human body, but a control machine as its central object. Nature, writes Haraway, is structured as a series of interlocking cybernetic systems, which are theorized as communications problems. The genetic calculus of sociobiology concerns maximization strategies of genes and combinations of genes. The noumenal object here is the gene, called by Richard Dawkins the ‘replicator’, within the gene pool. Bodies and societies are only the replicator’s strategies for maximizing their own reproductive profit. There seems to be a certain correspondence with the way Deleuze understands Leibniz in his book The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque.35 In Leibniz we are dealing with an infinity of monads which form the center of a compound substance, as he calls it (for example an animal). This body is organic when it forms a kind of automaton or natural machine, which is a machine not only as a whole but also in its smallest observable parts. Each monad is a kind of living mirror, or a mirror endowed with internal action; it represents the universe according to its point of view. Leibniz envisions three hierarchical levels of organic existence among ‘aggregated substances’. An organism as integrated aggregate, an animal as an organism dominated by a soul and an intelligent creature; an animal dominated by a spirit. Animals have consciousness or feelings, intelligent creatures have self-consciousness. Leibniz’s philosophy is ‘panorganic’, as Nicolas Rescher writes.36 In Leibniz all nature is alive, every monad is a vital center of an organic structure. Leibniz writes that each organic body of a living being is a kind of divine machine or natural automaton which infinitely surpasses all artificial automata. This is only true for living machines, not for man-made machines. A divine planning in nature is common for some 17th-century thinkers; God was the great watchmaker, a machine maker. But for Leibniz God was the great organism-maker, a machine as an organic automaton with inherent teleology. Every piece can be divided into further pieces, each of which has some motion of its own. Otherwise it would be impossible that each bit of matter could express the whole universe, Leibniz writes in Theodicy.37 Leibniz’s pan-organic view of the world is predicated on the idea that life is everywhere. The then-recent discovery of the microscope and the finding that even a single drop of water contains a whole variety of organisms, were regarded by him as a striking DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 8 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 illustration of this position. The work of e.g. the Dutch scientists Jan Swammerdam and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek always interested him enormously. To understand Leibniz’s thought it will be necessary to understand the world he was living in. David Harvey, drawing on Meyer, finds an argument that attempts to bring together Leibniz’s thinking and his world, writing: That world was torn with strife and controversy, religious wars and violence, pestilence and plague, political intrigue and chaotic fragmentations, and all manner of unsettling discoveries (geopolitical, scientific, etc). And Leibniz was deeply engaged in the politics of that world, trying to find solutions, to establish harmonies where there were none, to negotiate rational outcomes, to reconcile ideas about God’s perfection with the obvious imperfection in daily life as well as with the extraordinary advances then occurring in science (particularly Newton’s work) and in philosophy (particularly Descartes). He was also an active participant in contemporary geopolitical struggles and practices.38 But his worldview is not much different from Louis xiv’s doctrine of political absolutism; it is the notion that the observation of the essence of things is nothing else but an observation of the essence of our own spirit, a doctrine of personal absolutism. No real cooperative community is possible. Folding and unfolding in this sense are no longer simply means of contraction and dilation, but evolution. The organism is defined by its ability to fold its own parts and unfold them to a degree of development that is characteristic of each species. To unfold is to increase, to grow, just as the caterpillar will unfold into the butterfly. But the question remains in what direction is this growth? Here we might find a link to contemporary sociobiology. Haraway rightfully criticizes the explicit agenda of contemporary sociobiology. Sociobiological reasoning applied to the human societies easily glides into facile naturalization of job segregation, dominance hierarchies, racial chauvinism, and the ‘necessity’ of domination in sexually based societies to control the nastier aspects of genetic competition. For a sociobiologist, dominance is not a trait, nor even an individual organismic predisposition, but a system property.39 A system property that can only go one way. There is no cooperation. Cooperation falls under the same aegis as competition. Harvey argues that sociobiologists are correct when they argue that cooperation is in some sense an adaptive form of competition. The difficulty is that they make the competitive moment the shaping moment of all else and use adap-tation to absorb collaboration within the competitive framework.40 But since he considers competition, adaptation, collaboration and