Architectures of Time

Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture

SANFORD KWINTER

The MITPress
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

-- i
---·-I
First MIT Press paperback edition, 2002
© 2001 Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kwinter, Sanford..
Architectures of time : toward a theory of the event in modernist culrure / Sanford Kwinter.
p. · cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-11260-4 (he. : alk. paper)- 978-0-262-61181-7 (pb.: alk. paper)
1. Modem movement (Architecture) I. Tide.

NA628.M63 K89 2001

724'.6-dc-21
00-045085
 I The Complex and the Singular

Reality ... is a perpetual becoming.

It makes or remakes itself, but it is
neversomethingmade.
- HENRI BERGSON

u
Surfer, 1960s. Photo: Dr. Don James.

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 built wildness-we have given the name novelty.Yet exactly what is novelty, and
from where does it come? What might thinking about it make possible in this
world, in this civilization whose deepest religious and philosophical beliefs, and
whose social and political institutions, are committed precisely to reducing, elid-
WHAT wouLo IT CHANGE in our arts, our sciences, and our technics if time ing, or denying the continual mutations and insistent mischievousness of unmas-
were conceived as something real?Though over a century has passed since the first terable innovation and the wild becoming that drives it?
tremors of this fundamental question began to make themselves felt in philo- We might say that novelty is simply a modality, a vehicle, by or through which
sophical and scientific debate in the Western world, the problem stubbornly re- something new appears in the world. It is that ever-fresh endowment that affirms
mains, either largely intractable or willfully ignored. What is it about time's a radical incommensurability between what happens at any given instant and
relentless flu.idity,its irreducible materiality, that the modern mind finds so im-: what follows~What has made it a problem for thought-and its problematic na-
possible-or repellent-to think? tute predates our own modernity, reaching back to the time of the Greeks.:._isthe
"But Western Being," the voices of our institutions will protest, "is time, and way it is seen to introduce a corrupting element or impure principle into the pris-
has been so since the very dawn of modernity'':--since the advent of rationalized. tine and already full world of''Creation." The offending element here is no other
accounting practices, the dis~overy of universal mechanical laws and constants, than the principle of change, for in cosmological thought, change is either recog-
the application of systematic techniques for governing populations,.the rise of hu- nized as a first principle or not accepted to exist at all.1 All change is change over
manistic disciplines and experimental method, the birth of the Cartesian or mod- time; no nov{Ity appears without becoming, an~ no becoming without novelty.
ern "self." But the forms of time expressed in these seemingly disparate historical But more important, setting out to think about novelty, or "the new," might pro-
developments are not, strictly speaking, "real" at all. but only chimeras of an vide a way to revive our presently atrophied capacities of acting-practically, eth-
emerging and very specific instrumental culture; they are, in a word, abstrac- ically, and politically~in this world, a world whose scope and complexity have·
tions-ingenious tools contrived to distribute the senseless procession of events effectivelypassed beyond grasp or measure. It is, in other words, oupcapacity ac-
ill nature within an ext"ernal, thinkable space of measure,· management, and tively to engage the processesof contemporary reality, a capacity that by most ac-
mastery. counts is today so menacingly at stake, that might itself be brought into relief
But nature itself is wild; indifferent, and accidental; it is a ceaselesspullulatio~ here, grasped, interrogated, and perhaps transformed.
and unfolding, a dense evolutionary plasma of perpetual differentiation and in- The era of cultural production we are traversing is unarguably one of im-
novation. Each thing, it may be said, changes and arrives in time, yet the Posture poverishment and mediocrity-in art, philosophy, literature, even architec-
of externality that permits precise measure and perfect mastery can be struck and ture, though to a lesser extent-an era whose inaugural segment was marked by
assumed only in space; one must first withdraw oneself from the profuse, organic reaction, an era in which innovation itself seemed all but to have collapsed and
flux in which things are given, isolate discrete instants as projected frozen sec- which neurotically lauded itself for a "criticality'' that was lit"tlemore than the
tions, and then interpolate abstract laws like so much mortar to rejoin these sec- impulse, which would normally discharge itself through the assembling and in-
tions from the new perspective. But the very gestu"rethat carries thought away vention of new capacities, ensembles, and functions, become corrupted and
from the "event" and toward the "thing" abstracts and spatializes time in the act turned inward as "critique." In the domain of architecture-the first to have de-
of instrumentalizing it; it subjugates the contingency and volatility of time by re- clared its "postmodern" emancipation from avant-gardist modernity-this ten-
constituting it external to phenomena as a finitude and·a regularity: it becomes a dency to mediocrity was expressed, and only barely masked, by a decade of
techllique of measurement embodied in economic axioms and algebraic laws. submission to the cult of historical styles, and subsequently to myriad, but of-
Real time is more truly an engine, however, than a procession of images-it is ten hollow neo- and antimodernist intellectual postures ("strategies" such as
expressed only in the concrete,,plastic medium of duration. Time always expresses
itself by producing, or more precisely,by drawing matter into a process of becom- This statement applies of course to systematic philosophy and classical science, not to the
ing-ever-different, and to the product of this becoming-ever-different-to this in- continually self-updating pseudo-axiomatics of Christian theology and Western capitalism.

