an activity book

Manifestation,Berlin

1. freedom and willingness to change and adapt.

G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?“.A Thousand Plateaus.

2.The Other PerspectiveElizabeth Grosz Architecture from the Outside

Embodying Public Space: An Interview by Kim Armitage and PaulDash

3.Viewport To a mobile homelandSite Writing by Jane Rendel

4. What the other. See. Touch Feel.When Species meet, Donna J. Haraway

5. Photography is essentially the act of the non- intervention

Susan Sontag, On Photography“1977

contents

freedom and willingness to change and adapt.G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body With-out Organs?”. A Thousand Plateaus.The full body that is teeming with life and the futile hope for growth.

When you will have made him a body without organs,

then you will have delivered him from all his auto-matic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.

- “To Have Done with the Judgment of God“ (1947) by Antonin Artaud

Change is really the only constant. The BwO is a fusion of internal and external which must be constructed through dance. It can take place in very different social formations, through very different assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the BwO “not as a notion or concept but a practice or set of practices“(p. 149 “ 150)The BwO “is the state in which we aspire to dis-solve the body and regain the world.“ Every exist-ent organized body possesses “a vast reservoir of potential traits, connections, affects, movements,

etc.“ at the same time.What is important is that to “make oneself a body without organs“ one requires “to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and acti-vate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls “becomings“.“ A body without organs “is perme-ated by unformed, unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles“ (p. 40).Where psychoanalysis says “Stop, find your self again,“ we should say instead, “Let“s go further still, we havn“t found our BwO yet, we havn“t sufficiently dismantled our self.“ (p. 151) What they seem to esteem are bodies at the threshold of intensity that are nonetheless stable, even if flexible.

“Overdose is a danger. You don“t do it with a sledgehammer, you use a very fine file“ (p. 160). Rather than violently shaking up the BwO, one must very carefully with great considera-tion nibble away at the steps because creating a body without organs can be highly dangerous. The experimentation that Deleuze and Guattari suggest is a patient and careful working of the body that attempts to form new habits in unpredictable ways that disturb the monotonous routine of the everyday body.

“You don“t reach the BwO [ “] by wildly destratifying. [“] If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then“you will be killed,

plunged into a black hole, or even dragged to-ward catastrophe. Staying stratified “ organized, signified, subjected “ is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which bring them back down on us heavier than ever“ (p. 160-161).

“The organ is a restriction, not the cause, of the activity of the formative impulse.“ (G.R. Trevira-nus, Biology, 1802 “ 1822 vol. 4)

A body that is still a work in progress.

“An experimental practice into which desire must be continuously invested. The body without organs cannot be taken for granted, but needs to be created. “(p.149-150)

What Deleuze and Guattari ultimately affirm is not after all the completely rigid body or the purely chaotic one but the full body that is teeming with life. An ever-changing work in progress.

How optimistically wonderful.write

write

be considered when designing spaces. Her argument that Phi-losophy and architecture can both learn from each other through their methods in particular really does stand out to me;

“ If philosophy could think of itself more humbly as a mode of producing rather than as a mode of knowing or intellectually grasping or mastering concepts- which it cant do adequately at the moment- it would come closer to the practical nature of architectural practices, moving closer to everyday life and its concerns, which would be good for philosophy.“- p. 6

““ it is not a system that reflects and judges ( although it does this too) but exists as a set of practises, techniques and skills. it is more practi-cally mired, in rather obvious ways, than the abstraction of philosophical thinking. if phi-losophy could look at itself more as a process of making ( as architecture explicitly thinks of itself), then it might be better off. philosophy takes itself to be kind of pure reflection of thought, but infact its an active labour of words- writing, arguing,

The other perspective

Elizabeth Grosz Ar-chitecture from the OutsideEmbodying Public Space: An Interview by Kim Armitage and

Paul Dash

Elizabeth Grosz is a philosopher.

She is a philosopher with grow-ing interest and knowledge about architecture and the relationship between the two faculties. She focuses her interest of philo-sophical architectural discourse and the relationship between the body, architecture and the levels of habitation the body takes within space. The perspective she takes is quite objective as she keenly draws to attention that philosophy can definitely learn from archi-tecture. She looks towards differ-ent methodologies around concepts of embodiment and futurist technology, and how these can

criticizing““. where architects use building, bricks mortar, stone, glass, etc, philosphers use arguments, propositions, discourses.p 5

She goes on to reflect upon designed public spaces in co-junction with the themes of community and embodiment exploring the concepts of social boundaries, expectations and gender specific spaces.

“Space is the ongoing possibility of a different inhabitation. There are no boundaries which can be maintained under social conceptions, they are forever evolv-ing. Space or spaces is the product of a community. As much as it is the product of a designer.“

Amongst all of the ideas that Elizabeth explores in this interview, the theory that philosophy and architecture can work togeth-er is such a strong thought, because if we can template each, what would happen if we started to look towards other faculties of thought in regards to architecture?