cooperation, and environmental transformations as relational categories, and not as mutually exclusive categories, cooperation just like the others, keeps its relative autonomy as a relational figure. In his view the human capacity of ‘self realization’ is socially and economically related to values. For Naess, one of the leading figures of ‘deep ecology’, we need to challenge the instrumental values which alienate us. ‘(A) human being is not a thing in an environment, but a juncture in a relational system without determined boundaries in time and space’.41 It picks up on the process philosophy of Whitehead, Harvey writes, and on ‘the dialectical conceptions of internal relations’. With this it naturally runs against more conventional views of time and space. Naess’ philosophical system ‘rests on the individual application of the Leibnizian conceit to the understanding of the values that reside in nature’. The idea is that we work hard at ‘sharpening our conceptual understanding while opening ourselves up to the innumerable flows that bind us to the world of nature’.42 The comparison between the genetic or rule-based phenomenon of computation as a Leibnizian man-made machine is not comparable with human intelligence or nature. The question here is about selfconsciousness. Žižek makes a comparison with the computer screen and the human face. ‘When we communicate with another subject, we get signals from him, we observe his face as a screen, but, not only do we, partners in communication, never get to know what is “behind the screen”; the same goes for the DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 9 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 concerned subject himself (i.e. the subject does not know what lies behind the screen of his very own (self) consciousness, what kind of Thing he is in the Real’.43 Self-consciousness in Žižek is a surface screen that produces the effect of ‘depth’, of a dimension beneath it. This dimension is only accessible from the standpoint of the surface, and when we reach behind the screen this effect is dissolved. We are left with a set of meaningless processes that are neuronal and biochemical. The question of nature versus nurture remains unsolved since the key dimension is that of the interface between the two. Even if science defines and starts to manipulate the human genome, Žižek writes, ‘this will not enable it to dominate and manipulate human subjectivity’. Continuing, ‘it is neither the genetic formula nor the way my dispositions were developed due to the influence of the environment, but the unique self-relationship emerging out of the interaction between the two’. That leaves us with the basic question of the autonomy of the subject. It is not so much that with biogenetics we lose our freedom and dignity, Žižek writes, rather we experience that we never had them in the first place. This comes close to Althusser’s ideas on the relative autonomy of the ‘instances’. Althusser argued against economistic notions in Marxism in which economic production is treated as the main relevant category. Such arguments even become more and more Leibnizian (and idealist) to the degree that production is constructed as a hermetically sealed (windowless) moment, as Harvey argues.44 The way Hays understands the relative autonomy of architecture is comparable to the ways I have constructed the arguments in my Socius of Architecture. The book deals with a horizontal structure in the economic, political and ideological/aesthetic ‘instances’, instead of a vertical structure in base superstructure. ‘Instances’ are not fixed entities or ‘permanences’, but relational and temporal categories. Equally, Harvey argues that Whitehead’s doctrine of ‘permanences’ can be related to the dialectics of space and place. A ‘permanence’ arises as a system of ‘extensive connection’ out of processes, he writes. Entities achieve relative stability in their bounding and internal ordering of processes creating space, for a certain period of time. Harvey sees the process of place formation as a process of carving out ‘permanences’ from the flow of processes creating spaces.45 These permanences are however not eternal, they are subject to time. This to a large extent forms his notion on the ‘thing’ we call a city. The city is the outcome of a layered process of urbanization. Processes are more fundamental than ‘things’, they are always mediated through the things they produce, sustain and dissolve. The permanences produced frequently function as the solid and immovable basis of daily material existence. Harvey’s notion here again comes close to ‘instances’ since power structures, institutions and ways of thinking are included in these permanences, and it breaks away from 19th-century thinking. ‘… Olmsted, Geddes, Howard, Burnham, Sitte, Wagner and Unwin, all reduced the problem of intricate social process to a matter of finding the right spatial form’.46 The problem with so called ‘high modernism’ and the city was not its ‘totalizing’ vision, but its persistent habit of privileging things and spatial forms over social process. But on the other hand it is dangerous to reduce everything to flows, fashionable as it might be in design thinking at this moment. We also have to think about ‘permanences’ like the homeless and the day laborers. We cannot easily talk about the world of ‘nature’ or of ‘environment’ without simultaneously revealing