4 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 5

 collage, deconstruction, and the crypto-f~rmalist revivals of computer-aided tervene here to relate the two states or realms: The first is resemblance, the second
modding). Though the parochialism of these especially recent developments is limitation. 3 Resemblance, because what is r~ always conforms to, or matches, the
often obscured by the virtuosity of their results, they have never managed to image of the possible-the pos·sible presents the preexisting image of the real
hide their fundamental aimlessness, the inevitable result of cultures whose in- whose attractive forces realize it. The possible-though it is but a phantom en-
tellectual activity has become severed from its foundations in social, historical, tity-is nonetheless a true and faithful copy. Second, limitation, because al-
and economic life. though anything whatever can exist as a "possible" (a phantom or image) clearly
Yet a retmn to the "critical" modes of the preceding period is no acceptable so- not .everything that is possible can be realized. Were it the case, the world would
lution. For it is in periods like those that architects and artists, as well as writers become saturated in a clamoring instant and historical time would be annihilated
and thinkers, are able to see the world only in the terms of a (real or imagined) altogether. Everything would not only happen at once, but would indeed already
oppressor's conventions-indeed of conventions tout court------for
they have lost have "happened."
the thread, one might say, of their own reality or perspective, their-own politic, To these two operators of resemblance and limitation, then, something
their own "world-building." Critique is always a critique (and therefore an elab- clearly must be added, something that actively filters and constrains what can
oration) of what exists already, implicitly reconstituting this preexistence as a pass into reality. Here we find the only trace of a time-principle borne by this
static thing (both in its referential and representational forms). Clearly all critique model: Something divides into successive stages the passing of preformed phan-
is of representations and is, as many of its own most rigorous practitioners have tom images into concrete reality. Reality, according to this model, would still be
claimed, at bottom no more than an elaborate re-representation. But what con- nothing but a picture of possibility repeated, and the world of possibility would
cerns us here is the concept of time that one finds bound up in these wedded prac- be no m·ore than an unchanging storehouse of images existing from time imme-
tices of critique and representation. What type of intervention do these two morial. This theory of appearance or morphogenesis supposes a sad 'and confin-
practices actively effect in the world, and what type do they passively imply? ing world already formed and given in advance. Yet this static view of things has
The two relationships-between representation and reality on one hand, and dominated nearly all aspects of Western culture from the time of the Eleatics,
critique and representation on the other-may be understood accordiilg to the though most significantly throughout its modern scientific culture. According
classical morphogenetic model that is determined by the relationship of the pos- to Henri Bergson, this fallacy-that there exists a "realm of possibility" under-
sible to the real. I use the technical term "morphogenesis" here in no gratuitous lying the world of actuality-is the one upon which Western metaphysics is
sense, but because it is precisely the problem of"the emergence and evolution of based. Both the deep-seated mechanism of orir scientific traditions and the im-
form" that I am proposing to discuss, and because it is precisely this problem that plicit finalism of our theological, historical, and political traditions find their
is indisputably at the heart of all formal aesthetic practice in general, and design roots in this fallacy.
practice in particular. 2 It is through the development of this argument that the problem of novelty
How does one characterize the morphogenetic model of the possible in rela- takes on its full importance. For the very same principle that "corrupts," trans-
tio~ to the real? To begin, "possible" finds itself invariably placed in opposition to forms, and diminishes Forms, evolving them toward disuse, decrepitude, and dis-
"real" as ifit were some type of eariier stage; it has on its own, therefore, no real-( appearance, also gi.ves,produces, and creates. No object in nature-be it organic,
ity in the strict sense, but takes this on only at a later stage, through the process of
realizing itself. How does it do this? Two controlling rules or operators must in- 3 SeeHenri Bergson,"The Possibleand the Real," in The CreativeMind (New York:Philo-
sophical Library, 1946), Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Philosophical Library,
2 The term "formal"is used here not in the poor senseas in "formalistic,"but in referenceto 1961); and Gilles Deleuze, Difference et repetition (Paris: PUF, 1968) pp. 272-275, Le
the largelyunthought dimension of all active patterning processesin the universe, com- Bergsonisme(Paris: PUF, 1968), chap. 5. Seealso the arguments of AlfredNorth Whitehead
prising linguistic,social, political, and biological behaviors and fonns, in addition to aes- concerningthe "Fallacyof MisplacedConcreteness,"in Science in the Modern World (New
thetic ones. York:Macmillan, 1925), chaps. 3 and 4.
 mineral, or entirely abstract or immaterial such as an idea, a desire, or a func-
tion-escapes the perpetual onslaught of differentiation according to :which
objects are continually becoming different from themselves, undergoing trans- __
formation. It is true, that change may and ought to be seen as a type of move-
ment-the flow of matter through time-but even the simplest mechanical
movement of the classical translational type resisted scientific and philosophical
assimilation until very late in our history. For "transformation" and "inven-
tion," I wish to show, are also twin and inseparable functions. Both are quality-
producing piocesses that describe the coherent flow of matter through time, and
it is time, and only time, that makes the new both possible and necessary.4
To think in this way, however, means developing a radically different theory
and regime of morphogenesis. The so-called emergence and evolution of form
will no longer follow the classical, eidetic pathway determined by the possible
and the real. 5 Rather, it will follow the dynamic and uncertain processes that
characterize the schema that links a virtual component to an actual one. What is
most importa.Ilt to understand here is that unlike the previous schema where the
"possible" had no reality (before emerging), here the virtual, though it may yet
have no actuality, is nonetheless already fully real. It exists, one might say, as a
free difference or singularity, not yet combined with other differences into a com-
plex ensemble or salient form. What this means is that the virtual does not have
to be realized, but only actualized (activated and integrated); its adventure in-
volves a developmental passage from one state to another. The virtual is gath-
ered, selected-let us say incarnated-it passes from one moment-event (or
complex) in order to emerge-differently, uniquely-within another. Indeed
the actual does not resemble the virtual, as something preformed or preexisting it-
I.2
self. The relation of the virtual to the actual is therefore not one of resemblance
Hans Jenny. Kyrnaric: Wellen~mdSchwingungen mit ihrer Struktur und Dynamik, 1967,
but rather of difference, innovation, or creation (every complex, or moment-
Basel: Basilius PresseAG.
event, is unique and new). Thus the following should be clear: realization (of a
possible) and creation (through actualization-differentiation) are two intrinsi- In theseKjmatic images by Hans Jenny, standfng wavesare generatedby sinus tones emitted
acrosssteelplates by crystaloscillators(in much the same manner as Ernst Chladni'seighteenth-
4 In CreativeEvolution, Bergson argues the need for a science or "mechanics of transforma-
r centuryKlangfiguren). A mixture ofsand andsufe,ftne lycopodiumpowderfonns the outlines
of the resultantshapesas it is transportedacrossthe plate suiface into virtual troughsbetween
tion" of which our "mechanics of translation" would become but a particular case (New
. the morehighly activated areasof thefield One can discerna specificand unifonn underlying
York: Henry Holt and Co., 19n), p. 32. Alfred North Whitehead, drawing a similar dis-
tinction, claimed in 1925that "biology is the study oflarger organisms; whereas physics is pattern or texture "beneath"the resultantfigure that is ajoint property of the metallurgyof the
soundingpl.ate and of the tone that moves through it. This underlyingpattern is itself never
the study of the smaller organisms") (Sciencein the Modern World,p. 103). For Whitehead
even the physico-chemical world could be understood only in terms of the (prehensive) reproduced,but remains virtual The actual pattern (the sand-lycopodiumfigure) always
expressesa variation or developmentof its virtualform-built on the template but continuously
"events" it undergoes, and to which it gives place.
vmiable and varying. Both the actual and the virtual structuresare legiblein the same image,
5 Cf. Bergson's critique of Platonic and Aristotelian eidosin CreativeEvolution, pp. 314-329. though their .ontologicalstatus remainsperfectlydistinct.
cally distinct and irreducible processes. The first programmatically reproduces lightened vitalism may certainly be seen as a development of Nietzsche's radical
what was already there, formed and given in advance, while the other invents "biological philosophy," albeit in a more temperate, systematic mode. Bergson's
through a continuous, positive, and dynamic process of transmission, differen- principles of an ever-individuating elan vital and of becoming, both cast and un-
tiation, and evolution. folded within an irreducible actualizing duration, would resurface nearly a cen-
The crux lies here: Actualization occurs in time and with time, whereas real- tury later combined with those ofNietzsChe to produce Deleuze's philosophy of
ization, by limiting itself to the mere unfolding of what preexists, actually de- difference, and Foucault's philosophy of power/knowledge and philosophy of
stroys novelty and annihilates time. Ip.the first instance time is real; in the second will. These philosophies each develop in their own way the principle of a mobile
it remains artificially derived and abstract in relation to eve.nts. In the one case ground of continuous production of the real as the basis ofhisto1y and life. They
time is a dynamic and· perpetually activated flo~, in the other, the result of reject the static field of eidetic Forms and representations as so many sources of il-
an externally built-up succession of static images. Morphogenesis occurs either lusion, bad faith, or at the very least, as hostile to movement and arresting of an
as a mechanical process of translation fixed once and for all and external to irreducible livingdynamism that drives existence from within.
the specific morphogenetic moment-event, with its highly particular and unre- To approach the problem of "the new," then, one must complete the follow-
produceable conditioi:ts-or else, it is the very principle oflife, that is, perpet- ing four requirements: redefine the traditional concept of the object; reintroduce
ual instability and therefore creation itself, and wedded to the ever-evolving and radicalize the theory of time; conceive of "movement" as a first principle and
particularities of time, or what one could call, in homage to mathematician not merely a special, dismissable case; and embed these latter three within an all-
Rene Thom, the minute and ceaseless procession of catastrophes. Clearly, if encompassing theory and politics of the "event." This presents us with five areas
time is real, then the principle of morphogenesis (novelty) must be sought in ofinterrogation: novelty, the object, time, movement, and event. We can consider
time, within a mobile and dynamic reality riddled with creative instabilities and the problem of novelty only by confronting the question of determinations or
discontinuities. causes:What makes something new emerge? Where does that which did not exist
Can there, then, be an ethics of material culture free from the bureaucracy of before come from? How does it continue to persist in being? and especially,What
critique, of the negative, of the spatial-visual, and of the static? Can there be a pol- is its relation to matter?:-for clearly the "new" is significant only to the degree
itics of form based on the productive, the positive, the mobile, and the new? that it is concrete, And finally, how does that which is just a pure difference take
Might concepts such as "novelty" and "movement" still be politicized and placed on a body? These questions apply with their own urgency and specificity to the
at the heart of cultural production? Clearly, the concept of"new" as it is used here social and perceptual field-the realm in which objects and architectures of all
is deeply indebted to modernist philosophies-that is, philosophies that are types are assembled and circulated.
bound up chronologically with those same movements whose claim at another The question of the object may well be even more complex than the previous.
