an activity book
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 Perspective Elizabeth Grosz Architecture from the Outside Embodying Public Space: An Interview by Kim Armitage and PaulDash 3.Viewport 4.
5.
To a mobile homeland Site Writing by Jane Rendel
What the other. See. Touch Feel. When Species meet, Donna J. Haraway
Photography is essentially the act of the non- intervention Susan Sontag, On Photography”1977
contents
Manifestation,Berlin
freedom and willingness to change and adapt.
G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without 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 automatic 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 dissolve the body and regain the world.” Every existent 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 activate these virtual potentials. These potentials are mostly activated through conjunctions with other bodies (or BwOs) that Deleuze calls ‘becomings’.” A body without organs “is permeated 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 consideration 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 toward 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. Treviranus, 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
The other perspective Elizabeth Grosz Architecture from the Outside Embodying Public Space: An Interview by Kim Armitage and Paul Dash Elizabeth Grosz is a philosopher. She is a philosopher with growing interest and knowledge about architecture and the relationship between the two faculties. She focuses her interest of philosophical 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 architecture. She looks towards different methodologies around concepts of embodiment and futurist technology, and how these can
be considered when designing spaces. Her argument that Philosophy 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 conceptswhich 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 practically mired, in rather obvious ways, than the abstraction of philosophical thinking. if philosophy 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,
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 evolving. 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 together 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 homeland Site Writing by Jane Rendel
how do YOU provide a space through writing? how do I build an architecture 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.
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, different modes of writing construct architecture through the intimate and personal, through multisensual Each critical perspective of course rather than purely visual stimuladepends on the interpretation tion” ” interpretation is, we would argue, a We bring our own meaning and kind of performance of the object…. project that onto the curated Interpretation , like the production space to pierce together mateof works of art, is a mode of comrial and information. munication. Mean is a process of engagement and never dwells in any one place.”
What the other. see. touch. feel. When Species meet, Donna J. Haraway Donna Haraway has background first and foremost in zoology and philosophy, she has also taught Womens 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 philosophy 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 technological assembelages, just as much as mixed genetic herritage. ” entangled assembelages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assembelages, organic or not’. p.88 Through her perseverance of the plight of the “becoming well together”, Haraway finds the core of our encounters. 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 relationship.
unknown artist
what does the cat see?
Photography is essentially the act of the nonintervention Susan Sontag, On Photography”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 process. “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 experiencing 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 photography, the medium fostered an attitude of antiintervention. 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 experiences that we embodied. Were these truly uninhabited? In relation to the text, were we merely becoming the expected 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 experiences. 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.
1. G. Deleuze & F. Guattari. “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?�. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schitzophrenia, 149166. 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 Art Critisism. J.B. Taurus & CO.
architecture of New York: 2010.
4.Haraway, Donna J (2007) When Species meet, MInnesota Press 5.
Sontag,
Susan
(1977)
On
Photography",
Penguin,
London
b i b l i o g r a p h y
giselle s 3 1
9
0
laming 6 5 2