Viewport to a mobile homelandSite Writing by Jane Rendelhow do YOU provide a space through writing? how do I build an architec-

ture through words? how do WE tell our spaces? Site writing by Jane Rendell explores the site of writing and the spaces that are created within it- from a critical perspective. She not only defines what a critic is “ a more active and inherently spatial role, one which includes the optic but which is not driven solely by the visual and which involves both interpretation and performance.“ but then also explains other critical perspectives such as distance and

externalism.

Each critical perspective of course depends on the interpretation

“ interpretation is, we would argue, a kind of performance of the object“.Interpretation , like the production of works of art, is a mode of com-munication. Mean is a process of engagement and never dwells in any

one place.“

I want to tell you about my space.. but then how can I be critical whilst still telling you the space I want to? “ critism always has another space in mind.“- p. 7

“Spatially structured, Bloomer“s texts operate metaphoriacally to explore imaginative narratives and employ metonymic devices to bring the non- appropriate into architecture. For bloomer, differ-ent modes of writing construct architecture through the intimate and personal, through multisensual rather than purely visual stimula-

tion“

We bring our own meaning and project that onto the curated space to pierce together mate-

rial and information.

What the other. see. touch. feel.When Species meet, Donna J. Har-

away

Donna Haraway has background first and foremost in zoology and philosophy, she has also taught Wom-ens studies and the history of science.Her theories I believe start through her biological knowledge which then imforms her philosophical based theories. Through this book which follows on from one of her earlier publications;The companion species manifesto“, Donna explores the idea of the encounter not only to domestic animals, but also to the wider species.Throughout the book she relentlessly pushes the mantra to break down the “ great divide“ between human and animals and to embrace is “ to be one is to become with many.“She goes on to challenge philosophical theories including brutal rejection of the Deleuzian approach which one might easily affiliate her work to in first glance; “I am not sure i can find in philoso-phy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging,

incuriosity about animals and horror at the ordinaryness of flesh.“Haraway, being imbedded in the the analysis and crtique of twenty first century techno cultureto forget that contemporary species include techno-logical assembelages, just as much as mixed genetic herritage. “ entangled assembelages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other as-sembelages, organic or not“. p.88Through her perseverance of the plight of the “becoming well together“, Haraway finds the core of our encoun-ters. The soul of the book explores Haraway“s relationship with her dog Cayenne. Through which she proposes the question “ Whom or what do I touch when I touch my dog?“- p. 3

The point that Haraway continuously pushes through these points is the importance in contact. She wants us to be constantly able to be open to the possibility of rethinking the relation-ship.

what does the cat see?

unknown artis

t

Photography is essentially the act of the non- intervention

Susan Sontag, On Photogra-phy”1977

In Susan Sontag“s collection of essays “On Photography“1977, She scrutinizes the process of photography as a medium of experience “collection“ and the replications of the pro-cess.

“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge “ and, therefore, like power.“

That to capture a moment through photography is to give the impression that you are expe-riencing a moment when on the contrary the camera is between you and the moment and

you are only a spectator of a moment.

As she argues, perhaps originally with regard to pho-tography, the medium fostered an attitude of anti-intervention. Sontag says that the individual who seeks to record cannot intervene, and that the person who intervenes cannot then faithfully record, for the two aims contradict each other. Photography in general consists of quotations, found objects: the photographer is the collector of everything real (but does not reach understanding).

Sontag argues that the proliferation of photographic images had begun to establish within people a “chronic voyeuristic relation“ to the world around them. This leads me to question our own trip as a travel studio and how we collected images from all of the experienc-es that we embodied. Were these truly uninhabited? In relation to the text, were we merely becoming the ex-pected voyeuristic robots of our society traipsing across the world with our canons in hand ? Did we experience or merely view? Among the consequences of photography is that the meaning of all events is leveled and made equal. The world is accessible and so are the experi-ences. Before when one wanted to see the Berlin wall they would need to travel there geographically to see it, now to travel and see it one only need to pick up a mobile phone or book to instantly see what it looks like.

the experiences around you.

b i b l i o g r a p h y

1. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?“. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia, 149-166. Minniapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987

2.Grosz, Elizabeth. Architecture from the Outside:Embodying Public Space: An Interview by Kim Armitage and PaulDash

3.Rendel, Jane Site Writing:The architecture of Art Critisism. J.B. Taurus & CO. New York: 2010.

4.Haraway, Donna J (2007) When Species meet, MInnesota Press

5. Sontag, Susan (1977) On Photography", Penguin, London

giselle lamings 3 1 9 0 6 5 2