level to "newness" is so often reviled by contemporary c!itical cultural practices On one side it calls for a systematic investigation of physical theory: What is an
and theories. I use such a concept both without apology and without taking sides object's relation to the space immediately surrounding it, to its own component
in this debate-its purpose is to underscore why it may be interesting and fruf- parts, to the other objects with which it is combined; what are the forces-both
ful to reject the very terms and conditions in which such a debate is posed. historical and physical-that traverse it, compose it, and bear it along; and what
are the adjacent activities and behaviors it makes possible, the so-called meaning
The late nineteenth-century prescription to remake oneself absoluement moderne systems it partakes of, the spaces and temporalities it carves up (one thinks espe-
was inseparable from a more systematic and generalized historical need to dis- cially of technical objects and their correlative "modes")? On the other side, it
cover-or to invent at any cost-a principle of absolute novelty and a correlative forces to the surface the corresponding panoply of questions regarding the status
river of time to bear it along. For Nietzsche, the punctuated violence of the Un- of the subject as well.
zeitgemiijfliche, or the untimely, was wedded to the infinite spiral-not circle- The problematization of time entails a challenge to the primacy of the role of
of eternal recurrence, in order that the Will to Power might circulate freely, space, and the reintroduction of the classical problem of becoming in opposition
unfettered by the sclerosis of a false memory tainted by "morals." Bergson's en- to that of Being. With movement is introduced the larger problem of dynamical
and evolutionary systems and complexity, and the more remote question of a real) and develops a theory and praxis of the "event." This will be done in allusive
"middleness" that is opposed to essential or foundational beginnings and ends. adjacency to a body of recent developments in physics and experimental mathe-
(Since movement can be caused and modified only by other movements, the matics-those proposin,g the use of new types of geometry (phase space, fractals,
problem of origin and initiation must either be reconfigured or pass away.) Next attractor dynamics, scaling), new types of algebra (nonlinear equations, recur-
emerges the problem of nonlinearity and indeterminacy (what is cautiously re- sion, genetic algorithms), and new types of modeling tools (principally the inter-
ferred to as "deterministic chaos"), understood not only as a heuristic and cos- active ~athode ray tube and the desktop microcomputer). ,
mological model but also as an ethos. And finally, in the "event" it may be possible These last developments are particularly important, first, for having reoriented
to discover a vantage point from which all action is understood as political in the contemporary science toward the consideration of dynamical phenomena or dy-
positive (i.e., not critical) sense-because after all, in both the social and sub- namical morphogenesis, toward geometries or patterns that are not static but ap-
jective realms, politics is arguably nothing more than the production of new pear only overtime; second, for their role in the study of complexity-th~ study
possibilities. of phenomena no longer in analytic isolation but as embedded within a rich and
unStable milieu of multiple communicating forces and influences; and third, for
What follows will proceed schematically to develop two pathways along which ha".'ingintroduced into popular discussion the technical concept of "singulari-
design thought and practice might move today-pathways that would have as a ties," referring to those critical points or moments within a system when its qual-
role to restore to architecture specificallythe active, and not merely reactive, role ities and not just its quantities undergo a fundamental change. It is possible that
it once had in shaping cultural and social life. This will be done without forget- this latter development alone-the incorporation of qualitiesinto the numerical
ting or denying the .fundamental fact that is often seen to hamper social and cul- continuum of mathematics-is as radical in its implications today as was the re-
tural activity today: the perception that the world is finally composed of systems nunciation of qualities at the end of the sixteenth century (Kepler,' Galileo), the
so extensive, so dense, and so complex that it is no longer a question of repre- decisive event-itself a historical singularity-that gave rise to modern scientific
senting them in their totality/globality-through images, concepts, theorems, or method. The concept of singularities provides us with the chance to revise our un-
maps, all spatial models that today arguably have fallen into disuse-but rather derstanding of the role of time and the event in both historical and physical
of engaging these systems at certain specific and local points along their lines of processes.
deployment or unfolding. It is as if tociay one were forced into a neW type of in- Let us begin -withthe first pathway revising the concept of the subject. Among
tellectual and cultural warfare, forced to accept the mobile and shifting nature of the important developments in design discourse over the last few years has been
the phenomena that make up our social and political world, and by this same to- the architectural profession's discovery of the appeals of an intellectual cos-
ken, forced to discover within this slippery glacisof largely indistinct swellsand mopolitanism that had for several decades already come to characterize many I
I
flows, all the ledges, footholds, friction points-in short, all the subtle asperit~es of the other humanities disciplines. The architectural object today nonethe-
that would permit us to navigate, and negotiate life, within it. less remains strangely unmolested by this putative but still superficial cross-
The first pathway entails a revision of the concept of the object. Here arclit--, fertilization of disciplines. One important reason for this has to do with
tecture may be said to ~ave a natural and privileged role, owing first to its natural architecture's strange and problematic relation to history. Is architecture simply
function as an institutional, social, and instrumental operator (it must not be for- a branch of traditional art history-the history of movements and styles, the
gotten that within every concrete architecture is embedded an abstract institu- successive aesthetic solutions through which epoc~s, cultures, and entire civi-
tional "machine"); and second, because once we accept this machinic role and the lizations express their indomitable "will to form"-or does it, by virtue of those
behavioral (motor) modalities it regulates and entails, it is impossible not to con- intrinsic characteristics outlined above, -belong to history in another way? If ar-
sider architecture in an e:ipanded sense as a technical object, subject to the same chitectural thought and practice is to break out of narrow academicism on one
rules and dynamics as all other technological historical development. hand, and aestheticism on the other, it must conceive of itself as belonging to a
The second pathway attempts to conceive of movement as a first principle- different series of developments-to what recent parlance sometimes calls the
though it secondarily both engages the theory of time (treating time as something "history of practices." This approach is already opening architectural thought
and practice to a new series of relations, both historical-theoretical and material- In his book Disciplineand Punish-today commonly recognized as the canon-
practical, indeed to a fieldof relations in which many of the accepted unities of ical analytical work of this type-Michel Foucault demonstrated in considerable
classical architectural thought are coming to lose their sovereign and constitutive detail how the domain of "architectures" -social technical objects-forms the
status. Architecture would then be seen in its full proximity and intimacy with principle hinge or conductive relay permitting abstract, incorporeal (i.e., discur-
the system of forces that give shape and rhythm to the everyday life of the body. sive) formations of power to enter and permeate the adjacent material realm of
Thus the object-be it a building, a compound site, or an entire urban matrix, human flesh, activity, and desire. Archltecture's proper and primary function, it
insofar as such unities continue to exist at all as functional terms-would be could be said-at least in the modern era-is the instrumental application of.
defined now not by how it appears,but rather bypractices:those it partakes of and mastery, not only to an external, nonhuman nature, but to a human-social, psy-
thoSe that take place within it. chological-nature as well. This method in no way excludes a guerilla architec-
On this reconception, the unitariness of the object would necessarily van- ture of subversion and resistance, such as the active "resingularizing" of the
ish-deflected now into a single but doubly articulated field (relations, by defi, familiar and precoded, amplifying the transformative power of the contingent
nition, never correspond to objects). What comes to the fore are, on the one through an ethics of flexible, or "opportunistic" vigilance, or tapping the history-
hand, those relations that are smaller than the object, that saturate it and com- producing forces of the emergent and untimely. On the contrary, this vision of
pose it, the "micro-architectures" for lack of a happier term, and on the o~her, the technical world as a c.onstellation of activeagencies (rather than fixed or sedi-
those relations or systems that are greater or more extensive than the object, that mented constructs) invites intervention as a detournement of moving, flexible
comprehend or envelop it, those "macro-architectures" of which the "object," or processes.
the level of organization corresponding to the object, is but a relay member or
part. Furthermore, these particular clusters of action, affectivity, and matter- No genealogy of the body in relation to Western architectural rhastery is possible,
what I am calling "practices"-correspond less to formed and distinct objects 'even today, that does not begin by reviving, at least in passage, the convention of
than to a specific regime (of power, of effects) that for a given time inhabits the Vitruvian man splayed out and mathematically embedded in a reticulum of reg-
social field. A regime can be said to impose a configuration on such a field inso- ulating lines like a proud trophy honoring the Idea and geometric exactitude.
far as it organizes, allies, and distributes bodies, materials, movements, and tech- This familiar image still stands at the ceremonial head of a complex and many-
niques in space while simultaneously controlling and developing the"'temporal stranded procession through Western history in which the histories of the body
relations between them. There is nothing forced in characterizing these two itself, of architecture, and of the even more basic "will to order" are inseparable
planes of relations as "architectures"-they ·are every bit as material, as con- from one another. The role of mathematics especially must be underscored here,
structed, and as imperious as any building. Nor is the building or object con- in its relation to the anexact formalism of the sensuously and infinitely varying
jured away or repressed, as some will want to claim, but is rather reconceived as body: the Vitruvian hammerlock of quantitative-numerical reduction appears
a hinge produced at (and producing) the intersection of these two systems of ar- here as the forerunner of a relation that would grow only deeper, a deepening that
ticulation. It w~uld therefore be a mistake, I would argue, to limit the concept would be made possible only by diversifying and reinsinuating itself in ever new
of "architectural substance" to building materials and the geometric volumes institutions and practices.
they engender and enclose. Just as the meaning of a sentence differs de_pending Among the most significant developments in the history of Western mod-
on who is speaking, to whom it is addressed, the time and place in which itis ut- ernization was the emergence of the European monasteries of the early Middle
tered, the infinitely complex interplay of will, desire, and systems of legitima- Ages, in particular (as Werner Sombart, Lewis Mumford, E. P. Thompson,
tion, as well as on these same conditions applied to the referents of each and David Landes, and others have argued) those of the Benedictine order. There,
every element of the sentence, so arty proper understanding of architecture must for the first time, a periodic system of bells was used to punctuate the day-
· also confront itscharacter as an i!!ocutionaryevent, or at the very least as an ele- seven bells corresponding to the seven canonical "hours" or devotional peri-
ment inseparable from and in constant interface with the world of force, will, ac- ods-contributing immeasurably to the already staggering discipline and
tion, and history. regimentation of monastic life, all the more notable in an era still centuries away
 from the appearance (in Europe) of the first .mechanical clocks. This devdop-
ment represents the insertion of a new "template" or plan at three levels of cul-
tural organization: (r) at the macroscopic, geopolitical level, these routines
activated a wide range of adjacent processes through the broader social-historical - i