how space and time are being constituted by these processes. The same is true for the subject. The ‘I’ is not the autonomous subject as well as the effort to try to see and experience the world as a meaningful ‘whole’. The confrontation with the genome obliterates this fantasy-screen through which I perceive reality, a formulation that runs parallel to Althusser’s notion on ideology. ‘Faced with the genome or a “theoretical anti-humanism”, I am nothing, and this nothing is the subject itself’.47 Let’s turn to Lynn again. The computer is not a brain, he writes, its ‘intelligence’ makes ‘mindless connections’, the failures of artificial intelligence suggest a need to develop a systematic human intuition about the connective medium, rather than attempting to build critically into the machine. Haraway’s DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 10 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 critique on sociobiology easily works for a blind folding of computer generated forms. It even works for Lynn’s vocabulary. Haraway distinguishes the difference in vocabulary in pre-Second World War life sciences and post-war sociobiology. Before the Second World War the bio-science of organisms was dealing with notions of psychobiology, human engineering, organism, physiology, intelligence and person. Post-war theories are dealing with sociobiology, communication control, cybernetic machines, systems theory, information and genes. In other words the person with his/her intelligence is replaced by genes and information structures. The mediation however is not solved until we understand the unique structure of self-reference out of the interaction between genetic substance and environment. A similar critical notion we find in Virilio who is of the opinion that when people invent the ‘world brain’ by declaring that humans are no longer human but ‘neurons inside a world brain’, and that interactivity factors this phenom-enon, ‘it is more than just a question of the society of control – it’s the cybernetic society. Taking the model of bees or some other self-regulated system, is the very opposite of freedom and democracy’, Virilio remarks.48 With this we might further argue that architectural concepts and procedures are never neutral, not in Renaissance architecture, not in the baroque and not in our present-day situation of blob design or computational architecture. In that sense this kind of architecture (whether you call it digital, blobs, folds, diagrams, or programmable architecture) is not related to practical humanism since it deals with information systems, digital technologies, simulation and visuality. The reason I am referring to sociobiology is that the deities of the organic body as in Alberti are not sacred to the new designers of evolutionary strategies. Sociobiology, with all its dangers included, has the advantage that it can cleanse its objects of obsolescent flaws in natural design. One of the things we could learn from Haraway is her insight in the difference between natural and artificial, one of the parameters of every contemporary design strategy. Late 20th-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed. ‘Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves are frighteningly inert’, says Haraway. The sociobiological narratives depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. The best example is the movie Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott. It has been used many times as a future vision of our postmodern world. Blade Runner is not about modern production as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) once was, ‘but about postmodern reproduction, both genetic and mechanized’, as Christine Boyer writes.49 A characteristic of it is that ‘[t]he human body seems to be disappearing, becoming disposable as human memory is downloaded into computer programs, while a sense of disembodiment grows as actual body organs are replaced by electronic prosthetic devices and bodily sensorium augmented by biological and computer technologies that remain external to the body’.50 What Hays has critically detected in Hilberseimer’s and Meyer’s modernism, the decentering of the subject is, ironically if not cynically, fully present in today’s sociobiology. It is of course not the same, but in a certain way Alberti’s narrative already shows some similarity. Karsten Harries stresses the artificiality of Alberti’s construction.51 He quotes Hubert Damisch who writes that Alberti reduces the viewing subject to a kind of Cyclops that obliges the eye to remain at one fixed, indivisible point. In other words, it obliges one to adopt a stance that has nothing in common with the effective conditions of perception. In his discussion on ‘Folded Forms from Leibniz to Lynn (Skin and Bones)’, in Warped Space, Anthony Vidler shows us that Leibniz’s notions of the classical picture space have complicated this concept.52 Rather than accepting the viewing subject as Cyclops, and accepting the back surface of the camera as a receiving surface, he has himself stretched a canvas in the space, as a receptor of the images. This screen, Vidler explains, ‘is not the flat picture plane of classical representation; it is from the start ridged and folded’. For DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 11 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 Deleuze Leibniz was the philosopher of the baroque