function of the monastery, whose ostensible task was to provide for the welfare
of souls and to supply sanctuary-in effect, however, and more pragmatically, its
function was to provide a capture or refixingpoint for the human overflow that
had been set precariously adrift by the chaotic, destabilized conditions of
post-Roman Empire Europe; (2) at the level of the formation of collective sub-
jectivity, one witnesses the first institutionalization of the Christian contempt
for the body and its unruly affects and sensations, all of which are forced to sub-
mit to a rigid, even protomechanical aridity, regularity, and rule; and (3) at the
level of behavioral morphologies or "motor patterns," one notes the incipient
mathematization of the day and the bodJs temporal activities (meals and sleep-
ing scfdules in addition to the devotional activities), reinscribed by a complex
system of spatial organization that includes the monastery walls, the distribution
I.J of cells, common rooms, meditation yards, and so on. These latter are, after all,
Vitruvian Man the medium and vehicle through which the :iction of the bell and the intervals it
scoops out of the continuum of duration are made to penetrate into, and reor-
ganize, the bodies they seize. '
The monastery, then, is nothing if not a prototype clock; yet the clock and the
advent of homogeneous, mechanical-numerical time are rarely considered as
more than incidental technical devices, and, even when they are recognized for
the cataclysmic effect they have had on every aspect ofWestern culture they are
certainly not commonly thought of as being the province of architects or archi-
tectural thought. Yet the dock appeared in culture, initially as a form of pure ra-
tionality and as a pure junction, at once invisible and inseparable from the
continuum of bodies, behaviors, building-apparatuses, and the social life that
they carved up. If an independent clock mechanism was abstracted later from this
empirical arrangement of elements (naturally monks figured prominently in the
subsequent development and specialization of this new technology), it was only
to affect the body/architecture continuum in an ever deeper and more generalized
way. For example, the clock was soon transposed from the monastery to the town
marketplace (from the domain of private faith to that of commerce, an invisible
but active connection that Western capitalism has never sought to sever); and i
when the modern clockface was invented, it allowed time to be dissociated ever
l.4 further from human events, at once spatially projected in vision and displayed in
N. Audry, Orthopaedics,r7 49 a marvelously rationalized notational form.

IO CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR

 It is all the more cwcious, therefore, that architectural thought in the last two power corresponding to a micropolitical domain. It is a characteristic of Fou-
decades should have seized so willingly upon another "device"-Jeremy Ben- cault's analysis to direct attention at each turn to ·an always different level of re-
tham's Panopticonand the associated role of the mathematical quadrillage(sec- ality-away from the plane of (obvious and therefore misleading) objectsand
toring or gridding)-despite the fact that it was never built and exists, as Foucault toward a more fundamental and complex plane of relations.The Panopticon, his
himself has clearly underscored, only as "a figure of political technology that may argument clearly suggests, may already have been the last time that the constitu-
and must be detached from any specific use." This same tradition of design phi- tive relations of a society would be articulated at this particular, and traditionally
losophy remains nonetheless unwilling to accept the general role played by archi- architectural, level. The implication is not that the discrete and unitary building
tecture in the history of technique, and that which technique plays m the history or building-cOmplex had or ever could become dismissably trivial or obsolete;
of architecture. Yet the issue is more extreme than this: technique itself, I am~- rather it is that the constituent body of relations that determine it is simply no
guing, must be seen as an inseparable link in the continuum joining architecture longer to beefound at this level. It is one of the central tasks of Foucault's study
and all other aspects of design to the world around it (to bodies and huroan mo- to develop-to flesh out, as it were,__the new microphysical continuum where
tor-fields in particular), for technique is the foundation of all overcoding, mdeed, architectural and human multiplicities mingle as if two modes of a single
technique is the architecture of architecttires. substance.6
The clock may ~e said to have made possible not only the historical re- If it is possible to conceive-of architectUial practice and the field of architec-
nascences of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but the whole of what we call tural objects in intensive and extensive (or micro- and macrophysical) terms
the modern world-by introducing the use of quantitative methods for ordering rather than bniquely at the level of formed objects, then what I am callingprac-'
and correlating the episodic fluxes of nature into the cultural equation. It is well ticesand techniquesfall squarely into its domain. If the Panopticon-insofar as it
known how these methods came to be generalized in painting, science, cartogra- represents a technique rather than a building-could figure as an emblem for an
phy, music and economics. Interest in mathematical proportion, anatomy, ra- entire epoch and as an intensifying relay for that era's power-effects, what figures,
tional orders, and so on was also revived at this time in architectural and aesthetic it might be asked, serve analogous functions in the twentieth century? Clearly,
discourse and practice. Yet historical thought, applied to material culture in gen- one must resist the habit of thought that would propose the midcentury Gulags
eral and to architectural culture in particular, has not fully confronted these de- or concentration camps themselves. Indeed the real meaning of these sinister
·velopments as processes of tongue dude, bound up with the evolutionary architectures can be found only in the macroscopic systems of which they are
production of new domains: the universal optical theory of space; the evolution a part-the insidious, bUieaucratic, molar, political formations whose micro-
of battlefields, their science and design; the triadic nineteenth-century assemblage physics is still surreptitiously evolving (or else is once again even in Europe overtly
of the city, the factory, and the mines; the formation of the modern domestic and barbarously being explored).
household and the bureaucratic workplace. Indeed management-or rather lo- But where, for example, would one situate such a banal technical object as the
gistics-may well represent the preeminent, and perhaps only real, modern ar- loudspeaker, an apparently mundane appliance that played such an important
chitectural "object," albeit an object with a mutable and elusive shape. role in both Hitler's and Mussolini's rise to power in the 1920sand 1930s(long be-
Before turning to the twentieth century, we must pause for another moment fore it successfully revolutionized musical aesthetics through the electroacoustic
to consider Bentham's Panopticon and Foucault's analysis of it. What we have
presented before us is the plan, or at least the idea, of a building in which we are 6 The work's last three chapters (those that follow the one on Panopticism) are those to
supposed to understand there to be expressed a total and abiding vision that a so- which the attention of architectural and design thought would most fruitfully be tmned
ciety produced for itself-a vision that nevercameto be incarnatedin the building today. With the example of delinque1~cy,for instance, one witnesses the direct and invis-
in questionbut that was inserted rather into the social body all the more effectively ible incarnation of a complex motor-spatial ordering mechanism in the social sphere with-
and surreptitiously at a level, or number of levels, at which architectural objects out the mediation of objects.Here again, the actualization of virtual forms is apprehensible
in the classicalsense simply do not appear. For this very reason Foucault provides only in a temporal continllum. See Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punish, The Birth of
a self-motivating, capillary action theory of the social field, a microphysics of the Prison(New York: Pantheon, 1977).