and the experience of the baroque entails that of the fold; he is also the first philosopher and mathematician of the pleat, of curves and twisting surfaces. Nearly always when placed in opposition to the Renaissance the baroque is seen as arbitrary, as if it were simply that which had gone wild. Jakob Burckhardt expressed it as ‘one brutalized dialectic, to Quatremère de Quincy it was bizarre, to Panofsky it was illusionary, and to Benedetto Croce there was no talk of baroque art because it was considered all too ugly or grotesque to speak of’. ‘Malerisch’ is the word many historians have used; Wölfflin considers it an important term but not enough to adequately capture it. The same goes for movement. ‘Movement’ alone is certainly not enough to describe the baroque. The baroque is big, colossal even. The baroque uses the ‘Gewalt des Affekts’, the force of emotion, the ecstasy.53 Michelangelo is being characterized by a ‘leidenschaftliches Wühlen’ (a passionate toss and tumble), a continuing fight with substance. Wölfflin compares the baroque ideal with the image of the body in that period. On the place of the slender figures of the Renaissance, we now see the voluptuous bodies of the baroque. The lightness and the elasticity of the Renaissance makes way for the baroque ideal of embodiment. ‘Ernst und Würde’ (seriousness and dignity) take place in a pompous beauty that directed itself at grandeur and impressiveness.54 The baroque could only manifest itself in large and impressive forms. It overwhelms the viewer who must succumb to its imposing performance. In baroque architecture the severing of interior from the exterior is characteristic. The building itself is closed off, openings are becoming smaller and smaller in relation to the façades. Wölfflin mentions the contrast between the exacerbated language of the façade and the serene peace of the inside: ‘a little coffin containing the absolute’, as Jean Rousset writes. The interior of many baroque churches gives a new spatial feeling directed more to the notion of infinity. The joining light gives a picturesque effect. The choir appears in the abundance of gold causing the main altar to almost disappear. It dissolves in the splendor of the heavens as suggested in its very name of ‘splendori celesti’. The ground plan does not seem to have much of a development. The building is a convoluted mass. The spatial setting of Leibniz’s understanding is thus a pinhole camera, only with more than one opening for the transmitting of images from the outside. Leibniz postulated a screen, canvas or curtain in the darkened room to receive what he called ‘the species’ (les especs, or being). This screen or curtain is not uniform, but diversified by folds (les plis) representing items of innate knowledge. Deleuze sketches a house with two floors; the two levels are connected, and it is the upper floor that has no windows. ‘Monads’, Leibniz writes, ‘have no windows through which something could enter or leave’. Deleuze adds that ‘its only furnishing is that of the screen which represents a brain, a kind of mechanically pulsating substance’, quite different from Alberti’s construction. Deleuze has provided a lower story for this unlivable house without windows, one with five openings to let the five senses do their work; it operates as a kind of bodily antechamber to the monadic soul. But here too there is no stable ground for referentiality, no coherent system of meaning or autonomous base. ‘The monad is a chamber of whispers, and expression occurs only at the synthesis of these whispers into a chorus in which the monad itself might appear like a conductor’, writes Gregg Lambert in his book on Deleuze.55 The folds, cords or springs represent an innate form of knowledge, they move into action by matter. The movements of the visible oscillate or vibrate from the matter below; it is by a process of resonance in the monad that the visible movements in matter become audible. What is perceptible on one level becomes legible on the other, from matter to soul. The monad or crypt functions as an echo chamber. Deleuze writes that it is pointless to imagine modern situations unless they can help us understand what the baroque had entailed. ‘Folds are in the soul and exist only in the soul’. Matter triggers ‘vibrations or oscillations’ at the lower extremity of the cords, through the intermediary of ‘some little openings’ that exist on the lower level. It is a great baroque montage, writes Deleuze, ‘a montage that moves between the lower floor, pierced with windows, and the upper floor, blind and closed’. Deleuze makes it more complex, the fold in this construction runs DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 12 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 between the mind and the body that can no longer be figured in terms of oppositions. ‘The philosophical use of concepts and their regulation through a process of jurisprudence, is problematized’, Gregg Lambert writes. The cords translate visible and audible movements from below into sounds up above. But upper and lower floor are there for a reason. I already mentioned that folding means evolution, evolution into humans. When the hour comes to unfold their parts to attain a degree of organic development, proper to man, or to form ‘cerebral folds’ as Deleuze writes, at the same time their animal soul becomes reasonable. Life here is implicated or