18 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 19

 ments in a contagion-prone setting, a technique that invariably favors dema-
goguery and hysteria.
The loudspeaker is but a single element in a century of exhaustless innovation
and complexity, yet it arguably had a greater effect on, and may reveal inore about,
the workings and aspirations of an entire social and political conjuncture than
perhaps any visionary building of the er~-Vladimir Tatlin's M~nument to the
Third International, Le Corbusier's La Ville Radieuse, or even Italy's Musso-
lini/Piacentini EUR-city notwithstanding.
The ultimate site of all political and social mechanisms, and the power-effects
they engenderi is today often said to be the collective or individual body. Yet as
Foucault's study shows, the literal body has for a long time ceased to be the im-
mediate site of these. If power seizes the body it does so with an increasingly
sophisticated indirectness-an indirectness in which architectural and design
practice is always implicated in the deepest possible way. As design practice and
thought are deflected away from the t~aditional and largely "aesthetically'' consti-
tuted objectanq/2imultaneously reoriented toward a dynamic macro- and micro-
r.5 scopic field of interaction, an entirely new field of relations opens itself to the
Loudspeaker, 193.os designer, theorist, or artist.
A nondogmatic approach to this "field" and to the politicization of design
experiments of the 1950s and '60s). The loudspeaker's electrical amplification of practice today would be to consider all architectures as technical objects and all
the voice made possible the staging of vast, live aural spectacles, the amassing of technical objects as architectures. By technical objects, I mean simply this: that
unprecedented crowds of people, which gave literal and palpable expression t◊ the around each and every object there may be associated a corresponding complex of
concept of"mass culture" and "mass movement." The logistical achievement that habits, methods, gestures, or practices that are not attributes of the object but
underlay these spectacles was redoubtable, and the extension of military tech- nonetheless characterize its mod~ of existence-they relay and generalize these
niques of planning and control to the civilian multitudes was undoubtedly but a habits, methods, and practices to other levels in the system. Thus it is not in the
felicitous side-effect fro.gi the viewpoint of the ascendant fascist regimes. Leni object that analysis ought to be interested but in the complex, and if indeed it is
Riefenstahl's documentary film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nlirnberg rhyth- to practices and to the life of the body that we wish to open architecture up today,
mically intercuts from crowd to marching army and bf!.ck,underscoring the then we must be vigilant and rigorous in keeping the two entities conceptually
progressive annihilation of the distinction between military regimentation and distinct.
civilian life.What it must have felt like to have been among all those other bod- Each of the three technical objects or architectures presented above (dock,
ies, grouped, organized, and maniacally disciplined into precise geometric cOn- panoptical system, loudspeaker) shares one important feature with the others:
figurations, resplendently arrayed between Albert Speers's liquid columns of light, each is part of a more or less generalized Western technical apparatus of mas-
riVeted by the literally electric voice of the Filhrer, is a feeling that today we can tery-an apparatus whose power derives from its capacity t~ vanquish time by
only imagine-and tremble. But the loudspeaker brought with it other develop- spatializing it. How paradoxical, one may think: the origin of the clock as the de-
ments as well: the capacity to appeal to the masses bodily and in person (here an mise, rather than the invention, of time! But the dock, we must remember, did
electric technology serves to c~eateliteral contact with the interlocutor, not to dif- not produce time, it merely standardized it and permitted, or rather forced, it to
fuse or destroy it); the capacity to appeal to those sectors of the electorate who do be correlated. The clock reduces fraught, immanent: time to a single transcendent
not or cannot read; and the capacity to appeal to baser and more common senti- time, it relates all events to a single, "thin" duration that is general-the same for

20 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 2I

 everyone, for all processes, and so on-not specific or local. Clock tiine fixes in manage the shifting information fluxes of communication and control. Whereas
order to correlate, synchronize, and quantify, renouncing the mobile, fluid, ·qual- a clockwork or a linear equation can transmit only a prior or initial motion along
itative continuum where time plays a decisive role in transformative morpho- a predetermined path (from the possible to the real), a non-linear equation or
genetic processes. What _ismore, real time is not a unitary strand distributing servo-device is able to produce novel motion and pattern-breaking and to update
homogeneous units of past, present, and future in a fixed empirical order, but is itself from within its trajectory-it remains, in fact, perpetually sensitive to its
rather a complex, interactive, "thick'' manifold of distinct yet integrated. dur.a- surrounding milieu.
tions. Events belong to a class known as "emergent phenomena''-the product Scientists first became aware of this problem in the nineteenth century, par-
and expression of sudden communicative coherences or "prehensions" (White- ticularly through the science of thermodynamics, when it became necessary to
head) of converging qualities inexplicably interweaving and unfolding together, track the flows of heat through a continuum of matter. As changes of state and
even though they may originate at vastly different temporal and phenomenal qualitative tr~sformations began to impose themselves as significant problems
scales. for scientific investigation, matter increasingly came to be seen as active, and
The modern process of reduction and spatialization began in the Benedictine space as plastic, flexible, sensitive, and organic. James Clerk-Maxwell used partial
monasteries of the Middle Ages and was definitively and substantially reinforced differential equations as a means to begin to plot these movements. Einstein bor-
in the fourteenth century with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping prac-. rowed these same techniques in 1905 .when developing the field concept in rela-
tices. Soon after, the invention of linear perspective and the rise of quantitative tivity theory.7 But these were still reductionist methods that just happened to
methods in science completed the epistemological hold of space over tiine. By the suffice to solvf the specific problems at hand. Real time (and movement) re-
seventeenth century the modern syste~ was in place, and from that time it would . mained a problem, for nobody knew how to construct an organic equation that
remain merely a question of increasingly fine tuning. Everything that needed to could flow along with the phenomena and chart all of their moment-to-moment
be mastered-after all, capitalism needed a comprehensive system of global cor- transformations. Indeed, there were actually two problems. A human tallyer with
relatibn, where time could be transformed into standardized units of value, units paper and pencil could certainly attempt the task (at least experimentally), but he
of value into goods, and goods back into time-could be mastered by spatializa- could certainly never reckon quickly enough; nor could he ever account for the
tion and quantification. Time, forced now to express the false unity and rational- avalanche of interactive complexity (nonlinearity) that would be introduced in
ity of all being, ceased to be real. the first billionth of a second.
By their very Ilature, temporal phenomena cause disturbances and irregulari- From the moment a system is understood as evolving over time, what becomes
ties-what scientific experimentalists call "noise" in regular, linear, quantitative important are the transformations it undergoes, and all transformation in a sys-
systems. They pollute data with continual fluctuations and instabilities. They are tem is the result of energy-or information-moving through it. As energy
untrackable by conventional linear equations because mathematicians have not courses through a system it induces three general types of transformation: (1) It
discovered how to give equations autonomous flow or "life"-the capacity to ab- imports information from outside the system. (In addition to changes provoked
sorb or be sensitive to unforeseen changes in material conditions. Indeed, classi- internally within the system, this also transforms the external milieu in such a way
cal linear equations·are often compared to clockworks-they are set in advance as to affect the type of information it will, in subsequent stages, channel into the
and continue to run out their prog_ramaccording to conditions that held only ide- system.) (2) It exports energy from within a system to its ambient milieu, pro-
ally at the moment the initial programming took place. They cannot, and do not, ducing this same double effect now in asymmetrical reverse. (3) It transports in-
receive additional input regarding changing conditions-they cannot even be ~e- formation ftom certain levels in the system to other heterogeneous levels-producing
liably updated by input they themselves generate or gather up. morphological events that are often dramatically unpredictable with respect to lo-
What is needed-but which is by definition impossible-are time-sensitive cation, causal sequence, and magnitude of effect.
equations. These would be less like clockworks and more like engines that carry
their own independent, mobile reservoirs or motive sources with them, along
with second-order servo-devices (governor, gas pedal, or steering assembly) to 7 Einstein himself liked to describe space-time as a "mollusc."