enclosed with matter, knowledge is the discernment of the method by which the soul is folded with an animal’s body. Very much comparable with the paintings of Francis Bacon where the distinction between animal and human is blurred.56 ‘Discernment’ means for Deleuze to be a ‘cryptographer’, someone who can at once account for nature and decipher the soul, someone who can peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul. Cryptography is the art of inventing the key to an enclosed thing. In Leibniz becoming is an elevation: a change of theater, of level or of floors. In other words, the theater of matter gives way to that of spirits or of God. With Leibniz we notice three fundamental notions: fluidity of matter, elasticity of bodies, and a motivating spirit or God as mechanism. Leibniz rethinks the phenomenon of the point of view, of perspective. As I mentioned, Leibniz’s screen is under tension, it has a kind of elasticity or active force. The actions of the screen consist in certain vibrations or oscillations, like a cord under tension that is plucked and gives off a tone or musical sound. The problem with this concept as we know now, is that nerves are physiologically distinct; a uniform cause like electricity would generate different sensations from one kind of nerve to another. Electricity applied to the optic nerve (or cord, for that matter) produces the experience of light, applied to the skin the sensation of touch. Different inputs to the same nerve however, do not produce different sensations – revealing a fundamentally arbitrary relation between stimulus and sensory reception. The body possesses an inborn ability to misperceive, unable to register semantic input, thus sensations can be interchangeable to some extent. ‘Designers and theorists have tended to see the Deleuzian model as an invitation for a rather literal folding of the envelope, a curving of the skin that tends to ignore rather than privilege the interior’, Vidler writes. The Leibnizian fold could in no way be replicated simply by the curved surface of a tent-like or blob-like structure. This is not the case in Lynn’s Animate Form, as his references to Leibniz are not very central to his argument. Conclusion. Anthony Vidler referred to the new alliance between spatial theory and ‘biotectonics’, utilizing the potentials of digital modeling and drawing on the observations of Deleuze and Cache, as a way of sidestepping the traditional modernist and postmodernist polarities of simplicity/complexity, harmony/opposition, and construction/deconstruction. Such ‘reductive typologies’ are replaced in Greg Lynn’s practice by an open-ended set of mathematical/topological experiments that disturb if not replace the formal paradigms of postmodernism, Vidler writes. Lynn’s forms are now ‘proto-geometric’, ‘anexact’, ‘bloblike’, ‘viscous’. Form is no longer conceived of as a geometric ‘original’ distorted or broken to incorporate complexity or represent conflict; it is, says Vidler, a topological surface as if organically generating new species in a speed-up of Darwinian evolution. Greg Lynn’s architecture simulates organic analogies in information systems, it mimics artificial nature. According to Vidler Lynn’s spatial morphologies are generated to offer potential evolution to architecture. The question remains in what direction this evolution goes. If the ‘human’ is introduced as a force, Vidler writes, it is as movement – crowd or swarm – and not as a generative instrument in itself. To me it means we have finally lost all ground. What gets lost here is corporeality in a threefold way; three bodies are lost at the same time, the territorial DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 13 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 body of the planet and ecology, the social body or socius, and our human body. ‘In the Cartesian world of computers there is no longer any reference to the body’, Christine Boyer writes.57 For the internal matrix of the computer’s memory is an extended grid of zeros and ones without dimension, she continues. From this results the need to reorient oneself, Virilio has written, ‘to reorient oneself with respect to the body, to reorient one’s body with respect to the other, but also with respect to the Earth, or the world proper’.58 To me this means again that we need to find another practical humanism in architecture, another ground in social values. DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 14 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 Footnotes: 1 K. Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The architecture of Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). 2 Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1994). Gordon draws attention to the influence of Thomas Mann’s criticism of French ‘civilization’. In his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen of 1918, Mann makes the same distinction Lash makes between ‘civilization’ and ‘culture’, whereby Germany for Mann was more subjected to the latter and France to the former. Gordon’s book deals with the to his mind uncritical antithesis as used by Elias to argue about cultural history. Gordon shows that Elias’s ‘spatial axis’ – the difference between France and Germany – is not convincing. See my Versailles and the Mechanics of Power. The Subjugation of Circe. An Essay (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003), p.54. 3 Scott Lash, Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell 1999), p.57. 4 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1996). 5 Ole Bouman, ‘Hyperarchitecture’, in Kas Oosterhuis, Programmable Architecture (Milan: L’Arca Edizioni, 2002). 6 David Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p.8. 7 Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze and Consequences (London: Routledge, 2004), p.111. 8 Michael Speaks, ‘Folding towards a new Architecture’, in Bernard Cache, Earth Moves, trans. Anne Boyman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p.xiv. 9 ibid., p.xiv. 10 Speaks is referring to Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition, chapter IV, ‘Ideas and the Synthesis of Difference’, see p.208ff. ‘The actualisation of the virtual, on the contrary, always takes place by difference, divergence or differenciation’. And ‘Actualisation or differenciation is always a genuine creation’, p.212. 11 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002) p.30. 12 ibid., pp.30–31. 13 ibid., p.32. 14 Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference, p.44. 15 Arie Graafland, The Socius of Architecture, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2000), p.237. 16 ibid., p.236. 17 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p.6. 18 DeLanda, Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, p.62. 19 ibid., p.62. 20 Graafland, The Socius, chapter 2. On the uselessness of political categories in architecture. 21 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p.6. 22 Graafland, The Socius, p.24. 23 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p.20. 24 Gilles Deleuze, Difference & Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), p.208. 25 ibid., p.209. 26 Lash, Another Modernity, p.93. 27 Arie Graafland, De Architectuur van het Onbehagen (SUN 1995), p.70. 28 K. Michael Hays, ‘After Critique, whither’, in Praxis 5: ‘Architecture after Capitalism’, 2003. 29 K. Michael Hays, ‘Ideologies of Media and the Architecture of Cities in Transition’, in D. Hauptmann (ed.), Cities in Transition (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2001) p.263. 30 Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) p.17. 31 Peter Zellner, Hybrid Space: New Forms in Digital Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 32 Michael Sorkin Studio, Wiggle (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998). 33 Kevin Rhowbotham, Form to Programme (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1995). 34 Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman, The Reinvention of Nature, (London: Routledge, 1991) p.57, chapter: ‘Sex, Mind, and Profit’. 35 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. and with a foreword by Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), originally published as Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Minuit 1988). 36 Nicholas Rescher, G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology, An Edition for Students, (London: Routledge, 1991) p.220. 37 ibid., Section 65, p.226. 38 Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference, p.70. 39 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Woman, p.64. 40 Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference, p.190. DSD Publications, Prof Arie Graafland 15 © DSD - Arie Graafland - 2009 41 ibid., p.167. Harvey is here citing A. Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (Cambridge, 1989). 42 ibid., p.168. 43 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p.118. 44 Harvey, Justice, Nature & the Geography of Difference, p.74. 45 ibid., p.261. 46 ibid., p.418. 47 Žižek, Organs without Bodies, p.133. See also: Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2003). 48 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, an interview by Philippe Petit, trans. Michael Cavaliere (New York: Semiotext(e), 1999) p.80. 49 M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p.111, chapter: ‘Disenchantment of the City: an improbable dialogue between bodies, machines, and urban form’. 50 ibid., p.117. 51 Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) pp.76ff. 52 Anthony Vidler, Warped Space, Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), pp.219ff. 53 Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich 1908) p.22. 54 The palace and gardens of Versailles are a good example of this phenomenon. See my Versailles and the Mechanics of Power, pp.83ff. 55 Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London: Continuum, 2002). 56 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, Logique de la Sensation, la Vue le Texte (Editions de la difference, 1981). In chapter IV of his book he discusses the body in Bacon’s paintings as a whispering of animal spirits. By shifting the terms ‘la chair’(human flesh) and ‘la viande’(animal meat), he draws our attention to suffering and compassion in Bacon’s work. Meat is no dead human flesh, all suffering is captivated in the living flesh. Bacon is not asking for compassion with the animals, but is asking for compassion with men. Meat is a kind of indiscernible zone common to men and animal. L’homme qui souffre est une bête, la bête qui souffre est un homme, a suffering human is like an animal, suffering animals become human (pp.20–21). 57 M. Christine Boyer, CyberCities, p.117. 58 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst, pp.43–44.