22 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 23

 1.6
Steam Engine at CrystalPalace
r
Any model that would attempt to account for the behavior or patterns in such
1.7
systems must continually account for the millions of interdependent transforma-
Preston, England; Cotton manufacrory.
tions occurring within the system at a given moment. The equations must per-
petually feed information back into themselves, inforination that can be made
available only in tim.e,not in advance, and acrosstemporal scales, never within a to potential or real morphogeneses within and across a system. A simple ex-
single temporal plane. That classical mathematics, and its corresponding tradi- ample is when the molecular phase transition of boiling water (conversion into
tion of Western technics, should need now to become time sensitive is an ironic gas) is combined with a mechanical piston-and-pressure-chamber matrix to
reversal ofits deeply spatialist history. But let us return to these dynamical or com- form a steam engine. The steam engine, rising let us say, upward through the
plex systems. I have said that what characterized them is that they cannot be un- world-syst~m to the next level, combines with an economic flow reaching its
derstood by their spacial relations of configuration alone, but only through the own critical point (conversion to organized industrial capitalism) and is then
events and qualities-transitions of phase or state-produced as a result of the combined with the cotton gin to produce a more complex entity: mechanized
flows of energy and the informational gradients that move through them. Values labor. This third-level machine-complex now combines with others of identi-
are perpetually redistributed throughout such systems, hut the specific behavior cal type to produce a mobile, non-site-specific (because no longer dependent on
of this "cybernetic" redistribution is neither determinable in advance nor entirely naturally occurring streams, wind patterns, or ground-level real estate) produc-
random and continuous. There exist parameters, limits, border or catastrophe tion system-an early industrial (manu)factory-and this combines with the
states, and these always gather in basins around singularities. nineteenth-century social organization of the English town, giving rise to the
If time is real, then the world itself represents a complex, infinitely entailed, first industrial urban centers, which in turn draw huge population flows from
dynamical system or fluid manifold. As a manifold or flow phenomenon the the countryside, as well as flows of capital and 'primary materials from re-
world comprises not pregiven, ideal Forms but metastable shapes floating in a mote investor, market, and supplier countries and regions. Each perturbation
river of ever-generating differences. But there are differences of two kinds: generates instabilities in the system one level up, which, once resolved, trans-
There are random, or uncombined (incoherent) differences, which emerge and mit the instability in turn to the next higher leveL (In truth these cybernetic sys-
pass without leaving a trace; and there are those that are "singular" and give rise tems are computationally very powerful and do not require such step-by-step

CHAPTER 1 THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 25

procedures.) This "processing" continues until the system has either damped
out the original perturbation entirely, or else has "used," "exfoliated," or "geo-
metricized" it in order to transform its global dynamics in toto. Thus ·a singu-
larity describes specifically that type of difference, in a world of perpetually
engendered differences, that is produced at some point along a particular flow
and that may be combinedw~th another flow to induce a difference at another
scale or level in the manifold.
To understand the precise mechanics of how a form may be "time- and differ-
ence-generated"-or actualizedin the jargon of the present argument-consider
the example of the domestic ice cube versus the free-form snow crystal. Is time
realfor ·the ice cube in the same way as for the snow crystal? How do their re-
spective forms arise? In the former case a cubic slot is prepared and preformed in
plastic or metal and filled with water. It is placed in an environment where cold is
able to penetrate it from the outside, first fixing its boundaries in conformity with
its geometric receptacle, later simply filling out its interior. Every ice cube re-
sembles every other just as it resembles it own mother mold. There is no real time
to be found in this system, as almost nothing is permitted to flow (save for heat,
though along a rigidly controlled gradient); everything is locked into a static spa-
tial system that reproduces a pregiven form. All the aleatory conditions, all of 1.8
Fri'('crystalgrowth is a product of both complex nonlinear dynamics and specificconstraints:
chance, hazard, all virtuality and sensitivity to other disturbances and changes in
geornetricinstabilitiesof water,air, temperature,and saturationgradients.Each designperfectly
the environment-all wildness and openness-are scrupulously (i.e., by design)
expresses not only the state of one of the universe'sneighborhoodsduring a specificinterval in time
eliminated.
but alsothe mow crystal'sownparticular historicaltrajectorywithin it, Becausethe snow crystal
The snow crystal is different. Its genesis is dynamic and can be situated initially
is literallytheproduct of''time, "in it growth and designare one.
at the convergence of three distinct fluxes: mica and mineral particles;_amoisture-
saturated field; and a thermal fl.owof heat exchange. One does not know in ad- hexagonal matrix to catch more than their share of the external weather condi-
vance where or when such a crystal will begin to nucleate or form, but one ~ows tions.8 The resulting build-up takes place disproportionately on these humps, so
it will emerge-apparently spontaneously-from a flux or convergence of flows, that the snow crystal will always have six sides.
not in a prepared form or space. The form of the crystal, however, is not fixed Of course this inflexible part of its "program" may be said to transcend time; yet
from the beginning:._it is merely an incarnated singularity, a speck of dust-ice, this aspect is hardly what is compelling about snow crystal morphology. What is
that has been carried to a new level where it interacts with higher-order flows- interesting is that despite its partially fixed matrix no two results are ever alike.
gravity, wind, barometric pressure, humidity, other silicate dust, water, crystals, Each is different because the crystal maintainsits sensitivityboth to time and to its
and thermal and even acoustic flows, plus electrical and magnetic gradients. All
of these conditions vary continually in relation to themselves and affect the 8 These inhomogeneities are activated only by the particle's movement in time; the crystal in-
snowflake's trajectory. The crystal does carry some fixed information along with augurates its becomingthrough a "symmetry-breaking" operation, or the introduction of an
it-its preestablished molecular structure, developed within a rigid tetrahedral initial informatum of difference chat frees the crystal from the monotonous regularity of the
lattice ':'fhydrogen and oxygen atoms, determines the even formation of hexago- cecrahedral lattice and triggers a cascade of self-structuring pressures through the system.
nal plates with six "inflections" or surface asperities. This apparently "regular" ar- Processes of this type, and indeed the concept of"weather" in particular, were introduced
chitecture produces a dynamically i1regular space, causing certain regions on the into aesthetics by Marcel Duchamp and later systematically elaborated by John Cage.

CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR

 complex milieu. Its morphogenetic principle is active and always incomplete (i.e., "streaming" techniques combined with a rigorous ad hoc engagement of the sur-
evolving)-the snowflake interacts with other processes, across both space and rounding milieu-namely, skate- and snow-boarding. As in surfing, the primary
time; it belongs to a dynamical, fluvial world. As the snow crystal falls it absorbs, qualities valorized in these sports are fluidity of movement, intuition (a quiet body
captures, or incarnates all the chance events, all the fluctuating conditions (mag- harmoniously in step with its milieu-"in unity with the wave"), and innovation
netic, gravitational, ·barometric, electrical, thermal, humidity, speed) and builds ("rewriting the rulebook," "exploring uncharted territory"), 11 though because
them, or rather uses them, to assemble itself, to form its structure or edifice. The these unfold in a solid landscape, the environing terrain too must now be made to
snow crystal creates itself in the middle of, and by means of the convergences 0£ pulse, flow, and break. This involves the selection and identification of"hits" (in-
flux.Thus snow crystal morphogenesis is less the result of specific, punctual exter- cidental barriers, obstacles or breaks) and "lines" (trajectories of particular velocity
nal causes than a sympathetic but critical insertion within, and the subsequent "cy- or shape) in the urban continuum or landscape-a staircase, half-pipe, railing,
bernetic" management of, already present flows. This analytical model-based on pool, or any incline or gap for a skater; and note the total promiscuity of the (early
develop~ental pathways, dynamical interactions, singular points, and qualitative '90s) snowboarder who indifferently "skis" or "worries'' trees, rockfaces, fences,
movements in abstract, sometimes multidimensional space-arguably furnishes a logs, buildings, and service equipment, transforming any found space into a
far richer theoiy of ."site"than most curren~ employed in orthodox aesthetic or smoothly quilted interlock ofllisparately textured, twisting, quality-emitting, se-
architectural practice. quenced surfaces. The extension of the streaming ethos to landscapes and motor-
It would not be inappropriate to liken this approach to the artful shaping of a fields of solids may easily be identified as the primary engine of transformation of
surfer's trajectory on the sea. Unlike more traditional (hunter-warrior model) both technique and style in all spons of the last thirty years (track and field, bas-
sports, surfers do not conceive of themselves as exclusive or "prime motors" at the ketball, tennis, martial arts, cyclo/motocross, dance).
origin of their movements; they rather track, from within the flows, a variety of These developments are perhaps most acutely exemplified in one particular
emerging features, singularities, and unfoldings with which they can meld. This sport that has also recently taken on a contemporary-some would Say, post-
style of "soft" intervention-primarily perturbation or inflection-is certainly modern-dimension: rock-climbing. Today, according to a new concept of pu-
emerging today with increasing frequency in a variety of domains-art, politics, rity and rigor, certain rock.climbers will attack a mountain with no tools whatever.
mathematics -though sports may well offer the most startling and salient ex-
9
The morphogenetic principle of the climbers' space is no longer susceptible to
amples. Since the early days of surfing (whose origins go back to the 1950s), one forms imposed from outside (the "assisted" ascent). The free-soloists must flow
notes the appearance of other airstream sports such as skysurfing (carving freefall up the mountain, flow or "tack'' against the downward gradient of gravity-but
aerial trajectories between airplane and earth with a resistance board strapped to also mus~ become hypersensitive tamers and channelers of the gravitational sink,
one's feet), deltaplaning, hang- and paragliding (motorless, "low-," or archaic masters at storing it in their muscles or making it flow through certain parts of the
"tech'' sports), in which the principle is to slip oneself into moving columns of pelvis, thighs, palms, and this only at certain times; they must know how to ac-
air, 10 to create formal and temporal intensities by gliding, weaving, and hang- celerate rhe flow into a quick transfer that could mean the difference between tri-
ing-tracking and combining flows by apprehending and appropriating hydro- umph and disaster, to mix and remix dynamic and s_tatic elements in endless
and aerodynamic singularities. variation-for it is not enough to prevail over gravity but rather be able to make
In more immediately adjacent domains there has also been an interesting pro-
liferation-and fusion-of "cousin" board sports that deploy the same HU.id
11 "Shane Dorion turns the ultra-vertical lip-pierce into the cool and casual float. Not only
is the modem-day surfer fusing sports-surfing, skating, snowboarding-but also ma-
9 Interventionist art, earthworks, hacking, terrorism, sampling, vogueing, "experimental"
noeuvres. Cutback rebounds become 360s, reentries become reverses, and as we see here,
mathematics, computational biology, etc.
lip smackersbecome floaters." Jamie Brisick, "Young Guns on the North Shore," in Warp,
1O On the shift from the motor model in contemporary sports and society, see Gilles Deleuze, v. I, no. 2, spring 1993. For a surprisingly sustained debate on the ascending role of novelty
"Mediators," in ZONE 6 lncorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary 'and Sanford Kwinter (New vs. [he descending one of power in the surfing world, see also Matt Warshaw, "Power Out-
York: Zone Books, 1992). age,'' in Si11fe1;The State of the Art: A SpecialIssue,v. 34, no. 7, July 1993.

28 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR 29

 square centimeter represents its own interdependent dynamical system continu-
allycross-referencing with the others, but locally
in relation to its own "micro-site-
specificity."
Yet it is the mountainface itself whose flow is the most complex, the most in-
tractable and problematic of all. The mineral shelf represents a flow whose
timescale is nearly unfathomable from the scale of duration represented by the
electrolytic and metabolic processes of muscle and nerves-but even at this
timescale-nanometric in relation to the millennia that measure geological
flows-singularities abound: 12 a three-millimeter-wide fissurejust wide enough to
allow the placement of one segment of one finger, and anchored by sufficiently
solid earth to permit but eighty pounds of pressure for, say, three seconds but no
longer; an infinitesimally graded basin of sedimentary rock whose erratically
ribbed surface (weathered unev2y by flows of wind and rain) offers enough fric-
tion i:o a spread palm to allow strategic placement of the other palm on an igneous
ledge a half meter above. This very rock face, until recently considered virtually
slick and featureless-an uninfl.ected glacis even to classical _pick and piton
climbers11-now swarms with individualized points, inhomogeneities, trajecto-
ries, complex relations. The site is brimming over with interweaving forces and
flows-though without these the face's asperities and differences would fall back
into a true near-featurelessness-and the climber's task is less to "master': in the
macho, form-imposing sense than to forge a morphogenetic figure in time,to in-
sert himselfinto a seamless,streaming space and to subsist in it by tapping or track-
ing the flows-indeed to stream and to become soft and fluid himself, which
means momentarily to recover real time, and to engage the universe's wild and free
unfolding through the morphogenetic capacities of the singularity.

12 The ::trt of Robert Smithson of the late 1960s and early '70s developed this type of singu-
r.9
Photo: Simon Carter, Onsight Photography lari cy beyond that of nearly any plastic artist of modern times. In literature, and in the more
classical arenas of painting and sculpture, this program as we will see can already be dis-
covered in the.work of Franz Kafka and in the Italian Futurists respectively.

13 Cf. "Les Procedes arti.ficiels d'escalade," in Gaston Rebuffat, Neige et.Roe (Paris: Hachette:
it. stream continuously through one, and especially to be able to geheralize this 1959), pp. 72 infra. Even a cursory pass through any of the great manuals of classical moun-
knowledge to every part of the body without allowing it to regroup at any time- taindimbing is sufficient to note that this "ethic" that-I have called recent and new has always
transcendent and unitary-as a spatialized figure in the head. Thus the body too been an integral part of the Alpinist's tradition, and that what is taking place today is a shift in
must be broken apart into a veritable multiplicity of quasi-autonomous flows- e1~phasis.Witness the legendary Rebuffat: ''There is an intimate pleasure in communicating
conditions on the mountainface vary critically from centimeter to centimeter- with the mountain, not with its grandeur or beauty, but more simply and directly; with its
no climber could afford a strategic command center that programmed the body sheer mareriality, like an artist or artisan with the wood, stone or iron that he works." Re'buf-
to behave globally in response to fixed or, god forbid, averageconditions. Every fa[ goes on m evok~ the "rediscoverable kinship" between granite, ice, and flesh (p. r4).

30 CHAPTER I THE COMPLEX AND THE SINGULAR JI